Polyamory

Seems like a pretty "rawr" move to me, idk.

real-life open relationships don't involve either party 'going on the prowl' ime.

well, OKCupid works dandy too.

Just a turn of phrase.

Me and my gf both think the idea of the other fucking other people is really hot and that's the best way imo.

i can kind of see that Rev (tho i'm too jealous/insecure to ever actively seek that scenario out) but the thought of my partner just kissing someone else fills me with a deep sadness.

Kissing my partner and someone else at the same time was really fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sometimes I think my biggest problem in relationships is that I just really don't give a shit about the idea of them kissing or doing anything else with anybody else, but they *want* me to care (and/or don't want me to do things with other people). I've just always been wired this way or something, sometimes I feel like an alien, bystanders demanding that you should feel awful and bummed out about something that you don't actually.

a paragraph i found striking from ethical slut, which I'm barreling through now:

Unlearning Jealousy: To change the way you experience a feeling takes time, so expect a gradual process, learning as you go, by trial and error. And there will be trials, and you will make errors. Start by giving yourself permission to learn. Allow yourself to not know what you don't know, to be ignorant. You must allow yourself to make mistakes; you have no choice. So reassure yourself: there is no graceful way to unlearn jealousy. It's kind of like learning to skate-you have to fall down and make a fool of yourself a few times before you become as graceful as a swan. The challenge comes in learning to establish within yourself a strong foundation of internal security that is not dependent on sexual exclusivity or ownership of your partner. This difficult work is part of the larger question of how to grasp your personal power and learn to understand and love yourself without such a desperate need for another person to validate you. You become free to give and receive validation, not from need or obligation, but from love and caring.

take care of yourself, dude

^^^

i went through this once. long-term girlfriend in college wanted to open things up since we went to schools about an hour away from each other, and she was into the polyamory/sex adventure stuff. like, she got mad at me because i didn't want to make a retail porno with her when some indie porn production company visited her school and gave a presentation. i sorta dated her because i had this idea i was some groovy libertine sex rebel, but when actually faced with it i realized i wasn't as comfortable with it as i thought.

then in my 20s i went through one night stands, short term flings, etc. and same thing happened again. not as much of a cool, groovy sex dude as i thought. i've made peace with the fact that i'm a boring, white-bread, long-term, monogamous relationship person. i don't think there should be pressure to be anything you don't want or enjoy, whether it's polyamory or plain ole' monogamy. it's all up to what you want and enjoy since it's your life, bottom line.

TS: groovy libertine sex rebel vs. cool, groovy sex dude

;)

i've made peace with the fact that i'm a boring, white-bread, long-term, monogamous relationship person.

Yup, that's me too. And what is described above as "unlearning jealousy," which I have tried to do before (although I've never actually tried an open relationship) feels to me uncomfortably close to learning to bury your anger.

i read the ethical slut because i was infatuated with a poly-leaning woman (and had been before, to my chagrin). i was not very impressed. it seemed like there was something undertheorized about it. like, since the premise is the validation of some form of unconventional romantic or sexual arrangements, or not even unconventional but socially undefined, so that people interested in them essentially have no script to work from, what the book really has to appeal to is some indeterminate combination of a) self-actualization talk, b) contractualized liberal-individualist talk, c) touchy-feely communicative interpersonal relating talk, and d) moralizing directed at whatever it is (usually about you and your hangups) that stops you from making it work, although the bottom line is more or less always eventually 'welp some people are like this, some people are like that, maybe you are or aren't'. the basic orientation toward experimenting without ethical guiderails seems right (and it appeals to what are intuitively the right things to appeal to, more basic or more personal touchstones for what would be ethical or what would be fulfilling or what would work), but the mixture doesn't come off right somehow.

I see the monogamous relationship as a kind of civilizational compromise. I get the arguments against it, and I realize that there might be alternative arrangements that work for some people, but I don't think that you can get rid of the supposed drawbacks of monogamy without bringing a bunch of new problems on yourself, and I think most people prefer the problems of monogamy to the problems of polyamory.

i don't think it even needs to get that theoretical, the choice can just be based on personal preferences. i like monogamy because i prefer deep, time-invested relationships with people, and there's a lot of other shit i'd rather be doing than spreading my attention around among different people, which is emotionally exhausting for me. everyone has a different personality, brain, tastes, etc., and i think people should feel free to enjoy themselves however they want (ya know, within responsible limits).

I think I also just like the reliability of the monogamous relationship, like after a long day of work you know that the same person you love will be there waiting for you instead of wondering whether she'll be somewhere else or whether you're going somewhere else. It's also a lot harder for me to conceive of having kids outside monogamy, like little kids REALLY want to know that the same people are coming home every day. Although I guess there are people who make it work, and kids can adjust to things.

It also depends on how much sex means to you.

well, sex with other people that is

I think I also just like the reliability of the monogamous relationship, like after a long day of work you know that the same person you love will be there waiting for you instead of wondering whether she'll be somewhere else or whether you're going somewhere else.

Sure, but this seems like precisely the kind of thing that people inclined towards polyamory could work out with each other. Ground rules, comfort zones, this-but-not-that, these days but definitely not these days. Actually I think these can be really strengthening to the primary relationship because they reaffirm that the time you do spend together is by choice and desire, not out of habit, that this coming-home-to-each-other is a core value in the relationship that you aren't willing to trade off, etc. These things take different shapes of course - I don't believe all poly people have a 'primary' person but this is the version that clicks the most for me.

I do agree with j's take on The Ethical Slut - I haven't read it since 2000 or so (similar deal, was dating a poly person, somewhat more hippy-ish, less intellectually oriented, and carefree than me) and found it exciting but frustratingly glib and granola. But if it's clicking for a HOOS then the more the merrier! I actually think the core point can probably be usefully extracted from the title - you want to have multiple romantic relationships, okay, there are ethical and not-ethical ways to do that, just as there are ethical and non-ethical ways to be monogamous. The process of chipping away at your own biases/tendencies IS thorny, because it rides the edge between a conscious attempt to unspindle parts of your psyche from what amounts to a lifetime of this is what you want and this is the only way people can be happy together, and forcing yourself to do/think things that bottom-line, aren't really you. But to the extent that it's the former, hey, why not?

The 'primary partner' is also a phenomenon.

reaffirm that the time you do spend together is by choice and desire, not out of habit

Choice and desire are fickle and fleeting, which to me is part of the point of commitment. I mean, do I want to worry about whether getting ill or having a crisis I need to deal with will coincide with what my primary partner desires at that particular moment? Spending time with any person for long enough will inevitably feel like habit some of the time.

if spending time enough with someone gets to being a habit without you wanna kill them or they you, cash in

imo one of the worst positions from which to entertain polyamory / becoming more notionally polyamorous is basically one where your aim would be, 'i can be ok with this'.

it seems like one form of an ideal would work best when both partners have, in some sense, needs to give as well as to get that exceed the bounds of conventional monogamy. kind of an exuberant/overflowing amorousness. and give -to others-. if the main ask is that you somehow give your partner more of what they need insofar as you accept/ok their giving/getting from others, it seems hard not to be constrained to conceptualize that in terms of your deficiencies. and it seems to be a stretch to really think of that as 'giving' to your partner, as one might be inclined to think. but a lot of our thinking around close relationships tells us that we are doing a kind of giving when we modify our own feelings or behavior to allow them to act on their freedom or independence from us. that may be true in a sense, but i don't think it has, i wanna say, the same effect on the overall economy of the relationships in which you are both enmeshed. the balance (not in terms of debts but in terms of intensity and volume and direction, more like harmoniousness) of giving-and-getting.

Sometimes I think my biggest problem in relationships is that I just really don't give a shit about the idea of them kissing or doing anything else with anybody else, but they *want* me to care (and/or don't want me to do things with other people). I've just always been wired this way or something, sometimes I feel like an alien, bystanders demanding that you should feel awful and bummed out about something that you don't actually.

― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 6:06 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, this is something that was a problem for me in previous relationships. I never really gave a fuck what my partners did with anyone else but I felt restricted to monogamy because that was the socially acceptable thing. I never cheated on anyone but I always felt like it was because I was fulfilling some kind of social contract, not because I didn't want to sleep with other people, and in the time leading up to meeting my gf I'd pretty much started to believe monogamy is bullshit. Finding someone who was even more enthusiastically anti-monogamy than me was revelatory and I finally felt like I could have a relationship on the terms I wanted.

Btw the "commitment" thing is a total red herring, I feel way more committed to my gf than any person I've been monogamous with. Just because we sleep with (and in her case, have a relationship with) other people, doesn't mean we aren't deeply committed to each other. We both recognize that we want to be together for the rest of our lives and have talked about possibly having a child and making other long-term commitments.

yep, there is a big difference between physical fidelity and emotional committment

Rev if this isn't too personal a question, what's your strategy for raising children as a person in a polyamorous realtionship? I ask not for puritanical reasons but logistical ones; raising a child with one other person sometimes feels difficult and I am curious if you're talking about expanding your circle or if you'd keep the child-rearing as a thing between the two of you, or something else. It's not a question that would come up in a monogamous relationship with no divorce (which is the context both my wife and I come from so we have no practical experience with blended families or step- relationships) and I'm curious about your thoughts on how to navigate it, because I'm a ho for interpersonal logistics.

interesting choice of phrasing there

It's not honestly something I've given too much thought to, but she already has a kid (from her ex-husband, not her other current partner). I don't currently help raise her daughter at all, (I'm across the country most of the time at this point and I don't intend to anyway unless invited to do so, but that's basic dating a person with a kid stuff, nothing to do with polyamory), but her other partner who she's been with for much longer does help with her kid. She's always been open with her kid about the nature of her relationships. But I imagine the child-rearing for our own kid would mostly be between me and her unless things drastically changed between us. She has some ideas about raising kids as part of some extended radical queer family and ehhh I'm not as into that idea personally, but we've already had that conversation.

Ugh, could this thread be deindexed?

I think I also just like the reliability of the monogamous relationship, like after a long day of work you know that the same person you love will be there waiting for you instead of wondering whether she'll be somewhere else or whether you're going somewhere else.

that isn't monogamy, that's "I'd be so happy to keep your dinner warm" 1950s suburban style traditionalism.

not necessarily--in my experience there's an emotional comfort that comes from predictable contact that doesn't require any of the trappings of "suburban style traditionalism" to manifest.

I go home and cook the dinner, that's why she's waiting for me.

ie that's projection imo s

I think I also just like the reliability of the monogamous relationship, like after a long day of work you know that the same person you love will be there waiting for you instead of wondering whether she'll be somewhere else or whether you're going somewhere else.

that isn't monogamy, that's "I'd be so happy to keep your dinner warm" 1950s suburban style traditionalism.

― sarahell, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 5:53 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Um, no it isn't.

Also "be there waiting for you" = shorthand for "or will be coming home to you later." I happen to have longer work hours than my wife. Some nights she has classes and comes home later than me. You're being overly literal.

Sorry, just responding to the "after a long day of work (she) will be there waiting for you" -- maybe too literally? But it really conjures up this 50s suburban imagery. But the thing is -- people have lives outside of committed monogamous relationships. They have friends, hobbies, jobs ... maybe instead of sitting around at home, they go out with friends, they visit family, etc. Monogamy can be equally unpredictable, even without sexual infidelity.

Sorry - but your life sounds really dull, Hurting.

You're projecting an awful lot onto what I said.

I am responding to what you said!

I'm not sure where you got from my post that we don't have jobs, never go out, don't have friends, don't visit family, don't have hobbies, as though I literally meant the same exact job-home routine every day.

dull can be pretty fun though.

xp

yeah yeesh sarahell

Wait so is this thread not about me

pretty sure Hurting wasn't meaning he literally comes home from work every day to a partner that is sitting on the couch anticipating his arrival, but was more making a broad statements about routines, but ymmv

xxp - it sure sounded like you meant the same exact routine every day. That is the appeal you were attempting to convey, right? Also, based on other things you posted in this thread. Lots of people are boring. It doesn't mean you are deficient as a human being. Just own up to your boring-ness.

lol that isn't how it read at all.

considering your user name ...

I think I also just like the reliability of the monogamous relationship, like after a long day of work you know that the same person you love will be there waiting for you instead of wondering whether she'll be somewhere else or whether you're going somewhere else.

He never said home; we wait for each other at the pub tbh