Tags
I don’t want to say that there are literally zero polyamorous people who go around saying that polyamory is better than monogamy. The world is wide and full of many things, and God knows that people on the Internet can be blithering idiots on any topic.
However, I have literally never met such a person in my life, and yet I encounter monogamous people talking about how terrible such people are at least twice a month. It’s okay, guys! You’ve won! The enemy has been routed! You can stop discoursing now! Literally no one is arguing with you!
But then a funny thing happens when you try to get people to provide links to examples of this alleged ‘polyamory is better than monogamy’ claims. It turns out that they are actually instances of “a person saying that they are happier being poly than they were being monogamous.”
Or “a person saying that they had some problems becoming poly, but now they’re happily poly, and here’s how they did it.”
Or “a poly person being proud to be poly, in spite of the stigma they face from the rest of the world.”
Or “a silly Tumblr post about how we should resolve love triangles with polyamory.”
Or “poly people existing and being happy in public at all.”
It seems that growing up in a culture where monogamy is validated and accepted tends to leave a lot of monogamous people with a little bit of a thin skin.
Look, I get that having a relationship style you don’t share with the rest of your friends can be alienating. It can be harder to find partners. People might assume your relationship style is something that it really isn’t. People write fluffy romantic things that you don’t empathize with because they hinge on a different relationship style than yours. It sucks! I can empathize!
The reason I can empathize is that the places that are like this for me include literally the entire rest of the world.
Except that, while poly people who go around saying polyamory is better are mostly nonexistent, monogamous people who go around saying monogamy is better are not. They really, really are not. Feel free to peruse Polyamory in the News’s Critics of Poly tag if you don’t believe me. Or look at the comments of any news article about polyamory. Or come and meet my dad, who sent me a letter saying I was going to get AIDS before disowning me.
I wonder how many monogamous people asked a large and scary-looking friend to keep an eye on their family at their wedding, because they were afraid their family would make a scene about them being monogamous. Few?
I do not think there is anything wrong with monogamy. It’s not for me, but then neither are polo shirts, death metal, or ice dancing. I feel as little antipathy towards monogamous people as I do towards people wearing polo shirts, death metal fans, or ice dancers. But someone saying “I’m so happy now that I wear polo shirts all the time!” is not criticizing me as a T-shirt wearer. Someone talking about how they used to not be into death metal and now they are and here’s how is not criticizing me as a pop fan. The existence of happy ice dancers does not somehow mean I have to engage in ice dancing. The mere existence of happy people who do not share your preferences should not make you feel bad about your preferences. The fact that not everyone goes about constantly affirming how wonderful your life choices are does not mean you are being mistreated. Stop it.
Thing of Things 
In my experience (which is entirely based on the rationalist/adjacent Internet; I don’t know any out poly people in meatspace), it is very uncommon to see people express the sentiment that “everyone should be poly,” but quite common to see sentiments that boil down to “it’s too bad that not everyone has the mental makeup to handle poly” or “in the glorious transhumanist future where people can edit sexual jealousy out of their psyches, *of course* every rational person would choose to be poly”.
(See also “*of course* everyone rational would choose to be bi- or pansexual”.)
LikeLiked by 5 people
Yeah, this. I haven’t seen anyone directly say “everyone should be poly”, but I have seen a lot of /implications/ that monogamy is somehow inferior. Or saying things that strongly imply that it is both possible and virtuous to get over jealousy, which carries the implication that you’re somehow flawed if you can’t get over your jealousy, or insufficiently virtuous if you don’t want to try.
To be clear, I don’t think that most poly people who say these things *actually* believe that a desire for exclusivity is immoral — it’s just really really hard to communicate “I got over this preference and am happier now” without also unintentionally communicating “and everyone who still has this preference is less virtuous and strong than me.”
Separately from all of this though, I really dislike the framing of “stupidly oversensitive” — it feels unnecessarily mean. /=
LikeLiked by 3 people
I think rationalists view being poly as a lot like being bi: Some people are born that way, some people can become that way, and some unlucky people can’t pull it off, and we shouldn’t blame them or be rude to them about it.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Yes. I am frustrated and angry because it feels to me that many of the monogamous people I know expect me to be deeply sympathetic to and accommodate their pain, at fairly significant costs to myself (e.g. not saying “I got over this preference and am happier now”), while not even recognizing that my analogous and worse pain exists. I do not think this is an unreasonable emotion for me to have.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@ Ozy
This is our moment of Zen. I wholeheartedly approve of this sentiment and think that you have managed to express the primary motivating feeling of our entire zietgiest. You have successfully summed up a generalizable feeling that unites people on all sides of most debates I’ve seen, or been part of in the last couple years concisely and eloquently. I appreciate this comment so hard.
LikeLike
Anyone who is outside of traditional norms is often ill-treated by small minded and limited people. Too many people are thin skinned about too many things. As a person for whom monogamy works (perhaps a limitation of my own) I am sorry that people can’t accept what works for you
LikeLiked by 2 people
Consider the role of network effects, higher-order consequences, common knowledge, and plausible deniability here.
Or don’t, it’s your mind. I do all kinds of things with plausible negative externalities that I pretty much ignore. But I also try not to defend them by claiming that the negative externalities don’t exist.
LikeLike
What do you see as the negative externalities of being poly?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I see a lot of posts on tumblr that are like “Poly would solve all these love triangles etc.” and headcanoning groups of characters are polycules, maybe that’s what pisses off the monos.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I concur and wish to add that it is far from just a tumblr thing. This is a very prevalent thing in many subcultures (especially say, queer and trans ones) on twitter and elsenet. There’s lots of memes like “romantic/sexual/relationship conflicts in [fictional work] would be trivially resolved if everyone involved were poly” or “everyone in 2016 is poly” or just generally offhandedly talking like being poly is fundamentally superior/radical or being mono is a symptom of being pathologically flawed/jealous/defective/regressive or less capable of managing emotions/relationships.
There’s lots of this going around and it’s absolutely not just me and two other people in the comments section who’ve noticed this (https://psiloveyou.xyz/why-i-don-t-identify-as-poly-71a5a541dc99 in the section “Superior attitude of poly people” mentions it as well).
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with “all the romantic conflicts in [fictional work] would be resolved if everyone were poly.” I don’t think this is implying anything negative about monogamous people. “I like X and Y, X and Y like each other, but I can’t date both of them!” is a fairly common love-triangle plotline and, as a poly person, this situation is ripe for headcanoning them as poly.
I expect that monogamous people would suggest that all the romantic conflicts in [fictional work] would be resolved if everyone were monogamous, if fictional works with poly people in, uh, existed. Big Love? I am absolutely convinced that someone out there has said “wow! All the conflicts in Big Love wouldn’t exist if he were only married to one person!”
LikeLike
The issue is with the lack of qualifications implying that their mind is closed to the possibility that they’re missing something that the other side sees.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve never thought about this like this, and now that I’ve been caused to I still think/feel differently.
Which I think for me comes very largely from the fact that pretty much all love triangles I’ve seen have felt like what was going on was mononormativity rather than monogamy. Like, obviously at least one of the people involved isn’t mono*amorous* – otherwise there couldn’t be a love triangle. But also I basically never see any kind of expression of ‘well I like these two people but I also want only one committed romantic-sexual-etc relationship in my life’. It’s usually more like just taken for granted that it has to be one or the other because there can only be one. Which comes out of mononormativity.
LikeLiked by 4 people
“Like, obviously at least one of the people involved isn’t mono*amorous* – otherwise there couldn’t be a love triangle.”
I found this statement weird, surprisingly devoid of understanding of what motivates people to be monogamous. While I do think some people are better suited to polyamory and some to monoamory, I don’t think that the kind of person who could never wind up in a love triangle is a kind of person that exists.
One reason someone may not be poly is sexual jealousy. If you wouldn’t want your partners to have other partners and think it fair for them to expect the same of you, and in fact the particular potential partners you are interested in do wish for an exclusive relationship with you, then you may want to go with monogamy, but first you’ll need to pick one. Or, if you’re the sort of person that tends not to develop feelings for others once you feel secure in your relationship with someone, then monogamy is a good fit for you, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find yourself developing feelings for two people simultaneously in the early stages of a relationship when you haven’t formed as strong of an emotional bond yet.
LikeLike
Apologies for being unclear! What I meant was that I have seen some people self-describe as ‘I can only experience romantic-sexual-etc interest in one person at a time’, and I think of that with the word ‘monoamorous’ (as distinct from monogamous, which is a practice, and can be practiced for all sorts of reasons). It seems to me that such a person could not be the hinge of a love triangle.
However, you are completely correct that there are other experiences that are also under ‘monoamorous’ (like the “if you’re the sort of person that tends not to develop feelings for others once you feel secure in your relationship with someone” you mention, which I actually don’t think I’d run into earlier), and I should totally have actually said what I specifically was talking about.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What you are describing as monoamorous is precisely what I’m skeptical of the existence of, but maybe I just haven’t met a truly monoamorous person. It seems like you’d have to experience love as an entirely binary thing to be immune to love triangles, like maybe if you were a love-at-first-sight sort who never experienced love as an attraction that builds as you get to know someone? If such people exist I feel sorry for them.
In any case, the existence of monogamously inclined people who fall short of your definition of monoamorous means that the idea that a love triangle is proof that someone is better suited to polyamory and just being oppressed by society into monogamy is not necessarily true.
LikeLike
Wait, sorry to comment on something very tangentially related, but your father actually disowned you? Like, is that even legal anymore?
LikeLiked by 1 person
If the child being disowned is still *legally* a child (under 18), it can be considered child abandonment and illegal in that way.
Otherwise, I’m not sure the law has anything to say about it at all.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Why would there be a law against disowning your adult child?
LikeLike
In France it is illegal to disown a child of any age unless they are being “ungrateful”, which is legally defined as trying to kill the parent, denying them food or shelter, or engaging in abusive behaviour toward them.
Otherwise every legally recognized child is entitled to a minimal share of the inheritance.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Interesting. I think in America the concept of “disowning” is more of a cutting contact, not acknowledging your child sort of thing… not a legal process.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In a lot of countries in Europe you can’t disown your children or your spouse if there hasn’t happened something really big (like Machine Interface already wrote). France has it, but the German-speaking countries have that too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I recall that “messing around with inheritance” is one of the major things reserved to the states by the 10th(?) amendment. Thus, what laws exist, if any, are liable to be confusing and outdated.
LikeLike
Could this be a base rate thing? Most people are (or think they are) mono, so correspondingly most people-who-are-assholes-re:-mono-vs.-poly would be mono. And of course monogamous nonassholes mostly don’t care enough to make their views on the topic heard.
(mental image of a protester chanting “I don’t care! A-pa-thy! Makes no diff-er-ence to me! — What do we want? Whatever! When do we want it? Whenever!”)
LikeLiked by 4 people
You haven’t been around many poly people if you’ve never heard “poly people are more evolved”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is one of those things where timing is a key consideration.
I’ve heard plenty of “poly is morally superior”, and people creating the most awkward justifications to explain why calling themselves poly meant that they should get everything they wanted. (Mostly meaning the ability to monopolize multiple partners.) For a while it worked. This has less to do with poly, though, and more with a deeper flaw; social justicey types tend to flock around certain trendy causes without putting in any deeper thought, and twatwaffles flock in to take advantage of that support in order to advance their twatwafflishness.
Since then, though, we’ve also seen the part where the twatwaffles trashed the PR of the community. (That’s when they usually move on to find the next trendy thing to pile into, leaving the original community to clean up their mess.) That happened a long while ago. The poly community has since learned how to handle the memetic parasites who come along (aforementioned twatwaffles, although poly isn’t trendy enough now to draw them back in large numbers), new converts who can’t shut up with their new convert’s zeal, and the occasional person who just happens to be an asshole.
So it definitely happened. But the mess has been cleaned up, and the specific poly community has learned. And after a point, once someone has cleaned up their mess and shown that they’ve learned how not to make a new one, you stop holding stupid shit they did a long time ago against them.
LikeLike
I feel bad about this but still somewhat compelled to join in the voices of those whose experience (admittedly in my case rather small) does predominantly include polyamorous people implying (usually very tactfully) that there is something objectively superior about polyamory, even if they rarely go as far as far as claiming that poly is unilaterally the “correct choice”. In exactly one case I can think of, this implication was conveyed in a condescending and obnoxious way, but I found this person was condescending and obnoxious in general, so I’m happy to throw that out of my very small data pool (also she was advocating more for open relationships; in practice I’ve always found this distinction a little hazy). Otherwise these people have spoken with compassion and nuance, suggesting that humans are naturally wired to be polyamorous, or arguing that polyamory leads to better relationship skills, or Aellagirl’s blog post from just a week ago saying that monogamous people choose monogamy through insecurity. Of course, that’s not to say that I haven’t also heard from people (at least, rationalist-adjacent people) who defend their polyamory in terms of “this is just what works better for me”, nor that I haven’t heard monogamous people defend monogamy as objectively superior.
That said, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is polyamorous people, not monogamous ones, who suffer enormous social oppression, and I don’t know what else to say except I’m really sorry about that. I hope that in time we will make progress as we’ve been making in regard to same-sex relationships in which poly behavior is treated with less ignorance and stigma and more acceptance.
LikeLiked by 6 people
That blog post is really weird. Reminds me of that story where an atheist and a Christian are debating belief, and the atheist says: “Do you believe in Thor? Zeus? Ganesh? No? Then you’re already 99% atheist, I just take it one god further.”
Most poly people aren’t relationship anarchists, I imagine. Most nonmonogamous people I know in real life have rules – they’re poly-fi, or have primary/secondary guidelines, or only do swinging, or have a one penis policy, or only fuck people who aren’t friends or don’t hook up with the same people twice. Why is ‘you, Jeff, are only allowed to sleep with me’ a mark of insecurity while ‘you, Jeff are only allowed to sleep with me and Bob’ or ‘you, Jeff, are allowed to sleep with anyone who lets you as long as you don’t do it in our shared bed’ a mark of security?
LikeLiked by 2 people
As I commented under that blog post, I believe her logic “proves” way too much, although I did find it an interesting perspective to consider.
LikeLike
By that logic, since I can’t read Korean or Arabic or Cherokee I’m 99% illiterate, and someone who can’t read at all just takes it a few languages further.
LikeLike
People come in for “couple therapy” with one partner saying directly or indirectly “the problem here is that my partner/spouse won’t be poly with me and they need to get over their problems so we can be.” All the time.
LikeLike
I’ve definitely also run into polysupremacy stuff. Definitely people doing the ‘humans are naturally poly’ thing (I think/have heard the book Sex at Dawn had this issue?). And also a lot of ‘I became poly’ type posts that’ll say things like ‘and I realized that of course one person can’t be everything to you’, etc, that put this as them finding something more right rather than more right for them. The latter is one of those things that I find not-good-but-understandable – typical mind fallacy is very common and going against social mainstream and what you’ve heard all your life is hard! And it’s definitely true that this doesn’t compare to what poly people face etc.
(Also, eep! about your dad. That’s awful).
LikeLiked by 1 person
I find that a lot of monogamous people who have poly friends (…like me) recognize that poly relationships are more complex, or take more work, simply because more people are involved.
Which is to say, I recognize the problems you face on a social/cultural level and I’m sorry for it; I think some people are happier in poly relationships and some in monogamous ones, and probably some could be happy in either; I’m sorry you encounter the problems that come from bigotry and assholery (and all other problems, I guess, but that’s besides the point).
I think a lot of privileged groups find the need to talk about the default distressing, simply because it makes them question something they didn’t ever think they’d need to question, it rocks the world below their feet: white people in the US don’t like thinking about race, as a general rule; cishets seem distressed when gender comes up – especially men, especially if they never encountered media representation; middle class and higher seem very defensive with regard to poverty, etc.
Representation could probably help, but it’s always hard to get the mainstream to recognize that the default option is not the only option, which is to say, that it’s an option at all rather than an axiom/necessity.
Anyway, I guess it’s stuff you probably already know or have seen, so I’ll stop here.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, I’m monogamous (by default) with poly friends, and I’ve definitely had the head-patting “Aw, you poor mono thing. Look at all of us more well-adjusted more-advanced poly people! Why can’t you be more like us?” dialogue more than once.
LikeLiked by 2 people
For what it’s worth, the most condescending polyamory writing I’ve come across was written by Richard Carrier (to his credit, he admits he’s being “preachy”). This in particular:
“Even as a historian I well know now [monogamy]’s an old sexist institution that was invented by men to subjugate women (and then religion got ahold of it to oppress everyone), and now that its original function is no longer cool, in just the last half century or so people have been trying to reappropriate it and figure out how to use it in some sort of egalitarian way, but more and more (with but few exceptions) this looks like forcing a square peg to fit in a round hole.”
http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/8455
Also, monogamous couples don’t really know each other deeply because they can’t talk with each other about who else they’d fuck. I don’t really know how commonly these sorts of views are expressed by poly people as I don’t really know any, but I will say that I have not seen these sorts of views expressed by rationalist poly people.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This one strikes me as particularly ridiculous considering I’ve known faithful monogamous couples who routinely acknowledge their physical attractions to other people. My ex-girlfriend was completely monogamous and anti-cheating and had no qualms about bringing up which of my friends she found “hot”. This never really fazed me considering due to my confidence that she was in love with me (not them) and my contention that feeling physical attractions to other people besides one’s monogamous partner is pretty normal and healthy.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Indeed- my wife and I have no problem discussing physical attraction to others. Feeling otherwise would imply (to my mind) that we were only together due to current physical attraction, where both of us would claim that it’s much more than that!
LikeLiked by 1 person
You are so right. I’ve even found a lot of anti-poly sentiment in the kink community. I saw a woman go off on poly at a munch last week in front of several poly people, as if her way is the Twue Way.
We’re supposed to be a community, and yet we still turn on each other. 😦
LikeLike
Look up for scientific research and suggestions that indicate that mono may be a situation of convenience. Ryan Christopher for example and a few others.
LikeLike
There is always someone getting their knickers in a twist because you aren’t like what they think people are supposed to be. I have met a number of mono people that accepted my current poly situation. I was rather surprised and didn’t even get the mono is better spiel. Sometimes it is that one bad apple that acts like you have the plague that makes it harder to be you enough to find the reasonable types.
LikeLike