Is being polyamorous a real thing?

[ThisFluentBiscuit]

I would never have thought so. I assume that being "poly" is just a fancy way of saying you want to have your cake and eat it!

However, I have this new friend. She says that for her whole marriage, she has been "monogamous plus 1," as she puts it. She has had a small number of long-term partners in addition to her husband, who has had the same.

Here's the thing: I assumed it was a bit of a free-for-all and that they were practising consensual non-monogamy. But it seems that they are always "monogamous plus 1" - and here's the kicker - they really seem to love both their spouse and their partner!!!!!

I could never focus on more than one person.

But do you think that some people really are capable of loving two people? Like, they have so much love they need to love two people?! 🤣 I'm serious though - these two seem to be capable of so much love that they seem to need two people to love! It doesn't seem to be about sex - they both seem committed to both the people in their lives!

They don't do foursomes or threesomes or anything. They both think of themselves as having a primary partner (each other, married) and a secondary partner.

My mind is blown, but I'm trying not to judge.

I don’t watch soap operas and I’m not into dramas etc, so Sister Wives was an unusual thing for me to watch. I caught some of it accidentally one night when I was working and it came on in the background, and I was hooked! What’s good is that there are so many seasons so you can watch how the relationships with the family change - from a sociological/psychological perspective, it’s really interesting!

Re your other question on casual affairs versus longer term partners outside the primary relationship…. What always catches my interest is intense emotional attraction. My male (gay) friend is similar to me. Both of us have had flings or relationships where we’ve slept with the person very quickly and it’s always because we’ve been swept up in (unhealthy or inauthentic) intense emotions. We both have ADHD, and I’m also autistic, so maybe that’s a factor.

I’d never cheat on my DP but let’s say circumstances were different, it wouldn’t be casual sex that interested me but that intense excitement you get by being swept off your feet with someone new. It’s all about heightened emotions and that connection that gets me fired up, and it’s the same for my friend too. We have another friend who sleeps with multiple different people every week, but he’s only interested in casual encounters, no interest at all in feeling a connection.

So I guess the reason for having multiple partners rather than just affairs is manifold - there’s an exciting emotional connection, it’s safer, sex is usually better as you get to know each other, it’s easier than constantly finding someone new, and maybe it’s more acceptable too?

Honestly I think we missed a trick here as a society - everyone would have been way happier I reckon 😂😂😂

I work with someone who’s poly, she has 2 partners and seems to be very happy. They all know eachother and the other partners are friends, both of them also have other partners aswell. It seems to be a massive part of her persona, a conversation/work day fairly happens without mentioning polyamory. It seems to be a popular way of life for some of the LGBQT+ scene

Yes, it’s a thing and I know various people who would say they are, though the structure as it were varies from long-term married with +1, or married but they have an ‘understanding’ to those multiple dating at the same time. The multiple daters are the messier ones and I genuinely don’t know how they have the time or energy to put into that!!

‘Part of me thinks it's all just a big joke ’

I think it just an acknowledgment that being monogamous with one person long term can be really hard/a bit boring and that sexually attraction to other people can break up an otherwise great relationship. I always know women who are married to men but very much attracted to women, so do have poly/open relationships to satisfy that aspect of their sexuality .

I think it connects to the idea of true love, personally. I don’t believe in true love and think that I could fall in love and have long terms relationships with many people. However, as you say I don’t want to dedicate the time to them.

i prefer to nurture a relationship with myself and also I’m a big fan of platonic love- I thin those friendships can and often are more powerful than romantic love. Finding another romantic partner sounds like loads of effort for someone who has been married 25 years. I put the effort in back then when in had the time and inclination 😂

I think more and more young people are moving towards polyamory. Having said that I've not seen what I'd call a successful relationship IRL..but believe it can work. In truth humans would never have been monogamous for their whole lives would they? You can definitely love two people romantically at the same time.

Plenty of long-time married people don't really love their spouses 🤷‍♀️

This is why I think that a 10 year poly relationship is no more a sign of success than a 10 year marriage. Loads of people are in relationships that just tick along

Why does any relationship have to be a sign of success? Who cares?

Poly is as old as the hills; there are lots of historic examples of married couples with live-in "family friends" who'd sleep with one or both of them. In French society you'd be seen as really odd if you didn't have someone on the side.

I suspect it is more common than most of us think. Just like being lesbian but more so, it is breaking the default that most of us are brought up with, therefore many involved will live in a discreet way.

l think it could work and work well, but because it involves a larger unit, as in more people, l would think the potential for things to go wrong are higher.

It is not something l would totally discount in what appeared to be the right situation, but would approach with hesitation.

Success of the relationship, not a sign of success in life 😂

Garrhh, I was hoping I'd get a badge!! kicks grass

They are not really committed to the second partner though are they? As they keep one constant partner and have a series of changing boyfriends/girlfriends.

I have no doubt that people can have affection for more than one person, but your friends’ dynamic sound no different from affairs. The secondary ( or affair) partner is simply used to keep the main relationship going. The secondary partners are disposable and temporary. Your mates are just having ( using) a series of affair partners, it’s just that they are doing it openly. I suspect quite a number of those partners get hurt.

In real life the couple of occasions I come across this, that is what happened. The chosen ‘secondary’ partner ended up badly hurt, because they really fell for the ‘married’ person. The married person had deliberately picked a really nice guy, the type of person who would fall in love with them. One ‘married’ woman admitted they chose men like this as it felt nice for them to get all that love. When the secondary partner gets hurt and says they felt used, the ‘married’ partner just shrugs and says ‘I was honest with you’. But thats shit isn’t it? You are still using someone to love you, when you know you love someone else more, and this other person is just there to keep your marriage going. It is using people.

So in the rare cases of genuine polyamory where the ‘nesting’ couple have permanent other partners, who genuinely are equals with the nesting partner, okay.

But your friend’s arrangement I think is just a series of affairs dressed up in a modern label and where the affair partner is used and risks getting hurt.

My impression is that a lot of people in polyamorous relationships are desperate types who can't get anyone to commit to them exclusively, but can persuade a few people to have them as a second or third option for when their preferred partner isn't available. It also seems like the sort of thing which would naturally attract exploitative types.

If it works for them and they are honest with all parties involved, I don't see the problem.

I've never met a poly relationship which survived the birth of a child. 90% of the handful of real examples I know, the man dropped the mother to a lesser relationship tier and concentrated on the child free women. Maybe it works better childfree, or with adult children?

A lot of what we feel is heavily influenced by social norms though. The social norm is one pair bond at a time. These days the social norm is several pair bonds/serial monogamy rather than just one for life, which not many decades ago was considered absolutely the norm here. You’d be pretty upset if you found a new partner and your social circle assumed it can’t be real love, it’s a bit of a joke and your ‘real’ partner is your ex-husband.

If you read between the lines in social history you can spot a lot of different set-ups, some of which look like polyamory, but because they weren’t according to the norm either of the time or of the historian’s time, they aren’t written about as real relationships. They seem more likely to occur in circles with more money/resources, but then those people are the ones who get written about in historical accounts as well.

I don’t fancy polyamory - I’m as much a product of the norm as anyone else. Also it seems like a lot of admin. I also know a 23 year old who is in a 4 person polycule and it all sounds like the most Godawful nightmare tbh. But then I’m rarely looking at anyone else’s relationship and thinking, wow that looks great. I suppose if you are with 3 other people there’s at least a chance that one of them would be having a good day at any one time.

This is both very naive and rather condescending. Naive because "one true love" has been a societal ideal for the blink of an eye - it was only a few generations ago that marriage was primarily a tool of alliance between powerful factions, more akin to a trade deal than a Hollywood film. And secondly because your assumption that any given societal ideal actually mirrors what people want overlooks how societal ideals everywhere are constructed by those in power.

Condescending because it's one thing not to understand polyamory and quite another to say that those who practise it aren't capable of real love and are just pretending. The problem there is that you don't seem capable of understanding that other people are not like you. This is where the concept of the societal ideal comes into play again. It's a tool designed to encourage conformity and to erase difference. It's worked on you because you don't even understand the concept of difference.

I'm not poly. For much the same reasons as you, actually - time and effort. I once asked a poly friend when she found the time to be alone, between her three partners at the time, and she looked baffled and said she hated to be alone. Which explained a lot! By contrast I prefer being alone to being with even my loved ones. See, we're all different.

I get polyamory on an emotional level though. I don't feel sexual jealousy and I don't believe one partner can be everything to us - that's why we have friends as well. It makes more logical sense to me than monogamy. I just don't feel any great urge to make the logistical effort.

As far as lifestyles that seem baffling and alien to me go, though, polyamory makes a lot more sense to me (child-free) than parenthood. I look at poly friends and think, that seems exhausting but you seem to be having fun. I look at parent friends and think, that seems exhausting and also like eternal hell.

I don’t really get the link to social history- for much of history women were chattels, chained to the sink and pushing out babies. Why would we look back at their life models for reassurance?

I can't speak for anyone else but I am definitely built for 100 % monogamy.

@turkeyboots isn’t it possible that the mothers dropped the male partners to a lesser level? I know Dh drove me mad when ds was tiny. A bit like the assumption that Boris Johnson ‘left’ Marina Wheeler when she had cancer - I’ve always thought it was equally likely that she threw him out.

@TheWisePlumDuck , I’m the same

A lot of people are saying polygamy is the norm and it’s just social conditioning which makes us think we are monogamous.

But if we were ‘naturally’ monogamous we would never have evolved to feel sexual jealousy. That emotion just would not exist. And it clearly does.

And children are not self sufficient at 3! Rearing children is resource intensive. For most of human history, getting enough to eat and sufficient shelter has been challenging. Marriage, gives women and their children some protection in that the man and his family remain responsible for helping them to survive.

Lots of posters are referring to how ‘we’ used to be polygamous. But in all the major societies, it’s men who are ‘allowed’ to be polygamous. Particularly affluent men ( you know,,the ones who made the rules, so made the rules suit them). Islam, for example, institutionalized this. Fornification is banned ( it’s a speedway to hell) but men can have up to four wives, if they can afford to support them, and all the slave girls they can buy. Women can only have their one husband.