simplicio comments on Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous? - Less Wrong

48 Post author: WrongBot 26 June 2010 02:50AM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 29 June 2010 02:52:58PM 12 points [-]

I should probably provide a corollary to this. It's an interesting question and deserves more than a pithy one-word response.

Logistics:

It is difficult enough to coordinate the work diaries, social calendars, birthdays, anniversaries, dietary requirements, travel plans, in-laws, etc. of two reasonably busy people who live in close proximity to one another. The more people and locations you add, the more it compounds any orchestration problem.

Economics:

I claim romantic relationships do not enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, and the overhead of each additional relationship actually increases logarithmically. I also claim additional partners are subject to diminishing returns. In fairness, if this is accurate, it is less of a case against polyamory and more of a case against an arbitrarily high number of partners. Still, it's not unreasonable to suggest that the optimal number of typical partners for a given person is between 0 and 2.

"Love Anarchy":

Much like the international system, my lovelife has no police force. I am generally quite pleased with this state of affairs. In a monogamous relationship my partner and I each have a single trade partner for our romantic resources. The quantity of those resources may or may not be to our exact liking, but the distribution is not contested. This is a relatively stable system. Once a third (or fourth, or fifth...) party becomes involved, we have a negotiation problem.

There's no feasible method for someone to commit to a set distribution of time/effort/attention between partners. I'm not saying there should be, just pointing out that such things can't realistically be budgeted for or enforced. The absence of such a mechanism makes polyamory highly unstable compared to monogamy, though I suppose this only really sits in the pro-monogamy column if you place a premium on stability.

Comment author: simplicio 29 June 2010 04:04:44PM 5 points [-]

You pretty much took the words out of my mouth. A relationship between two people already involves an awful lot of moving parts and give-and-take. Let alone the 3-body problem. Even Newton had trouble figuring that one out.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 29 June 2010 05:12:44PM 3 points [-]

I toyed with the three-body problem joke, but couldn't really fit it in :-)