Well, you know, both parties may go into a relationship believing they share the same values, but in many cases they are wrong. Adultery and divorce don’t happen only to the self-proclaimed polyamorists. I’d say the marriages I know that haven’t been touched by adultery or ended in divorce are rarer than the ones that have.
Adultery is common. Divorce is common. Anyone who thinks that just because your partner promised to be true, that means you can rely on that promise, is just fooling themselves. Human beings cheat all the time, and when they aren’t cheating they’re being tempted to cheat. Is cheating inevitable? Of course not. But am I suprised to find that lots of people aren’t monogamous by nature? No, I surely am not. If I were getting involved with someone who wasn’t monogamous by nature, would I want to know about that? Yes, I would.
It seems to me that if you’re asexual, or a big slut, or gay, or need to be tied up, or a foot fetish, or whatever, it’s a lot better to be honest with your prospective partners than to try to hide it. Relationships can only work if both partners are aware of what they are getting themselves into. I don’t mean that both partners have to want the same thing, or that because you have a certain desire the other party is obligated to indulge that desire. But if you can’t work out a reasonable agreement that leaves both parties satisfied, that means the relationship is doomed to failure.
Also, whether we’re discussing “true” polyamory or not, based on the original thread, AHunter3 in NO WAY insulted monogamy, he just said it wasn’t for him. That makes it ok for you to insult polyamory?
Sure, why not?. Polygamy is illegal everywhere in North America except Saskatchewan. Why shouldn’t it be OK to attack something that is illegal almost everywhere? It’s even illegal in Utah. You ever wonder why?
Polygamy is polyamory, and both lead to shallow relationships. Sure it doesn’t have to be shallow, but the arrangement takes away the incentive to work things out. People being what they are, if the relationship with wife #1 hits a rocky patch, it would be all too tempting to just ignore the problem and spend more emotional investment in emergency backup wife.
Gee, maybe somebody will take aim at you with the same thing in mind.
Actually, a friend of mine agreed to be in an open marriage that eventually fell apart because she got waaaaay more action than he did. So what happens DragonAsh, if she scores 5 guys in a week and you get zero?
I make no qualms about having probably more than my fair share of self-esteem and confidence in who I am as a person and what I believe in…and no, I’ve never been in a relationship where I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Some people cheat on their partners, so gosh darn it, I’m just going to stop trying all together. :rolleyes:
As I said before - it’s the lazy way out.
He called his relationship a ‘failed experiment’ in monogamy, and he thinks that the poly lifestyle is the ‘honest’ approach to relationships. Ergo, he obviously thinks us monogamous types are secretly all lying cheats with commitment issues.
I’m just sort of wondering, but aren’t you making a bad comparison here, in that being gay or straight isn’t a choice while being polygamous or monogamous is? Even if a gay person is trying to be straight, he’s going to be sexually attracted to men and not women. But every straight man in a relationship, be he monogamous or polygamous, is going to be attracted to other women.
Would it have killed you to google it, or do you just like making uninformed comments that could have been prevented by taking thirty seconds to look something up? Fine, I’ll give you a cite
You are quoting a provincial family property act, which does not actually explicitly make polygamy legal - it simply tries to outline how family property is dealt with in the event of polygamy (not legal civil marriage polygamy, but simply living together or “common law” polygamy) Also your very cite says:
It is very likely that if push came to shove, the Federal courts would overturn a Provincial family property act if someone attempted to use it as justification for “legalized” polygamy.
Not really. I’m comparing the situations, not the states of being. Gay, straight, poly, mono, kinky, vanilla…whatever you are, it’s better to be upfront, and the other person gets to make a choice about whether this relationship is going to be viable or not.
Being attracted to someone else is one thing. The way you respond to that is the issue. I just don’t see the sacredness of monogamy…it’s a cultural and religious phenomenon, which people are free to accept or reject as they please. Rejecting puts you outside of official recognition for those relationships, but that’s not really all that big a deal, now that we don’t have a society that considers conformity to be an absolute ideal.
Well, as Obi-Wan said, truth depends a lot on your point of view. Some of us would consider getting laid by a cheater to be extremely unlucky and a bad health risk. But I can kind of see how the cheater would view it as lucky. Unfortunately, the cheater here seems to have substituted his point of view for that of the victim. If we could only give it a fancy dancy name like serial philanderer. No, that’s not right. Poly-amorous. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I’m not a sociopath, I’m poly-amorous. :mad:
I’m just saying that plenty of people try, and then fail. If you know you’re almost certain to fail at monogamy, shouldn’t you let your partner know beforehand? Or should you keep it secret, and hope for the best?
And the thing is, according to Ahunter3, he DIDN’T fail at monogamy. He ended the relationship because it wasn’t working anymore. While he was in it, he stayed monogamous because he knew his partner wanted him to, and if he wasn’t monogamous she would end the relationship.
I don’t get this pitting. You aren’t pitting him for being non-monogamous, or even for not wanting to be monogamous. It seems you’re pitting him for not wanting to want to be monogamous. Like, it’s OK to have a foot fetish, but you should be decent enough to be ashamed of it. Weird.
I dunno, I’d be matter at The Second Stone if I didn’t know a frankly idiotic number of guys who label themselves polyamorous for the sake of joining polyamory meets and poly-positive organizations, where they perceive the sexy times are numerous and lacking in angry-partner consequences. Fortunately, it seems like the majority of polyamorous women are pretty good at smelling them out and ignoring them.
So there are no poly women? Do you have a cite for this? If not, then you should probably reexamine your ideas about how men and women view relationships. Here’s a hint: if you think it has anything to do with gender, you are probably wrong.