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JoeW comments on Polyhacking - Less Wrong
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Congratulations on the hack. I would have expressed doubt that this could work, and am correspondingly updating my priors.
It happens that I agree with you on this, in fact I think tolerance of another's multiple entanglements is more important component of poly than the desire to oneself have multiple entanglements. In the poly circles I am aware of, there is no broad agreement on either of these points though. I thought I should mention that there are a non-trivial proportion of couples who self-ID as "one of us is poly and the other is not" where the poly one is involved with other people.
This is similar to the labeling disputes that occur when (say) two bisexual women are said to be in a "lesbian relationship". They might reasonably object that people will hear "lesbian relationship" and assume they are lesbians - "only lesbians can be in a lesbian relationship" is something I've heard some bi women say; but then again I can think of as many counter-examples where two bi women deliberately identify as being in a lesbian relationship.
So perhaps there is a similar scope issue with "poly person" vs. "poly relationship"; I was certainly startled to see you assert a poly person can only be involved with a poly person. I know many poly people currently involved in monogamous relationships with monogamous people, so perhaps this should be "one can only have a poly relationship with a poly person"?
Never mind tolerance, to me it feels better for its own sake to not be my girlfriends' only boyfriend. It was a surprisingly large weight off my mind to know that if I can't take her to Yosemite, or escort her to BENT SF, then she has other paramours who can do so. I know that I'm not personally responsible for matching every one of her sexual facets, just some of them, and that she won't be forever sexually unsatisfied if there's something I happen not to enjoy. If you asked me "Is it more important to your happiness that that your girlfriend be able to have more than one boyfriend or that you be able to have more than one girlfriend?" I might well reply "The former."
Decidedly a very admirable and selfless position. I guess that with tolerance the other poster wanted to highlight that many people in such a situation would feel a certain amound of jealousy, or, as Alicorn put it, fear of being abandoned.
An objection I could see coming is "doesn't it feel weird to be so easily repleaceable?" I guess that most people see this as being treated like a car's wheel, when the fact that the relationship is not "unique" or "exclusive" does not imply that the feelings of those involved are any less real or intense.
An objection that I often encountered in the past was something akin to "if you are not feeling completely satisfied by your current relationship maybe she isn't the right person". I often got the feeling that people thought that, simply because I was unable, or didn't feel like, catering to EVERY one of my partner's needs (i.e. she because of difference of interests, etc.), I was artificually sustaining a relationship that should have ended months ago due to incompatibility.
A more convincing objection was that certain acts, situations, gestures (not only sexual) acquired a particular importance and meaning simply because they were intimate, shared only among the two of us (i.e. a restaurant, a particular food, watching a movie I despised with her, and being happy all the same because it was something we shared with no other). Sexually, I have never had any problems in trying to accomodate my partner, I simply asked what she liked and proceeded to accomodate her, and she did the same... well, then again maybe I was never in a situation where I was asked to do something particularly strange or uncomfortable...
If anything I would imagine someone in a well-integrated poly is /less/ replaceable than either half of a typical monogamous pair. In the latter case, when one spouse dies, the survivor may well be expected to mourn for a while, get over it, and find a new one to fulfil the same duties; in the former, everyone still has to deal with individual feelings of loss, and then the whole highly-optimized system has to be refactored according to new comparative advantages.
A good answer to the wrong question -that's not what I was talking about-. Besides that, I don't think there would be significant differences in the case of the death of one of the partners, be it in a monogamous or polygamous relationship -but here, I am assuming the original poster's interpretation of polygamy, with a "main" relationship and other lovers on the side, who won't be involved in eventual marriage/production of offspring. Things could be different if their "position" in the relationship was similar, more simmetric.
What I was pointing out is that from Elizer's post, it was made clear that that interchangeability was an important aspect of this kind of arrangement: <It was a surprisingly large weight off my mind to know that if I can't take her to Yosemite, or escort her to BENT SF, then she has other paramours who can do so. I know that I'm not personally responsible for matching every one of her sexual facets, just some of them, and that she won't be forever sexually unsatisfied if there's something I happen not to enjoy>. It didn't seem like there was a dispute over the fact that another partner could "fill in" for him -he did say so himself, after all-.
What I was saying is that, while to him (or someone living happily in a polyamous relationship) that might be an asset, someone not accustomed to this sort of thing might very well feel that that very aspect of the relationship (i.e. the fact that on surface they could "do without him", in such a way that his presence is, in a sense superfluous) to mean that they are, in a sense, "not really necessary". That might be just a bias, but it certainly doesn't appear to be an uncommon position -as a matter of fact, it's what put the word "end" to my brief poly experience: while it might look good on paper, and logically is would solve many problems (i.e. cheating would be a non issue, and in general the whole relationship would be more open and honest, and in case anything happened that made it impossible for one partner to be there for the other, at least you would know that he/she was dealing with things alone), it fails to account for core "emotional" reactions such as jealousy and competition that goes out of hand or (to be perfectly honest and in the spirit of admitting one's mistakes least you become a "crackpot") the tendency to ignore uncomfortable truths and act as if everything is perfect until it's too late to be fixed-.
When you love someone, and therefore want them to be happy, how strongly do you want that happiness to be correlated with your own involvement in that person's life?
The answer to this question is bound to be highly subjective, and I don't think there even is a "right" or "wrong" stance on this issue. Of course, barring extreme cases, such as one partner being oppressive or controlling, or so unhealthily dependant on the other that he/she would, I don't know, be unable to live without him.
If you decide to say something on the lines of "anything goes as long as he/she is happy", you are not working under realistic assumptions anymore. Everyone is at least a little selfish, everyone, even in a polygamous relationship, has a "comfort zone" and determines what is okay and not okay for his/her partner to ask. Moreover, everyone has the right to be. Just like Alicorn had the right to decide to set those rules and boundaries with her partner. Pretending that nothing the other person does would "ever" cause disturb and discomfort, and you would be ready to accept it as long as he/she is happy about it is certainly very noble, but not very realistic. In practice, there are things we are okay with, and things we are not comfortable with, and that don't simply, automatically, become acceptable just because we value our loved one's happiness (for instance, in this case, by her own words Alicorn wouldn't be okay with her partner marrying someone else, or, eventually, having kids out of wedlock, because there are certain areas she want to be "just the two of them", something, for lack of a better word, "special", shared "just" between the two of them).
In the end, if I love someone I want them to be happy. Check. I don't wat that happiness to be entirely correlated with my involvement in her life -because, well, in that case we would fall in the previous rather unhealthy scenario-. That said, I don't think there would be anything wrong with desiring that a (hopefully not insignificant) part of the reason she is happy is because of my involvement in her life. After all, we are talking about a couple. Without a gesture, an event, a place, some form of special connection... without having something in common, shared only between the two of you, we wouldn't be talking about a couple. Maybe about a good arrangement for the purpose of sexual satisfaction and possible future reproduction. Otherwise, I could simply take this line of reasoning and bring it to its possible conclusion "I love her, I want her to be happy, I don't particularly care if any of that happiness is correlated to my involvement in her life, and apparently that doesn't seem to be the case -> we should not be together (you could say, since she doesn't mind your presence, either, you could still be an item, but we already established that we don't care at all is any of her happyness is connected to our presence, and we are for all intents and purposes unneccessary, redundant).
Of course, the point here is that in the case of an open relationship, or even a polygamous one, that is not the case, we are not going to the extreme where we say "I don't care how little time she spends with me, I don't care if she prefers to be with someone else rather than here with me, because all that matters to me is her happiness". You might be willing to do the sacrifice, but would a relationship where you never saw her, where no part of her happines was tied to your presence anymore (to the point where it wouldn't even matter if you were there or not) even be callen a "relationship" anymore?
Notice that, once again, that is not the case we are discussion. Reading Alicorn's post on polyhacking, she mentioned rules, boundaries, things that made her unconfortable, little priviledges she might want to have... like the fact that the "primarily" relationship (by her own words, 95% of the whole) is that between her and her partner, or the fact that she eventually wants to marry and requires "exclusive" rights when it comes to progeny, if nothing else, or the fact that she reserves the right (psychologically helpful trick) to stop him from going to see another woman, if she does not feel like it (thought she doesn't feel the need to exercise it).
Just as there is a "More Highly Evolved" poly trope, there is also what I might call "Needs-Based Poly" trope. ("I can't meet all the needs of one partner, nor can they meet all of mine, so by diversifying there is now more chance of our various needs being met by someone.")
That is not exactly incorrect, in that it does increase the probabilities, but it's by no means a guarantee. For instance I'm currently involved with (for various instances of "involved with") five people and I still don't have a partner I can play board games with.
The reason I'm calling this a trope is because when taken to excess it often seems to promote an idea of ... fungibility of relationships or people. This is possibly what the "replaceable" notion above was getting at.
Perhaps relatedly, I'll observe that one measure of relationship reassurance for me is how easy it would be for someone to leave me, and how many other options & opportunities they have. This seems counter-intuitve sometimes, but for me, the fewer constraints tying someone to me, the more it suggests (to me) that they are with me solely from desire and choice. The relevance to poly is that if they have other relationships and don't seem to lack opportunities for more, I can safely discount loneliness and horniness from their motivations for being with me. That's a plus in my head.
...I would never have thought of that in a million years. That's fascinating.
I chose "tolerance" because I was thinking of the converse scenario where it seemed to me that a monogamous person not only does not want their partner to have other romantic or sexual relationships, but would regard it as intolerable.
Mono-poly pairs strike me as a recipe for bad drama.
My experience supports that.
Ditto. (The relevant experience is secondhand, but played out essentially as you said in the other thread.)
Why?
The poly partner can agree to be monogamous, or the mono partner can agree to allow the poly partner to have multiple relationships. Either solution is fine if it works, but in practice one of the partners often isn't fully comfortable with the scheme. This can easily lead to stuff like a partner saying that thing X is okay but then changing his mind afterwards. Possibly worse, they may change their mind but not have the guts to say it (since they did, after all, already say it was okay) and get resentful and passive-aggressive. Or they may not really be comfortable with it in the first place, but go along with it because they don't want to destroy the relationship. Et cetera.
I'm not saying that this stuff is unavoidable: there do exist perfectly happy mono-poly pairs. But my experience suggests that such issues are pretty common for m-p pairs. (Not that my experience would be anywhere near a representative sample.)
You actually know this for a fact, or is it just a nice thing to say?
I know this for a fact, so I'll back Kaj here.
It is very challenging, but not all such pairs are doomed. I know one that's immensely stable and has been for over a decade; I knew another where the poly partner eventually couldn't take it (and got involved with me months after the breakup).
It's been my general impression. Though obviously this is the kind of a conflict that's usually kept private, so the conflict may be more common (and the perfect happiness about this issue more rare) than I think.
Agree that exclusivity-offerers tend to be exclusivity-demanders as well. But does this stay true given that they also say "Okay, you be poly"? That would seem to screen off a lot.
(Edit) To expand: demanding exclusivity from one's partner has perks (chiefly, exclusivity). Not demanding it also has perks (Eliezer gives examples). Given that someone wants one partner, they're likely to prefer the first set of perks to the second. Given that someone wants one partner and does not demand exclusivity from them? Seems much less clear to me.
I agree that the examples I'm aware of go awry more often than not, but not by any overwhelming margin. It is an additional challenge, and possibly a formidable one, but it is not fatal to a relationship.