Polyamory

xp oh ok, well I think "is there someone better than me" in a poly relationship seems like a pretty rational fear, no? I mean it seems like there'd obviously be a decent chance that your partner, spending intimate time and having sex with someone else, would get attached to that other person and decide they'd rather spend more time with that person and less with you. I mean to me it just feels like inviting that to happen, because that's kind of how hormones seem to work. It seems to me like to be truly ok with that, you have to be ok with a looser, more tenuous form of attachment that's more likely to dissipate. Although it would be interesting to see data, if there is any, on, say, the rate of divorce in poly marriages, but it's probably a small sample size with unusual characteristics. I mean maybe for some people that's just it: your relationship may be more likely to end some day, but what's so bad about that? I see that side of it.

great post, sleeve.

and hurting u have been making some great posts.

i would obviously be a different person were i able to have an appropriately close human connection with more than one partner. honestly i can't even fathom it. to find one person i love enough to actively miss them when they're not around is a tiny miracle to me.

very interesting post sleeve thx

<3

I was following this thread earlier today and did some looking around in regards to an earlier statement, it was always my understanding that lots of married people had affairs but new(er) data suggests otherwise:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/28/sanford-ensign-affair-opinions-columnists-extramarital-sex.html

this kinda punches a hole in what would have been my previous "all the married people do it to, they're just lying hypocrites" argument back when I was more defensive abt my choices & judgmental abt the mono lifestyle.

"too", oops

the divorce "stats" that get cited a lot are also both questionable and skewed by young marriages. The divorce rate among like college-educated people who wait until their mid to late 20s or later to get married is much lower iirc.

Yeah those affair stats make sense to me somehow. I mean sometimes I look around at all the married couples I know and I just think to myself "I can't really picture most of these people having an affair, how could it be statistically true that so many of them will?"

also, to CAD, this:

to find one person i love enough to actively miss them when they're not around is a tiny miracle to me.

is beautiful and touching and heartwarming and I am glad you found that person.

I think a lot of people also find that sexual involvement with a second person can interfere with your emotional connection with the first person.

For me the bigger problem has been my emotional connection with the first person interfering my emotional connection to a second. When I first started with my gf, we very quickly formed a hugely intense emotional bond. Then I started dating another woman for months (I still haven't officially broken things off but that's something I need to do) and while we liked and were attracted to each other, we never really seemed to form any emotional connection, and I've wondered if the intensity of the emotions I feel about my GF prevented me from having emotional energy to spare on the other woman I've been dating. I do think some of it may just be different personalities involved and the latter just being more emotionally detached, period.

maybe aside from all the other junk one reason people feel secure with monogamy is that it tends to quiet the question (in whatever form), 'is someone else better?'.

That's not necessarily how it works in polyamory. The GF says me and her other partner provide very different things that the other could not and knowing how different he is from me, I totally understand that.

I think sometimes "self-esteem" means knowing what won't make you feel good and not accepting it.

― ₴HABΔZZ ¶IZZΔ (Hurting 2), Wednesday, June 4, 2014 5:48 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is so otm I had to crosspost it to 'truth bombs.' I feel like most of my recent personal growth has been learning to establish that things I do must be on terms that work for me and will make me happy.

thx rev, also enjoying your posts

its all a mutual love fest ITT, appropriately enough

I'm not going to share my opinions on polyamory; people should feel free to do whatever works for them and their partners.

But I just wanted to call out this quote:

One good Califia quote is something like "don't blame the other woman for your divorce, blame the screaming and china-throwing you did when you found out about her."

As the total fucking next-level bullshit that it is. Because when a man has been having an affair, those are your two options: blame the other woman, blame yourself for your anger. The man in the equation has ~nothing to do with it~ and should of course just be excluded from all blame from anything ever! It's women who are responsible for the sexual behaviour of men! Always! Never the men themselves! I have no time for this logic.

It's in a piece where she's largely talking about lesbian relationships.

Gender is salient, when talking about the ways that male sexual behaviour is excused and justified. But in specific cases, whether it's a man or a woman doing the straying, to reduce it down to "one of two people are to blame: the jilted party or the other woman" HELLO THERE IS A THIRD PERSON IN THIS EQUATION WHO IS THE ONE WHO MADE THE CHOICE. Why not look at the person who made that choice? It's still flawed logic, and I still find it gross.

Anyway, I'm out. This is not something I can debate without getting emotional; it's not about polyamory, it's about infidelity which is not the same thing, and I don't want to waste my emotion on this.

Never mind. Every time I post on ILX lately, I wish I hadn't; this is no different.

As you were.

when the moons hit your eyes, like some big pizza pies, that's polyamore.

This thread needs a little bit of me!

http://www.rmi.org/Content/Images/Staff_ALovins.gif

http://www.rmi.org/Amory+B.+Lovins

come to think of it, poly-o amore is kind of like having the best part of the pizza, without the pizza

what a hacky signifier!

lol

i thought this was a terrific article

Most of the polyamory advice literature does not advocate for dense interdependent networks over a lifetime anyway. Their brand of polyamory is individual freedom rooted in personal responsibility and self-actualization, which fits much better into our current neoliberal opportunity structure. An interviewee from “The Ethical Slut” says it best:

“My open sexual lifestyle gives me personal freedom, independence and responsibility in a way that being an exclusive couple doesn’t. Because I’m responsible, every day, for my needs being met (or not), and for creating and maintaining the relationships in my life, I can take nothing for granted…and so this lifestyle gives me a very concrete feeling of individuality that I re-create every day.”

This is “expressive individualism” (à la Bellah’s “Habits of the Heart”) at its finest. The polyamory advice literature soaks in a sea of middle-class self-actualization, where seekers express their authentic selves through individualized decisions about relationships. Much like the human potential movement of the 1960s, the purpose of relationships in polyamory is to contribute to one’s individual self-growth and to allow others the individual freedom to do the same. This individualistic approach to relationships is also “convenient” in that it allows partners to be dispensable if we find better psychological or economic opportunities somewhere else. Polyamory expert Deborah Anapol describes this so called new paradigm as one where the purpose of relationships is to “further the psychological and spiritual development of the partners,” which she contrasts with the “old paradigm,” which she says “expects family members to replace individual desires with group agendas.”

As one polyamory advice website states succinctly, “polyamory encourages, allows, and almost demands that you be an individual first and foremost.”

...Seeing ourselves as part of a larger system (whether of three or 300 people) leads to taking social responsibility for the health of that system. Can we solve polyamory’s jealousy problem? Perhaps, perhaps not. But what we can do is stop pretending that we don’t know where jealousy comes from.

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/14/jealous_of_what_solving_polyamorys_jealousy_problem/

anecdotally I seem to be noticing a rise in polyamory among folx in my age group. good for them!

that looks interesting, but i'm sure it's not as hilarious as this badiouian-maoist critique of polyamory https://revolutionaryphilosophycommittee.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/a-communist-critique-of-polyamory/

hahah yeah i read that the other day it probably belongs itt

it does actually get at exactly what bothered me about badiou's argument, though what i took as shortfalls in his argument they're taking as virtues

I do like that article's critique of the individualist narrative of jealousy, which I often find very off-putting in writing about polyamory. I don't like the author's quid-aggy tone though, which makes polyamory sound like some kind of boutique relationship structure.

I'm also not sure what she means by "community" in modern terms, and I'm not sure I buy her identification of jealousy as a modern capitalist phenomenon. It's not like the term "cuckold" came about in the industrial revolution.

I don't like the author's quid-aggy tone though, which makes polyamory sound like some kind of boutique relationship structure.

not sure what quid-aggy is so this sentence kinda confuses me

I don't think she's saying jealousy itself is a modern capitalist phenomenon though, I think she's saying that the conventional polyamorous understanding of jealousy as an individual failure in a sea of individuals seeking self-actualization is--despite its claim to subversion--actually reinforcing a capitalist logic of individualism.

^^^

when what we ought to be forwarding, i think she's arguing, is an ethic of health of the structures of relationships we're in (& the individuals who make up those structures), no matter what they look like.

quiditties sand agonies xps

Seeing ourselves as part of a larger system (whether of three or 300 people) leads to taking social responsibility for the health of that system. Can we solve polyamory’s jealousy problem? Perhaps, perhaps not. But what we can do is stop pretending that we don’t know where jealousy comes from.

300? is there a village form where they all fuck each other? is that what that shyamalan movie was about?

it does actually get at exactly what bothered me about badiou's argument, though what i took as shortfalls in his argument they're taking as virtues

ha yeah, badiou is just about self-aware enough in his bourgeois maoism to avoid spelling out the silliest implications

Neoliberalism has certainly eroded our ability to rely on extended families and stable communities, which I think both makes traditional marriage more challenging and actually may be behind the growing interest in poly family structures (at least a few of my friends have said "I would be interested in raising kids with more than one other person"). I suppose inasmuch as that lack of community/extended family breeds insecurity and instability, it could also contribute to jealousy -- it's more scary to risk losing the person you're committed to when that's the ONLY person you know you can rely on.

Her point that fostering trust in every direction in the relationship helps to avoid jealousy makes sense. I did find myself wondering how much it was aided by the Japanese small plate cooking class she felt the need to mention, or rather, the material comfort implied thereby.

quiditties sand agonies xps

― killfile with that .exe, you goon (wins), Wednesday, August 5, 2015 8:30 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol sand agonies

in my vagina?

Coming out of my second, and most intense poly arrangement, which offered two basic life lessons:

1. Setting boundaries should be done quickly and resolutely; nobody should feel guilty about their feelings.

2. The pleasure of fucking somebody who's not your partner > the pain of knowing somebody is fucking your partner. Then, the reverse is true.

Our small talk consisted of Bourdieu, Navier-Stokes equations, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

i dunno seems like it would be hard keeping all the hyphens straight let alone figuring out whose night was whose

haha i hated the parts of the article where the rhapsodizing about the relationship happened, it made them sound so unappealingly pretentious

2. The pleasure of fucking somebody who's not your partner > the pain of knowing somebody is fucking your partner. Then, the reverse is true.

― got a long list of ilxors (fgti), Wednesday, August 5, 2015 11:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel the shit out of this

These fellows just love talking about themselves!

In the working space I'm using today, eventually two other people came in and at the coffee maker one of them asked the other how she came to be using this working space, after her short answer, his return answer was very long, a little bit about where he was from and where he had lived, then a large chunk about explaining what polyamory was.

I left and went back to my computer but forgot my headphones so could still hear him for some time. Eventually they walked past, and she said "well thank you for sharing", and he said "oh no problem I just love to share"

I don't have problems with polyamory as such (people should be able to find whatever forms of intimacy work for them, and poly oversharing is probably less harmful, because less institutionalized, than its heteronormative equivalents), but I will probably always find this funny: https://mobile.twitter.com/merrittkopas/status/680555624917299204

I dont have a problem with anything, other than war and people talking

Legit scourges, to be sure

http://nypost.com/2017/10/12/ive-been-polyamorous-for-almost-a-decade/

I feel like every article on polyamory relies on the same cliches. "50% of marriages end in divorce anyway" -- actually not true, one of those unsourced stats that has been repeated for generations now, and even less true when you account for education, age of marriage, age of divorce (not such a big deal if people divorce after their kids are out of the house).

Second the straw man idea that, in monogamy, "one person is supposed to meet all of your physical and emotional desires. I never got that message. I'm just a pessimist about the ability of "all" of ones needs and desires to be met anyway, and I think the ones met by monogamy outweigh the ones lost.

Anyway the author has neither kids nor a main partner so I don't really get the point. You date multiple people, cool story.