(Quote abbreviated because I’m not even going to try to take on the rest of what you said.)
What the hell do you have against poly relationships? Do you really think love between 3 people is inferior to that between 2 people? I’m not talking about sex here, so quit harping on “threesomes”. I’m talking about commitment, relationship, weathering life’s hardships together - all the stuff that marriage entails. How would you like it if someone said your relationship (assuming you’re in one) is not valid because of your choice of partner?
You seem to be missing the point others are making about being accepting of “alternative” relationships. It is unethical to dismiss a relationship as “stunted, immature” “acting out” based on a person’s choice of partner(s), whether because of gender, race, religion, or quantity.
Oh and if you really believe drama is confined to polyamory then you have another think coming.
Why do you people even bother arguing sex-related topics with Dio? It’s the same pattern every single time. Just ignore him!
Now this thread is going to go on for 4 pages, with you guys going back & forth with Dio, and he will not budge once inch from his position. You’re not going to convince him of anything.
That thread was surprisingly a clusterfuck of ignorance. I wouldn’t say bigotry, but it seemed that quite a few people hadn’t a clue what the hell they were talking about.
I think Dio was a little over the top in that thread, but my impression was that Dio was more upset with the way the poly couple was bringing their other partners to parties and acting affectionately with them. That’s the psychodrama he was talking about, I believe, not the actual poly relationship.
I have to agree with Dio on this one. The 1960’s came and went a long time ago. People like to think such a thing will work in the long term because some people like to experiment and play with fire. Most people have trouble keeping a two person long-term relationship together as it is. I know the world is a big place where some people have tigers for pets and some people do heroin well into their 80’s so I can’t really judge any individual without more information but polyamory is a freakish experiment that is doomed to failure for almost everyone. Unless the people involved aren’t really human in the traditional meaning of the word, it is an incredibly stupid idea if only because it brings on lots of negative attention which is what they may want in the first place come to think of it. Go rebels!
I was going to join this, but Dio’s modified position (of, essentially, skepticism until the people in question have acted like they’re polyamorous and don’t appear to be merely sleeping around AND parading it in front of their friends willy-nilly) is fine with me.
Yikes. If I wanted negative attention, I’d come out as poly to my severely Catholic parents.
Polyamory is like any other fringe relationship strategy (BDSM, living in separate houses Frida Kahlo-style, what have you) – if it worked for the majority, it’d be practiced by the majority, so one has to be careful to examine their reasons and feelings carefully when embarking on such a thing.
Eh, it’s entirely possible you know people who are in poly relationships (not necessarily close friends, though) and don’t know about their relationship for the same reason you don’t know if one of them likes to be tied up or dress up like a rooster. You only see the extreme examples of any fringe lifestyle.
This is exactly right. It’s like kids playing house. It’s immature, and self-absorbed, and (in my opinion), it’s obnoxious to expect people to take it seriously – at least (as I said in the other thread), not until they prove it over a long haul with some kind of sustained, stable and closed simulacrum of a serious, adult, relationship paradigm.
It’s not like I’m trying to make it illegal or stop anybody from doing whatever they want, so what difference does it make if I personally think it’s immature?
If you want a serious answer, it’s because you tend to posts which, while snarky, are generally useful and insightful, so when you decide you’re going to excoriate an idea it hurts more than if it were say, Glenn Beck or someone else equally contemptible and easy to dismiss.
I also have to add that in many situations, especially in one male with multiple female partners there is a definite element of the women being emotionally immature and unhealthily submissive to men.
What’s extremely bad is when one of these relationships produces children; I think it exposes children to extremely unhealthy relationship dynamics and is especially injurious in those scenarios.
Answers which are snarky yet useful and insightful? (If you say so.) Well, someone has to take QED’s place. The idea that DTC’s negative comments hurt more somehow because he’s not totally contemptible? Speak for yourself.
I’m often skeptical of scenarios where only one of the parties in a relationship has multiple partners for precisely that reason–there’s a potentially historically abusive/exploitative dynamic associated.
I don’t know if the latter half of your post refers to one-male-many-female groups or all polyamorous groups, but most of the poly groups I know have children. Not a few have grandchildren. I have yet to meet one whose kids had any more problems than average with relationship dynamics–certainly they’re better adjusted on average than the children of divorce that I’ve known.
I think he was specifically talking about the kind of male-dominan “polygamous” scenarios in which children are brought up in a household culture where women are submissive, and regarded only as servants to men.
