1. Why do you believe what you believe? What would change your mind?
You often hear people say things like “one year of Spanish taught me more about English than 10 years of English classes.” I believe polyamory is superior to monogamy because it promotes this kind of learning. If you care about your relationships, you can improve them by exploring other ones!
Like most everyone else, I was brought up to revere monogamy. Stability is good, growing up with just one parent is difficult, yada yada yada. But assumptions ought to be examined.
First of all, polyamory doesn’t imply instability or kid-unfriendliness. Many poly relationships last for decades! And isn’t having a small community of people that care about each other exactly what traditionalists say they want for children?
Second of all, monogamy doesn’t imply stability or kid-friendliness. In some poor communities (think Appalachia or parts of Chicago), the default relationship style is basically “serial monogamy.” But polyamory’s opponents rarely extol the virtues of such places.
What would change my mind: a lot of people trying polyamory and then switching back to monogamy of their own accord.
2. A monogamous person has a crush on someone other than their partner. In a healthy relationship, what would happen next?
This question illustrates the fragility of monogamous relationships. If one partner develops a crush – the most natural thing in the world – many would no longer consider the relationship “healthy!” Let’s call the monogamous person A, their partner B, and the target of A’s crush C.
What usually happens: A endures psychic torture for weeks, months or years, whether they act on their desire or not. There is either skulking around and self-loathing, or low-level heartbreak and similar self-loathing.
What should happen: A lets B know what’s going on. B gives enthusiastic consent for the crush to be explored. A and B agree on terms and conditions, e.g. regarding discretion, STI prevention, contraceptives. A pursues the relationship with C. In doing so, A becomes a better partner for B.
This is barely polyamory at all, but it’s certainly more “healthy” than the monogamy-approved alternative.
3. What would happen if 90% of people in a society were polyamorous?
Let’s compare a society with 90% monogamy to an alternate world where the same society has 90% polyamory. I think they would be about the same in the long run.
I don’t think things would be very different overall because by assumption it’s the same people in both scenarios. In the majority-poly world those people might be a bit more relaxed, a bit less insecure about relationships, a bit less prone to domestic conflict. But overall I think they’d feel like polyamory was natural and sort of boring.
And that’s what we ought to want! Polyamory isn’t a program for achieving utopia. It’s a program for being less hung up about relationships, having better partnerships, and not accepting society’s default assumptions uncritically. Let’s realize those benefits!
‘In some poor communities (think Appalachia or parts of Chicago), the default relationship style is basically “serial monogamy.” ‘ For someone arguing against a form of prejudice, that sounds incredibly classist
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Seems quite likely to me that this is an anti-poly person doing the tactic “write something bad so people assume it’s genuine on the basis that someone trying to deceive would do a better job”.
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Sorry if this isn’t the place to mention it, but the post where you first brought it up is old and it’s not the most relevant question in the first place so I wasn’t sure where else to ask.
You said that there was a site called Roman that would legally prescribe sertraline online. For various reasons unrelated to the post that mentioned this, I thought it would be useful to have something that lowered my sexual urges. I tried to fill out their survey as well as I could for that result, but they offered a different product that wasn’t an SSRI. I wasn’t sure if I should try to do the survey again, so I looked at their FAQ, and while they apparently have sertraline listed on the site, their FAQ says they currently aren’t prescribing it or any other SSRIs for ED. Do you have any idea what else i might do?
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Ugh, I’m sorry! That sucks. Do you have access to a doctor? I’d recommend going in and saying you have depression; most PCPs will give out SSRIs to depressed people pretty freely.
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Overall I think this is fake, but this bit is good:
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Well, except that lots of people are basically poly for a bit during their twenties…
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I feel like “casual dating with the goal of finding a monogamous long-term partner” is not really meaningfully the same thing as “poly”, though, it’s a quite different mindset.
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Are you then still arguing about polyamory in the general sense of having multiple partners at the same time or are you arguing about the merits of a certain subculture?
To me, it seems similar to saying that you are defending religion, but then actually only defending the merits of the Latter Day Saints, while dismissing all other religions. From within the LDS, this point of view makes a lot more sense than for those outside of it. Furthermore, if LDS theocracy isn’t on the table, but laws/policies/culture that favor or disfavor religion in general, then it can seem disingenuous to merely discuss the impact on LDS and/or the advantages/disadvantages of LDS, rather than the other religions that are also advantaged.
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“Polyamory” descriptively in general usage means something different from “casual dating while looking for a monogamous long-term partner”.
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Polyamory is obviously not just non-monogamy; none of these ITTs are going to be defending e.g. polygyny in pre-Islamic Arabia. Where you draw the line is debatable (although “things that practitioners call polyamory” seems like a reasonable starting place, which doesn’t include most casual dating) but there clearly is one.
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Wikipedia: “Polyamory is the practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the informed consent of all partners involved”
In certain youth cultures, it seems normal to have sex with multiple people until the person agrees with another person to be ‘exclusive.’ This seems to be implicit informed consent. So why wouldn’t this be temporary polyamory?
I understand that lots of people here are part of a rather hippyish Californiish subculture, with certain rules and norms around polyamory, but that doesn’t mean that you can just export that exact culture to the rest of society/the world. See how ‘normal’ people adopted internet technology in a different way to the nerds and scientists that originally used it. Or how democracy couldn’t just be exported to Russia or Iraq. Or how the sexual revolution worked out differently for the lower class (in particular black Americans) than for upper (middle) class Americans.
You can make laws, policy and cultural norms that enable your definition of polyamory, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t also enable and/or cause behavior that you might reject as proper polyamory, but that is still not traditional monogamy.
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Yeah no I’m literally talking about how I’ve known really quite a lot of people who were polyamorous, by which I mean exactly what we all mean by that, for a time, often in their twenties, and chose monogamy later.
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Oh, huh that’s not a pattern I’ve encountered, though also I personally have only just left my twenties and many of my friends are still there so maybe I’ll see it in the future?
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It’s sometimes later, and obviously some people are happily poly forever; I don’t think I’ll ever be monogamous by rule even if I am in practice for long stretches of time (such as now, right as I’m about to leave my twenties), and some of the people I talk about as having been poly in their twenties but not now are similar – they might date other peope again, some day, and certainly many maintain a healthy attitude to crushes and friendships that feels poly culture to me, but non-monogamy in practice is not on the foreseeable horizon.
I think for a lot of people this time seems to coincide with big life changes or priority-reassessments. A few of the people I know who aren’t looking for new relationships now are AFAB people trying to focus on friendships and/or themselves after spending their youth neglecting those things in favour of the romantic/sexual relationships society likes to tell us are the be all and end all.
I think that even if this is a pattern, and even if this pattern is not (as I think it may well be) countered by a similar pattern of people who have big life changes and *become* poly at similar or later ages, I don’t think that would make poly a less valid way to be? It’s still the thing forever for some people, but I also think that if a way of living works for you in one phase of your life and not another, that doesn’t inherently mean there was anything wrong with the first way of living.
I feel like half the people I know have lived in London at some point or another, and they’ve nearly all moved out eventually. But I don’t think many of us regret moving there in the first place.
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