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jmed comments on Polyhacking - Less Wrong
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It's not a change; there was no explicit comparison between connection to others and connection to me in that statement, so I didn't address it there.
So, to clarify: My partner can have any level of emotional/intellectual connection with friends and family, as long as it remains non-sexual and I remain most important / without equal.
In the previous post your only restriction was that they not have sex with others. You have now stated that you have two restrictions*: that is a contradiction of your previous position.
*and the restriction requiring that they give up anyone that is of equal importance to you is a massive one, far larger, to me and many polyamorous people, than the sexual restriction.
That my partner would have anyone equally important to me in the first place is highly unlikely, because we are not poly. How would such a high importance relationship form against a monoamorous backdrop? So it's really not a big deal in practice.
But you were talking about the hypothetical situation in which you were being courted by a polyamorous person, saying that you'd be upset about their unwillingness to give up their "swinging lifestyle"*, and therefore wouldn't date them.
*(a description that was extremely inaccurate)
Had you forgotten that that was the root of this conversation?
No, I wasn't. I think I see where that miscommunication happened.
I mentioned that it is pretty easy not to have multiple partners (which I wrongly lumped, off-handedly, under the non-term-of-art "swinging"), and so that someone being unwilling to not pursue multiple partners would make me feel replaceable.
I think you read my statement as "the person already has multiple partners, and I demand they give them up to date me." I didn't mean it that way. If someone already has a partner (or partners) that is (are) more important than me, I wouldn't be pursuing them or demanding anything of them in the first place.
Aside: I mentioned earlier that I shouldn't have used the term "swing*", but you still seem hung up on it. Can we move past that? Apologies, again; I hadn't realized it would be so offensive to the poly crowd.
The term itself is not the problem. The problem was that your original post claimed that the only bit you objected to was the sexual aspect. Clearly, this is not the case, but, for reasons I am uncertain of, you still seem to be standing by your original statement as an accurate one.
I am trying to make it clear to you that what you are asking them to give up is NOT just about the sex. What you are asking them to give up is the option to LOVE other people. Which is very different from just asking them to give up the option to FUCK other people.
No one asked me for a list of all conditions I place on relationships. So I stated one and not others. Accurate is different from complete. You are noticing incompleteness and accusing it of inaccuracy.
I was not surprised / learned nothing new about my preferences when I noted that I need to be the most important person to my partner.
Agreed. It's also about relative levels of significance. Not sure why you think that is not clear. I hope it is now clear that it is.
As long as they don't love them as much as they love me, and as long as that love doesn't become sexual/romantic, then no, I am not.
My partner can love her family and friends, as can I. But no matter how much she loves those friends, I would be quite surprised and hurt if she told me one of them were as important to her as I am.
Incompleteness claimed as completeness is inaccuracy. Your statement referred to poly as having precisely two sides, the sexual side (which you had a problem with) and everything else (which you didn't).
It turns out you DO have a problem with the everything else side.
That is incompleteness posing as completeness, which is inaccuracy.
Why would you be hurt by this?: this is honest curiosity on my part, because I don't understand that sort of thinking. I can't see any harm to you, so I find myself confused.
Good thing I didn't claim, in my original statement, to be stating anything precise about polyamory or about my own list of preferences. Else I'd be in trouble.
It is the harm of not being Most Important. This is something I value -- it makes me happy to be the center of my partner's world, and her mine. I consider removal of things I value to be harms.
jmed, you seem to consider admitting previous inaccuracy a bad thing. This whole site is based around the idea that coming in, one will be wrong, and leaving one will be less wrong. Why is it so hard for you to accept that what you wrote was wrong?
Would you feel similarly harmed if your partner revealed that she considered all of her friends and family put together (as a collective, but not individually) to be more important than you as an individual?