To think that consensual non-monogamy is usually a recipe for disaster?

[Xaviera]

I know some people say it’s great fun and improves their relationship but I have real trouble believing that the majority of people don’t feel at least a bit of angst and jealousy. And if you don’t, do you really love your partner?

Also, I think it’s usually being driven by the man and the woman is afraid to leave her partner.

The ones I know about ended in tears. One situation, the man invited his friend into his and his gf’s bed and a year later the gf moved in with the friend.

Other one was driven by the man of a married couple but the woman went along with it until she realised that she didn’t like having sex with seedy men (because most swingers are not great looking). So they stopped but the husband carried on thinking about it, ended up cheating with sex workers = end of marriage.

i feel like people think it’s cool or something 🤷🏻‍♀️ we can all have fantasies but actually doing it is usually a shit idea imho.

Why would you care what other people do in their relationships

Because it is an interesting social trend? Though I don't know if it is yet a trend. I don't care exactly but I am definitely interested because I know some poly people who are very open about their lives on social media ( so hard to avoid). Like they will say " I am off on my date and DH is off on his date. I love my life!!!!!". Or words to that effect.

Edith Craig, christabel Marshall and clare Atwood were a lesbian throuple who all lived together at smallhythe in Kent from 1916 until Edith's death in 1947. (Not poly by the way, just to answer your question)

Lots of reasons, good and bad.

You might know these other people and care about the risk of them being hurt.

People generally learn about what is right and wrong by seeing what other people do.

People can feel insecure about other people doing things differently and prefer to see their own choices validated.

Those are the few that spring most immediately to mind.

Definitely an issue. You can only have so many relationships before you’re out of time and energy.

For me I don’t live with any partners or intend to.

I have a long term partner (5yrs) who is long distance (70 miles) a fairly recent partner who lives in the nearest city and is hoping to build up a supporting loving relationship

I also have 5 people I hook up with as and when it fits. Not always ending in sex and could be 6+ months between seeing them.
They’re essentially intimate friends rather than partners in the traditional sense.

Can’t speak for anyone else but my male partner has only has 1 connection with someone else in 5yrs whereas I can’t count off the top of my head how many I’ve had.
Fortunately for us he is happy enough with what we have and not actively seeking anything though he’d be open to it if it happened naturally and appreciates that he has the freedom to do so. He is not jealous or begrudging when I am off with someone else and is actually really respectful and supportive.

I did once have a partner who needed to ‘even the score’ if I was with someone but that gave me the ick so I ended it

It works if it's the woman's idea in the first place.

@knittingdad

I mean maybe some people manage it. I’m not against it if people can make it work for them. I just find the thought exhausting and pointless.

Why bother being married to someone (which, let’s face it, is enough of a compromise in the best circumstances) if your primary emotional and sexual relationship isn’t with your spouse?

A fair number of the Bloomsbury Group cultivated open and non-monogamous relationships and liaisons for significant periods of their lives. Not necessarily throuples; but throuples are only one small subset of non-monogamy in the first place.

What makes you assume all poly people are married to one of their partners?

I don’t think you can extrapolate your personal feelings and experiences to other people. I think it’s great that you know your own boundaries and limitations and what you want in and from your relationships; but they’re not everybody’s. I’m always surprised when people talk about marriage as a compromise, because I don’t find my marriage a compromise at all; nor do I associate feelings like exhausting with my other relationships.

Romantic and sexual relationships can be/should be fun, joyful, and liberating. They also involve our deepest emotions. When we are intimate with
someone we become vulnerable. This is true in one night stand as much as a long term partnership. If you enter into polyamory you will inevitably have to face strong emotions, either yours or someone else’s. You can’t make that reality go away with lots of rules, boundaries or talking.

Emotions are very powerful and mostly don’t respond well to reason. Why deliberately choose to live like that? That’s nothing to do with judging others or being prudish. It’s just the nature of every human heart. If someone tells you they can manage a polyamorous relationship long term then perhaps there is something unusual in the way they feel emotion. I would steer clear of that kind of person.

I was the biggest advocate of this at one stage in my life.

But I was wrong and you're absolutely right

Long term I don't see how it can work without one or another person getting jealous.

Feelings are fluid. While you might have been happy to be 1 of 3 at the start, you can't be scrupulously "equal" so resentment is bound to arise, unless of course you really don't give a shit and if that's the case, then why bother?

Non-monogamy often doesn't work, I agree, but neither does long-term monogamy.

It's ludicrous that we still maintain the pretence that lifelong happy marriage is even desirable, let alone possible for the majority of people.

If we acknowledged and expected that most relationships have a natural expiry date, and structured society around that expectation, there'd be a lot less heartache and angst all round.

Ain't that the truth!

My wife and I have talked about this a bit, and mutually agreed it's not for us, but one of the things that came up was that my wife would want the reassurance that she would remain my primary emotional and sexual partner and vice versa. So I don't see that as an issue

Society places all sorts of expectations and taboos on relationships and sex, but if two people in a relationship don't begrudge each other the time they spend on hobbies, or platonic relationships, then is time spent cultivating a second intimate relationship really that different?

I can't say logically that it is, though I think that I would personally find that it would make me feel too insecure.

You’re only imagining it in the context of the mono relationships you know.

my relationships aren’t equal, I don’t split my time between like a child with separated parents!

I have different relationships with different people that we design between us to suit our wants and needs

I fundamentally disagree with this. For me, the value of a long-term committed relationship is precisely in making an open-ended commitment to another, because that commitment makes it easier for everyone involved to trust the others to be open, honest and vulnerable.

If I knew that the relationship with my wife had an expiry date then I'd find it much harder to open myself up and be vulnerable.

I think this is true of monogamous and non-monogamous relationships.

Why is it 'gross'? I think what you mean is that you find it gross, which is not the same thing.

It wouldn't work for me, but I have friends in varying forms of non-monogamous relationships and most of them seem very happy with it. The ones that don't are a couple where it's clearly driven by the wife's higher sex drive and the husband hoping she won't leave him - in those cases I think it's obviously not going to work. But I have multiple other friends who are very happily non-mongamous/polygamous.

From posts on here lots of people enter into them with entirely unrealistic beliefs that they can control how their partner will feel about person they start seeing. Not only is this quite a disgusting way to treat the 'other partners' - who are commodified as mere bodies to be shagged, but its also ridiculous to think you can control how emotions develop between your spouse and someone else he is having an relationship with.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, people use failed poly relationships to 'prove' it doesn't work/is bad/is purely for the man. Conveniently ignoring the huge percentage of monogamous relationships that fail.

"open myself up and be vulnerable"

What maudlin nonsense is this? Marriage is a legal and financial contract—originally created to control women's reproduction—with some fancy language about love and god often added.

Recognising that it's perfectly normal for people to want a change after the child-rearing years would be much healthier all round. If people wanted to stick it out to death, that's fine, but they'd be rare.

What marriage needs is the sentimentality taking out of it.

• Not all poly people are married, so a lot of the time that wouldn't apply - many are poly precisely because they don't want/can't have all their emotional and sexual needs met by one person
• Even if they were married: that's imposing one interpretation onto marriage and assuming that's why everyone does it. Lots of reasons why people get married that aren't for that specific dynamic - for financial or citizenship reasons, for companionship, etc. None of which would preclude having other partners
• And some people are married and do consider that their relationship with their spouse is their primary emotional and sexual one, but that still doesn't preclude them having other, different emotional and sexual relationships with others

I said upthread it wouldn't work for me (mainly from a logistical POV!) but I do think it's not that difficult to envision a world where people have multiple happy relationships at once. I find it quite strange that it's so difficult to grasp (not you specifically, just generally!) - we would think anyone over the age of about 16 who had one Best Friend who fulfilled all their friendship needs as a bit childish or intense, and yet we expect our romantic/sexual partners to do so and then find it surprising when some people do it differently.

The trouble with your conclusion is that you think "benefits men" as oppositional to, and mutually exclusive with, "benefits women".

Women (who enjoy sex) absolutely benefit from greater sexual access, less judgment around exploring their sexuality and freedom to have more sexual partners. If they're hetero or bi then... yes, I suppose men would also benefit from that, but you can't have the former without the latter. As someone who's very thankful to have had a sex life I'd have been judged and shamed for even a few decades ago, I can assure you that I did it primarily for my benefit.

I'm not non-monogamous, but I've toyed with the idea and don't find it particularly unusual. The idea of it doesn't bother me emotionally, but ultimately I think I'm a bit too introverted and selfish to want to juggle multiple partners. I've got a lot of friends in the poly community and they all seem very gregarious, extroverted types who don't especially enjoy being alone.

Non-monogamy is only a disaster when a couple go into it without proper, honest, open communication. It actually requires more radical honesty to be a success than traditional monogamy, the precise rules of your particular non-monogamy and all the potential wrinkles and boundaries need to be talked through. It's a disaster when people use it as a hail mary to fix an unhealthy relationship or if one party pressures the other.

But monogamy with poor communication skills tends to be a shitshow too (see: half of MN).

Also in every hetero poly setup I know the women benefit far, far more than the men in terms of increased options. Like, 90% of the time. Poly women have their pick of sexual partners, poly men rarely do.

Asking "do you really love your partner" is a weird question. Do you really love your kids if you have more than one? Of course.

Why it makes the relationships better is analogy-worthy. l love roast dinners. But having a roast dinner every single meal for the entirety of my life would make me hate roast dinners faster than anything else. Some days I want pizza. Or pasta. Or soup. I never get bored of roast dinners because I look forward to them when I do have one, rather than it being the only option on the menu every single time.

You wouldn't restrict yourself to wearing the exact same clothes daily, or committing to the same car your whole life, or only having one friend, this is no different.