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wedrifid comments on Polyhacking - Less Wrong
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I'll try. Not sure I'll succeed, though, as it screams obviousness to my brain, so it's hard to understand the outside perspective wherein it is not clear.
A partner stating he or she would rather not be with me than be with just me indicates that I am not particularly significant. Not special to him or her. Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).
I enjoy feeling like I am more important to my partner than anyone/anything else. I am under the impression that this is normal in humans, and that it feeds the default human tendency toward monogamy. Do you not enjoy this / prefer this to being one-of-many?
From a different angle: If MBlume (or whoever your primary is at a given time) would be with you either way, monogamous or poly, which would you choose, given all the non-drama/non-jealousy & other apparent 'awesomeness' of your poly adjustment? Would you prefer to stay this way, or would you prefer an MBlume who was happy to give up all other men/women to be with just you forever?
From what I understand the default human tendency is is medium term monogamy (with cheating) combined with extreme promiscuity, particularly by the highest status males. Some polygamy thrown in too.
I think that "humans tend towards monogamy" and "humans don't tend towards monogamy" are both misleading, as they lump together two things which don't necessarily go together: being monogamous, and requiring monogamy of others. Instead, I'm inclined towards thinking that there's a tendency to require sexual/romantic monogamy from one's partner while still wanting to have sexual/romantic relationships with others.
Though some people seem to be strongly monogamous (in both senses of the word) by nature, others seem to be strongly non-monogamous (in both senses of the word), and some fall in between. So if there is a strong genetic component, there's also the possibility that some kind of frequency-dependent selection might be going on instead of just a universal tendency towards one thing.
Monogamous (for how long?) is probably a very important question in discussions of to what extent monogamy is natural for humans.
Is there a convenient term for raising that sort of question and/or filling in that sort of blank?
Yes, humans are bad at plenty of things they want (or seem to / claim to want). Bad at rational action, yet members at this site strive to do better. Bad at ethical & consequentialist reasoning, yet many of us strive to do better.
So being bad at monogomy is not a particular good argument for abandoning it. But maybe you didn't mean to imply that -- I speak to it because I've heard that claim from a few poly folks before. If so, disregard.
If you just meant to clarify that, yes, humans are not perfect monogomists, then okay, we're agreed on that.
Um, no. And not anything about arguments for abandoning things either. It was a straightforward description of the approximate default human instincts with neither practical or normative argument implied.
This is what I meant by my last sentence, that humans are not perfect monogamists. Sorry I was unclear.
Ahh. Agreement!