I find it interesting that your crowd talks a lot about sex. In my poly network, this is very uncommon because some of us have a strict "no sexual details" rule when talking about our lovers. I have no clue what my wife is doing with her lovers, even though they are among my best friends. And I confess that I like it that way. Of course I lean a bit in group settings, but people are different in group sex than in 1:1
Yeah, this seems pretty key. I've lived in a household of poly folks for a long time, and only one of us could remotely see herself in a social circle like Aella describes here. The rest are varying degrees of one-on-one-only to sex-party-friendly, largely with little sharing of sexual details. I'd say this post is much more about the "slutcloud" and not representative of people in polyamorous relationships, even if there's overlap in the Venn diagram.
agree, I love that everyone can see and decide what works for them. in my polycule we also don't share many sexual details (it's not a full-on taboo, just something to be careful with to avoid unnecessary triggers) but we share everything else on an emotional level. and this works well for us. but we also discussed that if one of us discovers something that they like with someone else that we could try that out as well by sharing it or suggesting it.
I also like that things like this can evolve over time in poly, maybe in beginning it's too much to talk about sexual details but it might change over time. love this work-in-progress approach :)
That sounds good. I have an agreement with my wife that if she wants to try something new she first asks me if I also might be interested. But we're not a very kinky crowd anyways
I think as with most aspects of sexuality and personality there is a spectrum from purely polyamorous to purely monogamous. I've met both extremes and all sorts of people in between. There is no one size fits all or more natural type of relationship. If bonobos and chimpanzees have such different mating strategies- and we are a mix of homo species - then why isn't it logically accepted that we as humans have varied mating strategies too?
I wanted to say something to this effect too—because I’m very “rah rah rah” in favor of sex positivity and sexuality as a very natural and normal thing for everyone to share with as many people as feels right to them, and I still had moments reading this where I was mildly alarmed, on a visceral level, by the sense that this identity pervades every aspect of the lives of the people in it (and by glimmers of the sort of privilege that often exists alongside polyamory—chicken/egg, since folks with the level of financial security and mental space to focus on the self-actualization and emotional intelligence are the ones who can make polyamory work—but it triggers my fundamentalist childhood concept of evil as this decadent, unrestricted hedonism).
So, for those who will be similarly triggered by this piece, let me assure you that the intimacy, generosity, warmth and care Aella hints at here extend beyond the world of sex, orgies, and harems, and even those of us who don’t identify as sluts per se find what we’re looking for.
My polyamory is centered around the idea that every connection we make with every person out there is sacred and has its own potentiality which may or may not include a sexual connection—but that’s not for anyone to decide besides the people in question; and furthermore, that the caution and distance often involved in curtailing any possibility of a sexual connection can disrupt even platonic connections in ways that cut us off from one another and interrupt the natural flow of love, sexual or otherwise, in this world.
I believe that even people who don’t want to have sex with more than one person would benefit from releasing their chokehold on their partner’s relationship possibilities, as well as their own, not because they should be having more sex, but because the limitations they impose on themself and the person they are most committed to loving, supporting and uplifting are detrimental to both individual and collective spiritual well being.
People are partially afraid of engaging with polyamory because it makes too much sense to them, and they are afraid of what they desire and don’t think they can be trusted with it—and this is why they don’t think their partner should, either. What they don’t understand on a visceral level is that by letting go, they are not opening themselves up to violation, but to real choices instead of safe ones.
Monogamy, as it is classically practiced, isn’t so much about loyalty as it is about voluntarily closing yourself off to connections out of fear that you won’t be “loyal” in this narrow, prescribed way, which in reality has nothing to do with being a good partner (and that is part of why so many monogamous people struggle to be faithful, even after vowing they will—because on some level, they sense it is a lie that loyalty is best expressed by refusing to acknowledge that there are other possibilities for connection out there, some of which could be very beautiful, soulful, satisfying and gratifying for everyone involved, if only everyone were free.)
The problem with monogamy (on a spiritual level) isn't that you can't fuck other people, it's that, in practice, it severely limits your ability to connect with other people.
Women, traditionally, have more support than men. Men in monogamous relationships don't get support from other women and so must rely on their partner for everything. This can create a dynamic of decreasing attraction, among other things
"Women, traditionally, have more support than men."
--- Most of that support comes from other women.
"Men in monogamous relationships don't get support from other women"
--- They need to get that support from OTHER MEN. Women maintain their friendships after they get married and men need to do the same.
"... and so must rely on their partner for everything."
--- Yes, I've seen this in the USA and some other western, anglicized countries. Before marriage the wife has more friends than her boyfriend. After marriage the wife maintains those friendships more than the husband maintains his friendships (what few he had). The wife makes time to meet her friends for coffee or a girls' night out. Unless the wife puts in the labor to plan, organize and host a dinner or an outing with HER friends and their husbands, her own husband will have little to zero social life.
However it is not like this at all in non-western countries. Men there have male friends and maintain them after marriage. In fact, it's kind of skewed the opposite in those places where men have more of a social life than women, especially after marriage, if the cultures are dominated by ultra-patriarchal religions like Islam.
The bottomline is that western men need to step up, take personal responsibility for their social lives, do the actual footwork and labor it takes to make friends and maintain those friendships over years, decades, a lifetime.
Doesn't this dynamic depend a lot on the husband's line of work? If he is a doctor or an entertainer or a business owner he must have a lot more friends or casual acquaintances compared to let's say someone who does remote work.
Remote work is a recent thing. Surely psychologically healthy, well-adjusted adults have friends from before they began remote work that they have maintained after? I doubt women pool their friends circle from their work collegues exclusively?
Most women end up hanging out with colleagues or other moms when they have kids. I don’t know many women with childhood friends (or at least more than 1-2).
What is stopping married men from forming connections with other men, unless your only conception of it “fucking other people,” which wives are also restricted from doing in a monogamous marriage
Bingo. See my comment about this above. Copy-paste:
"Women, traditionally, have more support than men."
--- Most of that support comes from other women.
"Men in monogamous relationships don't get support from other women"
--- They need to get that support from OTHER MEN. Women maintain their friendships after they get married and men need to do the same.
"... and so must rely on their partner for everything."
--- Yes, I've seen this in the USA and some other western, anglicized countries. Before marriage the wife has more friends than her boyfriend. After marriage the wife maintains those friendships more than the husband maintains his friendships (what few he had). The wife makes time to meet her friends for coffee or a girls' night out. Unless the wife puts in the labor to plan, organize and host a dinner or an outing with HER friends and their husbands, her own husband will have little to zero social life.
However it is not like this at all in non-western countries. Men there have male friends and maintain them after marriage. In fact, it's kind of skewed the opposite in those places where men have more of a social life than women, especially after marriage, if the cultures are dominated by ultra-patriarchal religions like Islam.
The bottomline is that western men need to step up, take personal responsibility for their social lives, do the actual footwork and labor it takes to make friends and maintain those friendships over years, decades, a lifetime.
I don't actually know, but something makes it really hard to make and keep friends as an adult when you're not forced into contact with people the way you are when you're going to school. I never learned any patterns of behavior that would lead me to form and maintain contact with people outside of my family without that kind of thing holding us together, and my general lack of initiative around my own life has left me with no close relationships with anyone who isn't immediate family. I have a half-serious and half-joking definition of "friend" as "someone I invite to my house to play Super Smash Bros. with" and by that standard I haven't had a friend in a little over 20 years.
I lost l my high school friends when I graduated and everyone moved away to different places and colleges, I made friends again in my first year of college but lost them in my third year when they kicked me out of the dorm suite so someone else could live with them, and after college I became an unpaid family caregiver instead of an employee so I never had the opportunity to make friends at work either. It was an absolute miracle when my future wife started hitting on me online - I still didn't have any relationships outside of immediate family, but at least it was a different family, and I was very happy letting her become my whole life; if she believed that I was good enough for her, that was enough to make me feel good enough for myself, which was something I hadn't felt in ages.
She died in March 2024, and now I live with my sister-in-law and her daughter instead of my parents, but I still feel like I don't have the kind of friendships I had in high school (and thought I had found again in college) with anyone at all, and I also don't feel as though I'll ever be able to find that kind of friendship ever again.
(There's more to my own issues than this; I seem to be unusually bad at rousing myself to do anything outside of my default routine without being pushed, and I have a guess as to where this passivity and lack of initiative and ambition came from, but that's a story for another time.)
I'd say skill issue but you already covered that one.
Third spaces, walkable cities etc are "friendship infrastructure" and their collapse hurt the social fabric massively, it's a strong point to consider when picking a location to live in IMO.
There's some ROI from hobby groups but it's quite hard to find a person you'd like to hang out with outside of the group, I think part of it is just that people become more picky about social interaction as they age. On the other hand, if you find a person you vibe with, you vibe with them a lot and the relationship can continue indefinitely, as opposed to "forced" friendships from school that in many cases die out after a few years.
I wouldn't discount the internet, too, about half of my IRL social group are people I first talked to over the internet.
If one student fails a class, the student is the one that needs extra help.
If *all* the students fail a class, the one that needs extra help the most is probably the teacher; only a change to what the students all have in common is going to make a difference.
So: when it comes to male friendship skills, since so many people seem to be missing them, who - or what - is the teacher, and how can we help?
Most of my best Internet friends are not within driving distance (I live in central New Jersey), and I don't have the money to move to and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which I understand to be basically the highest cost of living area in the entire United States.
Finding people online that are both local and interesting is a lot harder than finding people that are local but not interesting or interesting but not local. :(
After thinking about it for a while, it started to feel like finding a new good male friend as an adult man would not necessarily be any easier than finding a new romantic partner - and if you don't have either of those, finding a girlfriend is probably more rewarding. (And the "failure" state of ending up with a close female friend instead of a romantic partner can still be pretty good!)
Monogamy is not as much about sex as it is about priorities - the lifestyle minimizes the risk that another person will come between you and your partner, which makes it easy to develop deep trust.
In an ideal situation you can probably do fine with several partners, but once life gets in the way, people start moving around the country or globe, get long running illnesses that require someone to take care of them, have children, etc there is a need to choose, and having a mutual understanding that you are each other's precomitted choice is an order of magnitude less interpersonal drama.
You are right, personal confidence also plays a huge part. I have met many people who told me that they have no problem with polyamory, but their self esteem is too low and they oppose the idea, because they are afraid that their primary partner will fall in love with someone else and leave them.
You don’t have to be exclusive to have this understanding—anchor partners are basically this, without the need for exclusivity. Part of polyamory is understanding that things change, and all connections are ephemeral to some degree. And monogamy doesn’t actually protect you from being left behind or drifting apart. It’s really just the illusion of permanence.
It’s not an approach. It’s a simple reality of life. “Til death do us part” has ephemerality to it—life is inherently ephemeral. We could die at any time, and so can our loved ones.
This is a really interesting point. I don't think you can conclude that poly-monog is purely an aspect of individual sexual identity, but at the same time, it isn't purely social skills. Individual disposition must matter some amount. So then the question is, how much is it nurture VS nature? And in what ways?
Is it really 50/50 for personality? I focus on CS and math, not psych or bio, so I'm not sure how much I'd need to learn, but how do you even measure that?
As for crazy speculation about ways that poly-monog would split between nurture and nature... I feel like the nature would be like the "raw material" you have to work with: Your inbuilt feelings and desires. The nurture would be socializing and learning to introspect and form abstract models of your own feelings and rationalize about other peoples feelings. The work of learning that stuff would be easier or harder depending on your natural disposition.
Afaik, women have an easier time getting more skilled with language from a younger age and I wonder if the statistical difference in disposition and motivation between boys and girls plays a role there or if it's something more to do with the language acquisition structure of the brain itself.
A complication is the fact that, iirc, and I think this is what you mean by personality being 50/50, is that the feelings and desires are not static when you are born, rather there are systems for "imprinting" feelings and desires at appropriate times, such as during puberty, but also as trivially as whether we are hungry or not. Like we have meta-selves that continually reprogram our conscious selves.
But with the simplified model of a "desire core" and then abstract modelling of and around that desire core. From a first approximation it seems like the modelling could try to plan contexts to most please the desire core, and so if the desire core isn't strongly specifying poly or monog as desireable than the modelling, if sufficiently skilled, could fit either the context of poly or monog to work well for the core of desires. Considering the other possible extreme, it is possible that a persons desire core would specify a definite preference for one or the other. I would guess a desire for poly would be more popular because of human drive for novelty and big happy friend groups and stuff, but that might be my own bias. But that does get into the complication that probably the core of desires doesn't specify terms for poly or monog specifically, but instead specifies things that are upstream like (for example) lust and jealousy, and so then the abstract modelling is trying to resolve the opposing desires to have lots of partners VS the desire to jealously guard your partners. How the abstract modelling resolves it (if it even does) would depend on the structure of the desire core and the skill and techniques of the abstract modelling (which itself is both nature and nurture). And I don't think we really have the tools or techniques yet for being able to really study and analyze that kind of thing. Please say if I'm wrong on that! Plus I don't think the actual structure of peoples desire cores can be understood very accurately with cumbersome umbrella words like "lust" or "jealousy". Probably the actual structure is much more complicated and nuanced. The question then is how much that complication and nuance matters for analysis, and I would guess it matters quite a bit.
Does it seem like I am thinking things that people are researching, or just spinning uninterpretable nonsense? Lol.
My understanding is that polyamorous people tend to rate highly on openness to new experience. They tend towards egalitarianism. They tend to rate low on conscientiousness. They are more likely to be some flavor of queer. They are slightly more likely to rank higher in extroversion.
None of these are rules, just correlations.
The most general aspects of the 'desire core' you refer to are sometimes called 'the big five.' Listed here for reference.
Openness to Experience
Curiosity, imagination, preference for novelty, intellectual engagement
I’m 64 and although I don’t have a social circle of sluts as large as your own, I do have enough people in my life with whom I can have adult fun, share our sexual experiences and enjoy being ENM. I would say that having the ability to separate sexual pleasure from love forms a big part of what I appreciate about these friends. They enjoy sex as they would going out for a great meal and don’t imbue it with a whole load of other attributes that would take it into a whole different realm. I agree that having low jealousy also helps. I can sometimes get off thinking about a partner with someone else and when they tell me the juicy details it can be a real turn on. I do wonder whether our early sexual experiences and our attitudes towards them play into all this. I lost my virginity during a casual encounter and that has informed my ability to have casual sex and enjoy it.
This was the life I had in college, and dreamed of continuing after. It's interesting how much friendcest goes on in high school and college in some friend groups, and then somewhere after college folks decide to "grow up" and "leave childish things behind them". I loved how free people were. I loved nude hot tubbing, and running around naked, and the friend group has multiple, overlapping relationships at various periods.
"Oh, it was fun, but we were so young! We've moved on from that."
We moved on into boring lives :( No one's fault but our own.
I'm glad to hear that some folks are still enjoying that type of life, and maybe I can eventually get back there!
You would've been ostracized af in my college for doing stuff like that, and I went to college in NYC too, btw. In an elite SUNY school near me, I remember a friend's DAD driving 100 miles to the school to keep his son from fucking with a girl who was considered a ho in her hometown.
Reputational threat is a big one for my wife. I could care less, everyone who knew me 20 years ago is astounded at my transformation into a "respectable adult" these days.
One thing I always sort of wonder: polyamory can kinda start to express like a niche hobby. People who rock climb seriously mostly only hang out with other people who rock climb, etc. because to be good at rock climbing you have to rock climb a lot and that means you're spending most of your time rock climbing, which means that's how you meet most of your friends.
It seems like if you spend your time going to polyamorous events and selecting for polyamorous people, you can end up in a polyamorous bubble, but that it actually looks even weirder than the rock climbing bubble to the outside because it threatens some core concepts of how relationships work.
It doesn't seem like you can end up in such a bubble without (primarily) selecting for it, and it seems like once you limit yourself to such a filter, whether it be rock climbing or polyamory or dungeons and dragons, you're certainly naturally limiting who will end up in your friend group, and by extension, less able to be discriminative on 'core' positive traits (say, intelligence, beauty, humor).
It seems to me that the result of this is, my guess, that people who are pretty happy with their polyamorous friend groups are probably quite good at making friends in order to achieve a good balance there. Maybe that sounds obvious, lol.
"It doesn't seem like you can end up in such a bubble without (primarily) selecting for it"
I do think it's possible to select for it indirectly because polyamory has some correlates. Lets say you're enthusiastically involved in LARPing of one form or another. Or BDSM. (Not my thing, but I'm reasonably adjacent.) Basically, anything where people love costumes. This will land you in a fairly poly-rich social circle without your explicitly selecting for poly individuals.
I can't speak for others, but my social circle has become weirdly incestuous (in a metaphorical sense.) I go to a big LARP and I end up running into friends and friends-of-friends.
Neurodiversity seems to be another correlate of polyamory.
"less able to be discriminative on 'core' positive traits (say, intelligence, beauty, humor). "
If you're out in a rural area where the community is small, I agree with what you're saying.
But lets say you like some niche sport. If only 10% of people like your sport, but you spend your time in stadiums full of fellow sports watchers, you don't have to sacrifice too much if you want to find a fellow sports watcher. Put another way; if you find any activity that has a community built around it, and you engage that community, you get that first filter and anything that comes with it without a reduction in the number of people in your effective social circle.
Yes. I'm into tantra, originally for the spiritual and personal developments aspects. But polyamory and open relationships are so normalized in this circle that while you can stay monogamous, you cannot be monogamous without questioning yourself whether this is really your right way of relationship. So a lot of people open their relationship over time. Plus, you get a lot of support while doing so because many others have done so before and know what are the right steps, agreements and so on.
I think I'm sympathetic to the claim that sex and relationships could theoretically be just a fun pastime. Like tennis or WoW, as somebody says below, going out for a great meal with friends. Given the prevalence of folks with autism in this community, it makes sense that romantic relationships could be conceptualized as a kind of esoteric martial art.
But then, once sex and romance are just a hobby, aren't you left with a community that's just about being, like, really obsessively into this hobby, to an uncomfortably totalizing extent?
No shade, there are plenty of obsessive hobby communities out there. I've met people whose spouses and entire social circle were fellow model train enthusiasts, I'm sure there are foodies who maintain elaborate Google Docs cataloging their friends' reactions at various Michelin-starred restaurants. The "texting friends way too many pictures of your experience" thing certainly checks out. Everybody should get to enjoy their weird hobbies, and infodumping obsessives for Hobby X should get to enjoy that too, in the company of other X-nerds.
But mostly hobby obsessives are self-aware about the fact that this is their pastime, just a pastime, not a program for a new world. It's when the evopsych references come out, and "bonobo life" and "well maybe non-monogamists just happen to have greater self-acceptance and communication abilities than most," that I think people's hackles get raised. Because nobody would put up with that from their neighborhood model train person.
I think you're looking at a culture or a tribe, which is a bit different from a hobby. And yes, tribalism can lead to divisions between people.
Fish don't talk about the water (assuming they're immersed in a big enough body of water that they can't see the edge.) You are immersed in whatever culture you live in for most of your time being social. You're not obsessive. That's just the world you live in, with all the expectations that go along with that culture. And your support for that culture will sometimes come across to you as 'just common sense.' Something so basic and deep and correct that you don't really need to think about it. Minority cultures might need to do a bit more translating, and be a bit more aware of the fact that they actually are in a distinct culture, and do a bit more work to distinguish themselves from the mainstream culture. (Which includes self promotion, often as a response to outside deprecation.)
Yes, the jealousy thing does not manifest how people think it does, and a *huge* part of that, at least in my experience, is simply talking about it. Being comfortable with that communication. When you can do that, the jealousy often dissolves. No, it isn't for everybody, but those who it *isn't* for could try believing the people who say it works for them!
Monogamy versus consensual non-monogamy: Alternative approaches to pursuing a strategically pluralistic mating strategy
JK Mogilski, SL Memering, LLM Welling, TK Shackelford
Archives of sexual behavior, 2017•Springer
Abstract
This study examined the frequency of partner-directed mate retention behaviors and several self- and partner-rated romantic relationship evaluations (i.e., sociosexuality, relationship satisfaction, mate value, and partner ideal measures) within monogamous and consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships. Measures were compared (1) between monogamous and CNM participants and (2) between two concurrent partners within each CNM relationship (i.e., primary and secondary partners). We found that individuals in currently monogamous relationships (n = 123) performed more mate retention behaviors compared to those currently in CNM relationships (n = 76). Within CNM relationships, participants reported engaging in more mate retention behaviors with primary partners compared to secondary partners. Likewise, CNM participants reported talking about their extra-dyadic sexual experiences and downplaying these sexual experiences more often with their primary partner compared to their secondary partner. There were no significant differences between ratings of monogamous and primary partners in participants’ overall relationship satisfaction. However, monogamous participants reported less satisfaction with the amount of communication and openness they had with their partner compared to CNM participants’ reports of their primary partner, but not secondary partner. By comparison, CNM participants reported higher overall relationship satisfaction with primary compared to secondary partners and considered their primary partner to be more desirable as a long-term mate than their secondary partner. We interpret these results within the context of previous research on monogamous and CNM relationships and hypothesize that these relationship configurations are alternative strategies for pursuing a strategically pluralistic mating strategy.
I'm curious what other traits, besides openmindedness, low-jealousy, and emotional maturity, of your slutcloud are - hot (or at least everyone's 5/10 or better)? Extroverted? Cisgender? Heterosexual (your anecdotes seem to be all hetero)? Rich (any households making less than $60k, or $100k)? Young or at least middle-aged? Comfort with all methods of pregnancy avoidance?
What happens if two poly partners have a kid, and then they break up - what happens to the kid? Do people ever get kicked out of communal parenting arrangements?
"I'm curious what other traits, besides openmindedness, low-jealousy, and emotional maturity, of your slutcloud are - hot (or at least everyone's 5/10 or better)? "
--- Aella's in the USA so not many "hot" people will be in the group. However she is in San Francisco which is in California so there will be more "hot" people than most other states.
5 is average, so one wonders why you include 5 in the "hot" category? Sure, a California 5 skews better looking than an Ohio 5, but still.
ya i cant tell if theyre just gross lil frickers, but i have never been pleasantly surprised to learn that someone is polyam. Salty bc they are out having Fun while i seem to attract predators
This is so strange to me. I can’t fathom having multiple sexual partners and caring equally(or much) about them, or having them care about me as much as if we were monogamous. Super interesting stuff.
The mainstream perception of poly seems to be "monogamous relationship, but copy-pasted", which builds upon the definitions and expectations of a monogamous relationship, and those vary a lot between people.
It helps to imagine poly as a crowd-sourced, need-based community where someone can jump in to satisfy an individual's desires and curiosity. There should be no need to care equally (or beyond your limits) since the support system is distributed
I have a feeling poly relationships work fine in San Fran and other cities like it. But work horribly in most other places. Most people live outside San Fran so they only see poly relationships in places without the culture to support it, and the internet.
You would be blacklisted from jobs and even apartments in NYC, not to mention the dating market, for doing that shit. People who fuck casually, do it anonymously and with shame. I don't know how the gay community works though.
I think the weirdest thing about reading this is that I find it fascinating, extremely erotic, and know instinctively it would drive me insane. I'm secure in my insecurity, I guess.
Interesting, I don't personally find the existence of poly people to be triggering and it doesn't make me mad or afraid or upset, nor does any of this sound erotic to me, (which is perhaps exactly WHY it doesn't upset me).
I absolutely see the appeal in not being monogamous, but the part about everyone talking about it and being open and naked together (physically and emotionally) is very unappealing to me, so perhaps that means I have an avoidant personality because all that emotional openness makes me queasy.
I also found the anecdote about a woman wanting to watch another woman insert a vaginal suppository to be entirely perplexing and I'm not sure why it was included? Just to display the clinical curiosity and low disgust response of these personality types?? Because it doesn't really have anything to do with non-monogamy. Though perhaps it was actually the most illuminating to include, because it's the one that put me off the most!
But I do have questions, bc this is interesting:
1. Are any of these people economically vulnerable at all, or at all economically dependent upon one another?
2. What's the overall sex ratio in this community?
3. Are all the females bi or at least willing to be contextually sexual with other women? Kind of seems like it, from this reading.
4. Are any of these people profoundly better (or worse) looking than others, and if so does that cause problems? Are these people less concerned with physical appearance than the norm? You did not filter for looks in your gangbang so I'm assuming the answer is likely that yes there is less concern with appearance.
5. Do you think the males have higher or lower testosterone than average? It's very difficult for me to imagine a normal level T guy not being at risk of sexual jealousy based rage/violence at least sometimes, I've just seen it too many times.
6. What do you all do when someone starts getting possessive and territorial? Do you all have an intervention or boot them from the friend group? Or you vet hard before they're let in? Or there's enough ambient social pressure to restrain this behavior? It just seems like one loose canon could cause a lot of chaos to everyone if the cloud is so interlinked.
7. Are these people all unusually high in self esteem? My experience is that most people have no jealousy issues when it comes to anyone they think is their inferior, but that they can suddenly turn right nasty on a dime if they perceive someone is actually better than them (on whatever metric they think is relevant), and an actual threat to replacing them.
"I absolutely see the appeal in not being monogamous, but the part about everyone talking about it and being open and naked together (physically and emotionally) is very unappealing to me, so perhaps that means I have an avoidant personality because all that emotional openness makes me queasy."
--- Dating multiple people at the same time is non-controversial. Like, who cares? Disgust can be generated from hearing about graphic sexual exploits. It can grate against the ears, the consciousness. Kind of like explicit sex scenes in movies or shows where you don't expect them and you are sitting there with your kids or parents. Even "poly people" get disgusted by this.
It seems (tho I have no data) that there must be a subgroup of the population that is some combination of too unskilled and too busy to manage successful poly relationships, and that it seems painfully unfair that some people should get to experience this and others, due to circumstances outside of their control, cannot. I could imagine people who think they are in that subgroup could be quite jealous and angry and because of it may project hate and myths that the lifestyle is actually sour.
There are probably two other subgroups worth identifying, those for whom an ideal relationship experience, for whatever reason, is not poly, and those for whom cultural background gives them the impression that this must be bad.
I think the latter two groups would benefit from more awareness of poly lifestyle and understanding that it is not evil nor better just different. (and maybe also better). But the first group will probably continue to hate poly lifestyle until either the skill and resources to be successful with poly is decreased, or the burdens of time and resources keeping people from imagining themselves capable of investing in becoming poly are lessened. For decreasing requirements, I think better guides, apps, and communication norms are required. I think language is a tool and you can build better language. For example, developing and refining the minimal amount of jargon required to have good poly relationships. Likewise, people need the self awareness and such, which is also difficult to obtain, but which may be easier to develop with better language and techniques.
But... of course all of this is the baseless speculation of a crazy nerd.
I think the number of people who can pull this off will always be relatively small, and I'm not sure how much guides and apps are going to help--you always have significant free-rider problems. I remember seeing a Diana Fleischman interview where she hypothesized about the type of person who could pull it off. I wish I could remember what she said!
Life is unfair and cruel and bad--this is nothing new. I think jealousy might be part of the reason it never takes off, though given the number of kids seems low that might be part of it as well (as Kryptogal says downthread).
I find it interesting that your crowd talks a lot about sex. In my poly network, this is very uncommon because some of us have a strict "no sexual details" rule when talking about our lovers. I have no clue what my wife is doing with her lovers, even though they are among my best friends. And I confess that I like it that way. Of course I lean a bit in group settings, but people are different in group sex than in 1:1
Yeah, this seems pretty key. I've lived in a household of poly folks for a long time, and only one of us could remotely see herself in a social circle like Aella describes here. The rest are varying degrees of one-on-one-only to sex-party-friendly, largely with little sharing of sexual details. I'd say this post is much more about the "slutcloud" and not representative of people in polyamorous relationships, even if there's overlap in the Venn diagram.
agree, I love that everyone can see and decide what works for them. in my polycule we also don't share many sexual details (it's not a full-on taboo, just something to be careful with to avoid unnecessary triggers) but we share everything else on an emotional level. and this works well for us. but we also discussed that if one of us discovers something that they like with someone else that we could try that out as well by sharing it or suggesting it.
I also like that things like this can evolve over time in poly, maybe in beginning it's too much to talk about sexual details but it might change over time. love this work-in-progress approach :)
That sounds good. I have an agreement with my wife that if she wants to try something new she first asks me if I also might be interested. But we're not a very kinky crowd anyways
I think as with most aspects of sexuality and personality there is a spectrum from purely polyamorous to purely monogamous. I've met both extremes and all sorts of people in between. There is no one size fits all or more natural type of relationship. If bonobos and chimpanzees have such different mating strategies- and we are a mix of homo species - then why isn't it logically accepted that we as humans have varied mating strategies too?
I wanted to say something to this effect too—because I’m very “rah rah rah” in favor of sex positivity and sexuality as a very natural and normal thing for everyone to share with as many people as feels right to them, and I still had moments reading this where I was mildly alarmed, on a visceral level, by the sense that this identity pervades every aspect of the lives of the people in it (and by glimmers of the sort of privilege that often exists alongside polyamory—chicken/egg, since folks with the level of financial security and mental space to focus on the self-actualization and emotional intelligence are the ones who can make polyamory work—but it triggers my fundamentalist childhood concept of evil as this decadent, unrestricted hedonism).
So, for those who will be similarly triggered by this piece, let me assure you that the intimacy, generosity, warmth and care Aella hints at here extend beyond the world of sex, orgies, and harems, and even those of us who don’t identify as sluts per se find what we’re looking for.
My polyamory is centered around the idea that every connection we make with every person out there is sacred and has its own potentiality which may or may not include a sexual connection—but that’s not for anyone to decide besides the people in question; and furthermore, that the caution and distance often involved in curtailing any possibility of a sexual connection can disrupt even platonic connections in ways that cut us off from one another and interrupt the natural flow of love, sexual or otherwise, in this world.
I believe that even people who don’t want to have sex with more than one person would benefit from releasing their chokehold on their partner’s relationship possibilities, as well as their own, not because they should be having more sex, but because the limitations they impose on themself and the person they are most committed to loving, supporting and uplifting are detrimental to both individual and collective spiritual well being.
People are partially afraid of engaging with polyamory because it makes too much sense to them, and they are afraid of what they desire and don’t think they can be trusted with it—and this is why they don’t think their partner should, either. What they don’t understand on a visceral level is that by letting go, they are not opening themselves up to violation, but to real choices instead of safe ones.
Monogamy, as it is classically practiced, isn’t so much about loyalty as it is about voluntarily closing yourself off to connections out of fear that you won’t be “loyal” in this narrow, prescribed way, which in reality has nothing to do with being a good partner (and that is part of why so many monogamous people struggle to be faithful, even after vowing they will—because on some level, they sense it is a lie that loyalty is best expressed by refusing to acknowledge that there are other possibilities for connection out there, some of which could be very beautiful, soulful, satisfying and gratifying for everyone involved, if only everyone were free.)
Wonderful commentary
The problem with monogamy (on a spiritual level) isn't that you can't fuck other people, it's that, in practice, it severely limits your ability to connect with other people.
Women, traditionally, have more support than men. Men in monogamous relationships don't get support from other women and so must rely on their partner for everything. This can create a dynamic of decreasing attraction, among other things
"Women, traditionally, have more support than men."
--- Most of that support comes from other women.
"Men in monogamous relationships don't get support from other women"
--- They need to get that support from OTHER MEN. Women maintain their friendships after they get married and men need to do the same.
"... and so must rely on their partner for everything."
--- Yes, I've seen this in the USA and some other western, anglicized countries. Before marriage the wife has more friends than her boyfriend. After marriage the wife maintains those friendships more than the husband maintains his friendships (what few he had). The wife makes time to meet her friends for coffee or a girls' night out. Unless the wife puts in the labor to plan, organize and host a dinner or an outing with HER friends and their husbands, her own husband will have little to zero social life.
However it is not like this at all in non-western countries. Men there have male friends and maintain them after marriage. In fact, it's kind of skewed the opposite in those places where men have more of a social life than women, especially after marriage, if the cultures are dominated by ultra-patriarchal religions like Islam.
The bottomline is that western men need to step up, take personal responsibility for their social lives, do the actual footwork and labor it takes to make friends and maintain those friendships over years, decades, a lifetime.
Doesn't this dynamic depend a lot on the husband's line of work? If he is a doctor or an entertainer or a business owner he must have a lot more friends or casual acquaintances compared to let's say someone who does remote work.
Remote work is a recent thing. Surely psychologically healthy, well-adjusted adults have friends from before they began remote work that they have maintained after? I doubt women pool their friends circle from their work collegues exclusively?
Most women end up hanging out with colleagues or other moms when they have kids. I don’t know many women with childhood friends (or at least more than 1-2).
What is stopping married men from forming connections with other men, unless your only conception of it “fucking other people,” which wives are also restricted from doing in a monogamous marriage
Bingo. See my comment about this above. Copy-paste:
"Women, traditionally, have more support than men."
--- Most of that support comes from other women.
"Men in monogamous relationships don't get support from other women"
--- They need to get that support from OTHER MEN. Women maintain their friendships after they get married and men need to do the same.
"... and so must rely on their partner for everything."
--- Yes, I've seen this in the USA and some other western, anglicized countries. Before marriage the wife has more friends than her boyfriend. After marriage the wife maintains those friendships more than the husband maintains his friendships (what few he had). The wife makes time to meet her friends for coffee or a girls' night out. Unless the wife puts in the labor to plan, organize and host a dinner or an outing with HER friends and their husbands, her own husband will have little to zero social life.
However it is not like this at all in non-western countries. Men there have male friends and maintain them after marriage. In fact, it's kind of skewed the opposite in those places where men have more of a social life than women, especially after marriage, if the cultures are dominated by ultra-patriarchal religions like Islam.
The bottomline is that western men need to step up, take personal responsibility for their social lives, do the actual footwork and labor it takes to make friends and maintain those friendships over years, decades, a lifetime.
I don't actually know, but something makes it really hard to make and keep friends as an adult when you're not forced into contact with people the way you are when you're going to school. I never learned any patterns of behavior that would lead me to form and maintain contact with people outside of my family without that kind of thing holding us together, and my general lack of initiative around my own life has left me with no close relationships with anyone who isn't immediate family. I have a half-serious and half-joking definition of "friend" as "someone I invite to my house to play Super Smash Bros. with" and by that standard I haven't had a friend in a little over 20 years.
I lost l my high school friends when I graduated and everyone moved away to different places and colleges, I made friends again in my first year of college but lost them in my third year when they kicked me out of the dorm suite so someone else could live with them, and after college I became an unpaid family caregiver instead of an employee so I never had the opportunity to make friends at work either. It was an absolute miracle when my future wife started hitting on me online - I still didn't have any relationships outside of immediate family, but at least it was a different family, and I was very happy letting her become my whole life; if she believed that I was good enough for her, that was enough to make me feel good enough for myself, which was something I hadn't felt in ages.
She died in March 2024, and now I live with my sister-in-law and her daughter instead of my parents, but I still feel like I don't have the kind of friendships I had in high school (and thought I had found again in college) with anyone at all, and I also don't feel as though I'll ever be able to find that kind of friendship ever again.
(There's more to my own issues than this; I seem to be unusually bad at rousing myself to do anything outside of my default routine without being pushed, and I have a guess as to where this passivity and lack of initiative and ambition came from, but that's a story for another time.)
I'd say skill issue but you already covered that one.
Third spaces, walkable cities etc are "friendship infrastructure" and their collapse hurt the social fabric massively, it's a strong point to consider when picking a location to live in IMO.
There's some ROI from hobby groups but it's quite hard to find a person you'd like to hang out with outside of the group, I think part of it is just that people become more picky about social interaction as they age. On the other hand, if you find a person you vibe with, you vibe with them a lot and the relationship can continue indefinitely, as opposed to "forced" friendships from school that in many cases die out after a few years.
I wouldn't discount the internet, too, about half of my IRL social group are people I first talked to over the internet.
On "skill issue":
If one student fails a class, the student is the one that needs extra help.
If *all* the students fail a class, the one that needs extra help the most is probably the teacher; only a change to what the students all have in common is going to make a difference.
So: when it comes to male friendship skills, since so many people seem to be missing them, who - or what - is the teacher, and how can we help?
Most of my best Internet friends are not within driving distance (I live in central New Jersey), and I don't have the money to move to and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which I understand to be basically the highest cost of living area in the entire United States.
Finding people online that are both local and interesting is a lot harder than finding people that are local but not interesting or interesting but not local. :(
After thinking about it for a while, it started to feel like finding a new good male friend as an adult man would not necessarily be any easier than finding a new romantic partner - and if you don't have either of those, finding a girlfriend is probably more rewarding. (And the "failure" state of ending up with a close female friend instead of a romantic partner can still be pretty good!)
How about online friendships? If you met your wife online, it means that meeting other people online could work better for you.
" I was mildly alarmed, on a visceral level, by the sense that this identity pervades every aspect of the lives of the people in it"
--- Those who allow it to pervade every aspect of their lives are probably those trying to make a career out of it somehow, I would think.
Monogamy is not as much about sex as it is about priorities - the lifestyle minimizes the risk that another person will come between you and your partner, which makes it easy to develop deep trust.
In an ideal situation you can probably do fine with several partners, but once life gets in the way, people start moving around the country or globe, get long running illnesses that require someone to take care of them, have children, etc there is a need to choose, and having a mutual understanding that you are each other's precomitted choice is an order of magnitude less interpersonal drama.
You are right, personal confidence also plays a huge part. I have met many people who told me that they have no problem with polyamory, but their self esteem is too low and they oppose the idea, because they are afraid that their primary partner will fall in love with someone else and leave them.
You don’t have to be exclusive to have this understanding—anchor partners are basically this, without the need for exclusivity. Part of polyamory is understanding that things change, and all connections are ephemeral to some degree. And monogamy doesn’t actually protect you from being left behind or drifting apart. It’s really just the illusion of permanence.
"all connections are ephemereal to some degree"
Yeah, I'll pass on that approach, thanks.
It’s not an approach. It’s a simple reality of life. “Til death do us part” has ephemerality to it—life is inherently ephemeral. We could die at any time, and so can our loved ones.
Death and betrayal are two very different ways for a relationship to end.
Usually people with that understanding do something like become a Buddhist nun/monk or something...
This is a really interesting point. I don't think you can conclude that poly-monog is purely an aspect of individual sexual identity, but at the same time, it isn't purely social skills. Individual disposition must matter some amount. So then the question is, how much is it nurture VS nature? And in what ways?
Usually it's about 50/50 such as with personality I'd guess. In what ways is a lot harder to work out. Any thoughts?
Is it really 50/50 for personality? I focus on CS and math, not psych or bio, so I'm not sure how much I'd need to learn, but how do you even measure that?
As for crazy speculation about ways that poly-monog would split between nurture and nature... I feel like the nature would be like the "raw material" you have to work with: Your inbuilt feelings and desires. The nurture would be socializing and learning to introspect and form abstract models of your own feelings and rationalize about other peoples feelings. The work of learning that stuff would be easier or harder depending on your natural disposition.
Afaik, women have an easier time getting more skilled with language from a younger age and I wonder if the statistical difference in disposition and motivation between boys and girls plays a role there or if it's something more to do with the language acquisition structure of the brain itself.
A complication is the fact that, iirc, and I think this is what you mean by personality being 50/50, is that the feelings and desires are not static when you are born, rather there are systems for "imprinting" feelings and desires at appropriate times, such as during puberty, but also as trivially as whether we are hungry or not. Like we have meta-selves that continually reprogram our conscious selves.
But with the simplified model of a "desire core" and then abstract modelling of and around that desire core. From a first approximation it seems like the modelling could try to plan contexts to most please the desire core, and so if the desire core isn't strongly specifying poly or monog as desireable than the modelling, if sufficiently skilled, could fit either the context of poly or monog to work well for the core of desires. Considering the other possible extreme, it is possible that a persons desire core would specify a definite preference for one or the other. I would guess a desire for poly would be more popular because of human drive for novelty and big happy friend groups and stuff, but that might be my own bias. But that does get into the complication that probably the core of desires doesn't specify terms for poly or monog specifically, but instead specifies things that are upstream like (for example) lust and jealousy, and so then the abstract modelling is trying to resolve the opposing desires to have lots of partners VS the desire to jealously guard your partners. How the abstract modelling resolves it (if it even does) would depend on the structure of the desire core and the skill and techniques of the abstract modelling (which itself is both nature and nurture). And I don't think we really have the tools or techniques yet for being able to really study and analyze that kind of thing. Please say if I'm wrong on that! Plus I don't think the actual structure of peoples desire cores can be understood very accurately with cumbersome umbrella words like "lust" or "jealousy". Probably the actual structure is much more complicated and nuanced. The question then is how much that complication and nuance matters for analysis, and I would guess it matters quite a bit.
Does it seem like I am thinking things that people are researching, or just spinning uninterpretable nonsense? Lol.
My understanding is that polyamorous people tend to rate highly on openness to new experience. They tend towards egalitarianism. They tend to rate low on conscientiousness. They are more likely to be some flavor of queer. They are slightly more likely to rank higher in extroversion.
None of these are rules, just correlations.
The most general aspects of the 'desire core' you refer to are sometimes called 'the big five.' Listed here for reference.
Openness to Experience
Curiosity, imagination, preference for novelty, intellectual engagement
Conscientiousness
Organization, self-discipline, reliability, goal-orientation
Extraversion
Sociability, energy, assertiveness, enjoyment of stimulation
Agreeableness
Compassion, cooperativeness, trust, altruism
Neuroticism (sometimes called Emotional Stability in reverse)
Tendency toward anxiety, moodiness, emotional reactivity
Why did the extreme ones come to therapy? Would you please elaborate?
I’m 64 and although I don’t have a social circle of sluts as large as your own, I do have enough people in my life with whom I can have adult fun, share our sexual experiences and enjoy being ENM. I would say that having the ability to separate sexual pleasure from love forms a big part of what I appreciate about these friends. They enjoy sex as they would going out for a great meal and don’t imbue it with a whole load of other attributes that would take it into a whole different realm. I agree that having low jealousy also helps. I can sometimes get off thinking about a partner with someone else and when they tell me the juicy details it can be a real turn on. I do wonder whether our early sexual experiences and our attitudes towards them play into all this. I lost my virginity during a casual encounter and that has informed my ability to have casual sex and enjoy it.
This was the life I had in college, and dreamed of continuing after. It's interesting how much friendcest goes on in high school and college in some friend groups, and then somewhere after college folks decide to "grow up" and "leave childish things behind them". I loved how free people were. I loved nude hot tubbing, and running around naked, and the friend group has multiple, overlapping relationships at various periods.
"Oh, it was fun, but we were so young! We've moved on from that."
We moved on into boring lives :( No one's fault but our own.
I'm glad to hear that some folks are still enjoying that type of life, and maybe I can eventually get back there!
You would've been ostracized af in my college for doing stuff like that, and I went to college in NYC too, btw. In an elite SUNY school near me, I remember a friend's DAD driving 100 miles to the school to keep his son from fucking with a girl who was considered a ho in her hometown.
That's fair. I'm sure more buttoned up schools probably had very different vibes and standards, and there were probably wilder schools than I went to.
Jobs get in the way for most people, I think, both in terms of time and of reputational threat.
Reputational threat is a big one for my wife. I could care less, everyone who knew me 20 years ago is astounded at my transformation into a "respectable adult" these days.
Well, and marriage, but I assumed that came after college. Very upper-middle-class of me I suppose.
One thing I always sort of wonder: polyamory can kinda start to express like a niche hobby. People who rock climb seriously mostly only hang out with other people who rock climb, etc. because to be good at rock climbing you have to rock climb a lot and that means you're spending most of your time rock climbing, which means that's how you meet most of your friends.
It seems like if you spend your time going to polyamorous events and selecting for polyamorous people, you can end up in a polyamorous bubble, but that it actually looks even weirder than the rock climbing bubble to the outside because it threatens some core concepts of how relationships work.
It doesn't seem like you can end up in such a bubble without (primarily) selecting for it, and it seems like once you limit yourself to such a filter, whether it be rock climbing or polyamory or dungeons and dragons, you're certainly naturally limiting who will end up in your friend group, and by extension, less able to be discriminative on 'core' positive traits (say, intelligence, beauty, humor).
It seems to me that the result of this is, my guess, that people who are pretty happy with their polyamorous friend groups are probably quite good at making friends in order to achieve a good balance there. Maybe that sounds obvious, lol.
"It doesn't seem like you can end up in such a bubble without (primarily) selecting for it"
I do think it's possible to select for it indirectly because polyamory has some correlates. Lets say you're enthusiastically involved in LARPing of one form or another. Or BDSM. (Not my thing, but I'm reasonably adjacent.) Basically, anything where people love costumes. This will land you in a fairly poly-rich social circle without your explicitly selecting for poly individuals.
I can't speak for others, but my social circle has become weirdly incestuous (in a metaphorical sense.) I go to a big LARP and I end up running into friends and friends-of-friends.
Neurodiversity seems to be another correlate of polyamory.
"less able to be discriminative on 'core' positive traits (say, intelligence, beauty, humor). "
If you're out in a rural area where the community is small, I agree with what you're saying.
But lets say you like some niche sport. If only 10% of people like your sport, but you spend your time in stadiums full of fellow sports watchers, you don't have to sacrifice too much if you want to find a fellow sports watcher. Put another way; if you find any activity that has a community built around it, and you engage that community, you get that first filter and anything that comes with it without a reduction in the number of people in your effective social circle.
Yes. I'm into tantra, originally for the spiritual and personal developments aspects. But polyamory and open relationships are so normalized in this circle that while you can stay monogamous, you cannot be monogamous without questioning yourself whether this is really your right way of relationship. So a lot of people open their relationship over time. Plus, you get a lot of support while doing so because many others have done so before and know what are the right steps, agreements and so on.
I think I'm sympathetic to the claim that sex and relationships could theoretically be just a fun pastime. Like tennis or WoW, as somebody says below, going out for a great meal with friends. Given the prevalence of folks with autism in this community, it makes sense that romantic relationships could be conceptualized as a kind of esoteric martial art.
But then, once sex and romance are just a hobby, aren't you left with a community that's just about being, like, really obsessively into this hobby, to an uncomfortably totalizing extent?
No shade, there are plenty of obsessive hobby communities out there. I've met people whose spouses and entire social circle were fellow model train enthusiasts, I'm sure there are foodies who maintain elaborate Google Docs cataloging their friends' reactions at various Michelin-starred restaurants. The "texting friends way too many pictures of your experience" thing certainly checks out. Everybody should get to enjoy their weird hobbies, and infodumping obsessives for Hobby X should get to enjoy that too, in the company of other X-nerds.
But mostly hobby obsessives are self-aware about the fact that this is their pastime, just a pastime, not a program for a new world. It's when the evopsych references come out, and "bonobo life" and "well maybe non-monogamists just happen to have greater self-acceptance and communication abilities than most," that I think people's hackles get raised. Because nobody would put up with that from their neighborhood model train person.
I think you're looking at a culture or a tribe, which is a bit different from a hobby. And yes, tribalism can lead to divisions between people.
Fish don't talk about the water (assuming they're immersed in a big enough body of water that they can't see the edge.) You are immersed in whatever culture you live in for most of your time being social. You're not obsessive. That's just the world you live in, with all the expectations that go along with that culture. And your support for that culture will sometimes come across to you as 'just common sense.' Something so basic and deep and correct that you don't really need to think about it. Minority cultures might need to do a bit more translating, and be a bit more aware of the fact that they actually are in a distinct culture, and do a bit more work to distinguish themselves from the mainstream culture. (Which includes self promotion, often as a response to outside deprecation.)
Yes, the jealousy thing does not manifest how people think it does, and a *huge* part of that, at least in my experience, is simply talking about it. Being comfortable with that communication. When you can do that, the jealousy often dissolves. No, it isn't for everybody, but those who it *isn't* for could try believing the people who say it works for them!
[PDF] researchgate.net
Monogamy versus consensual non-monogamy: Alternative approaches to pursuing a strategically pluralistic mating strategy
JK Mogilski, SL Memering, LLM Welling, TK Shackelford
Archives of sexual behavior, 2017•Springer
Abstract
This study examined the frequency of partner-directed mate retention behaviors and several self- and partner-rated romantic relationship evaluations (i.e., sociosexuality, relationship satisfaction, mate value, and partner ideal measures) within monogamous and consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships. Measures were compared (1) between monogamous and CNM participants and (2) between two concurrent partners within each CNM relationship (i.e., primary and secondary partners). We found that individuals in currently monogamous relationships (n = 123) performed more mate retention behaviors compared to those currently in CNM relationships (n = 76). Within CNM relationships, participants reported engaging in more mate retention behaviors with primary partners compared to secondary partners. Likewise, CNM participants reported talking about their extra-dyadic sexual experiences and downplaying these sexual experiences more often with their primary partner compared to their secondary partner. There were no significant differences between ratings of monogamous and primary partners in participants’ overall relationship satisfaction. However, monogamous participants reported less satisfaction with the amount of communication and openness they had with their partner compared to CNM participants’ reports of their primary partner, but not secondary partner. By comparison, CNM participants reported higher overall relationship satisfaction with primary compared to secondary partners and considered their primary partner to be more desirable as a long-term mate than their secondary partner. We interpret these results within the context of previous research on monogamous and CNM relationships and hypothesize that these relationship configurations are alternative strategies for pursuing a strategically pluralistic mating strategy.
I'm curious what other traits, besides openmindedness, low-jealousy, and emotional maturity, of your slutcloud are - hot (or at least everyone's 5/10 or better)? Extroverted? Cisgender? Heterosexual (your anecdotes seem to be all hetero)? Rich (any households making less than $60k, or $100k)? Young or at least middle-aged? Comfort with all methods of pregnancy avoidance?
What happens if two poly partners have a kid, and then they break up - what happens to the kid? Do people ever get kicked out of communal parenting arrangements?
"I'm curious what other traits, besides openmindedness, low-jealousy, and emotional maturity, of your slutcloud are - hot (or at least everyone's 5/10 or better)? "
--- Aella's in the USA so not many "hot" people will be in the group. However she is in San Francisco which is in California so there will be more "hot" people than most other states.
5 is average, so one wonders why you include 5 in the "hot" category? Sure, a California 5 skews better looking than an Ohio 5, but still.
I'm jealous of your lifestyle and it's painful. I don't like that I'm jealous but proud of myself that it's painful
ya i cant tell if theyre just gross lil frickers, but i have never been pleasantly surprised to learn that someone is polyam. Salty bc they are out having Fun while i seem to attract predators
That sounds like an entirely different problem, and I'm sorry to hear
This is so strange to me. I can’t fathom having multiple sexual partners and caring equally(or much) about them, or having them care about me as much as if we were monogamous. Super interesting stuff.
The mainstream perception of poly seems to be "monogamous relationship, but copy-pasted", which builds upon the definitions and expectations of a monogamous relationship, and those vary a lot between people.
It helps to imagine poly as a crowd-sourced, need-based community where someone can jump in to satisfy an individual's desires and curiosity. There should be no need to care equally (or beyond your limits) since the support system is distributed
I have a feeling poly relationships work fine in San Fran and other cities like it. But work horribly in most other places. Most people live outside San Fran so they only see poly relationships in places without the culture to support it, and the internet.
You would be blacklisted from jobs and even apartments in NYC, not to mention the dating market, for doing that shit. People who fuck casually, do it anonymously and with shame. I don't know how the gay community works though.
I've never once asked a candidate for a job about his or her sex life. This sounds like overzealous speculation.
Do you Google their names?
I think the weirdest thing about reading this is that I find it fascinating, extremely erotic, and know instinctively it would drive me insane. I'm secure in my insecurity, I guess.
Interesting, I don't personally find the existence of poly people to be triggering and it doesn't make me mad or afraid or upset, nor does any of this sound erotic to me, (which is perhaps exactly WHY it doesn't upset me).
I absolutely see the appeal in not being monogamous, but the part about everyone talking about it and being open and naked together (physically and emotionally) is very unappealing to me, so perhaps that means I have an avoidant personality because all that emotional openness makes me queasy.
I also found the anecdote about a woman wanting to watch another woman insert a vaginal suppository to be entirely perplexing and I'm not sure why it was included? Just to display the clinical curiosity and low disgust response of these personality types?? Because it doesn't really have anything to do with non-monogamy. Though perhaps it was actually the most illuminating to include, because it's the one that put me off the most!
But I do have questions, bc this is interesting:
1. Are any of these people economically vulnerable at all, or at all economically dependent upon one another?
2. What's the overall sex ratio in this community?
3. Are all the females bi or at least willing to be contextually sexual with other women? Kind of seems like it, from this reading.
4. Are any of these people profoundly better (or worse) looking than others, and if so does that cause problems? Are these people less concerned with physical appearance than the norm? You did not filter for looks in your gangbang so I'm assuming the answer is likely that yes there is less concern with appearance.
5. Do you think the males have higher or lower testosterone than average? It's very difficult for me to imagine a normal level T guy not being at risk of sexual jealousy based rage/violence at least sometimes, I've just seen it too many times.
6. What do you all do when someone starts getting possessive and territorial? Do you all have an intervention or boot them from the friend group? Or you vet hard before they're let in? Or there's enough ambient social pressure to restrain this behavior? It just seems like one loose canon could cause a lot of chaos to everyone if the cloud is so interlinked.
7. Are these people all unusually high in self esteem? My experience is that most people have no jealousy issues when it comes to anyone they think is their inferior, but that they can suddenly turn right nasty on a dime if they perceive someone is actually better than them (on whatever metric they think is relevant), and an actual threat to replacing them.
"I absolutely see the appeal in not being monogamous, but the part about everyone talking about it and being open and naked together (physically and emotionally) is very unappealing to me, so perhaps that means I have an avoidant personality because all that emotional openness makes me queasy."
--- Dating multiple people at the same time is non-controversial. Like, who cares? Disgust can be generated from hearing about graphic sexual exploits. It can grate against the ears, the consciousness. Kind of like explicit sex scenes in movies or shows where you don't expect them and you are sitting there with your kids or parents. Even "poly people" get disgusted by this.
It seems (tho I have no data) that there must be a subgroup of the population that is some combination of too unskilled and too busy to manage successful poly relationships, and that it seems painfully unfair that some people should get to experience this and others, due to circumstances outside of their control, cannot. I could imagine people who think they are in that subgroup could be quite jealous and angry and because of it may project hate and myths that the lifestyle is actually sour.
There are probably two other subgroups worth identifying, those for whom an ideal relationship experience, for whatever reason, is not poly, and those for whom cultural background gives them the impression that this must be bad.
I think the latter two groups would benefit from more awareness of poly lifestyle and understanding that it is not evil nor better just different. (and maybe also better). But the first group will probably continue to hate poly lifestyle until either the skill and resources to be successful with poly is decreased, or the burdens of time and resources keeping people from imagining themselves capable of investing in becoming poly are lessened. For decreasing requirements, I think better guides, apps, and communication norms are required. I think language is a tool and you can build better language. For example, developing and refining the minimal amount of jargon required to have good poly relationships. Likewise, people need the self awareness and such, which is also difficult to obtain, but which may be easier to develop with better language and techniques.
But... of course all of this is the baseless speculation of a crazy nerd.
I think the number of people who can pull this off will always be relatively small, and I'm not sure how much guides and apps are going to help--you always have significant free-rider problems. I remember seeing a Diana Fleischman interview where she hypothesized about the type of person who could pull it off. I wish I could remember what she said!
Life is unfair and cruel and bad--this is nothing new. I think jealousy might be part of the reason it never takes off, though given the number of kids seems low that might be part of it as well (as Kryptogal says downthread).
The smell of faux nonchalance is the giveaway in just about every sentence