There is one issue that I have with this article and most discussions around polyamory. That is mixing in open relationships and poly. There is a massive difference between, you can do whatever sexually you want and dating other people. There is an emotional difference.
Myself, I am in an open relationship but I know that what I consider poly is a line I do not wish to cross. I know that just it is not for me. I don't consider myself poly. (To be very clear, this is not a judgement on being poly. I have several poly friends. I just don't know why we group all of them together)
Mixing these has made having discussions with some people more difficult. So I am not really sure why we are grouping all... non traditional relationship structures into poly.
That all aside. I find whenever this topic comes up to be quite interesting. I don't live in SF but I am a gay man. I know very few gay couples that are not at least "door ajar" as I have heard a few explain it. I have had a few people ask me why I am open, and honestly I don't like that question. To me the better question is, "why not?". And you may have a valid reason, maybe you are a very jealous person, maybe you just don't want too and thats perfectly valid.
But to me this boils down the problem isn't monogamy, being open, poly, or however you want to define your relationship (or lack of one). The problem is the assumption of monogamy. Not ever having that discussion, and honestly having the discussion without jumping to doing something because you think it's the way you are supposed too.
I do find some of the numbers presented here to be interesting, particularly the divide between men and woman. But I honestly can't really speak on that since I don't really have much exposure to this world outside of the LGBT world.
The poly vs open distinction is interesting because (anecdotally) I see some variation there between gay and lesbian relationships—it seems like gay dudes are more likely to be in a door-ajar couple, whereas the throuples I know are usually groups of lesbians!
Conversely, I don't see many poly gay dudes or door-ajar lesbian couples, and lesbians might be more monogamous on average.
From my experience. I only know a few poly gay men. I know far more gay couples in open relationships that have similar lines that I do when it comes to anything beyond that.
I mean, for sure those lines get blurry. Things that you may traditionally associate with dating like cuddling on the couch at a party (just a party, not anything more) or similar things. But, there is still that line.
I do wonder why that seems to be the case. I am reluctant to get into stereotypes to explain it...
Def agree that consensual non-monogamy (CNM) != polyamory, and there's a loottt of confusion out there around that distinction (and in this article and this HN thread, too).
I might be poly for the right people at the right time, but I'm not currently. However, I'm definitely CNM for life because all I want is to talk it out!
Well, that, and occasionally hook up with other people
They are often times grouped together because the people writing this blogs, articles, newspapers were never in a poly relation and have no clue about the topic they are writing (but of course they have an opinion without the experience and think it's ok to sell an opinion or morale piece as more than it is).
I think poly is kind of an umbrella term right now for a lot of different kinds of "multiple partners" type relationships. I am ENM (ethically non-monogamous) but if you're not familiar with the term (and most people aren't) saying poly is much easier. It is a bit like saying LGBT and including all the things that fit under the umbrella but aren't lesbian, gay, bi or trans.
It's not a very good umbrella term, the term itself implies a relationship structure where an individual is in multiple, involved intimate relationships. A couple in an open relationship where one or both partners engage in dalliances doesn't fall under that umbrella.
21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago
Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I've never seen a poly relationship make it past 10 years and I've never seen a poly relationship without significant issues that you wouldn't see in a monogamous relationship. Furthermore, there simply isn't enough time in the day for poly to work. You sleep for eight hours, work for eight hours, and then have eight hours in your day left for everything else. Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people, you're going to quickly become a boring person whose entire personality is the fact that you're poly, god forbid you have a commute or a kid.
I think you're making the claim much bigger than it is. The narrow interpretation of "consensual non-monogamy" does not imply a relationship. Having a threesome with your partner and your best friend already qualifies. Making out with a non-partner while your partner watches might already qualify, depending on how the question is understood.
Time spent with different partners doesn't necessarily have to be equal. For instance a "comet partner" who you only spend a couple of days with every few months is one type of common poly relationship
> 21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago
> Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I guess it depends a lot on how the terms are defined. If you include parallel dating (during the "non-exclusive" phase of dating), I could easily see this as being true.
I don't think most people are having sex with multiple people or even doing this parallel dating business. Parallel dating is less common than serial dating, and parallel dating with sex is even less common than parallel dating. It sure isn't looking like 20% of people to me. I avoid people like that too so maybe there is some selection bias.
I think this might be less of "I now have two families" and more of "we brought a third person into the bedroom for a bit of spice once in a blue moon".
After some sleuthing I believe the original source for that statistic is [1]. But that’s a study of single adults which is a wildly different population than adults as a whole.
Good thing you figured out that non-monogamy simply doesn't work. Must feel good to finally get to the bottom of that! I'll make sure to inform the millions of Americans currently practicing it that you figured it out - simple arithmetic!
> Furthermore, there simply isn’t enough time in the day for poly to work. You sleep for eight hours, work for eight hours, and then have eight hours in your day left for everything else.
Not everyone (or even necessarily anyone in a family) works full time, and not everyone who works, full-time or otherwise, works in an institution at arm’s length from the family, so even at the basic premises your argument about constraints suffers from false generalization problems. Observing that polyamorous family structure is suboptimally suited for a dystopian proletarian life in some extreme capitalism assumptions is accurate, but note that that the same observation has been made by many about monogamous relationships.
> Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people,
Why are you assuming splitting time? A person can interact with more than one other person at a time.
> god forbid you have a commute or a kid.
Seems that in many ways having kids in a poly family would be easier than a monogamous nuclear family. The only problem I see with commutes is that a poly family unit is going to be forced into more complicated commute-optimization trade-offs (OTOH, the probability of having viable commute-sharing with at least one other partner is also higher, so there’s plusses and minuses on that front, too.)
It's wild that we can't differentiate lust and love, committed relationship and meaningless sex. That's the main thing I get from the confusion in the article and the confusion in the comments here about what even defines polyamory. It sounds to me like who you have sex with is the main and only thing that defines a relationship? Can people that wait to have sex until marriage ever be considered polyamorous while unmarried? If a married person gets close to a second person but doesn't do anything sexual with them are they still being monogamous?
Polyamory may literally just mean "Many loves" but I think we can all agree that we are not in a polyamorous relationship with our parents or close friends
The level of partnership doesn't have to be sex, but being real sex is the thing that most often differentiates romantic partnerships from other close relationships
> but being real sex is the thing that most often differentiates romantic partnerships from other close relationships
I don't actually agree. I think "willingness and continued intention to follow this person and live with them ever still, including the sacrifices that come along with it" tends to be something that connects more with relationships traditionally seen as romantic.
It's something that would separate a very close friendship from, for example, a "Queer Platonic Relationship", which could very arguably be romantic.
It can be difficult to differentiate between those, because you can have meaningless sex in a committed relationship and meaningful sex in a non-committed one. I have sex with several of my close friends because the difference between platonic love and romantic relationship is not very clear in my mind. And I've had relationships that are very close and intimate where I haven't had sex with them because while some of them have been romantic, they just haven't been physical.
> you can have meaningless sex in a committed relationship and meaningful sex in a non-committed one
no, I don't think this is true. The older I get the more I think there's real wisdom in being very careful about who you have sex with.
It will have meaning, whether you want it to or not, and it will be negative meaning like regret if you are not very careful.
Sex is extremely dangerous and it is only safe to engage in it with someone you know well and trust, and trust isn't to be given lightly. You will be at your most vulnerable with your partner, both during the act and potentially afterwards due to the hormonal effects and emotional effects as well as the potential physical consequences. "Safe sex" is a lie.
I don't think in the age of birth control that everyone needs to wait until marriage but we have gone very far in the other direction and I really wish someone had told me when I was younger that I would remember all of my partners in vivid detail, especially the ones I wish I could forget.
No, there is really no such thing as meaningless sex.
For our ancestors, not being choosy about sex had very serious consequences. (It still might.) It’s “wild” to you that 3 million years of evolution is working as intended?
I assume you are talking about our Hunter-gatherer ancestors based on the timeframe, but I'm not sure what you mean by serious consequences. Could you expand on that a bit?
I suspect monogamy as we know it is a response to the invention of agriculture, and we have closer relatives (the bonobos) who have sex much more freely than some of our other closer relatives.
I think it depends on what we consider "meaningless".
Is it "meaningless" that I hang out with friends on a Friday night? We didn't really accomplish anything except for possibly growing our relationships.
I think when myself and many people say we have "meaningless" sex it just means that beyond that particular moment, it doesn't have any other purpose. (beyond maybe its with a friend and it does the same as going out for drinks and just grows a relationship).
It was fun in the moment, but thats it. It is the same as going out for drinks, playing a game, or any other activity that I engage with friends with. Of course it's not truly "meaningless" or we wouldn't be doing it since we wouldn't be enjoying it. But it doesn't have to go deeper than that.
It depends how you define meaningful and meaningless which is highly subjective - so it’s neither naive nor idiotic to be able to have meaningless sex - maybe it’s just not something you feel
I think people who like ideas like polyamory have misconstrued notions about what monogamy is, which is a general cultural problem in western societies these days.
I don't own my partner and she doesn't own me. I give myself freely to her and she does the same. It's not about expectation, but commitment. I promise her she's the only one for me, despite my very human desires, and she promises me the same thing. This is healthier than the pervasive "ownership" mental model, because we both very much are aware that we have human and animal desire, and understand that the commitment is freely given. We don't get mad at each other for being attracted to other people, and feel no jealousy, we would feel betrayed if the other broke the commitment, because we were promised something by the other.
The idea that monogamy is the default in relationships outside of marriage is a very new thing in US culture. There was a time, not so long ago, when the point at which monogamy began was marriage, or for some, engagement. Needing to define being single in over convoluted terms like "polyamory" is a bit ridiculous.
I've always been very casual about these things with partners. Some can't handle it, they're jealous by nature or something. Usually, being clear "we aren't committed until we talk about that and commit" is a pretty easy to digest thing for people, even if they default to the opposite usually.
On a less personal note, it's no coincidence I think that the most successful cultures in the world were and are monogamous by social expectation. Polyamorous social structures are not conducive to responsibility with regard to rearing children, and are more often than not to leave women in a difficult position. As such, women expect commitment from men where there are few options to prevent pregnancy. That's not to say anything about the spread of disease. Jealousy is still a problem, and leads to conflict. Polygamous social structures, the second most successful of the reproduction/sex oriented social structures, lead to swathes of unmarried men, and you get rejections from the tribe, hostile takeovers, warlike cultures designed to dispose of the men who will not hope to reproduce. Monogamy is the stable arrangement and it shows. Other more exotic complex social arrangements tend to be very niche, small tribal groups relegated to basically Africa, and don't scale well.
I think if young people want to have fun, do it, be clear, if someone doesn't like it that's their decision to not participate. But slapping labels on it like it's some revolution in sexual dynamics is silly. Be prepared to outgrow your exploration, read the allegory of Chesterton's fence to understand why.
Well said, monogamy is a structure for producing a stable child rearing environment — and by relation a stable society. It is entirely consensual where arranged marriages no longer take place.
I have no issues how people screw each other but monogamy has a purpose, and if your purpose is to raise a stable family your odds are best if you pursue monogamy.
Monogamy is one such structure. It seems very tied to the modern idea of the "nuclear family." There are others. Having an extended family all living together is another. Tribes where children are raised communally is another.
You are taking effective birth control completely for granted.
It wasn't that long ago that monogamy was the default because no one wants to have a baby from a night of netflix and chill.
IMO you have the direction of causation backwards. Monogamy is not some child rearing optimization strategy. It was a social construct that evolved because causual sex at one point was incredibly expensive and now it is not because of birth control.
Similar to comments above there's a difference between poly and open. I've not tried either but I've multiple good friends who are in "monogamish" relationships and it seems to work pretty well. For them the non-monogomy is just fun they have with others, but ultimately their partnership comes first. Otherwise it's very similar to the monogamy you describe but with agreed exceptions to sexual exclusivity.
It's not for everyone and it takes a lot communication (and low levels of jealousy) but it seems to work well at providing the structure and stability of marriage without forcing the full sexual exclusivity that some find constricting.
Why does their partnership come first? Whats stopping you from finding somebody better to make a priority? Isn’t that the point of being poly is to have the ability to shop around?
People nowadays don't want commitment, and when they have it they don't respect it anyway.
I think this attitude will sooner or later change back, when the bill will come due. Life is full of challenges and hardships, and having somebody you committed to and who's committed does help deal with stuff.
I think the raise in popularity of polyamory is largely a proxy measure for the raise in selfishness.
Where I am from marriage is forever and there is no way to dissolve it without burning in eternal fire - it’s very much about ownership.
Kudos on you to having a modern marriage but marriage in the past (and also now) also is about ownership.
It’s a literal contract between two people and you are legally obligated to take care of the other person.
Polyamory is a sign of comodification/casualness about relationships and sex, in an increasingly sexless and loveless period.
Sexless and loveless are both well documented in research and polls. People fucking less than past decades, fewer being in relationships than than past decades, and more reporting being alone and lonely than past decades.
It is a sign of increasing inequality / hypergamy as the most desirable 1% of men have multiple partners while the rest have none.
In other words human society is reverting to the way it always has been since the dawn of the agricultural age 12,000 years ago.
There was never any reason to believe that the monogamous system of the 1950s West was a permanent stable arrangement and indeed we are seeing its death in our own lifetimes.
It's not exclusively a "West" thing, and it never was. Monogamy has been a stable and thriving system in many parts of the world for centuries, well before the 1950s or the Western framing of it. Societies in South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, for example, have long upheld monogamous traditions through cultural and religious practices, sometimes even more rigidly than the West.
Ehh, maybe it's just how the poly scene is shaped around here, but in my experience the men are usually very far from any real or imagined "most desirable 1%". For poly women the gamut is wider, but not that much. Heavy tendency towards the ASD spectrum in both.
Your "1%" will just go to clubs or on Tinder and hook up with other conventionally attractive people, without having to deal with some weirdo subculture.
I liked this, but I feel like it glosses over a significant dynamic that discolors both sides of the mono/poly split, which is "people not living the life they want".
Not that it's literally "coercive" -- they're not being forced to be in that relationship in any real sense. But the dynamic I often observe (well, infer from observations) is that a person would really like to monogamous or polyamorous (or a different kind of polyamorous---just, they want to be in a different status) but feels they aren't allowed to assert what they want from their partner(s), and a result is being somewhat "degraded" by the status of their relationship. They may even believe they are happy with everything, because it's the best thing they can feel they can get, but often (I suspect) there's an arrangement they would be much happier with, if they could bring themselves to insist on it.
After all a person ought to aspire to be physically and emotionally secure enough to assert what they need from their partners, even if that risks the partner leaving them, and they ought to be able to find partnerships in which their partner respects them enough to compromise or negotiate if it is something they truly need.
But I suspect a lot of people aren't there, and being mono/poly is often a "workaround": if you don't believe you can fully assert the relationship you want, sometimes you can get half of it by becoming monogamous/polyamorous instead even if it's not truly your preference. And maybe that lets you avoid the issue, sometimes for years. But it's never as as good as being able to get what you truly want.
(Occasionally I mention this vibe to people and they react negatively---"who are you to question other people's decisions?", they say. And at one level they're right, because yes, everyone out there is pretty much day-to-day making the best decision they can see to make for themselves, so if they're coping with their world by being in a certain kind of relationship, it's not really our place to doubt them.
But on the other hand, you can sense when someone is not living their best life, whether it be living the relationship they want or having the job / friends / beliefs / sexuality / gender that they want. You can't be sure, but these things do show a bit through cracks in the way that people talk and act. So I think it's fair to observe this phenomenon and speculate about it, so long as you never push anyone to "admit" to it, or to change before they're ready.)
The downsides of being in a rigidly-defined monogamous relationship are all kind of obvious, I think. Most people do not experience love or attraction as zero-sum games: you can have a "crush" or whatever on Person B without diminishing your feelings for Person A. So a person in a monogamous relationship is going to miss out on some positive physical and emotional connections that might have been really enjoyable.
But...
I've known a fair number of people in poly/open/etc relationships over the years and they tend to be inherently unstable, even moreso than trad monogamy. Like you said, often one person wants more exclusivity.
Also... let's be totally honest. One partner is almost always going to have more access to sex and love outside the relationship. Either they are more attractive, more assertive, or simply have more free time, or any other number of reasons. So the "openness" never seems to work out in a totally equal and/or equitable way.
They also seem to run into the problem of time and energy. In the abstract, love and sex are not zero-sum games. But a person only has so much energy and so many free hours in a week. So in practicality, yeah. It does become a bit zero-sum.
If someone truly loves their partner, wouldn't they be happy that their partner is getting more of what they need? Even if that is more sex?
I honestly don't know the answer to this question.
I've heard the optimal form of monogamy is when both partners fully give themselves to each other, and 100% seek the happiness of their partner. I was taught this in a religion. I can't logically understand it though. I can't imagine being happy or maintaining my own identity without spending at least a portion of my energy on myself.
I haven't been successful in relationships though, so what do I know? Is that just a religiously inspired fantasy, or can a real relationship work that way?
People focus so much on getting equal sex. If that bothers you you'te totally missing the point. Poly people invented the word compersion to amend a blind spot in our language, and thereby do the same in our emotional vocabulary. At least from their point of view. Maybe it's not a part of our vocabulary because it's contrary to our biology.
Only issue is that when you get what you want, you might be convincing your partner(s) to settle for something they want less. Perhaps the mindset of "best I can get" and finding an acceptable compromise is the way to go.
I truly believe that it is possible to be in a relationship where both people's "best I can get" is "me and my partner are both getting what we want", like you can love someone in a way in which your own preferences recalibrate to be compatible with theirs.
Not sure if this is a state everyone can reach, or would want to, but I'm quite sure it's attainable for lots of people.
(Aside, I have some friends who are bad at asserting themselves in the ways I was talking about, but about, like, everything. They'll say "I want X", but they'll feel they have to provide a good reason for it to be taken seriously, e.g. "I want to eat dinner early tonight because it messes up my sleep when we eat late".
(You can imagine the kind of relationships (family or friends or romantic) they might have had in their lives which trained them to act this way...)
So they act like they have to give a sufficiently good reason for their preferences to be taken seriously.... which is, IMO, the degraded state I'm talking about.
In a respectful relationship, the fact that you want something IS a reason to do it; you don't have to provide a logically adequate reason to get what you want as well. And if two people's desires are incompatible, both will happily compromise to find a way to make them compatible again.)
I have a strong feeling that like many new things, poliamory is currently mostly/only getting get “positive marketing” narrative.
Basically: what’s being advertised is mostly the “happy path”. Everything goes well until it doesn’t, what then?
Relationships are hard. There are a number of ways things get messy (and/or toxic) with two individuals, somehow things should improve with more than two persons ?
I wonder if it's also easier for people who have less family relationships going on.
Me and my girlfriends are all distant from our families. If I regularly visited my parents and siblings and spent time with them, I'd have less time for romantic partners.
I wonder if there's a need for secure family-like relationships, and where the family of origin has failed, people are more likely to seek that feeling from romantic partners. "There is no form of incest greater than T4T"
I really hate "traditional values" on account of their peddlers and the history books full of horrors they have enabled but when literally every successful society and major religion has some semblance of a 1:1 rule even if the exceptions and edge case handling are different you kinda gotta take notice.
More of a one-to-many rule. Only one side is expected to be fully monogamous.
It's long been socially acceptable for men to have mistresses or even multiple separate families, so long as they had the resources to take care of them all. And the social faux pas of merely sleeping with other women is very recent.
One side would be stuck with a kid and have significant difficulty paying for/supporting themselves with the extra burden, without an attached male. The other one could give false names and/or disappear never to be seen again.
There's a tragedy of the commons when it comes to the question of "what do all of the single people do?" Each relationship beyond monogamy can be thought of as "taking away" an opportunity from the partner you would have paired with had you been monogamous. ie a relationship opportunity cost.
Typically, societies with imbalanced relationship ratios, an in particular single males, tend to be more unstable. Should poly folks design their life around the consequences of disaffected young males? No, of course not. Nor should we artificially privilege monogamy to ensure social stability for obvious reasons of individualality and moral policing. We should study the phenomenon and remedy the male psyche to ensure social stability and discover, scientifically, the threshold at which we can expect it to be a problem.
Readit News
Myself, I am in an open relationship but I know that what I consider poly is a line I do not wish to cross. I know that just it is not for me. I don't consider myself poly. (To be very clear, this is not a judgement on being poly. I have several poly friends. I just don't know why we group all of them together)
Mixing these has made having discussions with some people more difficult. So I am not really sure why we are grouping all... non traditional relationship structures into poly.
That all aside. I find whenever this topic comes up to be quite interesting. I don't live in SF but I am a gay man. I know very few gay couples that are not at least "door ajar" as I have heard a few explain it. I have had a few people ask me why I am open, and honestly I don't like that question. To me the better question is, "why not?". And you may have a valid reason, maybe you are a very jealous person, maybe you just don't want too and thats perfectly valid.
But to me this boils down the problem isn't monogamy, being open, poly, or however you want to define your relationship (or lack of one). The problem is the assumption of monogamy. Not ever having that discussion, and honestly having the discussion without jumping to doing something because you think it's the way you are supposed too.
I do find some of the numbers presented here to be interesting, particularly the divide between men and woman. But I honestly can't really speak on that since I don't really have much exposure to this world outside of the LGBT world.
Conversely, I don't see many poly gay dudes or door-ajar lesbian couples, and lesbians might be more monogamous on average.
From my experience. I only know a few poly gay men. I know far more gay couples in open relationships that have similar lines that I do when it comes to anything beyond that.
I mean, for sure those lines get blurry. Things that you may traditionally associate with dating like cuddling on the couch at a party (just a party, not anything more) or similar things. But, there is still that line.
I do wonder why that seems to be the case. I am reluctant to get into stereotypes to explain it...
I might be poly for the right people at the right time, but I'm not currently. However, I'm definitely CNM for life because all I want is to talk it out!
Well, that, and occasionally hook up with other people
Deleted Comment
How does one move from a monogamous relationship to a poly relationship except through an open relationship?
Neither of them are actively looking, going to events, on apps, etc.
But if an opportunity presents itself with a friend or whatever they have already established that it’s fine.
It’s still open, but it seems the difference is seeking it out vs it just happening.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I've never seen a poly relationship make it past 10 years and I've never seen a poly relationship without significant issues that you wouldn't see in a monogamous relationship. Furthermore, there simply isn't enough time in the day for poly to work. You sleep for eight hours, work for eight hours, and then have eight hours in your day left for everything else. Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people, you're going to quickly become a boring person whose entire personality is the fact that you're poly, god forbid you have a commute or a kid.
I don't think it does qualify any more than having a one night stand between two single people implies that they are dating
This seems to be ignore that Poly implies a relationship, not just sex
> Not only do I not believe that statistic, but the footnote citation seems to be broken.
I guess it depends a lot on how the terms are defined. If you include parallel dating (during the "non-exclusive" phase of dating), I could easily see this as being true.
I think this might be less of "I now have two families" and more of "we brought a third person into the bedroom for a bit of spice once in a blue moon".
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2016.1...
Not everyone (or even necessarily anyone in a family) works full time, and not everyone who works, full-time or otherwise, works in an institution at arm’s length from the family, so even at the basic premises your argument about constraints suffers from false generalization problems. Observing that polyamorous family structure is suboptimally suited for a dystopian proletarian life in some extreme capitalism assumptions is accurate, but note that that the same observation has been made by many about monogamous relationships.
> Even if you perfectly split your free eight between two people,
Why are you assuming splitting time? A person can interact with more than one other person at a time.
> god forbid you have a commute or a kid.
Seems that in many ways having kids in a poly family would be easier than a monogamous nuclear family. The only problem I see with commutes is that a poly family unit is going to be forced into more complicated commute-optimization trade-offs (OTOH, the probability of having viable commute-sharing with at least one other partner is also higher, so there’s plusses and minuses on that front, too.)
We do a lot of three-person dates and hangouts, that helps with timing
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
The level of partnership doesn't have to be sex, but being real sex is the thing that most often differentiates romantic partnerships from other close relationships
I don't actually agree. I think "willingness and continued intention to follow this person and live with them ever still, including the sacrifices that come along with it" tends to be something that connects more with relationships traditionally seen as romantic.
It's something that would separate a very close friendship from, for example, a "Queer Platonic Relationship", which could very arguably be romantic.
no, I don't think this is true. The older I get the more I think there's real wisdom in being very careful about who you have sex with.
It will have meaning, whether you want it to or not, and it will be negative meaning like regret if you are not very careful.
Sex is extremely dangerous and it is only safe to engage in it with someone you know well and trust, and trust isn't to be given lightly. You will be at your most vulnerable with your partner, both during the act and potentially afterwards due to the hormonal effects and emotional effects as well as the potential physical consequences. "Safe sex" is a lie.
I don't think in the age of birth control that everyone needs to wait until marriage but we have gone very far in the other direction and I really wish someone had told me when I was younger that I would remember all of my partners in vivid detail, especially the ones I wish I could forget.
No, there is really no such thing as meaningless sex.
I suspect monogamy as we know it is a response to the invention of agriculture, and we have closer relatives (the bonobos) who have sex much more freely than some of our other closer relatives.
Just to complicate, some more types of love to add into the mix: limerence and agape.
I’m of the opinion that arguing for the existence of such thing is naive and idiotic.
Is it "meaningless" that I hang out with friends on a Friday night? We didn't really accomplish anything except for possibly growing our relationships.
I think when myself and many people say we have "meaningless" sex it just means that beyond that particular moment, it doesn't have any other purpose. (beyond maybe its with a friend and it does the same as going out for drinks and just grows a relationship).
It was fun in the moment, but thats it. It is the same as going out for drinks, playing a game, or any other activity that I engage with friends with. Of course it's not truly "meaningless" or we wouldn't be doing it since we wouldn't be enjoying it. But it doesn't have to go deeper than that.
Meaning comes from distinction, the opposite of undifferentiated sex.
I don't own my partner and she doesn't own me. I give myself freely to her and she does the same. It's not about expectation, but commitment. I promise her she's the only one for me, despite my very human desires, and she promises me the same thing. This is healthier than the pervasive "ownership" mental model, because we both very much are aware that we have human and animal desire, and understand that the commitment is freely given. We don't get mad at each other for being attracted to other people, and feel no jealousy, we would feel betrayed if the other broke the commitment, because we were promised something by the other.
The idea that monogamy is the default in relationships outside of marriage is a very new thing in US culture. There was a time, not so long ago, when the point at which monogamy began was marriage, or for some, engagement. Needing to define being single in over convoluted terms like "polyamory" is a bit ridiculous.
I've always been very casual about these things with partners. Some can't handle it, they're jealous by nature or something. Usually, being clear "we aren't committed until we talk about that and commit" is a pretty easy to digest thing for people, even if they default to the opposite usually.
On a less personal note, it's no coincidence I think that the most successful cultures in the world were and are monogamous by social expectation. Polyamorous social structures are not conducive to responsibility with regard to rearing children, and are more often than not to leave women in a difficult position. As such, women expect commitment from men where there are few options to prevent pregnancy. That's not to say anything about the spread of disease. Jealousy is still a problem, and leads to conflict. Polygamous social structures, the second most successful of the reproduction/sex oriented social structures, lead to swathes of unmarried men, and you get rejections from the tribe, hostile takeovers, warlike cultures designed to dispose of the men who will not hope to reproduce. Monogamy is the stable arrangement and it shows. Other more exotic complex social arrangements tend to be very niche, small tribal groups relegated to basically Africa, and don't scale well.
I think if young people want to have fun, do it, be clear, if someone doesn't like it that's their decision to not participate. But slapping labels on it like it's some revolution in sexual dynamics is silly. Be prepared to outgrow your exploration, read the allegory of Chesterton's fence to understand why.
I have no issues how people screw each other but monogamy has a purpose, and if your purpose is to raise a stable family your odds are best if you pursue monogamy.
It wasn't that long ago that monogamy was the default because no one wants to have a baby from a night of netflix and chill.
IMO you have the direction of causation backwards. Monogamy is not some child rearing optimization strategy. It was a social construct that evolved because causual sex at one point was incredibly expensive and now it is not because of birth control.
It's not for everyone and it takes a lot communication (and low levels of jealousy) but it seems to work well at providing the structure and stability of marriage without forcing the full sexual exclusivity that some find constricting.
I think this is the main point.
People nowadays don't want commitment, and when they have it they don't respect it anyway.
I think this attitude will sooner or later change back, when the bill will come due. Life is full of challenges and hardships, and having somebody you committed to and who's committed does help deal with stuff.
I think the raise in popularity of polyamory is largely a proxy measure for the raise in selfishness.
Kudos on you to having a modern marriage but marriage in the past (and also now) also is about ownership. It’s a literal contract between two people and you are legally obligated to take care of the other person.
Where you are from sounds horrific. Hopefully it changes for the better soon.
Dead Comment
Sexless and loveless are both well documented in research and polls. People fucking less than past decades, fewer being in relationships than than past decades, and more reporting being alone and lonely than past decades.
In other words human society is reverting to the way it always has been since the dawn of the agricultural age 12,000 years ago.
There was never any reason to believe that the monogamous system of the 1950s West was a permanent stable arrangement and indeed we are seeing its death in our own lifetimes.
It's not exclusively a "West" thing, and it never was. Monogamy has been a stable and thriving system in many parts of the world for centuries, well before the 1950s or the Western framing of it. Societies in South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, for example, have long upheld monogamous traditions through cultural and religious practices, sometimes even more rigidly than the West.
Your "1%" will just go to clubs or on Tinder and hook up with other conventionally attractive people, without having to deal with some weirdo subculture.
Not that it's literally "coercive" -- they're not being forced to be in that relationship in any real sense. But the dynamic I often observe (well, infer from observations) is that a person would really like to monogamous or polyamorous (or a different kind of polyamorous---just, they want to be in a different status) but feels they aren't allowed to assert what they want from their partner(s), and a result is being somewhat "degraded" by the status of their relationship. They may even believe they are happy with everything, because it's the best thing they can feel they can get, but often (I suspect) there's an arrangement they would be much happier with, if they could bring themselves to insist on it.
After all a person ought to aspire to be physically and emotionally secure enough to assert what they need from their partners, even if that risks the partner leaving them, and they ought to be able to find partnerships in which their partner respects them enough to compromise or negotiate if it is something they truly need.
But I suspect a lot of people aren't there, and being mono/poly is often a "workaround": if you don't believe you can fully assert the relationship you want, sometimes you can get half of it by becoming monogamous/polyamorous instead even if it's not truly your preference. And maybe that lets you avoid the issue, sometimes for years. But it's never as as good as being able to get what you truly want.
(Occasionally I mention this vibe to people and they react negatively---"who are you to question other people's decisions?", they say. And at one level they're right, because yes, everyone out there is pretty much day-to-day making the best decision they can see to make for themselves, so if they're coping with their world by being in a certain kind of relationship, it's not really our place to doubt them.
But on the other hand, you can sense when someone is not living their best life, whether it be living the relationship they want or having the job / friends / beliefs / sexuality / gender that they want. You can't be sure, but these things do show a bit through cracks in the way that people talk and act. So I think it's fair to observe this phenomenon and speculate about it, so long as you never push anyone to "admit" to it, or to change before they're ready.)
The downsides of being in a rigidly-defined monogamous relationship are all kind of obvious, I think. Most people do not experience love or attraction as zero-sum games: you can have a "crush" or whatever on Person B without diminishing your feelings for Person A. So a person in a monogamous relationship is going to miss out on some positive physical and emotional connections that might have been really enjoyable.
But...
I've known a fair number of people in poly/open/etc relationships over the years and they tend to be inherently unstable, even moreso than trad monogamy. Like you said, often one person wants more exclusivity.
Also... let's be totally honest. One partner is almost always going to have more access to sex and love outside the relationship. Either they are more attractive, more assertive, or simply have more free time, or any other number of reasons. So the "openness" never seems to work out in a totally equal and/or equitable way.
They also seem to run into the problem of time and energy. In the abstract, love and sex are not zero-sum games. But a person only has so much energy and so many free hours in a week. So in practicality, yeah. It does become a bit zero-sum.
I honestly don't know the answer to this question.
I've heard the optimal form of monogamy is when both partners fully give themselves to each other, and 100% seek the happiness of their partner. I was taught this in a religion. I can't logically understand it though. I can't imagine being happy or maintaining my own identity without spending at least a portion of my energy on myself.
I haven't been successful in relationships though, so what do I know? Is that just a religiously inspired fantasy, or can a real relationship work that way?
Not sure if this is a state everyone can reach, or would want to, but I'm quite sure it's attainable for lots of people.
(Aside, I have some friends who are bad at asserting themselves in the ways I was talking about, but about, like, everything. They'll say "I want X", but they'll feel they have to provide a good reason for it to be taken seriously, e.g. "I want to eat dinner early tonight because it messes up my sleep when we eat late".
(You can imagine the kind of relationships (family or friends or romantic) they might have had in their lives which trained them to act this way...)
So they act like they have to give a sufficiently good reason for their preferences to be taken seriously.... which is, IMO, the degraded state I'm talking about.
In a respectful relationship, the fact that you want something IS a reason to do it; you don't have to provide a logically adequate reason to get what you want as well. And if two people's desires are incompatible, both will happily compromise to find a way to make them compatible again.)
Basically: what’s being advertised is mostly the “happy path”. Everything goes well until it doesn’t, what then?
Relationships are hard. There are a number of ways things get messy (and/or toxic) with two individuals, somehow things should improve with more than two persons ?
anecdotally, all those I know who practice poly, and name it as such, also say they have asperger's.
Me and my girlfriends are all distant from our families. If I regularly visited my parents and siblings and spent time with them, I'd have less time for romantic partners.
I wonder if there's a need for secure family-like relationships, and where the family of origin has failed, people are more likely to seek that feeling from romantic partners. "There is no form of incest greater than T4T"
More of a one-to-many rule. Only one side is expected to be fully monogamous.
It's long been socially acceptable for men to have mistresses or even multiple separate families, so long as they had the resources to take care of them all. And the social faux pas of merely sleeping with other women is very recent.
Biologically, there are differences.
Typically, societies with imbalanced relationship ratios, an in particular single males, tend to be more unstable. Should poly folks design their life around the consequences of disaffected young males? No, of course not. Nor should we artificially privilege monogamy to ensure social stability for obvious reasons of individualality and moral policing. We should study the phenomenon and remedy the male psyche to ensure social stability and discover, scientifically, the threshold at which we can expect it to be a problem.