Ooh, me, me! I need a cudgel!
How do I snag an invite to one of those parties?
I read him as bagging on the whole concept of poly rather than just the individual guys who do this.
Go away. You’ll be allowed back if you can provide a quote of me saying there were zero poly women. I note you haven’t bothered to argue my actual point.
I think this is a kinda stupid pitting. I mean, if someone said they were poly and spent 12 yrs acting all poly, then ended the relationship saying, “Hey, I told you I wasn’t really poly when we began”, I don’t know that I’d have much sympathy for that person when they acted all buthurt about it.
Something seems extremely disingenuous about being in a monogamous relationship for 12yrs, then calling it quits by saying, ‘I’m poly!’. I’m just not seeing it. If you hate monogamy so greatly how/why exactly did you do 12yrs of it?
Something bugged me about that thread, and I’m not exactly sure how to say it, so I’ll just blurt it out.
We’ve had a few male posters recently post in MPSIMS about the end of their relationship. I have no problem with that; when my first marriage broke up (would have been our 12th anniversary yesterday, in fact) I posted here about it. And we’ve had people post breakup threads and ask for sympathy, advice, legal ramifications, or just to talk about their feelings after the end. And all that’s cool.
But it seemed to me that AHunter3 could have saved himself a lot of vitriol in that thread if he’d just left things out of the OP he didn’t want discussed. AHunter3 is a smart guy, and I like reading what he has to post. That said, he’s been here long enough to know how this place works: you can post about how great cookies are, and next thing you know you’ll have 50 people complaining that cookies are fattening and unhealthy and what about people with wheat allergies and so on. This is a place of argument.
It’s not AHunter3’s fault this place is like that, and I wish him all the best. But maybe if one is thinking about posting here about how thing X ended your relationship, one should realize there are going to be people who are going to attack you over thing X, and totally blow over the “maybe it would be the wise thing to do to cut some slack over someone who just ended a relationship.” It’s a hard lesson to learn, but one I learned here personally long ago.
And that’s what happened, they laid everything out, and they had the relationship for 12 years, and then they broke up. The thing is, I don’t really see this particular situation as a polygamy/monogomy thing at all. AHunter didn’t dump her because they disagreed about the polygamy/monogamy thing. He dumped her because after 12 years, he got bored with her. I’m not even sure there’s anything wrong with that. They weren’t married, as far as I know, kids aren’t involved, and it sounds like she wasn’t all that happy with the relationship either. I just think polygamy is a red herring here.
Cheating involves dishonesty. Functional polyamory requires gobs of honesty. Big difference.
Duke, you are wise. On the whole, this board is remarkably friendly to “alternative” lifestyles (gay, kinky, poly, etc.) but we’re still a ways away from broad-based acceptance. It’s a shame AHunter3 couldn’t post a thread about what happened without people making rude comments. And I can see where his OP could easily open up a debate, but some of the responses were just mean and degrading.
Much like communism.
Lemme put it this way–I know abused spouses who don’t like beatings but endured significantly more than 12 years of them.
Emotions make people do funny things. Sometimes they lead you to stay with someone you love but who is not ideal in the long term for you. Given that he didn’t cheat on her, this is no different than (another less inflammatory real-world example) a Jewish girl I knew who married a Methodist with reservations about his religion but confidence that they could work everything out. Nine years later, divorce, they couldn’t.
How about a ladle?
I was being facetious. I was completely unaware that there were genuine women with many partners who were avoiding ‘da playas’. I figured that all bed hoppers who were not discrete were players of some sort, including the women. Because if half of all hetero men cheat, they’ve gotta be cheating with someone, usually women. So either half of all women cheat too, or there is one super slut out there working really hard at it.
Generally speaking, high status males have earned the right to cheat. This is usually an unspoken understanding with their wives and girlfriends. The guy will play it lowkey and won’t rub her face in it let alone ever talk about it, the girl won’t make trouble because she knows what’s going on. The problem starts when low status males (e.g. anyone who posts on a message board about this sorta thing) tries to shoehorn their way in. They’re gonna get slapped down hard, especially if they ever have the presumptuousness to make it known to their girl. That’d be like if she started asking for exotic whirlwind vacations and designer clothes. Ain’t happening. Unless you’re lucky.
Give Jamaika a jamaikaiaké the benefit of the doubt, though; in his defense, your point is fundamentally incoherent. You concede on the one hand that all partners in a poly relationship are adults fully capable of making decisions about what’s best for their own lives. Yet on the other hand, 99% of what you’ve posted to this and the other thread requires an assumption that the women in these relationships are timorous, cowed and passive recipients of “the guy’s” decision about how the sexual dynamic in the relationship is going to work.
You’re going to have to pick one or the other: in a consensual and adult relationship predicated on open disclosure at the outset that it will be sexually non-exclusive, the female partners are either A. capable of rational decisions and capable of god damned saying no if they aren’t interested in the relationship; or B. incapable and in need of DragonAsh’s heroic philosophical intervention to preserve their innocence.
Well, I guess there is the third option, which is to just keep shouting about whatever it is you’re shouting about, oblivious to the contradiction, but we don’t put that one on the menu.
There are cheating men and cheating women. There are polyamorous men and polyamorous women. The latter set, in both gender cases, tries very very hard (in my personal experience with them) to avoid, call out, and stigmatize the former.
I know, for example, that I’m talking with a typical polyamorous woman if, after it’s clear there’s potential romantic interest, she asks me if she can speak with my wife privately to make sure I’m NOT a cheater or coercer, and to verify that my claims about what levels of commitment I’m permitted outside my primary partnership we’ve agreed that I’m allowed.
Well, there is a B.5 option that, in fairness, is somewhat plausible and the one that **DragonAsh **is actually pushing–namely, the scenario where a guy gets a significant degree of commitment and emotional investment from a woman before he reveals he’s poly–thus making it a lose-lose choice of either hurt herself by dumping him after she grew to care, or potentially hurt herself more when he exercises his poly option.
Interestingly, in the real world this (while rare) happens pretty equally to both men and women on the fringes of the poly scene–and I don’t think DragonAsh will terribly mind amending the implied sexism out of his claim if he still wishes to believe this is typical “poly” behavior.
The idea that anyone is “allowed” to cheat (defined as “breaking a promise you made to your partner, typically one of exclusivity” here) is utterly reprehensible to me. So is the idea that “status” determines anything about acceptable behavior in an absolute sense.
In the library, with the candlestick!
If **AHunter **had written about his relationship on, say, his private blog, I wouldn’t be posting. But that’s not what happened - he wrote about his ‘failed monogamous relationship’, and how he was hitting strip clubs and dating sites looking for quick sex thrills, on a public message board, asking for comments and opinions. I’m more than happy to share my comments and opinions. He’s an adult, I’m sure he can take it. If he doesn’t want people to disagree with his lifestyle, maybe he shouldn’t be posting detailed accounts of his sex life on a popular message board.
However - I was hoping that AHunter would chime in to at least defend himself, if not try to convert me to his cause. Since he hasn’t, I figure either a) I’ve convinced him to re-think his views (probably not that likely), or b) he doesn’t care what I think (probably more likely). Either way, I don’t want to continue slagging on the guy if he’s not around to defend himself, so I won’t be adding too much more to this thread specifically about him after this post.
So let me take this post to clarify and summarize, as it were.
a) Zeriel, you say you’re married and that you have a ‘primary’ relationship. That to me sounds a lot closer to swinging than poly: You have a primary relationship that you’ve clearly committed to; any other relationships are secondary, and it’s clear that the other women understand where they have to accept second-class status. The only difference between that and a women that dates a married man who hasn’t told his wife is whether the wife knows or not.
In this situation, if for whatever reason your wife wanted the other relationship(s) to stop, I’m assuming you would stop, right?
If that is the case for all poly relationships, well I’d have very little to complain about. Technically you’re cheating on your wife, but telling her and getting her to consent to it (I’m assuming she does the same), the other women know about it, and more importantly everyone knows everyone else knows about it. Consenting adults, blah blah blah. Not my cup of tea, I still think it mostly comes down to wanting sexual partners with (fewer) strings attached, and I think most relationships like this are a recipe for disaster….but if it works for you, great.
But is this really poly, or is it merely ‘Open marriage’ = commited relationship + friends with benefits on the side. It’s not what most poly relationships are like based on what I’ve seen / heard.
b) Jimmy Chitwood, this sort of responsds to your post: Zeriel is correct in thinking that I think the B.5 option (man doesn’t tell woman about poly until she’s already emotionally invested) is not only plausible, I think it’s fairly common. Here’s why.
I think we would all agree that overall, men are more likely than women to want multiple sexual partners. In 40+ years I’ve lived in five countries and speak multiple languages, and if there is any one golden universal truth it’s that more men like to play around then women.
As such, men are more likely to meet women that *aren’t *interested in multiple partners (and don’t want the man to have multiple partners). I think we can also assume that, poly or not, most guys try not to be jerks, and they don’t like upsetting people they like and may potentially be romantically interested in.
In other words…. it will likely be at least several dates while the guy tries to gauge how receptive the woman will be to the poly idea; I highly doubt a guy would bring it up over the first beer on the first date. Problem is, even after a few dates there is a decent likelihood that the woman already has an emotional attachment to the fledging romance. Think about your own relationships and your first few dates - everything is new and fresh, and by that time hearing about poly might not seem like such a big deal. ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it’. Or ‘I can change him’. Or ‘ultimately he’ll realize he’s happy with just me’.
This isn’t only true for women - think about all the threads we see here on the SD boards about guys asking for advice about dating someone with potential problems. Think about how often the guy goes ahead with it anyhow, against the advice of the majority of the posters, because of an already-made emotional investment.
I thus think that in many cases, the woman accepts poly but doesn’t embrace it, I think most of the time is eventually going to want the man to stop, or at some point the relationship is going to come to a impasse; and most of the time it’s doomed to failure. The women ends up waiting for the other shoe to drop, the man has to either continue having multiple partners, knowing he might be hurting one of his partners who wishes he would stop, or he has to commit to one woman, while monogamy, according to AHunter, is the dishonest approach to relationships.
I don’t think situations like AHunters’ are really all that rare. It’s not that the women are cowed or passive or incapable of making her own decisions (men and women are equally capable of making horrible decisions when it comes to relationships). But even **Zeriel **admitted himself: Emotions make people do funny things. Sometimes they lead you to stay with someone you love but who is not ideal in the long term for you. I think women are more likely than men to have to accept conditions to the relationship that, in the cold hard light of day, she’d rather not have to live with – be it an abusive spouse or a poly spouse. (Not that I’m equating the two, nor am I saying that it can’t or doesn’t happen to men).
And this is all before we even get to the fact that women are still more likely then men to get pregnant and how that plays a role in the relationship equation. I don’t accept any premise that says that poly men/women are more careful/successful than non-poly men/women at preventing pregnancies.
c) I’m sure there are poly women. I doubt they outnumber men looking for multiple partners, but I’m sure there are such women out there. I wonder whether they’d remain committed to poly even after getting pregnant. I question whether poly men and women really don’t just want to have slightly more adult versions of ‘sleeping around with no strings attached’, since in my mind, sex has to be involved: I have multiple people (of both sexes) that I (and my Much Better Half) have very meaningful relationships with that doesn’t involve sex – we call them ‘friends’.
d) I personally am really curious about AHunter’s experience. According to him, he went from a pure poly lifestyle, straight to exclusivity, and never once had any sort of relationship with anyone else, for 12 years, and yet he still calls that a ‘failed experiment’ and is never ever going back and is only going poly from here on out?
I just don’t get it. If he was so happy in the relationship that he didn’t want to be with anyone else…isn’t that clearly evidence that monogamy works if you’re with the right person? If he –did- want to be with other people the whole time but didn’t only because (in his own words, mind you) ‘he didn’t want to hurt her’, then it was by no means a true, committed, monogamous relationship – from the start the relationship was imbalanced. (The third option, of course, is that he’s simply not telling the whole truth about not having any other relationships for the entire 12 years).
e) In two threads and over dozens and dozens of posts, I have yet to see anyone even try to answer some of the basic questions I’ve had about how poly relationships are supposed to work: What happens if two (or more) women get pregnant at the same time? Are the women automatically happy with their children only having part-time fathers? What about financial responsibilities? What if two or more partners suddenly depend on the guy (or the women, it could happen either way) for significant emotional or financial support? What about as people get older and need more care? What about sudden severe illness?
Relationships aren’t just about the two people – people have family, relatives, friends. They sometimes need are help and support. Are you willing and capable of being there for multiple sets of friends and family? What about raising children? Home loans? What happens when partners die?
Even in cases like Zeriel, where there appears to be a pecking order of sorts, these questions don’t just go away - I mean, Zeriel, what if one of your other women gets pregnant? What is your wife’s view on this?
These kinds of situations occur in real life in adult relationships, and they happen all the time. Commitment in a relationship means being willing to be there for that person when they need you to be there, not just when it’s convenient for you. Unless you’re fabulously rich with massive amounts of free time, I simply do not see how anyone can possibly be in a real relationship with the same level of commitment to multiple partners. The math just doesn’t work.
+1
You should have pitted me as soon as you were inclined to express contempt for me and for polyamory and how you think I treated my partner, instead of turning my MPSIMS thread into a Pit thread. I haven’t chimed in in here before because it felt like we’d already done this, why bother? (And because you were doing such a great job, I didn’t even need to hand you a shovel)
We’re talking ongoing relationships here? I’m not sure this is true, and I certainly don’t just assume it.
Men also seem to be more inclined to be jealous and possessive. If it is indeed true that men are more likely to actually do it, men are also more likely to be a problem for women who are polyamorous. So although I’m not sure either of these differences is real as opposed to confirming our cultural biases, if we assume for the sake of argument that they are, then each sex has a good strong reason to be up-front and explicit about the fact that they are polyamorous, to establish that so that any potential partner who wants nothing to do with it can run for the hills.
Certainly NOT. You tell folks things ASAP (not just this, but any potential dealbreaker). You want to quickly filter out those who would be a waste of time for both of you, don’t you?
The pair of us (from my OP other thread, Herself of course) actually had a conversation sort of like this before we ever met face to face, even:
Herself: You need to know I have a medical ailment. It isn’t going away and over time is expected to worsen.
AHunter3: And you should know that I’m an escaped mental patient who was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. I don’t see shrinks and I don’t take psych meds. I hardly ever froth at the mouth.
Herself I’m not an escaped mental patient but I have a personal history of trauma that makes me PTSD. I’m hypervigilant and wary.
AHunter3 I live on a suburban hippie commune, I’m polyamorous and the initial interview to move in here took place in the bathtub with two of the female residents although I’m not actively involved with either at this point. I don’t do marriage, promises of permanence, or promises of exclusivity.
Herself OK we need to talk.
(some details obscured, I feel a little odd detailing her material)
I think you believe in built-in differences between the sexes and that you know what those differences are. Not everyone shares those beliefs. I don’t.
As Elizabeth Janeway once said: “If we limit ourselves to what we know for sure about innate psychological differences between the sexes we can go no further than to say that their existence is an unresolvable hypothesis. What we can say besides is that there is little need to believe that men and women are born with psychological differences built into their brains because the workings of society and culture, by themselves, are perfectly capable of producing all the differences we know so well, and in my opinion they have”.
I don’t think it is ever an ethicallly permissible thing to treat the people of the opposite sex as if they were inherently different from you and require or deserve different treatment. (They may be in a different situation — the same world is actually a different world because it is a very gendered world — but to understand that is still to believe that IF you were somehow in that other gender’s context you’d probably behave that way, too, as a result of the situation not as a result of being innately different).
I see no reason why the co-parenting bond between a father and a mother who have children in common should not be its own thing. It should ideally persist as a loving partnership even if it ceases to be a sexual relationship, and it does not depend on exclusivity of sexual relationships. Heck it doesn’t even depend on exclusivity of co-parenting relationships.
Some poly people don’t do casual sex at all. Me, I have no judgmental proscriptions against casual sex between consenting adults, but I can’t seem to get the hang of integrating casual sex into my life. I see totally delicious-looking women all the time, but they hardly ever seem interested in casual sex with a total stranger. Or if they are they don’t indicate the interest on any channel I’ve managed to tune into. And there’s so many preconceived notions about sex & gender we’d have to clear up that by the time we’ve had that discussion we’ve got a personal relationship of one sort or another anyhow.
I think in a mono relationship, or in this one at any rate (your mileage may vary), we each needed the other person to be everything an ideal partner should be. And we just weren’t. And we came to take each other for granted and became casually dismissive of each other’s feelings. Too much proximity & familiarity, not enough variety. (The missing other variety included not just other sexual rels but networks of community and friends, by the way). FOR ME, the possibility of a new romance is part of what lights up my day. With that off the table, I became old and dull and as if I had retired from life. I was boring.
You go on to ask questions about what I think of as community responsibilities rather than love-relationship responsibilities. Not that everyone who is poly is also into communal living, I’m not sure there’s even all that much overlap, but for me therein lies the best answers on that one. You commit to a community and your primary economic interdependencies take place there, things like mutual (communal) purchases, property in common, and so forth. Some communes are exogamous (don’t get sexually involved with your housemates) some are not in which case they tend to have couples (or other quantities for poly people) living with other couples/trios/quads plus some folks not currently in a rel. A tiny handful are deliberately constituted as a large group marriage. Think of them as the replacements for what previous generations had in the form of large extended families and stable neighborhoods. If you want those structures in your life nowadays you have to do deliberate things to create them. Putting all that weight on the romantic relationship, making it pick up the slack created by the absence of cousins aunts inlaws next-door-neighbors of 12 years’ standing, and so on puts a lot of pressure on the romantic rels. Just as one indiv partner can’t be everything, I don’t think romantic rels can be everything either.