Tags
The popular dating site OKCupid has recently unrolled a new feature aimed at polyamorous people:
Online-dating behemoth OkCupid is adding a feature tailor-made for polyamorous people. The new setting, which became available for some beta users in December, allows users who are listed as “seeing someone,” “married,” or “in an open relationship” on the platform to link their profiles and search for other people to join their relationship.
When I originally read this article, I was excited, if a little bemused by the article helpfully informing us that the most common way to begin being nonmonogamous is for couples to look for a single bisexual woman. However, after testing this with my fiance, I discovered that it is impossible to link your profile to more than one person.
That’s right. OKCupid does not seem to understand that poly people date multiple people.
OKCupid’s new system works great for people with partnerships like mine: a single, committed primary relationship, where both partners sleep with and casually date other people. Of course, that is a totally valid relationship structure as long as it’s good for everyone involved. But not all poly people have this structure!
What about the triad or quad who have merged finances, married each other as much as they legally can, and are planning on buying a house together? What about the woman who considers herself to be equally committed to two people: her spouse that she lives with and is raising children with, and her cowriter whom she’s written several books with? What about the relationship anarchist, who doesn’t distinguish between friendship and romance, primary and secondary relationships? What about the solo poly person who has many deep, intimate, committed relationships, but doesn’t plan on going up the relationship escalator with anyone? What about the woman who balances both sides of her personality by having both an egalitarian relationship and a 24/7 relationship with her master? What about the best friends who share a husband? What about the four bros who have taken “bros before hoes” to the next level by having a loving, committed, but non-sexual and non-romantic relationship?
All of those people are part of the poly community too.
It’s not like this is impossible to implement. Fetlife, for years, has allowed someone to be in a relationship with multiple people.
But as long as you’re just accommodating one kind of polyamorous people– the kind that’s as goddamn close to monogamy as humanly possible– you aren’t accommodating poly people.
Our community is more diverse than just couples looking for some strange. We shouldn’t accept solutions aimed at that group as if they helped all of us.
Thing of Things 
Socialist polyamory! Seize the romance of production!
Wow, though. Did they seriously make their thing targeted at unicorn hunters? I mean, most common journey, yes, I’ll grant that… to the point of having become an annoying stereotype that poly communities have given a name to so as to be more efficiently exasperated with it.
It’s this kind of non-offer that suggests they wanted to just phone it in. Even if someone completes this triad — and just typing that out feels like canonizing a host of bad assumptions — what if they want a fourth? They really weren’t capable of seeing that far?
LikeLiked by 1 person
THANK YOU I’ve been loudly complaining to everyone for the last two days about exactly this thing
I noted in most of the official OKC statements that they’re using the language “nonmonogamous” or “open relationship”, suggesting to me that they know this thing- and the feature is, in fact, targeted to unicorn hunters, and the media is getting it wrong. I haven’t exhaustively tracked down every single official OKC statement, though, so this might not hold true for all.
LikeLike
Yes yes yes yes. Fuck, I’m just so happy that other people are bothered by this.
Oh, and hey, thaaaaaanks, OKC, for giving me another scarce resource/status marker to share across multiple partners. That’s awesome, and doesn’t contribute to any conflict or bad feelings.
Fuckers.
—Myca
LikeLike
There’s a couple of interesting aspects of this, to me. The first is the acceptance, on the part of OKCupid, of the degree of poly stuff that happens there. I once tried to filter nonmonogamous people from my matches, to find that I had basically none left (admittedly, oakland and all that). The second is that haven’t you already been able to do this? I’ve seen people listing long strings of connections in their profile for years at least.
LikeLike
This is a very interesting take, especially since giving more robust options would probably benefit the company as well. Even though a lot of the relationship categories you mentioned are very niche there are probably still enough people in many to make implementing new features for them profitable. Although it seems OKCupid will get the benefit of free positive press either way.
One bit that kind of confused me though. If four bros have a loving committed non-sexual non-romantic relationship… aren’t they just friends? A definition of poly where a fraternity counts as a polyamorous relationship is likely too broad to be useful.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This doesn’t surprise me at all. First of all, poly is political. OKC is a business, and while the quasi-triad has mainstreamed and is now acceptable because all it changes is sex, not love, and that’s somehow more acceptable to the average person, the various iterations of poly that are not this will continue being Socially Unacceptable (outside the Bay Area) for probably a long time. Anything OKC does to facilitate that gets it a reputation as “that site for weirdos”, which is terrible just as internet dating is losing its stigma.
Second of all, outside the Bay Area I doubt there is much of a market for the non-unicorn oriented. When I was on OKC, I got tons of messages from couples looking for casual or semi-casual thirds, but only 2 messages from any other permutation of poly in my entire year and a half on the site, a relationship anarchist and a solo poly dude. And I think the latter was just using “solo poly” as a fun new word for screwing around. So there probably won’t be enough outrage out there for OKC to consider it worth its while to change anything.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“All it changes is sex, not love.”
I’m not sure what you mean by this?
“the various iterations of poly that are not this will continue being Socially Unacceptable (outside the Bay Area) for probably a long time.”
… I mean, there’s places that aren’t the Bay Area that are pretty accepting of poly relationships to the point that they’re pretty normal. Maybe not “more common than serial monogamy” but not… rare. I don’t think it’s going to be entirely mainstreamed for another couple decades but when your subcultures are prominent presences in parts of the community… and those subcultures often are strongly against this kind of triad-seeking behavior.
I don’t think OKC should respond to outrage, per se. But I think it’s important that people communicate to OKC that this is a half-measure that does not serve the community it tried to serve. And I strongly suspect that the OKC userbase is strongest in big cities, which are also most likely to have these kinds of… well… libertine norms? Certainly this heat map shows a lot of https://nycdatascience.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/qq20150709-62x.jpg users in those spots, though it’s hard to tell exactly how much based on the nonspecified intensity.
LikeLike
Do you have any link to more details on that map? From what I can tell, a load of people are treading water at 0.0N 0.0W off the coast of Ghana.
LikeLike
It appears to have been constructed via a scraper here.
http://nycdatascience.com/okcupid-scraper/
So errors are either in the software glitching or people providing spurious reports as to their location. And, you know, I’ve seen enough people reporting their location as “Antarctica” on social media to know that there probably isn’t a kinky colony in the southernmost continent.
LikeLike
I’m so baffled by the whole unicorn hunter thing, since my first exposure to nonmonogamy was cis gay men, to the point that I thought monogamy wasn’t an option for me! (My hubby persuaded me otherwise. And then, after eight years of that, he persuaded me that poly might be fun too. *laughs*)
Seriously, you’d think nonmonogamy had only just been invented, instead of being a thing for millennia all over the world.
LikeLike
Any guess as to what percentage of nonmonogamous folks would have a use for this?
LikeLike
It looks like they added only the poly-related feature which wouldn’t involve significant changes to their database structure. Hopefully this means that more robust support for expressing poly relationships is upcoming, and this is kind of a water-testing. I don’t see that being spelled out by OKC though.
LikeLike
Pingback: Who Benefits From OkCupid’s New Polyamory Feature?