1. Why do you believe what you believe? What would change your mind?
I believe that polyamory is good because relationships are good. Sex is good. Mutual emotional support is good. Dinner for two at Luigi’s is good. Meaningful discussions about the semiotics of Ginny Weasley Potter are good. Visiting your partner in hospital (or prison) is good. Assuming that A’s relationship with C doesn’t detract from their relationship with B (which absent irrational jealousy or unmanaged conflict between metamours it shouldn’t), polyamory allows more of all of these things than monogamy.
Furthermore, I believe that the vast majority of people find it easier manage jealousy in a poly relationship than to manage the fact that a monogamous partner is only meeting some of their relationship needs. A monogamous relationship requires A to meet all of B’s relationship needs, and B to meet all of A’s. Finding this complete double co-incidence of requirements (a so-called “soul-mate”) is a rare stroke of good luck. Under polyamory, the requirement is that both paramours meet at least some of the other’s relationship needs, and that they are able to tolerate any metamours. This is a much lower bar.
The main thing that would change my mind is evidence that most people can’t manage jealousy well enough to be happy in a poly relationship. To get hard evidence you would need a rigorous way of measuring proneness-to-jealousy, and a study showing that it was resistant to change (probably that it didn’t shift after someone formerly monogamous spent several years in a poly relationship). There is quite a high bar here, because the divorce rate is proof that many people can’t make monogamy work either.
2a. A monogamous person is jealous of their partner (for example, because they’re afraid their partner has a romantic interest in someone else). In a healthy relationship, what would happen next?
The couple would discuss what is making the jealous partner feel jealous and how it is affecting their relationship, and then agree either that the jealousy is unfounded, or what steps are needed to restore trust and eliminate it.
2b. A monogamous person has a crush on someone other than their partner. In a healthy relationship, what would happen next?
Ideally nothing, but realistically most people can’t hide their crushes if they see the object of the crush often enough, so eventually this is going to turn into a justified jealousy case (and given the norms of actually existing monogamous culture, the couple won’t be able to communicate about the jealousy in a healthy way). Of course there is also the possibility that someone leaves their current partner for the crush, which is a disaster if there are children or other serious commitments involved.
2c. A polyamorous person gets an STI. In a healthy relationship, what would happen next?
Ideally the STI is caught by routine regular testing before it can spread at all, or at least while it is still possible to trace contacts and test everyone in the polycule. This is far more likely to happen under polyamory than under monogamy-with-cheating because polyamory removes the stigma against taking a STD test or asking your long-standing partner to take one.
2d. A polyamorous person hates their partner’s other partner (their metamour). In a healthy relationship, what would happen next?
The three people involved talk about it like grown-ups. If there is something about the shared paramour’s behaviour that is making the situation between the matamours worse, then it may be possible to change that. Alternatively it may be possible to negotiate a split of the shared paramour’s time such that the metamour’s don’t need to come into contact with each other. As a last resort, one of the relationships might need to end.
2e. A polyamorous person has a date scheduled with their primary partner, but their secondary partner is in the hospital with an emergency and needs support. In a healthy relationship, what would happen next?
Obviously the partner in hospital needs the paramour more – this isn’t difficult. Depending on the relationship between metamours, either the shared partner or the primary couple visit the secondary in hospital. The date is rescheduled.
3. What would happen if 90% of people in a society were polyamorous? (You may assume they all practice one style of polyamory, or different styles.)
A lot of the problems with polyamory as it exists now would go away if it was the default. Most people would acquire the necessary skills to manage poly relationships in high school. Over time society would co-ordinate on sensible default arrangements for how to handle e.g. finances when a partner enters or leaves a polycule. Widespread existence of more-than-two-parent households would lead to stronger alloparenting norms more broadly, which is a good thing in its own right for the obvious practical reasons.
Overall, there would be less sexual repression (in high-conscientiousness subcultures) or jealously-driven conflict (in low-conscientiousness subcultures) because A’s interest in C and C’s interest in A cease to be a threat to A’s pre-existing relationship with B. More people would be having more relationship needs met more consistently. For Great Justice!!!
OP seems to have really different ideas about “relationship needs” than I do. Like, why does polyamory allow more sex/visits/etc than monoamory? Can’t you only be in one place at once? Maybe I’m missing something about threesomes or logistics; maybe the idea is that people are prevented from dates they would like to have had, by rejection of polyamory.
What I REALLY don’t get: “monogamy requires a soul mate” while polyamory requires the multiple parties just be kind of adequate. This doesn’t fit my model of human relationships as non-fungible. I’d understand if you were alleging that
Say Alice is dating/living with Bob, and Bob chews tobacco really loud. Alice is annoyed by this. To get out of the house more, she begins having sleepovers with Charlie. However, Charlie has a fairly intractable dismissive attitude towards Alice’s past trauma. Bob was always pretty understanding, so Alice can really compare the attitudes and feel uncomfortable around Charlie.
To me, Bob’s trauma-friendliness and Charlie’s non-tobacco chewing do not balance each other out. At all. They are simply two different challenges in meeting needs.
You could say my point of view is that the polyamorous person is charged with the challenge, should they accept it, of finding MORE THAN ONE so-called soulmate.
Also, while alloparenting does have obvious practical benefits, I am alarmed that OP does not even briefly address that stepparent incest is very disproportionate relative to birth parent incest.
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Re: different partners meeting different needs, I think the thing that is meant is more like – Alice wants to sometimes rant to someone about a fight she had with her mom and get 100% unconditional validation, and sometimes wants to instead have an analytical conversation about her fight with her mom in which they break down what went wrong and what she personally might have done wrong, and also she wants to cuddle on the couch and watch TV with someone, and also she wants to have PIV sex sometimes and do bondage things sometimes, and Bob instinctively does the 100% validation thing no matter what while Charlie is much more likely to skip straight to the analysis step, and Bob doesn’t like watching TV but Charlie does, and Bob likes PIV but not bondage and vice versa for Charlie, etc.
There are certainly things that are baseline requirements for ANY relationship, like “has basic respect and understanding on important sensitive issues” and “is fun to be around”, but then there are also things that one needs to have in one’s life but not necessarily in any one specific relationship? The same way you might hang out with different friends depending on what kind of interaction you feel like at the time – presumably none of your friends are people you can’t stand but different ones are better at different modes of interaction and prefer different activities?
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I don’t think most of those needs require relationships to fulfil. You can receive validation and have analytical conversations and possibly cuddle on a couch with platonic friends. So this seems to more or less reduce to “if you want to have lots of different kinds of sex, you might want to try polyamory”, and even then that only requires the kind of polyamory where you have multiple sex partners which is less general than the polyamory that people usually promote. I think it’s difficult to object to this statement unless you’re a puritan who thinks wanting to have lots of different kinds of sex is inherently bad. However, I’m not sure this is actually a very common need, so I think it’s a pretty weak argument for polyamory.
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It’s true that time with one person trades off against time with another person, but also different relationships tend to be different from each other in non-fungible ways; with more relationships one can get a wider variety of relationship experience.
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This is not an argument in favor of polyamory, but against a society that is more restrictive than any that exists, where people are not allowed to have friends other than one partner, coworkers they socialize with other than one partner, people to do hobbies with other than one partner, etc.
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I mostly liked the #1 and #3 answers here but mostly not #2.
2a: this is mostly okay but “okay we have decided your jealousy is unfounded” is not really a complete solution
2b: poly answers to things pretty much ALWAYS start with “talk about it” so it’s jarring to open with “ideally nothing”! “and given the norms of actually existing monogamous culture, the couple won’t be able to communicate about the jealousy in a healthy way” okay but the question asked specifically about what happens in a healthy relationship, and I think most poly people would love to give monogamous people advice about how to approach this in a healthier way
2c: this is mostly good, but “Ideally the STI is caught by routine regular testing before it can spread at all” feels a little unrealistic – I think people usually recommend testing every 6 months or so, and if you actually have multiple partners who live in your geographic area you probably will have had sex with more than one of them within six months?
2d: this is good except I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone using “paramour” in this way
2e: same
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