I guess taken collectively, that’s what I picture as the “non-monogamous life”. I also watched Vanilla Sky again last night, so I kind of have a picture of Tom Cruise’s character in my head - immature, self absorbed 30-something year old trust fund kid with the big Manhattan apartment “snowboarding through life”, never settling down, never taking anything seriously, playing lots of games with women without regards to the consequences.
That doesn’t seem to apply to your particular situation.
Why would I be jealous my wife not sucking another guy’s dick?:dubious:
I don’t know about “immature”, but it definitely feels like wanting to have your cake and eat it too (which now that I think about it…why wouldn’t you want to eat your cake?). Maybe Maurie can answer, but if you want to have sex with other people, why BE in a marriage? I suppose one could get married for the legal and financial aspects. From a sexual and emotional aspect, it’s not clear to me how non-monogamy works. Can you sleep with whoever you like? Do you date or is it just one night stands? Does the primary partner have right of first refusal of sex or date nights? Is it open or are you expected to keep in on the DL? Are there multiple “sister wife/partners” with equal emotional claim, like in HBO’s Big Love? Does the wife get mad if you want to go out on dates instead of helping with the kids or housework? What happens if you find someone else and fall in love with them? Do you get a divorce or does the marriage sit on the backburner until the new relationship runs its course?
Except maybe a non smoker who doesn’t want to smell their stank in the first place.
Those are some good questions, and I’ll take a stab at answering them with the caveat that of course I can only speak to my own relationship and how it works.
Why BE in a marriage? For a lot of the same reasons that most people enter monogamous marriages, I imagine. Legal and financial aspects, sure. And we love each other and wanted to formally declare our commitment to building a partnership and family together. I doubt that sexual exclusivity is the only factor in why most monogamous people decide to get married – presumably most couples have already established their sexual exclusivity before the actual marriage, so removing that from the equation, why does anyone want to be in a marriage?
Can you sleep with whoever you like? For the most part, yes. I can think of one or two times we have asked each other to please not consider certain people as potential partners for various reasons, and we have both respected that.
**Do you date or is it just one night stands? ** I personally would never sleep with someone I don’t know well, and my husband is the same. I have, however, had a couple of “one night stand” make-out sessions. I don’t believe my husband has. I have a partner I have been sleeping with for about 8 years, and have had several shorter-term “boyfriends” over the years as well. My husband’s are generally more short-term.
Does the primary partner have right of first refusal of sex or date nights? Yes, our family’s plans and schedules take priority over any social activities – whether it’s a “date” with someone else or going to the movies with a co-worker.
**Is it open or are you expected to keep in on the DL? ** We know who each other is seeing, but are generally discreet with details. I actually quite like to hear all about it, but he doesn’t really.
Are there multiple “sister wife/partners” with equal emotional claim, like in HBO’s Big Love? No, we are committed primary partners. My “boyfriend” of 8 years sees other people as well, and doesn’t ask or expect me to be his primary emotional support.
Does the wife get mad if you want to go out on dates instead of helping with the kids or housework? Answered above – we both contribute equally to the kids and housework, and run any plans by each other, whether “Hey, mind if I go for a coffee with my mom after work” or “Does it work if I go to a party with my boyfriend Friday?”
**What happens if you find someone else and fall in love with them? Do you get a divorce or does the marriage sit on the backburner until the new relationship runs its course?**The marriage would never sit on the backburner, no. We both have (and do) love other people, but have never encountered a situation that threatened the primariness of our relationship. I don’t 100% know exactly what we would do if one of us did find someone that we wanted to be with more than each other, just as most monogamous couples probably don’t really know. We would try to work through it (just as most monogamous couples probably would) and if we couldn’t, I suppose yes, we would get a divorce.
Nice strawman. It sure makes more sense if you were jealous of a guy who had all the emotional benefits of a long term relationship, but still had the freedom to fuck other people. I’ve personally run into jealousy based around that many times before, and that was what I was referring to.
Why BE in a marriage? I’m not and would not want to be. The institution itself seems to be to be inherently mono and sexually possessive. My opinion is not by any means the prevailing one in the poly community though.
Can you sleep with whoever you like? Absolutely (assuming “whoever I like” is in favor of the idea, of course)
**Do you date or is it just one night stands? ** I date. I’m not much for one night stands myself, nothing against them ethically or anything.
Does the primary partner have right of first refusal of sex or date nights? We don’t don’t do the “primary” / “secondary” thing. We work out schedules amongst all the involved people.
**Is it open or are you expected to keep in on the DL? ** Wasn’t sure what was being asked here but extrapolating from the previous answer, most of us aren’t much into blow by blow accounts of who did what to what person’s orifice or organ with what, but we sometimes talk about how things are going overall with this or that other partner, ask for and receive advice, etc.
Are there multiple “sister wife/partners” with equal emotional claim, like in HBO’s Big Love? Never watched it, but all of my partners have equal claim; and their other partners have equal claim to mine, with one exception who does regard one of her partners as her “primary”.
Does the wife get mad if you want to go out on dates instead of helping with the kids or housework? not applicable for the most part; domestic chores are no more the responsibility of any of my partners than of me. We don’t all live under one roof, by the way.
What happens if you find someone else and fall in love with them? Do you get a divorce or does the marriage sit on the backburner until the new relationship runs its course? (not married): There is a finite amount of time in a week. If I were to meet someone new and fall in love, it would make scheduling difficult at this point. But pretending for the moment that I wasn’t fully booked, there is no restriction and my partners would be happy for me. If any of them were to connect with someone new, I would expect them to be rather centrally obsessed with their new love interest but we’d stay connected and retain our date days and I would be happy for them.
Mostly I’m just jealous of they guy who gets to fuck other people.
But not really. No one held a gun to my head to get married. And I had plenty of time to contemplate it.
Plus, the sort of relationship **Maurie **describes is too complex for me, even just from a scheduling and logistics standpoint. If I were to be single, I’d rather just go for a more casual version of something like what **AHunter3 **describes.
That’s funny you see my relationship as too complex! I find AHunter3’s sounds way more confusing. But I think it’s just a matter of how it seems when it’s laid out in black and white as opposed to how it flows in the moment when you are simply organically living it.
My relationship is probably almost identical to yours, from a scheduling standpoint. We get up, make the coffee, put lunches in backpacks, head off to work, come home, grab groceries, make dinner, get the kids to practices or play a game or whatever, watch some tv, go to bed, rinse & repeat. On some evenings, one of us might go out socially - just like you and your wife likely do - sometimes it’s for the exact same kind of platonic “date” you and your wife may have with friends or co-workers, and sometimes it’s to see a friend or partner we also want to fool around with. Logistically, it’s exactly the same.
I’m curious to know whether everyone is operating with essentially the same vocabulary. That is, is the term “non-monogamy” interchangeable with “polyamory?” Are either one interchangeable within the concept of “open marriage?”
Do the OP and all of the respondents answer those questions in the same way?
Non-monogamy includes things like swinging, where the partners are not constrained to each other sexually but can have other sexual partners… but not necessarily additional ongoing relationships. ETA: I’ve known swingers who had the rule that if they start to form emotional attachments they have to break it off, for the stability of their marriage. It’s a different mindset than polyamory.
So polyamory is a subset of non-monogamy. So is swinging.
Open marriage overlaps with polyamory but not all polyamorous people marry; most (though not all) people in an open marriage consider their married partner to be “primary” and additional partners — ongoing romatic-sexual relationships — to be “secondary”. Some non-married poly people do that too, but not all of us.
One of the things that can make this a complicated topic to discuss is how varied “non-monogamous” can be. It seems like the default assumption a lot of people jump to (see several responses in this thread alone) is that it equals a lot of casual sex, when that frequently isn’t how it works.
My own relationship is a great example of the type of arrangement that raises a lot of eyebrows. My fiance has a long-term girlfriend and is free to date other women if he’d like to. We started this journey with him thinking he wanted something casual, but frankly I knew him better than that, and things soon started getting serious with a lady he really connected with. I have not dated or slept with anyone else, and have little (none, really) interest in doing so. He also hasn’t slept with or dated anyone else since he started seeing the one specific woman.
My relationship with him is the primary relationship, we’re happy, we have our own specific rules (like I get veto rights for new partners and I do not want details), and good lord do we talk a lot. Our communication standards had to be raised considerably, and it’s a whole hell of a lot of work to not only make more of an effort to check in with everyone involved, but to force ourselves to really be honest with the people checking in with us.
It’s not something we talk about much to other people. Mainly because we’re reasonably private and it’s nobody’s business, but also because we had to deal with a bunch of drama when we first “came out” to people that needed to know. Because of the kind of arrangement we have, it seems like the assumption there is that I don’t want this, it’s something my fiance is doing to me, etc. I think the last time I brought it up in a relevant thread here I was told I didn’t know what kind of relationship I have. No wonder so many poly/non-monogamous people frequently keep quiet.
I’m going to go with yes for certain definitions of* immature *or stunted.
Non-monogamy is a hedged bet, a fear of emotional commitment, IMO. It’s an acknowledgement that on some fundamental level your primary relationship isn’t providing you with what you want/need emotionally and that gap is not something you are capable of filling for yourself. A hobby or platonic friendships can’t fill it for you, so you find someone outside your primary relationship that serves as an escape from the mundane and ordinary day to day routine.
I’m not sure exactly what vocabulary to use. To be honest, aside from this kind of discussion I don’t generally label our relationship. If anything, I tend to more use negatives, because to me it is more about something I’m not than something I am. I would be most likely to say something like “we’re not sexually exclusive”, or “we’re not monogamous”. I don’t think of myself as a “polyamorist” though I suppose I might be.
Take, for example, how a lot of people absolutely must have a coffee every morning. Now say that you don’t like coffee and have a juice instead. Or sometimes water, or tea, or a Sprite. That is strange to the people who can’t imagine starting the day without a coffee, but for you it just works. What do you call yourself? Are you a polybevist? Or would you just say, “I don’t drink coffee” or “I’m not a coffee-drinker”? I know it’s a dumb example, but I think it’s similar in illustrating the lack of a thing – the point of interest is not that you enjoy different beverages, it’s that you don’t enjoy coffee. You’re not likely to think of liking water or tea or juice as a part of your identity, but on occasion you may have to explain that you don’t drink coffee to people who expect you to.
I suspect that some people here imagine a “lifestyle” – some elaborate system of sex dates and scheduling and checks and balances. It just isn’t that way at all (in my relationship). There’s no conscious planning or specific language. It’s not like “Well, it’s Tuesday at 3:00! Time to go be polyamorist with Joel! Back in an hour.” When I spend time with someone I have a sexual relationship with, it’s just like meeting up with any other friend – we might meet for a beer, or go see a local band, or have a coffee. Yes, sometimes (not always, even) afterwards maybe we’ll fool around. But it’s usually pretty organic, not as regimented as I think some people imagine it is.
Dumb example my ass, I’ve been getting in trouble because of my non-coffeeing ways since I was 14! I’ll never understand why is everybody so traumatized by my choice of drinks. “OK, then, so you’ll have a decaf?” :twitch:
Good for you for making this work. I’m sort-of working on a novel and among other things it’s going to feature an open relationship and have some discussion of the kind of issues you mention.
Non-monogamy is a blanket term that includes a lot of specific things under it. Polyamory is a type of non-monogamy, but the terms are not interchangeable as non-monogamy includes things like ‘swinging’ and ‘open relationships’ that are not part of polyamory. Polyamory is also a blanket term for multiple distinct relationship styles - there’s ‘family style’ polyamory where 3 or more people engage in a single combined relationship, ‘couple style’ where an existing couple dates people ‘on the side’, and ‘network poly’ where people date multiple other people independently.
“Open marriage” usually refers specifically to a marriage where the couple is allowed to have low- or no- strings attached sex with people outside of the marriage, but not to develop serious relationships or feelings for others. It’s also possible to use open/closed as simple descriptors for whether people can see others outside of an existing relationship; some polyamorous relationships involve three or more people that have relationships with each other but don’t see people outside.
It’s also interesting that a lot of people who criticize non-monogamy fundamentally don’t understand it, for example:
Demonstrates a belief that all forms of non-monogamy are structured around a “primary relationship”, when that simply isn’t the case. Family-style polyamory where multiple adults have relationships with each other and raise kids together typically doesn’t have a ‘primary’ relationship anywhere, and this has been practiced by people in America longer than white people have been on the continent. There are various other non-hierarchical poly arrangements, some of them ‘everyone is in one big relationship’ style, others where each person has multiple relationships but none is marked as a ‘primary’, and more.
There are undoubtedly exceptions to the norm in some societies. But it seems to me that the OP is coming from a primarily first world western society POV and thus I’m responding in the same context. If you want to introduce alternative societies from the past or other native populations around the world, be my guest. But I don’t find it relevant.
As someone who’s social skills only come from a lot of observation and learning, I find poly much easier to deal with than mono. There’s a huge (and varied, though people often don’t admit it) set of unspoken rules for mono relationships that you’re instantly a bad guy if you break. You have some sort of restriction on what non-sexual things you’re allowed to do with other people, though the rules vary depending on their gender and don’t usually take orientation or possible non-binary gender into account. You are supposed to be riding the relationship escalator, so only seriously dating people who you can see yourself marrying, having kids with, and eventually dying with. And being forced to deal with all of one person’s problems all of the time is much worse than trying to deal with more than one partner to me.
I like that if I want to watch a movie with a platonic friend and cuddle on the couch, I can just do it without it possible being a relationship-ending ‘mistake’, regardless of what gender they are. If I decide to date someone, I don’t have to immediately start evaluating whether this person is compatible enough to go exclusive with, marry, have kids with, and eventually die with, and to ditch (or treat as disposable) the relationship if it doesn’t fit the relationship escalator, I can just let it develop to whatever level works. If a partner’s schedule shifts and we can only see each other infrequently for a year, that doesn’t mean we have the choice of ‘break up’ or ‘feel miserable and alone’.
Where exactly do you think Native Americans live now? For a good portion of them, it’s in the United States, which is a first world western society, so when I talk about things that Native Americans have done for centuries and continue to do so today, that is something that is happening in a first world western society, no matter how much you want to deny their experience or existence. Seriously, do you think all Natives just vanished one day? Or that they just forgot their own culture rather than putting on enough of a front of being ‘Westernized’ to avoid persecution? This isn’t ‘the past’, it’s ‘today’, and it isn’t some foreign land, it’s the US.
And where do you think I’m drawing my other examples from? Oh, it’s also people who live in the United States, the first world western society that I live in. But I’m not really surprised that someone criticizing non-monogamy as ‘immature’ lacks even a basic understanding of how people in a first-world, western country actually practice it. That kind of willful ignorance is actually pretty immature, though.
If I accept what you say as true (and I very much don’t), then how is sharing any activity with someone other than your primary partner not the same acknowledgement of the same fundamental lack?
Some things about monogamy are stressful. It’s the best fit for my marriage - and really important to my husband, but I hooked up with him at age 19, FFS. I think I was 33 before I had any sort of sexual awakening, and it was like, “Huh. I sure would like to try that…” Like I found out a good 12 years into my relationship that one of my closest friends shares my specific kink. It turned into an awkward situation because I wanted to talk about this awakening with someone, it wasn’t strictly anything my husband understood on a visceral level, being the vanilla bean that he is. And my friend and I are both writers and we both write erotic fiction on occasion, so it just naturally led to us exchanging critiques and talking about our own sexuality. So I became emotionally intimate with this guy in a way that it finally dawned on me was kinda wrong.
Then I felt like shit about it. I mean I was in really bad shape mentally at the time, so just the guilt I had over feelings for this other guy damn near killed me. I talked to the object of my affection about it a little (I never suggested acting on it, I just was freaking out about it), and while he shared my feelings of affection, he has always respected my marriage, so he encouraged me to discuss it with Sr. Weasel.
I went to my husband and ‘‘confessed’’ to the sin of having feelings for someone else. I think in most monogamous relationships the partner would have lost their shit or it would engender jealousy somehow. My husband is not like that, though. He consoled me for feeling guilty, reassured me that it was not my fault, and we talked openly about it. The whole thing strengthened our partnership, and the feelings I had for the other guy faded, even though we still have an openness about sexuality with one another that doesn’t bother my spouse. This guy is in town for the holidays and literally spent the night at our house last night, and we talked about the sex scene in my current novel and went out for brunch just the two of us this morning, so it’s weird… well what’s weird is that I did nothing wrong, really, but some people might think I had.
In a standard monogamous relationship, I think a lot of people would keep those feelings for someone else to themselves and just feel guilty - or worse, pursue an affair behind the other person’s back. By bringing it all out into the open I enhanced my relationship with both guys. We all know exactly where we stand.
On the flip side (less extreme) my husband has a lot of female friends, and in grad school, particularly, many of them were single. It wasn’t uncommon for him, while traveling for school, to crash at the house of a female friend’s place while he was out of town. He spends a lot of time alone with other women. It doesn’t bother me in the least, but occasionally I get messages from society that indicate this is somehow wrong of him. Well, as far as I’m concerned, this is our marriage, and whether one of us is in the wrong is entirely incumbent on the two of us to decide. It’s nobody else’s business.
In both of those cases, I’d argue it takes a pretty high level of maturity to not fly off the handle or feel threatened by other people. You have to really trust the people you are with.
I don’t think I want a poly or open relationship, but I recognize the almost arbitrary constraints that monogamy can impose on a relationship. There are definitely some elements of open relationships that appeal to me.
This is well said. Even within sexually exclusive relationships, the line of what’s okay and what’s not varies drastically depending on the people involved. As long as both people are comfortable with where the line is in their individual relationship and trust each other to operate within that line, it seems really strange for other people to arbitrarily decide where the line should be.
