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Oct 25, 2022Liked by Aella

I’m a recent subscriber after taking the big kink survey, and I’d like to say how absolutely refreshing of a take this is on polyamory. I’ve felt like I’ve been born into a poly brain but didn’t discover it was a legitimate thing that had a name until after being in a committed monogamous relationship and married at that. I don’t like being restricted but it’s hard to leave from the security of a relationship that is committed. I know that fear of the unknown is not the reason to stay in a situation that will potentially be a bad outcome, but fear is also a good motivator or restriction in its own right.

Regardless, I love the way you put this, and yes I know it’s months and months ago, but truly this opened my eyes to a few concepts and thought processes that I hadn’t considered. Thank you.

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Mar 13, 2022·edited Mar 13, 2022

1. Polyamory sounds good but I don't know yet if my brain can handle it.

2. I saw a potential contradiction between "...This seems like controlling behavior, and is bad." versus "it’s okay to try to mitigate that by requesting your partner obey certain rules as a condition of being in a relationship with you, and it’s okay for someone to voluntarily agree to restricting behavior in order to please you." I guess the difference is latter was discussed and explicitly agreed in advance, and the former was not, but otherwise it would be fine? Are there any implicit contracts which a relationship defaults into unless agreed otherwise? Is one of them "construct a predictive mental model of what would hurt my partner, and use it to avoid hurting my partner, and talk to them in advance about any ambiguous cases"? In the first scenario, I guess the jealous-of-friends person is at fault for having an unusual/unpredictable insecurity and not making it explicit in advance.

3. insecurity seems like a Russell conjugation of desire.

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"But if you did manage to get into a committed relationship with this person, then they probably don’t have higher SMV; people tend to be pretty evenly matched, at least most of the time!"

I think this is true for monog relationships, but not true for poly ones.

- If a woman is telling a man she's in a poly relationship, this tends to raise the man's interest by default as men are much more open to sleeping around on average.

- If a man is telling a woman he's in a poly relationship, this tends to significantly lower the woman's interest on average as most women want a monog relationship.

Both of these come from personal experience. I've tried telling women I'm not interested in a serious relationship and most of the time this resulted in the woman in question losing interest. On the other hand I've never rejected a woman telling me she's looking for something casual, nor have I heard any of these women complain about men rejecting them (we had very open communication about these things).

I would say I'm relatively good looking - I got 200 matches on Hinge over a month in a tech-heavy city on the West Coast (swiping selectively) and could probably schedule a date with a new woman I find attractive for 7 nights a week. But even at this level of attractiveness my success would be *much* lower if I told everyone I'm in a poly relationship or seeking to start a poly relationship. Out of curiosity I've always swiped right on women who openly said they're in a poly relationship on Hinge and never once got a match - this tells me that these women are swamped with attention, which is a complete opposite of what my own situation would be.

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I loved this post enough to finally subscribe after reading all the free stuff all morning. Your premise was quite a revelation, namely that there's a name for what I actually feel toward my wife, which is that she is so hot (high SMV) that it is perfectly natural for other men to want her and who am I to stop her. It was even more breathtaking that this definition of the term "polyamory" is the exact mirror image of what I though the word meant, namely that I want my wife to one day give me permission to try things with other women, but am willing to wait.

A tiny bit of pushback is still in order. You use the word "average" without any discussion of the distinction between the three most common types of average: the mean, the median and the mode. The mean number of partners might be the same for both high-filter females and bang-anything men, but that means nothing when you realize that you are just dividing the number of sexual encounters by the number of men or women. So if 100 men had 4 women each, and another 300 men had 1 woman each, the mean is still the same (1 3/4) but the median man had one partner and the modal model male has 4.

Now if the women were free agents instead of being locked into a harem, then the above would NOT change one bit! All that changes is that we no longer need exactly 700 (4x200 + 1x300) women to make the example work. We could have a few as 4 poly women doing all the work, each preferring all 100 modal men and exactly one median man. Or any other number, perhaps an even 400, with tons of ways ("fair" or "unfair") to match up and still generate the exact same statistics for men.

Now there is definitely a possibility that your ideal of each woman having a distinct primary (so no man is left behind) and any number of consummated celebrity crushes. But the "it all averages out" argument does not inexorably get us there.

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How would you describe someone whose ideal relationship would involve a locked door for their partner(s) but craves multiple relationships themselves? (Some might describe it as inherently selfish or something, but assuming it's genuinely what someone wants, are they poly/mono?)

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Would polygamy be the right term? Or polygyny if you're female. One man/woman with multiple partners who don't get to sleep with other people.

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