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JulianMorrison 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"?
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.