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When I see people talk about polyamory, one concern they often have is that the partner who’s more attractive (or female) will be out every night sleeping with a new person, while the partner who’s less attractive (or male) will spend all their nights alone crying into their bowl of ice cream while watching Netflix.
There is a grain of truth to this. In my experience, it’s very rare for everyone in a primary relationship to be dating exactly the same number of people. Lots of primary poly relationships include one partner who is dating four or five people or having a lot of casual sex, and another one who isn’t. And certainly it’s much easier to have casual sex if you’re more attractive or if you’re a woman.
A lot of people assume that this situation is naturally the sort of thing that makes the left-out partner miserable. They might feel insecure, like their partner is more attractive than they are; they might be envious of their partner’s relative level of sexual success; they might be jealous; they might feel humiliated. And I don’t want to say that those dynamics never happen.
But I think the level of distress caused by one’s partner dating lots of other people is often pretty low, assuming that the rest of the relationship is healthy. Obviously, people are often sad if their partners are neglecting them for other people, or won’t stick to their agreements, or want a less committed relationship than they want, or similar. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about sadness caused solely by your partner dating lots of people when you aren’t dating very many at all. And I do think that’s less common than a lot of monogamous people think.
One reason this is true is that the number of people you date isn’t just related to how attractive you are: it’s also related to your extroversion and your pickiness.
Some people thrive on having lots of relationships: there’s nothing they love more than having a brunch date with Sally Saturday morning, grocery shopping followed by a long walk with Alex Saturday afternoon, and going out dancing with Josh Saturday evening– and then repeating it all on Sunday. For other people, this sounds like a newly discovered tenth circle of Hell.
Obviously, that second group of people are going to have way fewer partners.
I called this “extroversion”, but it’s not just about extroversion. It’s about how you choose to spend your time. Some people prioritize having lots of romantic partners and sex. Other people prioritize writing their novel, or having deep and rich platonic friendships, or maintaining open-source projects, or climbing the corporate ladder, or binge-watching Netflix. If you’re into writing novels, and your partner is into going out on lots of dates, you’re probably not going to be sad that you have fewer boyfriends than your partner does. You’re going to be like “great! He’s busy and not bugging me, so I can really dig into the edits on Chapter Three.”
And of course this is particularly an issue for casual sex. Lots of people don’t have much casual sex because they find casual sex unappealing. And many people are not at all jealous about not participating in their partner’s unappetizing and incomprehensible hobby.
Another factor that affects how many people you date is pickiness. I have a friend who, at any given time, has a crush on about half of the women he interacts with. Inevitably, whenever he meets someone new, two days later he’s PMing me to go “so-and-so is pretty.” Naturally, he is dating a rather absurd number of people.
Now, I don’t mean to insult my friend’s girlfriends, all of whom are lovely people the appeal of whom I entirely understand. I’m not saying “some of the people your slutty partner dates will be ugly as fuck” (although this is sometimes true). But if you are only interested in shy, petite, multilingual girls who enjoy tabletop roleplaying, love children, and never raise their voices, then you will be totally uninterested in your metamours who are tall, loud, outgoing, monolingual, and aggressively childfree and who think dice only come in six-sided. In my experience, it does not hurt nearly as much for your partner to date lots of people if all the people they’re dating are unappealing.
Moreover, there’s a certain fairness to it. You are aware that if you liked as many people as your partner does, you would be able to date as many people as they do. Your partner dates lots of people because they like lots of people; you don’t because you don’t.
In general, extroversion and pickiness matter more than attractiveness when explaining why one person is dating more people than their primary partner is. In general, with some exceptions for people with unusual tastes, people tend to date people who are about as attractive as they are. (And quite often if your primary is more conventionally attractive than you are but is super into you due to your unusual traits, you will be pleased to have scored such an attractive person and accepting of their increased romantic success.) So most of the difference within relationships is about extroversion and pickiness.
I am not saying that there’s no such thing as jealousy in poly relationships– there is– nor am I saying that no poly person is ever insecure, neglected, or envious. But quite often when one person dates many more people than their partner does, it is because that person wants to date more people than their other partner does. The person with fewer partners might need more alone time, be putting energy into something other than dating, or simply have a hard time meeting people they’re interested in– and that means they’re dating exactly the number of people they actually want to date.
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Chris Wagar said:
I had a lot of issues with this in my last relationship, but I wasn’t really uncomfortable with my partner dating a lot of people so much as them neglecting me.
Having gone through a promiscuous phase after our breakup, I’ve had more time to reexamine my feelings and decide that I wouldn’t be that unhappy with an open relationship (though I might be a little cautious about polyamorous romance).
Jealousy isn’t uncommon in poly, but the social contract of poly requires people to examine their jealousy and work through it in a healthy way, rather than use it as an emergency stop button for the whole relationship. In this way, I’ve described polyamory as “chemotherapy” for bad relationship habits that typically get ignored in monogamous relationships.
Polyamory forces you to confront and negotiate issues with your partner(s) and ultimately be okay with them, which, while painful, can help build healthy relationship habits, like communication, and remembering to value your partners in the ways they want to be valued, which are healthy to bring over even to monogamous relationships.
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a person writing things said:
This is deeply wrong, and harmful for people who are living in this situation to hear. Imagine some equivalent situations without the word “sex” in them:
1. You and your spouse agree to move to your spouse’s hometown, and when you get there, you discover that your spouse has tons of friends. Over the next few years, you find out that you don’t have lots of friends, that there aren’t many folks here who you like. Being in that relationship is going to be really really hard, even if some will manage to get through it.
2. You and your spouse are going through life, and you have tremendous career success, and your spouse hits wall after wall of failure. They were trying for a harder career, so it’s not surprising, but this is still corrosive to the relationship.
3. You and your spouse have children, only to discover that one of you really really loves parenting and the other doesn’t.
The critical difference between my examples and your assumptions is one of getting what you want. You seem to be assuming that different partners having different relationship patterns are both getting what they want, but the underlying fear here isn’t about having different, both desired, relationship patterns, it’s about one member getting what they want and the other not. And that is a perfectly legitimate fear, and often seen reality in polyamory. It’s also corrosive to relationships.
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M said:
It’s late at night for me so perhaps I’m mis-reading, but it seems like the concern you’re expressing was addressed in the post: “But I think the level of distress caused by one’s partner dating lots of other people is often pretty low, **assuming that the rest of the relationship is healthy.**” (emphasis added).
Or maybe you’re arguing that Ozy should have addressed the cases where the person-dating-less ISN’T pleased with that dynamic – they want to be dating more and they value it similarly to how their other, more successful partner values it, so the imbalance is painful to them. Is that more accurate?
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Aapje said:
No, that part argues that it shouldn’t be distressing if your partner has more dates, if the you enjoy each others company, the other person doesn’t neglect you, etc. It doesn’t address that it can be destructive to the well-being of a person and/or a relationship if one partner does very well at something that the other partner wants, but can’t have/do.
It can also reduce the attraction by the more successful partner. In particular, many women seem to judge men by how attractive they are to others, so it can then be to the benefit of both to preserve a false perception of how attractive the man is to other women.
This article (and poly writing in general) seems to assume that people are or can be made to be very rational, including what makes them attracted to others, which seems…very optimistic.
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Sigivald said:
The post assumes communication and cooperation as a prerequisite, I think?
And your examples have a lot of “have you considered telling your partner that this is bothering you?” buried in them, maybe?
“People living in this situation” implies a problem, suggesting that they did not enter into the situation inentionally or knowingly, and feel unable to communicate with their partner to resolve it, and we’re back to “unhealthy relationship”, which is not the predicate of the post.
(And, well, the “have children” one is especially awkward, because even if it turns out post facto that one of you really doesn’t like having kids, it’s not like you can really just STOP being parents, realistically. That’s the risk of any sort of long-term obligation.
“People sometimes find they don’t like the things they thought they liked, in the event”, is universal, and the solution is “use your words and figure out the best course”, not “never do anything you haven’t already proven you know you both like”, isn’t it?)
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chridd said:
But there’s also
4. Your spouse has more friends than you, but that’s because you’re an introvert who prefers to spend a lot of time alone or with a small number of close friends and your spouse is an extrovert who likes to have lots of friends.
5. You have a career that’s often considered higher-status or more-desirable or harder to get into than your spouse, but that’s because that’s the career you want and your spouse is fine with or actively prefers a career that’s easier to get into or not considered as high-status or desirable, and is fine with this.
Both the sorts of situations you’re talking about and the situations I just mentioned are possible for both sexual/romantic and non-sexual/romantic things. The point of the post, as I understand it, is that people too often assume situations where one person has more partners than the other are analogous to 1-3 and ignore the possibility that situations analogous to 4-5 are possible and perhaps more common or more likely. (I personally haven’t been in any sort of relationship, poly or otherwise, and I don’t know the details of many people’s relationships, so I don’t really know which is actually more common or likely.)
Also, as your post shows, those sorts of problems aren’t exclusive to poly relationships.
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Leona Mollica said:
> And certainly it’s much easier to have casual sex if you’re more attractive or if you’re a woman.
this feels pedantic but i don’t think womanhood makes it any easier to have casual sex? being willing to have sex with men makes it much easier to have casual sex, and women are much more likely to be so willing, but once you factor out androphilia i expect if anything being male makes hookup hunting easier? certainly it’s not *harder* to find hookup partners as a gay man
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ozymandias said:
I think lesbian hookup hunting is also much easier than hookup hunting as a straight guy?
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