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Polyhacking
This is a post about applied luminosity in action: how I hacked myself to become polyamorous over (admittedly weak) natural monogamous inclinations. It is a case history about me and, given the specific topic, my love life, which means gooey self-disclosure ahoy. As with the last time I did that, skip the post if it's not a thing you desire to read about. Named partners of mine have given permission to be named.
1. In Which Motivation is Acquired
When one is monogamous, one can only date monogamous people. When one is poly, one can only date poly people.1 Therefore, if one should find oneself with one's top romantic priority being to secure a relationship with a specific individual, it is only practical to adapt to the style of said individual, presuming that's something one can do. I found myself in such a position when MBlume, then my ex, asked me from three time zones away if I might want to get back together. Since the breakup he had become polyamorous and had a different girlfriend, who herself juggled multiple partners; I'd moved, twice, and on the way dated a handful of people to no satisfactory clicking/sparking/other sound effects associated with successful romances. So the idea was appealing, if only I could get around the annoying fact that I was not, at that time, wired to be poly.
Everything went according to plan: I can now comfortably describe myself and the primary relationship I have with MBlume as poly. <bragging>Since moving back to the Bay Area I've been out with four other people too, one of whom he's also seeing; I've been in my primary's presence while he kissed one girl, and when he asked another for her phone number; I've gossiped with a secondary about other persons of romantic interest and accepted his offer to hint to a guy I like that this is the case; I hit on someone at a party right in front of my primary. I haven't suffered a hiccup of drama or a twinge of jealousy to speak of and all evidence (including verbal confirmation) indicates that I've been managing my primary's feelings satisfactorily too.</bragging> Does this sort of thing appeal to you? Cross your fingers and hope your brain works enough like mine that you can swipe my procedure.
2. In Which I Vivisect a Specimen of Monogamy
It's easier to get several small things out of the way, or route around them, than to defeat one large thing embedded in several places. Time to ask myself what I wanted. A notable virtue of polyamory is that it's extremely customizable. (Monogamy could be too, in theory, but comes with a strong cultural template that makes it uncomfortably non-default to implement and maintain nonstandard parameters.) If I could take apart what I liked about monogamy, there seemed a good chance that I could get some of those desiderata in an open relationship too (by asking my cooperative would-be primary). The remaining items - the ones that were actually standing between me and polyamory, not just my cached stereotype thereof - would be a more manageable hacking target. I determined that I could, post-hack, keep and pursue the following desires:
- I want to be someone's top romantic priority, ideally symmetrically. [This is satisfied by me and MBlume having an explicitly primary relationship instead of each having a bunch of undifferentiated ones.]
- I eventually want to get married. (This one isn't in the works as of this time, but isn't precluded by anything I'm doing now. Open marriages are a thing.) Relatedly, I want to produce spawn within wedlock, and to have reproductive exclusivity (i.e. no generating half-siblings for said spawn on either side of the family). [MBlume was fine with this mattering to me.]
- I want to be able to secure attention on demand - even though I didn't anticipate needing this option routinely. My model of myself indicated that I would feel more comfortable with my primary going off with other girls if I knew that I was entitled to keep him home, for status- and security-related reasons. Actually requiring this of him in practice is rare. [We invented the term "pairbonding" to refer to designated periods of time when we are not to be distracted from one another.]
- I want to be suitably paranoid about STIs. [We worked out acceptable standards for this well in advance.]
These things weren't the sole components of my monogamous inclinations, but what was left was a puny little thing made of ugh fields and aesthetic tastes and the least portions of the above. (For example, the first bullet point, being someone's top romantic priority, is 95% of the whole wanting to be someone's exclusive romantic priority. That last 5% is not that huge.)
The vivisection process also revealed that a lot of my monogamous inclinations were composed of the bare fact that monogamy had always been the specified arrangement. Being presumed by the agreed-upon boundaries of my relationships to be monogamous meant that if either party went off and was non-monogamous, this was Breaking A Rule. My brain does not like it when people (including me) Break Rules2 or try to change them too close to the time of the proposed would-be exception, generally speaking, but doesn't object to rules being different in different contexts. If I entered a relationship where, from the get-go, poly was how it was supposed to work, this entire structure would be silent on the subject of monogamy. Pre-vivisection I would have considered it more closely embedded than that.
3. In Which I Use My Imagination
Humans respond to incentives. We do this even when it comes to major decisions that should be significant enough in themselves to swamp said incentives. Encoding the switch to poly as a grand, dramatic sacrifice I was preparing to make for cinematic reasons (advance the plot, make soulful faces at the camera, establish my character to the rapt audience as some sort of long-suffering altruist giving up a Part Of Who I Am for True Love) was admittedly appealing. But it wasn't appealing to the bits of my brain that were doing the heavy lifting, just to the part that generates fiction and applies the templates to real life whenever possible. Better to find ways to cater to the selfish, practical crowd in my internal committee.
Polyamory has perks.
So I imagined a model of myself with one modification: the debris of my monogamous inclinations that were still left after I'd pared away the non-intrusive parts were not present in this model. Imaginary Model Alicorn was already finished with her hack and comfortable with plugging into a poly network. Contemplating how she went about her life, I noted the following:
- She got to date MBlume. (This one was important.)
- When I considered who else besides MBlume I might want to date if I lived in the relevant area and was poly, I found that I had a list. In several cases, the people on the list were folks I couldn't date if they were going to be 100% of my significant others or if I was going to be 100% of theirs - some had the wrong gametes or other features for hypothetical future spawn-production, some were already thoroughly poly and weren't about to abandon that (or, where applicable, other partner(s)) for me, some were incompletely satisfactory in other ways that I'd find frustrating if they were my sole partner but could overlook if they were supplemented appropriately. Imaginary Model Alicorn could date these people and wouldn't have to rely on hypotheticals to learn what it would be like.
- She acquired a certain level of status (respect for her mind-hacking skills and the approval that comes with having an approved-of "sensible" romantic orientation) within a relevant subculture. She got to write this post to claim said status publicly, and accumulate delicious karma. And she got to make this meta bullet point.
- She had a way to live comfortably in the Bay Area within arm's reach of lots of her friends.
- She had a non-destructive outlet for her appetite for social drama3.
- She had firsthand information about both ways to orchestrate her love life, and even if she wanted to go back to monogamy eventually for some reason, she'd be making an informed decision.
- She had to check fewer impulses and restrain fewer urges to remark on the attributes of people around her, because the consequences for being interpreted incorrectly (or correctly) as expressing romantic or sexual interest in arbitrary people weren't as big a deal.
So I spent some time thinking about Imaginary Model Alicorn. When her life started seeming like a pleasant fantasy, instead of a far-out alternate universe, that was progress; when it sounded like a viable plan for the near future, instead of an implausible flight of fancy, that was progress too.
4. In Which I Put Some Brainbits in Mothballs
At this point my interest in being poly was thoroughly motivated and I already had a comfortably broken-in new self-model to move into - if and when I managed the hack. It wasn't done. I still had to get rid of:
- My aesthetic keening for a perfect, pretty, self-contained monogamous setup4.
- Resentment that I ought to have to self-modify to get some things I wanted, instead of the universe being set up so I could comfortably retain my factory settings.
- The difference between "top priority" and "exclusive priority".
- My impulse to retain the right to claim victim status if certain things went wrong (e.g. if I were faithful in a supposedly monogamous relationship, and then I wound up with an STI because my SO slept with someone else, I would be the wronged party and could tremble my lip at my faithless partner and demand the sympathy of my friends, instead of being a casualty of an accident yielded by allowable behaviors and entitled to nothing but a sigh of regret).
- Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary.
- Loss aversion, which wanted to restrain me from giving up the potential to date people who would consider ever having been poly a dealbreaker. (Note: I implemented what I believe to be a reversible hack, so I didn't have to worry about not being able to enter a monogamous relationship if that ever seemed called for).
Respectively, here's what I did to get these brainbits to stop struggling long enough that I could box them up and put them into deep storage (forgive the metaphors in which I appear to make faces at myself. I did not actually need a mirror for any of this; those bits are symbols for the attitudes associated with the mental actions):
- Replacement. Cultivated a new aesthetic according to which polyamory was the "prettier" style. (Each aesthetic has the weakness of working primarily when the people around me are all doing the same thing, and I don't know how to fix that yet; but I was going to move into an area and subculture with lots of poly people anyway.)
- Rolled my eyes at myself and listed prior self-modifications I'd undertaken, then asking if those goals were less important to me than getting the benefits of being poly or if I regretted those prior hacks.
- Raised an eyebrow at myself and asked what, exactly, was the added value of exclusivity. Question dissolved on sufficiently skeptical inspection.
- Pointed out that victim status is not actually particularly valuable. I have acquired a better caliber of friends than I had when this brainbit appears to have crystallized, and could reasonably expect sympathy from most of them whether or not I was technically the victim of someone else's wrongdoing. And I can tremble my lip as much as I want, for all the good that will do.
- Weighed the badness of losing an SO to someone vs. just plain losing one due to dissatisfaction; determined difference to be insignificant, at least without more detailed information about the "someone" which I could not generate ex hypothesi. Noted that I would hardly improve my odds of retaining an SO by demanding a relationship style dispreferred by said SO. And the relevant individual had indicated his preference to be polyamory.
- "Who exactly are these people? Do I know any of them? Not any who I'd want to date in any recognizable scenario. Okay then, the class as a whole is to be counted a less valuable opportunity than the class of poly people (which notably includes MBlume)."
5. In Which Everything Goes According To Plan And I Am Repeatedly Commended For Having Magical Powers
Field-testing has confirmed that I'm doing something right: I'm happy and comfortable. (Also, spontaneously all kinds of popular. If I'd known I could get this many people interested by hacking poly I might have done it sooner.) I would reverse the hack if my primary decided he wanted to be monogamous with me, but otherwise don't see a likely reason to want to.
1I'm counting willingness that one's sole partner have other partners (e.g. being an arm of a V) to be a low-key flavor of being poly oneself, not a variety of tolerant monogamy. I think this is the more reasonable way to divide things up given a two-way division, but if you feel that I mischaracterize the highly simplified taxonomy, do tell.
2The details of what my brain considers to be Rules and how it protests when they are broken or self-servingly altered are mildly interesting but irrelevant to this post.
3I don't think I'd describe myself as enjoying drama, but it's interesting and I'm drawn to it, and if I don't keep track of this carefully enough I go around starting it without realizing what I'm doing until too late. Generating actual drama is a good way to hurt people, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the same appetite appears to be indulged by working out the intricacies of relationship parameters, and keeping track of the structure of a polycule in which I am an atom, even if no drama per se exists.
4If the comments I linked when I first mentioned this aesthetic don't adequately explain it to you, perhaps listen to the song "Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors. The exact details in the lyrics thereof are not what I ever had in mind (it's designed to highlight and poke fun at the singing character's extremely modest ambitions) but the emotional context - minus the backstory where the character currently has an abusive boyfriend - is just right.
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Comments (603)
My favorite part, at which there was actual LOLing:
"•[Imaginary Model Alicorn] acquired a certain level of status (respect for her mind-hacking skills and the approval that comes with having an approved-of "sensible" romantic orientation) within a relevant subculture. She got to write this post to claim said status publicly, and accumulate delicious karma. And she got to make this meta bullet point."
Since I first read this about a year ago, it had had an interesting side effect. I am less able to enjoy fiction where the plot requires a monogamous assumption to function. Plots and Tropes like "Love Triangle", "Who Will Zie Choose?", "Can't Date Them, Not the One", and some "Cheating Spouse" and "Jealous Spouse" now seem weird and artificial to me (unless the poly option is considered and discarded).
I was never a huge fan of romance or romantic comedy, so this is no great loss. It is an interesting minor memetic hazard though.
By analogy with an Idiot Plot which dissolves in the presence of smart characters, a "Muggle Plot" is any plot which dissolves in the presence of transhumanism and polyamory.
Shortly after generalizing this abstraction, someone at a party told me the original tale of the Tin Woodsman, in which there are two men vying for the attention of a healer woman who gives them replacement metal body parts while constructing a whole new body out of the spares. In the end, she decides that the men she's been healing are mechanical and therefore unloveable, and goes off with the new man she's constructed.
"Ah," I said, "a Muggle Plot."
They're surprisingly common once you start looking. I originally generalized it while watching the romantic subplot in Madoka. Blah blah, not a real human, blah blah, love rival..
As cool as that term sounds, I'm not sure I like it. I think it's too strongly reinforcing of ideas like superiority of rationalists over non-rationalists. Even in cases where rationalists are just better at things, it seems like it's encouraging thinking of Us and Them to an unnecessary degree.
Also, assuming there is a good enough reason to convince me that the term should be used, why is transhumanism-and-polyamory the set of powers defining the non-muggles? LessWrong isn't that overwhelmingly poly, is it?
I don't really see the inherent superiority idea. Seems like there should be plenty of interesting ways to mess up everything with polyamory and transhumanism as well as with monogamy and bioconservatism, just like muggles and wizards both have failure modes, just different.
Plots which are just about people not being rational are a subspecies of "Idiot Plots". Plots which are about people not behaving like SF con-goers are "Muggle Plots".
http://oz.wikia.com/wiki/Nimmie_Amee
The retconned version is a bit more of a transhumanist story. Nick Chopper abandoned Nimmie Amee after his series of cursed injuries deprived him of his heart — construed here as the seat of the emotions. He was (some time later) fitted with a new heart; but it was a kind heart, not a loving heart, and so he didn't return to her.
Aside from the anatomic specifics, it's a problem of maintaining goals under self-modification!
Amusingly, I find I'm subject to this effect despite being happily in a monogamous relationship myself, simply by virtue of living in an increasingly poly-normative social environment. Culture-default handling of traditional gender roles often have this effect on me as well.
Yeah, I have this problem too. I can still write mono characters, but I'm more thoughtful about it than I used to be. (I suspect I'd enjoy reading thoughtfully-written mono characters more.)
That kind of story doesn't assume that polygamy is nonexistent. It only assumes that polygamy is rare enough that it's pretty unlikely as a solution. If a similar percentage of people are willing to participate in polyamory as are gay, that's around 5%.. The odds that three random people in a love triangle, who aren't already selected for polyamory, are all polyamorous will then be 1 in 8000. That's small enough that the story really doesn't need to consider and then discard the option.
Judging from how many nominally monogamous people switched to being nominally polygamous in my social circle as the social norm changed, versus how many didn't, I strongly doubt that a plurality of the population is sufficiently exclusively and innately monogamous that considering alternatives is a waste of time.
Then again, I also doubt that 95% of the population is exclusively and innately heterosexual. OTOH, I've never lived in a normatively bisexual community, so I have minimal data
I'm considering it, but I do have some concerns. Mainly, the community that I reside in would probably find it low-status, since the majority aren't interested in that. I'm wondering if anyone else encountered this and how they handled it.
I'm reminded of this.
If you don't like something about your community, you can put up with it, you can change your community, or you can... change your community.
Can we get a follow-up about how this working a year later?
Works great! Primary relationship still strong, have also three other boyfriends (primary has two other girlfriends). I am well pleased :)
How about now?
We got married almost a year ago :D. I can't keep track of who-all spouse is dating (it fluctuates a lot) but I have three other nodes on the Big Unruly Chart Thing, one of whom is also dating spouse. Going very smoothly :)
Are you polysaturated yet? Most people seem to find 2-3 to be the practical limit.
I don't see very much of the two boyfriends who don't live in my house, so no. (They have other girlfriends to keep them occupied.)
This article had a big impact on me! I had never even considered the idea that mono vs. poly was a setting you could change, and I discovered that I didn't have nearly as much of an attachment to monogamy as I had thought.
One problem I'm having is getting started with polyamory in practice. I'm worried that adding another constraint on top of other requirements (i.e. women interested in men, around my age, in Tucson, looking for a romantic relationship, who are rational) will make it hard or impossible to find someone. Any tips?
Assuming you haven't gone and made irreversible deep hacks in your brain, you could add it as an option instead of a constraint. Find someone you like without paying attention to whether she's poly or mono; then, find that out, and be whichever she is and carry on from there. Or, if you strongly wish to be poly, look for polyamory groups in your area or something. (I don't actually know if Tucson has any. But it might.)
Yeah, that optionality is effectively what I'm doing right now, using OKCupid. I don't see myself checking out polyamory groups any time soon, just because I'm much less sexual than my cached idea of a poly person is and the whole idea still makes me feel somewhat awkward.
I've also found proposing a poly relationship is a nice alternative to dumping someone. I just stopped seeing a girl who I would be happy to be date, just not to the exclusion of everyone else (due to availability and pacing differences between us). If she had been amenable to poly, that would have been great, but the mutual break-up went very smoothly.
Thank you for sharing this!
My own concern with being polyamorous is that having N times as many relationships seems like it will involve at least N times as much relationship drama, and the drama of one relationship seems to be about as much as I can handle. Much of the drama in long term relationships seems uncorrelated with jealousy, so it's far from obvious to me that poly relationships would involve systematically less drama.
It's actually O(N^2) if you think about it. 2 people = 1 relationship; 3 people = 3 relationships; 4 people = 12 relationships.
I have found that a reliable way to reduce relationship drama is to explicitly prioritize alternative conflict-management and -resolution tools.
Plus, you know, filter for low-drama people. Poly is an advantage there, as there is opportunity to observe their drama-generation and -mitigation. And one can carry out more reference checks.
Eeheehee. Is it considered poor form among poly folk to respond to "Want to go out with me?" with "Can you provide references from your past and/or current partners?"
I can only report from direct experience, and experience reported to me, that there certainly seems to be at least one geeky poly loose social web where this is said with a smile and a laugh... but is followed up with "you're welcome to contact them directly".
I have seen mostly-joking forms to do this in text, too. Yes, really. Again, while it's mostly not serious, there is a serious signal of "no skeletons in the closet".
I suspect this is more about a certain kind geeky attitudes and aptitudes than it is about poly. q.v. "geek flirt".
Oh, and I've also seen "references available on request" after an amicably resolved breakup. Again, within the sub-communities that have this geeky approach to sex and to relationships, it's a powerful signal.
(Enjoying the meta of posting this during a trip to the USA where I'm seeing LDRs, amicable exes and friends within these geeky sub-communities. There's a presentation in a tech conference in there somewhere too, but it's mostly about poly and friends-known-through-poly.)
It's my perception that poly does indeed involve more drama than monogamy.
Can you give some examples of the sort of drama to which you are referring? It may be that some of the poly people here will be able to shed some light on how/if they deal with such things.
Also, with the extra practise they get, some polyamorous people can offer excellent advice on relationship issues.
Alexflint is right, in a sense -- the more people involved in a romantic relationship, the more potential points of stress and failure there are. Not to mention, poly people are often operating without a net or a manual, so to speak -- there's little cached wisdom that might help us specifically, and a wide variety of possible configurations into which any poly group of N people might fall.
It has been my observation that there's also more potential (if not in direct symmetry with the increased failure modes) for coping strategies, supporting those in a difficult time and generally things that make a relationship robust. Some drama is harder ("you aren't spending enough time with me and all your other partners are getting your attention"), some is easier ("I have no interest in seeing/doing this with you"). Eliezer mentions the comfort he gets knowing that if he can't do something with his girlfriend, she has other paramours who are happy to do it instead.
Raised an eyebrow at myself and asked what, exactly, was the added value of exclusivity. Question dissolved on sufficiently skeptical inspection.
Could you expand on "sufficiently skeptical inspection"?
Okay, imagine two of me standing facing each other in a blank space a la Elspeth so as to chat.
Skeptic: *raises eyebrow* Okay, so what is the extra value of exclusivity above and beyond top priority?
Flailing Brainbit: It is special! And and and exclusive.
S: Top priority is also special. And calling exclusivity exclusive is not informative. Come on. You can trust the rest of this brain, right? When we figure out what we want, we arrange to have it; we're not going to gang up on you unless you decide you want something more destructive than monogamy. We just need more detail for this one so we can see if there's a simpler way to get it.
FB: Uuuum, it would mean that he wouldn't go around kissing random girls.
S: Yes, I know, that's what it means, but why does that seem important?
FB: Um. Um um um. He would be miiiiiiiine.
S: Okay, so if I ask him, "Would it be a correct summary of the model of poly we're considering to say "you're mine but I'll share"?" and he says yes, will you calm down? We count as ours lots of things that we share, even things that we feel socially obliged to share.
FB: ...Maybe?
S: Okay, we'll ask him that, then. ...Say, look. He said that sounded good to him. You okay over there?
FB: Meep.
S: Are you going to give us any more problems?
FB: No...
S: Okay then.
Hee, I didn't know the backstory to that one =)
Thank you for writing this. I've been wanting to discuss rationality and relationships for some time now, but my first attempt had several problems with it you seem to have avoided or solved. For example, your intro paragraph disarms (for many people, hopefully) a few objections that my own post did not, for example "I don't like gooey personal details" and "You sound self-righteous, as though everyone should try to be like you."
Those who haven't tried polyamory may be curious to hear my own polyhacking story, told using a structure similar to the one Alicorn used. (Like Alicorn, I'm considering "willingness that one's sole partner have other partners" to be a "low-key flavor" of polyamory.)
Motivation
I grew up a sexually repressed evangelical Christian, and therefore didn't date until fairly late (19, I think). My first relationship was traditional and monogamous and a rollercoaster ride of drama. I felt attracted to other potential mates but fought to remain faithful, we both experienced sexual jealousy, I started to feel trapped… you know, the usual.
When the relationship ended I realized that that kind of relationship didn't suit me. I didn't like sexual jealousy, I didn't like being solely responsible for somebody else's needs, and I didn't like having a kind of ownership over somebody else's sex life.
Self-Examination
What did I want that I had originally thought I could only get from monogamy? Pretty much everything: intimate connection, sex, cuddling, protection from STIs, the social status of that comes with not being single, etc. All these, I rather quickly realized, could be had with polyamory. I didn't want marriage or children, so those weren't issues. Nor did I care much whether I was somebody's primary romantic interest or whether I could get attention on demand.
Perks
For me, some perks of polyamory are:
Modifcation
Really, the only thing I had to modify was my evolutionarily-programmed sexual jealousy. This turned out to be easier than I expected.
When somebody I was attracted to slept with someone else or kissed them in front of me or whatever, I tried to feel happy for them. This was easy to do, but it didn't actually remove my feeling of sexual jealousy.
What turned out to be most effective for me was a different technique: I trained myself to think of Sexually Jealous Guy as being Not In Agreement With My Values and Not As Admirably Progressive As My Ideal Self and Not Exhibiting As Much Self Control As My Ideal Self. I developed a kind of moral indignation around the idea that I could be sexually jealous. And, as I recall, it only took a couple weeks for my sexual jealousy to fade.
Success
My sexual jealousy is so thoroughly extinguished that I am forgetting what it is like to feel it.
I've seen my current primary partner kiss another partner of hers in front of me many times, and I haven't felt a twinge of jealousy. My primary's two other current major partners are good friends of mine; the four of us have traveled together, slept in a hotel room together, and eaten dinner together. I've kissed my primary goodnight so she can sleep with someone else for the night, and I'm friends with a few others with whom she has chosen to intimately connect. My primary has some preferences I don't share, so she has explored those things with others. And at no time during all this have I felt any sexual jealousy. It feels great to be able to fully support my primary in whichever connections and experiences she wants to have.
Meanwhile, I haven't contracted any STIs, I pursue other women at my leisure, I don't feel trapped, I don't need to fulfill all my primary's needs, and that relationship is highly customized to my (and her) preferences.
Oh, and like Eliezer I feel "vaguely guilty about not being bisexual, since immortal superbeings clearly would be." I tried to hack that once, it didn't work, it's not a priority, it has much higher costs than polyhacking, and I'm not pursuing it.
Upvoted since I feel this post significantly improves several aspects of your previous post including sounding less self-righteous. It also benefits from mentioning the idea of polyamory earlier and going into more details about it. I read a single article on polyamory four or five years ago and didn't really see it mentioned much at all again until I visited this site. A lot of people will have no idea what this is, and some might confuse the word with polygamy.
I still sometimes confuse the word. Just never the concept.
Valuable post. Self-revelation is hard! I commend your account in this kind of forum. There are many considerations here, first and foremost of which is that emotional makeup a) differs greatly between people and b) is more set than we care to admit; i.e. not subject to hacking. If Alicorn's is to this degree, more power to her. Before the rest of my comment (as a mono): this is most emphatically NOT a moral judgment about polyamory. Consenting adults, will defend to the death your right, etc.
Other considerations (for someone like me, which maybe you are or are not):
I'm often on the defensive when polys talk to me, because there is a good bit of evangelism and insistence that monos are morally inferior, emotionally immature, etc. I didn't get that at all from Alicorn's post but it's out there, perhaps as a counteroffensive to monos who do express moral judgment. (Smart polys, police this so we can all have a real discussion!)
In my personal experience, many of the people who think they're capable of polyamory are not honest with themselves, and once a partner starts seeing someone else, they experience bad jealousy which they're uncomfortable admitting, because after all they're not supposed to; they're poly! Polyamory is going to TEND to favor a) people who become less attached emotionally in relationships; b) people who are very outgoing and popular (i.e. attractive people); c) women at younger ages (mid 20s) and men at later ages (30s onward). Sure, if you're Brad Pitt, be poly! Why not! Think of the population dynamics if everyone was polyamorous. Captains of football teams and cheerleaders as the primaries. The rest of us, gazing adoringly upon them while we wait for our turn on Tuesday night. Then back to the romantic ghetto. That's a bit extreme, but it's a serious thought-experiment about an all-poly-world.
Marriage is in large part an economic institution focused on child-rearing. Polyamory is a better arrangement for young non child-producing couples than for people who want kids. Are primary poly relationships, even like Alicorn and MBlume, as stable over time as mono? As good for raising kids, if that choice is made? As happy? (I don't think we know. Data?) And the whole idea of wanting someone as the primary means that, given enough time, you WILL meet a more amazing person years down the road, and one of the primaries will lose when you're overcome by the temptation to upgrade. Because of the way human brains relate attractiveness to fertility differently for different genders, this is going to give men an advantage over time as in c. above. One of MBlume's secondaries is going to knock his socks off and 12 years from now Alicorn might get demoted or fired. Or vice versa, but happens less often that way - again, personal experience, and we need data, but it was Alicorn who changed her lifestyle to be with MBlume, so it seems MBlume is the one with the upper hand, and this will increase over time. (Note: this is the main long-term reason I'm not interested in polyamory, at least for even half-serious relationships.)
Explicit symmetrical polyamory has never emerged stably in history so far. It's worth asking why. Maybe this is coincidence; maybe something has changed now that will be more conducive, but I think it's worth pointing out. For example, a higher prevalence of non-child-producing adults. More questions for actual studies.
So far I've been discussing polyamory as a hetero practice. I don't know any gay polys but it would certainly be informative to see what's different if anything about gay polys.
If you can do away with your emotional need for monogamy, why not do away with the need for mates and reproduction completely? I would frankly love to become asexual so I can think about other things for more than 2 minutes at a time! Not in the cards. (If you know a pill I can take or a meditative technique please hook me up. Then I can be nihilamorous.)
Finally, a lot of polys seem to be doing so partly because they get a buzz from being part of an alternative lifestyle community (affective death spiral, anyone?) While that was a bit of a low blow, I do think it's worth examining this in ourselves, especially with regard to whether choices we're presumably making for the rest of our lives are really sustainable. Kind of like diets, but even more important.
More likely they would end up a LOT of peolple's secondaries. Possibly with a mostly political 'primary' alliance with each other.
Can you elaborate on the model that leads you to this conclusion?
Captains of football teams and cheerleaders do not want to be the 'primaries' of lots of people. That's an awful lot of work. They also wouldn't make particularly good primaries - given that they are always so busy fucking other people. Furthermore, when it comes to 'primary' status they will want to reserve that for people who they gain status for being affiliated with - other elites.
I would expect a lot of people to realize they don't want to stay with the football player or cheerleader for very long. But in any case, you have to compare the result to what we have now:
Telling members of a social minority you're not part of what every member of that minority must do to be worthy of your time and consderation as a member of the social majority, is neither reasonable, rational or realistic. Just FYI. It's like asking "smart" queers to police the tendency of certain (stereotyped) gay men you have in mind to flame it up, or come to that, asking atheists not to be so militant...
Yes, many poly folks do think they're more evolved. Yes, this is just embarrassing at best, and sanctimonious and preachy at worst. No, the rest of us are not accountable to shut them down so you don't feel squicked by the whole thing.
This is a perspective some poly types share, that jealousy and polyamory are not compatible. I've never quite understood it; I experience jealousy sometimes (and I'm in five serious relationships; each of the people involved is seeing two of the others in some capacity), yet it never quite occurred to me that experiencing jealousy meant that the situation had to change...unless that jealousy was functioning as sort of an early-warning threat detection (I've been in situations I was clearly not going to be happy or functional in, with specific arrangements of other people given their own needs, wants and behaviors -- my interests were not being looked after by anyone else, and after interrogating my own emotions and their cause for long enough I realized that I wasn't comfortable with that).
Suffice it to say there is a diversity of actual opinions about this within polyamory and nonmonogamists generally -- some people experience jealousy, some don't; some experience compersion, some don't; some think these feelings should be primary drivers of their actions and communication, and some don't.
Given the divorce rate, should we care about this in a statistical sense? I mean, unless we're talking about your own children, the odds for or against a given family's long-term stability are not your business...
(I will note that what little research has been done suggests that polyamorous relationships are less stable, but should that really be surprising? They are more complicated arrangements of complex parts; as the number of people goes up, the number of failure modes AND success modes will increase, and the failures will probably outnumber the successes. My question is, why does this matter? You seem to be arguing against polyamory in general with it, and I can see no sense in that.)
As to the question of children's welfare, there's very little data because it's difficult to get funding for it -- what researchers are interested in asking the questions are finding it very difficult to secure the backing needed to perform studies. Speaking anecdotally, I've known plenty of people who were monogamous parents, openly-polyamorous parents, and closeted-polyamorous parents (meaning their kids aren't told). The welfare of the children seemed to have much more to do with their parents' social and economic standing than their relationships.
I think your theoretical understanding of human sexuality has left you ill-prepared for making predictions about real-world cases like this.
Having lots of experience with both hetero and queer poly dating and living: the differences seem to be much more down to the cultural influences on the people involved, and their individual personalities, than anything else.
Tell that to the people of Laguna Pueblo, prior to Christian missionaries. They'd be vastly amused to find out they never existed.
I think you're seeing what you want to see, there. Do people choose an "alternative lifestyle" because they get a buzz from being altie? Or do they get a buzz from finding someplace they suddenly feel like they fit? Having spent most of my life socially-isolated and largely unable to fit into mainstream society, I was much more stoked about finding a social "fit", which I stumbled onto just while going about my life.
What's your source for this? Not trying to challenge you factually (it's a reasonable enough claim given the diversity of cultures out there), but I've found non-romanticized sources on all but a few pre-contact cultures fantastically difficult to find short of asking actual anthropology departments, and it's an area I'd like to know more of.
I'll call people on the offensive tropes not because I feel responsible on behalf of the Poly Conspiracy to do so, but because they are offensive tropes.
We're almost playing Poly Trope Bingo now! (Although they don't actually seem to have the "poly = no jealousy" meme there, oh well.)
I have said that poly doesn't mean no jealousy; poly means additional tools in the repertoire with which to deal with jealousy. Perhaps I can draw a long bow and say just as some bi people might describe themselves as gender-oblivious while others might self-ID as gender-aware-and-interested-in-more-than-one gender, my experience has been that some poly people self-ID as "did not install the jealousy patch" while others can be jealous but don't regard that as fatal to poly. I cannot find any research on this.
Custody has been (successfully) awarded and children removed from parents in some (USA) areas simply by referencing open poly or revealing closeted poly. There are a lot of cultural and privilege challenges in poly for families with children.
Thanks for reading my (long) comment. RE the Laguna Pueblo, I will read up. Certainly it's not something that we've seen often. Whether this is because "things are different than they were before" or something else less plastic is another question.
To be clear, my argument about the correlation between polyamory and child-rearing is not about how effective a poly environment might be at child-rearing. On the contrary, I'd be that a stable poly family would provide access to consistent capital and caretakers that a mono family cannot. However, the question remains of how it's in the individual parents' interests to enter into a given family arrangement. When it's not, they won't have kids, and the eventual parenting outcome remains moot; if moms and dads don't want to do it, it won't happen. My suspicion is that among those individuals so constituted that polyamory is a good match, having kids might not be part of their plan. (Again, early days, data needed, though this could be done with surveymonkey.)
My objections to your comments: my "hey smart poly people, round up the jerks" comment was intended as a humorous way to point out the sanctimoniousness that you also recognize, and which damages the discussion. It wasn't intended as a serious proposal for the Grand High Poly Council to take up. (Note: I also don't really think there's a Grand High Poly Council, but I think we understand each other by now.)
My second objection is to your statement that "[my] theoretical understanding of human sexuality has left [me] ill-prepared for making predictions about real-world cases like this". A less charitable person than myself might react to this as a personal attack. Suffice it to say, I must sadly report that I have a good track record of looking at relationships and identifying tensions that later end them. My predictions aren't based on personality clashes, but rather fundamental supply-demand tensions that would seem to be constant across any kind of arrangement where a person can be happier with one person than another. Maybe I hang out with awful people who act this way, or maybe I've just been around the block enough times to know where cynicism is warranted.
This is true. Poly requires excellent communication skills to pull off successfully, even more so than ordinary relationships. I keep emphasizing that poly is not for everyone: not only because you need to be emotionally suited for it, but also because it often takes much more work than a mono relationship. For most people, poly is hard.
I've heard this claim before, but I can't help feeling that it's still thinking in a mono pattern even while trying to think about a poly world. The whole point of poly is that X dating Y doesn't necessarily make either X or Y unavailable to others. If the captain of a football team has five women, that means that he only has one-fifth as much time for each of them, meaning that they're likely to be available to others as well. And perhaphs, since they're getting their desire for high-status übermasculinity satisfied from him, they'll also be more open to relationships with less masculine and lower-status men.
There are plenty of imbalances in dating-related gender ratios. A large fraction of men prefer women younger than themselves, so a straight man in his twenties faces competition from not only men his age, but men in their thirties as well. Add to this the fact that there are more men born than women, and we find that in a mono world a lot of young men will necessarily be left without the kind of a mate they'd prefer. In old age, the pattern reverses, so that it is the old women who have a hard time of finding a suitable partner. All of this is inevitable in a mono world, but in a poly world, there's at least the possibility that everyone will manage to date the kind of a person they want to be dating.
I'm not entirely sure about that one. Raising kids takes a lot of time and effort, often leaving the parents exhausted. It might be better for everyone involved if the kids have (say) three parents instead of just two.
At first sight it seems that those women are 4/5 available for other men in the group. But this assumes that men and women have the same sex drive on average. If we assume that men have stronger sex drive, or that their sex drive increases significantly when many women are sexually available to them (I am not a biologist, but I think both of this is true), then there is less than 4/5 availability of these women for the rest of group.
In other words, to make all members of a poly society equally sexually satisfied, this society must have more women than men. With the same number of women than men, less successful men will be frustrated, even if all women are satisfied. (Of course, if you are a woman, or if you are the most attractive man in your poly group, this is not your problem.)
EDIT: In essence, "one fifth of time" does not equal "one fifth of sex". A woman may spend one fifth of her time having hot sex with the captain, and the remaining time in just-friends mode, or 90% just-friends mode, with the remaining men.
Or perhaps, their demands will increase, and the remaining men will seem even more pathetic.
It seems to me that for most men monogamy is better. For women, two topics to think about: children and age above 40.
When the children are born, do you want to test paternity or not? (But even if you won't, some man will think that he is a father, and the others will think they are not. Or maybe, everyone will think that someone else was the father.) It seems like most men do not want to invest much resources into child that is not biologically theirs. Even if the man has one child with one woman, and three children with other woman, he may invest little into the first child.
If you are a young woman, it is important to note that the balance in "sex market" depends on the age. On average, younger women have higher sexual value than younger men, but older women have lower sexual value than older women. Thus we have so many young boys unable to find a girlfriend, and so many old women unable to find a partner (this imbalance is even worse because women on average live longer). Don't assume that your "sex market" value will stay constant.
Both monogamy and polygamy have their benefits and risks. The risks of monogamy are well known, therefore I wrote about the risks of polygamy. (Risks of monogamy: choosing the wrong partner and not having enough data to realize it; also if your partner dies or leaves you, you start from zero.)
Or you could just adjust the bisexuality / homosexuality rates... I dare say an all-men all-homosexual polyamorous group would have to be entirely stable, at least so long as we're playing entirely to gender stereotypes.
(Is there any actual research about women being less interested in sex, by the way? I've heard that dismissed as a myth a few times, born primarily of cultural conditioning, but never with any actual research either way)
I find that my (female) sex drive is incredibly mutable; I've been perfectly happy going a year with no sex, and at other times, in other circumstances (and with different available partners), been motivated to have sex daily. I suspect that the female sex drive is much more situational and partner-dependent than the male, and to model women as like men, but less horny, is a mistake.
Now I will do the Subjective Speculation Dance of Shame.
(electric slide) I like to shake my butt, I like to make stuff up (electric slide) Is there published data? Maybe! Doesn't matta! I'll pull it out of my butt! (butt shake!)
You guys I think I made the shame dance too fun.
I looked it up, but I still don't understand what the electric slide is. I second Jack's suggestion.
Please consider writing full lyrics and choreography and putting this on youtube.
This is awesome :D
This is my new favorite comment. Thank you! ^_^
This is possible, though I would note that sex is just one of the things one gets from a romantic relationship. Even if a poly society would leave more men without sex, it might provide more men with things such as close companionship. It is not obvious which one is more important. (Companionship is far more important than sex for me, though I'm probably atypical for a male in that regard.)
Another possibly atypical male here:
To me, sex is a craving I occasionally get, but is no more pleasurable than any other fun activity.
Companionship is a constant need. I don't always need someone there, but I always need to know that there would be someone with me if I needed them.
This is a little bit more complex.
Sexual desires are not a constant for each invidual person.
It seems (in the poly community) that awesome sexual experiences with one partner make one want more sexual things with the other partners rather than less.
Another, seperate point on biology:
The 5 women that are spending so much time with this alpha male will find their menstrual cycles becoming synchronised (assuming, of course, that they allow natural menstrual cycling). This will therefore mean that they are all at their most sexually active simultaneously.
Assuming that the peak sex drive of a woman is more than 1/5 of the constant male sex drive, this means that at least one of those 5 women will be unsatisfied during her days of peak sex-drive.
Which is an important fact in the context.
Menstrual synchrony is controversial.
I will note that, from my own reading, I am under the impression that (among animals in general) males will invest resources in any child that might be theirs, while ignoring/killing only those children that are definitely not.
As such I would be moderately surprised to discover that humans differed from this pattern, and cared only for children of known paternity.
I was unclear on this point. As clarified above, I think you're probably right that 3 parents are better than two, for the kids. But ultimately, it's whether the arrangement is serving the parents' interests that will determine if kids are produced. The same person who loves being in long-term, child-free poly relationships might not want to be in a child-ful poly relationship, and in fact my intuition is that a lower proportion of people who are emotionally cut out for polyamory would eventually want kids. Need data.
If you're saying that the kinds of people who typically wish to be poly are the kinds of people who typically don't want children, that might be so, though I haven't seen any evidence for that hypothesis. Anecdotally, the "wants children" / "doesn't want children" ratio seems about the same as in the general population, or maybe as in the general high-IQ population. Your original comment seemed to talk about the suitability of poly for raising children, given that the people involved want children, though.
But I actually think that the main benefit of having three parents is for the adults, not the kids. Child-raising is typically really, really tiring, at least when the children are still young enough to need constant supervision. Having a third person around would really help make things easier. At the same time, there are all kinds of studies around saying that most of the things we'd expect to have an impact on the long-term outcomes of the children actually don't, and I'd guess that this would fall into the same category.
speaking as a parent (and someone who is poly) if it helps the parents, it helps the kids. And kids like having more adults around as resources.
Primates (including humans) raised in stable, supportive environments are more friendly, trusting, willing to take risks. Those who grew up desperately alone, or with only a few allies-of-convenience who might run off as soon as costs outweighed benefits or better prospects appeared elsewhere, are less friendly, trusting, and willing to take risks. This mechanism evolved because using either strategy in the opposite environment means being isolated from the support of your peers and/or murdered at a young age, which is strongly selected against. Polyamory requires a large population of friendly, trusting-and-trustworthy potential partners; modern economic and political developments have produced an environment (in some parts of the world, anyway) sufficiently stable and prosperous that such a population can emerge and thrive.
As far as I know, explicit symmetrical anything hasn't existed for very long...
There's been a lot of discussion about how the reproductive function of sex might have shaped institutions of love and relationships. But I think an equally salient thing is that people age deteriorate and die. That one is pretty symmetric.
Right, that's the noise in these questions. Some things have changed since the paleolithic, so are we talking about conventions that fit with old social norms and economic systems, or something less plastic. I don't know that we know yet.
Upvoted for your insightful description of your thoughts on polyamory and monogamy during this process. I think it's rare to find someone able to detail their approach to changing themselves with such exacting precision. Personally, given that I currently have no interest in being either polyamorous or monogamous, the specifics are not pertinent to my situation, but I think your approach to documenting them could be useful for many other types of changes.
Also, congratulations on increasing your utility!
I'm skeptical because of the huge differences in male and female dominant strategies for mating*. I think poly can work, but that a lot of people who consider themselves poly just haven't run into a highly frictional situation yet or have put their fingers in their ear and are shouting "lalalala".
*I should note that I'm also extremely skeptical of monogamy. The situation that makes men and women happiest seems to involve some (sometimes a lot) of unhappiness in their partners.
I can think of another disadvantage to becoming polyamorous: you lose the ability to deflect would-be suitors by telling them "I already have a boyfriend/girlfriend".
"Poly" <> "available".
It would be technically accurate for me to turn down someone I had no interest in by saying "My boyfriend wouldn't like that." Since of course he would not prefer me to date people in whom I am uninterested. I could also just, in fact, say, "I have a boyfriend" - for the same reason I can say "I don't own a telephone". (I have a phone number, but people won't work hard enough to avoid needing it if they know it exists right off the bat.)
But perhaps you meant among people who know me - in which case yeah, I do have to utter words to the effect of "no thanks". And then they ask "why?" and I say "do you want the nicest sufficient reason or an exhaustive list of relevant factors?".
The answer I would make to "why?" (but have never had to, as women tend to be much less clueless than men about dating) would be something like: "Because it seemed as though you were the sort of person who would feel entitled to ask me why, instead of merely accepting my answer."
It's none of someone's business why unless you choose to volunteer that information, and needing to know why you've just been turned down is a massive low-self-perceived-status signal.
The only exception to that rule would be someone that you already have a deep and long standing relationship (just not sexual or romantic) with. Such a person might be justified in starting a "Why" conversation as your friend. But even that is dicey, and the sort of conversation that could destroy the friendship, as it can so easily ride the knife edge of trying to make you defend your answer, or guilt you into changing it if you can't convince them that is both reasonable and not a negative judgement of them.
Okay, seriously? This kind of "No you can't know what you did wrong, asking means you're even lower-status" dynamic to sexuality has probably been responsible for a number of geek/Aspie suicides over the last century. The existence and popularity of PUA isn't so much a response to men who feel deprived of sex, it's targeted at men who feel deprived of sex and romance and any idea of what they're doing wrong and any known strategy for even getting started on fixing things. A major reason why people hurt is that there's no known gentle slope into sex, and not getting any feedback is part of that.
I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before. (And my girlfriend has confirmed a number of these, so it's not just a unique nose.)
If you don't need to ask yourself, that's fine. If someone else does need to ask, try to be more sympathetic. And if someone asks you, TELL THEM.
Um... very often the real reason is unflattering.
"You are morbidly obese." "You are so tiny I feel like I'm crushing you." "You act like I'm your last hope of ever meeting a girl." "Your religion forbids premarital sex and that won't work for me." "Your conversation is just really boring."
Are you actually saying that people want to be told these things?
I'm sure you can find slightly nicer ways of saying atleast some of of the above. e.g. "I prefer people who are more physically fit" rather than "you are morbidly obese".
Well this place is pretty infested with truth/information fetishists, so it might not be a good place to ask.
Some do.
Some are stupid and will shoot the messenger even though they're emotionally better off knowing for certain than just wandering in an unhappy fog, wondering over and over what they're doing wrong.
If they ask directly, I'd say, tell them honestly.
Every time I have ever pointed out specific things I don't like in answer to "Why won't you date me?" (back when I was available) the guy has used my reply to insist that he will change and beg for another chance. Then I have to say, "No, I don't believe you will ever change in that way, and even if you did it wouldn't be anytime soon, and offering to change yourself for me is really weird." And then he argues that no, he can change right away, it's no trouble, please give him a chance. It's terribly unpleasant. I stopped giving specific answers, and instead said things like, "I guess we just don't have the right chemistry." Actually I think that's a perfectly good and honest answer, and it's the one that's always true even when there's no specific thing I can put my finger on.
I can't pick out exactly what about someone turns me on or doesn't turn me on because it's subconscious, it's my subconscious mind processing a million details all at once, and even when a person does have, say, bad BO, that's just something that I was actually able to notice consciously so I might think of that as The Reason but once they fix their BO, all the other stuff, the millions of details only my subconscious picks up, those will still be there and the person will be pissed that the "fix" didn't work. So I think actually giving a specific reason, or even two or three, is not as honest as just saying chalking it up to "chemistry" (which of course is shorthand for "it's too complex and subconscious to explain").
If I really wanted to try explaining a lack of chemistry, I'd probably be able to do no better than, "Some things about you, especially your para-language but other aspects of your behavior as well, though I can't put my finger on them, rub me the wrong way, or at least inspire no romantic response in me." Would anyone really find that helpful?
Perhaps you could start by saying, "I can only tell you if you're asking for information and you promise not to argue." I don't know how practical that is in real life.
LWers could have a convention for saying to each other, "Please tell me so that I know how I was perceived by you. I will not argue and tell you that you perceived me differently, I will not blame the messenger, and I will not subject you to the unpleasant experience of hearing me offer to change."
At first, I thought that making a new convention is the wrong way to go about it. How many conventions should we need to remember then? making new conventions all over the place for LWer's will be too difficult, too many different social rules to juggle.
For example, in such a situation, as in asking a person out, you would need to think about the LW community conventions and then normal conventions when deciding actions. But then, you couldn't do better unless you allow for change.
If a community is to be truly made, perhaps a set of conventions can be constructed so that, this convention will slot nicely into an easily searchable hierarchy: Relationships -> relationship changing -> approaches/dating requests. You could make an iPhone app so that the LWer looking for love (or wishing to do some social action) can quickly and discretely check up the currently accepted conventions/guidelines. If someone deviates, you can have all sorts of fun deciding to call them on it.
The problem isn't in remembering social conventions, humans naturally do it and you're using oodles of them now.
If there is a problem, it is in consciously calling for the new social convention, as it's the less common way they form. I don't think there's anything wrong here, though.
Perhaps best summed up as "I don't want to answer because I want to avoid verbal overshadowing."
Edit: fixed negation
I've had this kind of thing happened to me and have heard similar stories way too many times. For people who want to ask directly for reasons why they've been rejected please remember than an answer is not license to argue the point. Nor is arguing the matter a good idea. You will not argue your way into a healthy relationship- just take the person's reported feelings and update on that evidence.
This is why last time I had cause to ask for an explanation, I specifically disclaimed that I would not be using her reasons to come up with some clever way we could get back together.
There are some cases where I have made factual errors in which I'd like to be corrected. Like, if a necessary condition of my not wanting to date someone is "I don't do long-distance relationships and you are about to move to Bangladesh", and in fact the person is not about to move to Bangladesh because there was some change of plans, this is in fact a fine time to notify me. Or even "my model of you implies that you would, under $circumstance, do $behavior, even though I've never directly observed you in $circumstance".
But yes, if it's "you have $personal_characteristic", offering to change it - unless it's really trivial, on the order of "you use the word 'splendid' annoyingly often", which would rarely if ever be the whole reason anyway - is not a correct answer.
It would be nice of you to make sure the guys leave without his illusions about the power of introspection. They apparently think not only that they can instantly change whatever they want about themselves, they think you know and can tell them what would need changing.
Ok, if it comes up again, I'll try that.
If they're asking, they deserve to be told.
If they don't want to know, they shouldn't ask. Lying to someone "for their own good" is, to me, one of the most disgusting concepts in existence.
I've been lied to "for my own good" several times. And every single time, all it really did was allow the person lying to me to feel good about themselves, while simultaneously screwing me over.
If they're asking, it's often not because they actually want to know, but as a way of telling the other person off for having the wrong opinion. Telling them puts everyone in an extremely uncomfortable position. If I wanted to pass on such information to someone, I'd do so anonymously.
To illustrate, I'll go through some likely results of telling someone each of these things Vs. not telling them.
They are now aware that their weight is a major reason for lack of success. This is an extra incentive to lose weight. In addition, it's possible they weren't even conscious of how overweight they were previously. So, they gain health benefits.
They now know to be on the look out for either smaller partners, or partners who show signs of a crushing fetish, as opposed to continuing to ask large people who will turn them down.
You may need to give more explanation on this one; because it's likely that there's some specific part of their behaviour that's a problem. However, at least they are now aware that they are giving off vibes of desperation, and can try and change that (giving them more self-confidence, because they now know that the problem isn't something innate)
They get to feel morally superior to you.
Provided you are willing to explain why you find their conversation boring, this is helpful. Seriously, I'm friends with a lot of aspergics*, and every time I explain to one of them "you're being boring, the problem is that you are doing X" they have henceforth put effort into avoiding doing X, which has increased their success in socialising.
*(I suspect this is because I'm a borderline case myself, and therefore often end up acting as a "translator" between them and NTs)
They don't know why they were rejected; and likely find themselves wondering whether they'll ever be able to be successful, making them feel increasingly desperate and despondent about their chances with each rejection.
While the first few rejecters may successfully prevent this by using "it's not you it's me" type lines, it will soon become clear to the rejectee that these are, in fact, often lies.
From experience: this can lead to resonant doubt/panic attacks. It kinda sucks.
This one may not be as good as you think. Fat people are generally told repeatedly that they're fat.
The risks of being fat are generally wildly overestimated.
I've read a moderate number of accounts by fat people who found that their romantic success improved when they stopped pre-rejecting themselves.
There were a few articles here on the limited introspection humans in general have. I assume they have less so for others and also are not necessarily able to express their reasons well enough to be understood.
My guess is that Aspergers (or generally people with internalized nonstandard interaction modes) have the best chance to get useful information from people who are also off, but less so.
Questioning a person about why they feel a certain way about you is weird in its own regard. And there is no safe way to communicate about communication.
All but one of those are things that people can change. The most difficult one to change (being tiny) is something which people can adjust in part by bulking up and also carrying themselves better. Frankly, speaking as a really tiny male homo sapiens (slightly under 5'2) , if I were to ask someone out and to find out that that was the primary issue I'd be a bit relieved that it wasn't something else. On the other hand when I was told explicitly that people were not interested in me due to my height it has sometimes felt really awful. But it did cause me to focus more on people who were of below average height or not too tall and that seems to have lead to some success. So even that has been a general positive.
I agree with everything you said, and with everything michaelsullivan said. They're not in conflict. Barring a Friendly Singularity and CEV people with poorer social skills are going to have worse lives, and worse, improving your own social skills or improving other people's social skills is not going to change the fact that there is a bottom 10%, and life is going to suck harder for them.
Life is a bitch and it is quite abnormal to act on any sympathy one may have with the creepy/awkward/annoying person near you.
For any young geek reading this, here are a few ways of improving your social skills/ decreasing mild to moderate social anxiety
succeedsocially.com has a lot of reasonably useful advice too, and if you're a romantically deprived male there's plenty of instrumentally useful advice in the PUA subculture but the lowest hanging fruit is * Shower daily and use anti-perspirant. That's not negotiable. You needn't use deodorant but honestly you probably should. * Smile more, greet people i.e. say "Hi" a lot. * The more people you talk to the more likely you are to make friends; the more girls you talk to, and know, the more likely you are to find someone you're interested who is interested in you </end heteronormative> * If you can get into an exercise regimen, most people can make relatively large gains pretty fast for not much time or work. This will make you hotter and more confident. Some people are fucked genetically but they're a small minority. Try to get fitter * Learn how to tell if clothes fit and never buy anthing that doesn't fit again. There's much more to fashion but that is the single biggest gain you can make and it will take well under two hours. There's a guide here and plenty more good stuff here particularly in the sidebar.
Also, Everything gets better after you leave High School, and it can continue to get better for a looong time.
Also it got easier to hang out with other fellow geeks. It might be useful to learn the common stuff for the sake of getting along in life. But there is no need to actually spend too much time with people you do not enjoy.
What do you consider to be the comon stuff? Agreed that spending lots of time with people you don't get on with is mostly unnecessary, but a little social nous goes a long way, and in many situations it's a large force multiplier in your effectiveness.
Although I largely agree with what you've said here for the socially inept, I think the prevalence of the sentiment of that final statement may well lead to a great many people being disappointed when they arrive at university and find themselves more isolated than ever.
You are entirely correct. I could more accurately have said "For the majority of people with bad high school experiences, the post high school environment, whether in college or at work is much, much better. If this is not true for you then making a concerted effort to make the acquaintance of people who share your interests will, in the majority of cases, make your post-high school experience much better. If that doesn't worktry to improve your most basic social skills and go back to step 2, meeting people with similar interests."
Is that more or less accurate? How could it be improved?
I think, more or less, yes. But, just in case high-schoolers who have had trouble in the past are reading this, we should give as much specific advise as we can: Don't expect university to be easier in social terms; there are less people ready to score a quick status-boost from putting you down, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be charitable with their friendship. I think the most important piece of advise is "join a club." Really - it's the quickest and most effective way to hack yourself out of loneliness.
For me, it got worse.
Sorry to hear that. How and why? I'm under the impression that your over-riding, basic problem is that you would prefer to not be, maintaining this preference even under medication that makes the experience of being alive more or less pleasant. Is that impression accurate?
I suspect that the average person as intelligent and (perhaps slightly more) motivated than you, but without the outlook on life would end up with a dead end, not terribly well paid job with ample leisure possibilities, or on some variety of social welfare, and mostly satisfied-ish with their life, as evidenced by lack of action to change it. I say that because I am that guy.
<Other Optimising> How goes the moving out of parents' house? I strongly recommend it from my own experience. Even a pretty crap badly paid, low status job and pack of lose, mildly substance abusing, poorly socialised friends is a huge improvement. Freedom is, in my experience fantastic, and a social life makes it much better. </end Other Optimising>
Short answer: In high school I was "popular". In college I basically had to start over socially. I did okay with that in my first two years, but in my third year onward it kind of fell apart and I ended up fairly isolated. (It didn't help that I took six years to graduate and my freshman-year friends all graduated in four.) I also hated most of my classes, and the ones I didn't loathe were merely tolerable.
Oh, interesting. That's the first explanation/justification for PUA that hasn't seemed creepy to me.
There is a significant difference though between wanting an explanation and feeling entitled to one. Anything that suggests a sense of entitlement, particularly when that crosses a privilege asymmetry, risks seeming threatening. "I've already said no and they have not unconditionally accepted that" is not that far a step from "they are giving vibes that suggest they think my right to a no can be overridden by their desires".
I don't think it's actually that hard to signal "unconditional acceptance and a harmless desire for more information if you're feeling generous", but if we're talking about a population with insufficient people/social skills, that will not be easy for them.
I agree it's a virtue to donate information in such cases, but I don't agree they're entitled to it.
Not telling is mostly about wanting to avoid the other party getting angry.
I wouldn't mind disclosing the reasons to someone if I was given some confidence they wouldn't get angry at me.
Thus most of the time one ends up using polite safe generic to turn away people.
I trained myself to not give unrequested feedback anymore after some bad experiences. I find it a sad situaton but am not inclined to be the one telling others things they don.t really want to hear.
Gratulation!
I don't mind being asked why. I sort of prefer the presumption that I do have reasons and am able to articulate them and will be honest about them if asked. Also, assuming that these things are all true, it's not strictly impossible for someone to come up with ways around all my objections, status signal or no. If I felt the question were intrusive or something I could just refuse to answer, but why would I refuse someone feedback, if I believe they actually want it?
Contrast this with the institution of the bug report in software. In programming, everyone expects that there are going to be some errors. Everyone learns from them, programmers, current users, prospective users... I consider the social institution of nonjudgmental bug reports to be, in and of itself, a substantial benefit from computer science to society at large.
"Could Not Reproduce"
Actually getting the list can hurt a lot. Depending on how long and relevant it is.
At that point it's kind of too late to matter. The rejectee has already been liberated from the necessity to signal high status to that particular recipient. They are free to do whatever the hell they want and play whatever status they feel like in the moment.
Which is quite possibly a benefit, depending on the circumstances. Although there are less awkward, pointless and painful ways to go about it than 'why?' questions.
If asked in an honest (rather than a begging) tone it is a massive signal that they are a person seeking self-improvement.
Yes, this means that they have accepted that they have flaws, and therefore that their status isn't as high as it could be. But I don't see how that would be a problem?
Is it, in your eyes, better that someone accept that they are flawed, and seek to change that (by learning of their flaws, and fixing them) or that they believe themselves flawless?
Well, I suppose it's really a disadvantage to being known to be polyamorous...
I find it odd that no one is discussing the wider societal implications of a greater adoption of polyamory in the sight of a much more important instinct than jealousy. Naturally I speak of female hypergamy and its effect on the distribution of losers and winners on the sexual marketplace among men.
Within the sort of of communities where polyamory is popular, I don't think it will be a big problem for the mating market. There is some evidence that highly intelligent people are more androgynous. If so, then sex differences may be less sharp between intelligent people, which anecdotally makes sense. If intelligent people are less gender-differentiated in general, then perhaps their sexual preferences are more similar, too. If there are less sex differences in mating preferences, then there is probably less sex differences in selectiveness and less hypergamy.
In poly nerd communities, I don't know if there is a winner-take all situation for men, but it's hard to tell, since the gender ratio is so skewed. Let's imagine a community with 10 men and 2 women. Under monogamy, woman #2 dates man #10, and woman #1 dates man #9. What happens under polyamory? Do both women date man #10? Or do they both date men #9 and #10? Or #8, #9, and #10? Those all seem like plausible scenarios, and in the last case, there are actually less male losers than under monogamy. With a high male:female ratio, the women have their pick of 80+ percentile men.
Of course, outside this particular androgynous phenotype, the differences between monogamy and polyamory are likely to be more stark. Average people are already doing plenty of non-monogamous mating, so we can consider how well it's going for them.
When you put it this way it sort of sounds like poly nerd communities are/could be a coping strategy for the 'losers' of female hypergamous mainstream dating. Like, if we're worried about negative externalities from male losers in an increasingly non-monogamous (i.e. deregulated) sexual marketplace then a poly community where men outnumber women and women correspondingly have more partners than men seems like a decent idea.
You've flipped something the wrong way.
Thanks. Fixed.
Having seen a number of previous LW discussions about sex, gender, and related matters, I have given up attempts to participate in any future ones. I suspect most other people who would have been likely to open such discussions in the past have reached similar conclusions. Whatever the exact reasons might be, this is one cluster of topics where this forum just doesn't seem capable of approaching reality closer than what one reads in mainstream venues, or of rational discussion that won't be smothered by ideological preconceptions, moralizing, and internet drama.
On occasions, when I see some particularly egregious nonsensical claims about these topics that go unchallenged (and perhaps even get strongly upvoted), I am strongly tempted to respond, but given the past record, I try hard to resist the temptation.
Well, for one thing, its a piece on polyhacking and luminosity -- trying to understand the degree to which one can successfully change one's preferences, and to the extent to which this is individually worthwhile. It's not an advocacy piece on polyamory.
That said, polyamory (and queerness in general) really does offer opportunities for people to step outside many kinds of sexual status competitions. If there is a standard relationship 'package' that most people will have with exactly one person, and if there is social pressure to conform to and excel at that kind of relationship, then I can make an intelligent guess about your status by seeing how well your partner fits the stereotypes. E.g., if your boyfriend has two left feet and works at Blockbuster, you must not be very good at attracting the rich, suave type that 'everybody' wants, and so I'm probably doing 'better' than you are.
By contrast, if there are several different acceptable types of relationships, and any given person will usually have multiple such relationships, then the math gets too fuzzy -- it may not even be obvious to me exactly who you're dating, let alone what you're doing with them or how much fun you're having or how much support you're getting. The fact that you're seen in public with the Blockbuster guy who can't dance doesn't really say anything about your status. You obviously find something about him vaguely attractive, but you're not 'settling' for dating only him, so the fact that you're dating him doesn't imply that you can't or won't attract a conventionally successful dude. Thus, by making interpersonal status comparisons difficult or impossible, polyamory has a tendency to reduce the stupider kinds of status competitions.
Finally, even assuming that there are lots of women out there who are 'marginal hypergamists,' i.e., who would sleep with only the 'best' men if they were allowed to do so, but who would have sex (almost) exclusively with one low-status man if they were shamed into doing that, it's not clear that women prefer exclusive commitments to permanent commitments. In other words, a low-status man who credibly pledged to be permanently available to a woman for very large amounts of romance, sex, financial support, and child-rearing, while giving both parties the option of having occasional flings, would probably be at least as attractive as a low-status man who pledged (somewhat less credibly) to permanently and exclusively devote all of his romantic, sexual, financial, and parenting energy to his wife while requiring the wife not to engage in affairs.
I believe this answers Robin Hanson's concern that polyamory will just leave ordinary women free to sleep with even more high-status men. High-status men can't credibly commit to devote most of their energy to more than one woman; only one partner can receive 'most' of your attention. But if 'most' of your attention, delivered on a permanent basis, is valuable even if you are low- or medium-status, then you'll have something to offer in the romantic marketplace.
Seems pretty obvious that hypergamy is what poor women do in societies that only let them gain control of resources through marriage. It's a rational adjustment to a sexist, unequal society, not some sort of instinct.
Polyamory, especially the "open mesh" kind, dissolves the question of whether there exists a better match, or (most of) the fear of losing a partner to someone better. It's no longer necessary to consider whether this match outranks alternatives you haven't yet encountered, for both of you. It's sufficient to consider whether it works in itself.
JulianMorrison:
This is a hypothesis worth investigating, but how much data seems to support it? The research I've read supports the existence of hypergamy in both modern societies, and in pre-agricultural societies without high levels of gender inequality.
The Dalmia study cited on Wikipedia supposedly doesn't find women "marrying up," but since I can't read the full text I'm not sure how they were operationalizing "marries up." For instance, perhaps the study found that women don't marry up in wealth. But that doesn't mean they don't marry up in education, which is what this study found:
In short, education hypergamy exists, but it’s getting weaker at the top (presumably because there is a shortage of higher-education men to date up to), and may be getting stronger at the bottom.
For women of high socioeconomic status, hypergamy does appear to decrease. For instance, women in some college samples tend to not care about men's wealth very much. Though this could also be partly because those women are more oriented towards short-term mating.
Even in a modern, short-term mating context, it's not clear that hypergamy disappears. In a speed dating study, Asendorpf & Penke found
Note how eduction and income mattered to women, but not to men. Those are elements of hypergamy. Avoiding shy men is also hypergamy because shyness is low-status in Western men.
For another example of modern hypergamy, observe the attraction of women to rockstars and actors. Yet do women become groupies of rockstars merely in hope of gaining their resources through marriage, as a rational adjustment to a sexist society? I doubt it.
Is modern hypergamy merely a hold-over due to outdated norms? No. In pre-agricultural societies where women don't economically depend on men, hypergamy still exists. Anthropologists used to be bamboozled by the discovery that the lioness' share of calories in some cultures is supplied by the women. So why were the men hunting, if it was so inefficient? Anthroplogists eventually came up with the hypothesis that male hunting isn't (just) about providing meat.
Hawkes and Bird argue that a large function of men’s hunting isn’t putting food on the table for their families, but rather showing off to gain social status and mating success. The researchers observe that competent male Ache hunters have greater mating success:
Since the hunter's skill doesn't translate into more provisioning for his family, the it's difficult to explain women's preference for hunters as a response to economic deprivation. Women don't have to date good hunters to feed their children, but they do anyway.
Successful hunters gain high status, have more partners, and experience greater reproductive success. That's hypergamy.
The "economic inequality" hypothesis does not explain this pattern of women "dating up" in terms of <insert culturally valued pursuit/trait here>. It does seem plausible that women start caring less about men's economic status in prosperous societies, but that doesn't mean that women have stopped being hypergamous.
Without the need to mate with good providers to put roofs over their heads, women are free to go after the men they are attracted to, which seems to mean dating up on other dimensions they care about such as personality traits, education, status, intelligence, and accomplishments (some of these traits have been discussed in this comment, and others will have to wait for another time). This appears to be a generalized phenomenon; for instance, women care more about humor in their partners than men do, another culturally-valued trait.
As far as I can tell, this pattern of evidence looks a lot more like some sort of instinct on the part of women than merely a response to economic inequality (those as I've mentioned above, economic inequality is a factor in how hypergamy is expressed). The other problem with the sociocultural inequality hypothesis is that it can't explain how gender inequality came about in the first place: clearly there are some pre-cultural forces in play. It's difficult to make any sense out of this data without invoking evolutionary theories like sexual selection.
I'm not necessarily talking about marriage or women seeking material comfort here. I'm referring to the mechanisms of female and male sexual desire and how they on average differ in more than just the parameters of the physical attributes the sexes seek in mates.
For most women their sexual attraction is in itself partially dependant on how desirable she thinks other women find the male in question. It also depends heavily on his status. And status as we know is basically zero sum.
My impression is that men are also influenced by how attractive other men think a woman is.
Semi-Anecdotal evidence of this: Tina Fey reports that she was never seen as "hot" until after she became famous.
Evidence that I suspect says more about Tina Fey's past insecurities than about scarcity bias. She is hot enough that she would have been seen as such even in school. Unless American high schools really are like they appear in movies. The hot girl isn't hot until she has a makeover involving taking off her glasses and letting her hair down!
When I was in high school, most of the girls around me seemed to me to be as beautiful as anyone I ever saw on television or in the movies. Most high school girls are significantly hotter than the woman of median hotness in the population as a whole (getting older tends to make women less beautiful), so they would have to be even hotter than that in order to stand out.
Tina Fey lost a bunch of weight just before she got on TV. Given that there isn't really anything else to explain.
It's plausible that people weren't talking about in public where she could hear it about how good she looked until she became famous.
Also, excuse me if I'm mistaken about this, but there's something about your phrasing which leaves me thinking that there's something weird about a woman who's attractive to you being insecure about her looks. There seems to be huge cultural pressure in the US for women to think they don't look good enough, and what's surprising to me is immunity to it.
If the hypergamy hypothesis is correct this isn't so at all.
Also consider these stats from the CDC:
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Just to ensure clarity, you meant to say; "every time a male has sex with a new female [partner], their opposite-sex partners rise by one. Correct?
One other thing which could skew the statistics is the fact that people that have had many sexual relationships can die, and the dead are not often counted in statistical surveys, while some of their partners might be.
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The true mean values should be close, but the medians etc can be very different.
You forgot to follow that with "...in a sexist culture with a very strong monogamy taboo and a tendency to punish women unequally for behavior considered slutty".
Why do you implicitly assume that mating behavior is determined by culture, rather than vice versa? Humans had mating strategies long before we had language, let alone anything resembling modern societies. A priori is seems a lot more plausible that human cultures evolve to fit our natural behaviors, or perhaps that mating behaviors and traditional cultures co-evolved for long enough to become inextricable.
I'm struggling to come up with a reason why female and male average tendencies wouldn't differ from each other on this.
Women's unavoidable investment in reproduction for most of our history is something that rewards very different strategies between women and men in nearly any sexual marketplace conditions that I've so far thought of.
You need to read "Evolution's Rainbow" and to a lesser extent, "Sex at Dawn". Neither are perfect but they are strong antidotes to this kind of "sexual strategies" thinking, which is heavily contaminated with cultural assumptions.
Watch out for biology too. That stuff is heavily contaminated with sexism and doesn't pay the proper respect to politically correct ideals. We should ostracize it.
Both of the books above are biology. Sex at Dawn is by non-biologists but Evolution's Rainbow is by an evolutionary biologist. Her complaint is that actual biology is being misread in ways that distort the science, including the science of evolution, by people whose interpretations are culturally biased.
But hey, you can also wave brain-stop words like "political correctness" around if you want.
Let me translate in to overt. The following statement-reply pair:
Is overwhelmingly strong evidence that your beliefs on this subject are not optimally correlated with reality.
Sure it is quite possible (and likely) that a lot of people are wrong about what sexual strategies are used. But not that there are sexual strategies and not that it should be startling to find that the sexual strategies turn out to be symmetric. It should be difficult for Konkvistador to think of reasons for that to occur, because it would be a miraculous coincidence.
Why? From what I know of Sex at Dawn, the book's claims would lead us to expect sexual strategies for both men and women that involve many partners.
You're making claims and ignoring sources without giving a shred of evidence yourself.
In the last post I'm just wondering why the attraction hardware would differ in predisposing us for desiring different physical types but not behavioural types (independent of the question if hypergamy is or isn't such an adaptation).
As to the recommendation, that has been on my to read list for a while now, I guess I'll bump it up. :) The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature was the last book with a similar subject if not conclusion that caught my interest.
Check out Male, Female by David Geary. It's more rigorous than the Red Queen.
Something's wrong with those numbers. Medians of integer-valued quantities are always integers or half-integers.
EDIT: I've taken a look at the report, and it doesn't say anything about how they calculate medians, so I don't know how they're fudging their numbers to get these out.
EDIT 2: I should also say "good job for looking at the research and getting numbers", even if I'd like these researchers to be more transparent as to what they're actually reporting.
An uninformed guess: those medians are presumably based on survey data, so they might've been adjusted using the survey's sampling weights.
It's almost certainly true, perhaps doing a weighted average of the medians of subgroups. However, any method that does that is not producing a median. A good way of doing that adjustment might give "cooked" numbers for the various options, but the point where 50% are below and 50% are above would still almost certainly be an integer. And if it is actually balanced (highly unlikely with so many data points), so that any number greater than X and less than X+1 divides the population in two, then the convention is to report X + 1/2. There is no information about the median that anything past the decimal point can actually convey.
I think a PUA would say: 5 minutes of alpha is worth more than 5 years of beta.
Which is, at best, true only in terms of inclusive fitness.
In fact... not even then, because you need that beta to help care for your offspring.
Yet it described human behaviour accurately. People take significant risk of loosing decades of beta to get 5 minutes of alpha.
Remember there is no need for the beta taking care of the child to be the sperm donor. Also in tropical agricultural societies (like say West Africa) and in modern social democracies (like say Norway), women don't need the help of their sexual partners to care for their offspring.
I hope you're not assuming that all human behavior is rational...
What if you're wired in such a way that, when you strike up a romance with someone, the New Relationship Energy wipes out your romantic feelings for everyone else, and only when the NRE has run its course do romantic feelings for other people return? Is that something you can self-modify out of, or otherwise deal with in a polyamorous context?
I'm not such a person, but I've dated poly people who seemed to hyperfocus on their new love interests like that. One in particular stands out as someone who'd become deeply infatuated with the current object of attention, almost to the exclusion of others.
Said person was also very new to introspection, rather comfortably selfish (that's not a "boo!" signal, just a relevant and somewhat abnormal trait -- they didn't have much empathy or concern for the feelings of others if it didn't impact them directly and insofar as they knew it might cause others to feel hurt, didn't want to self-modify), and wasn't very able at the time to understand people feeling hurt as anything other than an attempt to manipulate due to a lengthy abuse history.
I'm sure that there are people closer to "baseline" (whatever the heck that is) who are poly and do this. I do get rather intense NRE, and my feelings for each of my partners are somewhat different, but it still doesn't wipe out the feelings for other people. I think the advice I'd give such a person, if they wanted to change this for the sake of their partners, would be to cultivate a lot of self-control, and maintaining perspective. Your new love may push different buttons than your old love, but what you're experiencing is a neurochemical rush which will not last -- when it passes, you and your existing loves will either be grateful it's over, or picking up the pieces. In short, I treat NRE as something on the order of puberty or psychoactive drugs in terms of its emotional intensity: be aware you're extremely biased in this state.
I like The Ferrett's take on it:
Also, his clarification in the comments:
Many polyfolk deal with this sort of thing, much as people in monogamous relationships deal with their partners becoming absorbed by a new interest, being assigned to six-month deployments overseas, driving trucks for weeks at a time across the country, having crushing deadlines at work, or otherwise having things come up in their lives that force their partnership to take second priority for a while.
The common thread in my experience is an acceptance that they are not the absolute top priority in their partner's life (partners' lives) 100% of the time, and that's OK, and the relationship is still positive and valuable.
So, yes, that is something that some poly folk can deal with in a polyamorous context.
Whether it's something you can self-modify out of (second person used advisedly), I don't know.
Being absorbed by a new interest or being busy or away aren't quite the same thing as not being into your partner anymore.
That's certainly true. But, again, IME being OK with not being the absolute top priority in one's partner's life 100% of the time helps one deal with all four of those not-quite-identical things.
I should also note that your first description made it sound like a temporary thing, whereas your second description makes it sound more like a change of the baseline; is that intentional, or am I just over-reading?
Alicorn would you have "hacked" yourself to be a secondary or n-th"ary " of MBlume?
That's a complicated question, in large part because it was practically necessary that MBlume subsidize my housing and living expenses. (I was previously living with a roommate who did not require of me rent or grocery money, and very much approved of this arrangement; I didn't want to take a gigantic financial kick in the teeth and have to job-hunt when I'm not especially employable and move across the country for something that could have failed to work out in practice.) It seems unlikely on the face of it that he'd have been up for doing that for a secondary or n-th*ary. If he was, my answer is "maybe" - it would have depended on the exact circumstances, probably. If I liked his primary and would have been interested in dating her too (assuming she liked me back) I think I could have lived with being a member of a triad without explicit rankings; other arrangements would have been progressively less appealing and at some point I would have been necessarily skeptical that there was enough interest for both the relationship and the subsidy to persist. (One can emit arbitrary numbers of words about how one has enough love for everyone. Introducing money demands prioritization.)
The analogies between transhumanism and late-19th century socialism are unmistakeable. http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/07/unintended-consequences-19th-century-socialism-and-21st-century-transhumanism/
They called it "free love."
I have no idea if that means anything, but it is interesting to see how many similarities there are.
Alicorn is describing here a specific type of polyamorous relationship (classified on wikipedia as having Sub-relationships) . There are other types polyamory for example - "Group relationships, ... in which all consider themselves associated to one another, popularized to some extent by Robert A. Heinlein (in novels such as Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, Friday" -Triad :Three people romantically involved. (Commonly initiated by an established couple jointly dating a third person; however, there are many possible configurations.) -Quads : Relationships between a couple and another couple
Editing tip: the bullet points in Section 4 should be numbered or else they are unnecessarily hard to match up (I was curious to see what your solution was to bullet point 5, and this required a lot of counting). That probably means the other bullet points should be numbered too, even if there's no need.
The following is a public service announcement to all women who naturally like at least some shy nerds.
If you are (1) polyamorous and (2) able to directly ask men you find attractive to sleep with you (instead of doing the sheep dance where you freeze motionless and wait for them to approach) - or if you can hack yourself to be like that without too much effort - it is vastly easier than you imagine to acquire an entire harem of high-status and/or handsome nerds.
(For some but not all nerds, this may require that you be reasonably attractive. Most nerd girls I know are reasonably attractive and think they are not. So if you think that you're overweight and hideous and yet oddly enough nerds spend a lot of time talking to you at nerd parties, this means you are pretty.)
This concludes the public service announcement.
Actually, what's happening is they're giving the nerdy male 3-4 obvious body language signals telling him to approach. The nerdy male just misses them.
Fellow males, please learn to read body language so that all these hot nerdy girls stop feeling like they're ugly because nerdy men don't respond to their flirting.
How would one go about doing this? It would be useful, but I don't know where to start.
This is the best free, online resource I know of. But there are tons of books, even courses out there.
Sometimes. But since Eliezer mentioned girls who think they are unattractive some the signals are probably not nearly so clear.
You're suggesting the girls think they are unattractive because their unclear non-verbal signaling fails to yield positive feedback from men? This is plausible though Eliezer also mentioned nerdy men who are notoriously bad in this regard.
No, I'm suggesting that "Actually, what's happening" should be "Sometimes what is happening". It isn't only the nerdy guys who aren't playing the game correctly. Sometimes nerdy girls don't signal correctly either, especially those with low self esteem. And that's ok, just something that can be improved on.
It's hardly flirting if it's body language from across the room and neither party has said a word to each other. At that point, you're not even sure they know you exist - and how could they be sure that you are aware of their existence? No, you have to talk to them - at least be in the same conversation as them! - to begin flirting with body language.
Nope. Not sure what to tell you if you're not already aware this isn't so.
Maybe a study documenting it?
There are not such things as suggestive glances, eye-locking, inviting postures, etc.?
While "acquire" and "harem" are words quite conflicting with the spirit of polyamory (and I know you were kidding), it's a good point.
Though, as a flirty poly nerdy guy, I have no personal interest in this message getting out. :-)
Worthwhile clarification: It is not necessary to ask them to sleep with you right off the bat. You could ask to snuggle.
Sure, and I also didn't mean to imply that this should happen on a first meeting, only at the point where you find yourself thinking, "Hm, I think I would prefer having sex with this person to not having sex with them," regardless of whether that takes a long or a short time.
This remains true for gay male geeks, by the way.
Is there a trick to identifying gay male geeks? I find that sometimes I can go to four or five nerd parties and still have no idea about the sex lives of half the people there -- the shy male nerds I know tend not to talk about dating unless they're forced to. Maybe I'm going to the wrong parties.
Back when I was in the market, I found that asking male geeks whose sexual preference I didn't know on dates worked pretty well. Not, admittedly, the most efficient possible mechanism... and not entirely reliable, as it landed me a few dates with self-identified straight male geeks, which puzzled me... but still, it worked pretty well.
Of course, I only tried this for male geeks I was interested in dating, which may have introduced relevant selection biases.
Isn't that just bizarre?! The same thing has happened to me.
Is it conceivable that some of them thought it was an invitation to socialize rather than a date?
In the cases I was thinking of, no, not really.
I know, right? As a straight male, I keep doing this.
Why?
I'm like Kaj Sotala, and much of what TheOtherDave said applies to me.
Yeah, what? That's definitely not something I would have predicted. What were their detailed reactions?
Mostly Kaj said what I was gonna say.
In terms of detailed reactions... well, I could summarize the common thread as "If I were going to hook up with a guy it would probably be you, and I'm not unattracted, which is surprising, and, hey, sure, why not?" followed some time later by "Nah, straight."
I generally took it roughly in the same spirit that I make a point of tasting foods that I don't like when someone who does like it identifies a good example of it, just to see whether I still don't like it... because, hey, sometimes I discover that my tastes have changed while I wasn't looking.
That said, I far preferred the ones who were clear about that being their state. (In their defense, most of them were.)
I don't find that surprising at all. We don't have full conscious access to all our preferences: we can just make guesses based on previous data. Realizing that there are men of the same sex that you might be attracted to doesn't seem any different from realizing that although you generally dislike science fiction, there are some sci-fi stories that you enjoy.
Straight/bi/gay is a classfication scheme that often works, but by collapsing a sliding scale into just three categories it necessarily loses information. A person who is only attracted to people of the opposite sex, and a person who is attracted to people of the opposite sex and to 0.1% of people of the same sex are usually both lumped in the category of "straight".
I have occasional fantasies of men and enjoy some varieties of shounen-ai/yaoi, but I'm almost never attracted to men in real life, though there have been a couple of exceptions. I can never figure out if I should call myself straight or bi, though straight is probably closer to the mark.
Also, sexual orientation is not a static thing, but something fluid that may change throughout life. This is particularly the case for women, though possibly also for men:
Heteroflexible?
I've identified as that before, but I find it doesn't really apply well anymore.
Instead of slapping labels onto finer and finer grained levels of the fluid scale, I just have a clearly defined set of things that I will do with men, and a clearly defined set of things I will do with women, and that's sufficient for me.
The studies I know of have found that while many people can identify orientation (EDIT: sorry, only gay/straight, don't know of any non-binary studies) based on facial appearance, voice, and other outward signs with better-than-average accuracy, participants tend to have a hard time identifying specific traits that led them to judge.
I also would be interested in any such result.
Are you saying that nerd males do not talk to non-pretty nerd females for other reasons (i.e. they are smart and funny or whatever), or simply that they don't do it a lot?
That's a good question. I am hard pressed to think of any nerd females I've known well enough to observe them in any detail, who I would actually consider non-pretty. So to rephrase the test: If you go to nerd parties and male nerds who don't already know you seem to gravitate in your direction and then continue to be there despite not having an obvious personal stake in the ongoing conversation, this is because you are pretty.
Also, short of actually having half your face burned off a la Two-Face in the Batman series, being visibly smart and funny will boost your apparent prettiness by quite a lot.
Even if you do have half your face burned off a la Two-Face in the Batman series, being visibly smart and funny will boost your apparent prettiness by quite a lot.
I find that most people have some things attractive about them. If they are interesting and kindly disposed toward me, it is not hard to focus on the attractive features, and blur out the less attractive features. It works very much like the affective death spiral, but with no real negative consequences.
Once you find enough things attractive about someone, you enter the spiral, and you begin to notice the very attractive square line of Harvey's non-burned jaw, and just don't even notice the scary skeletor burn face anymore, or you might even find little parts of it that start to look interesting to you.
Well, this all assumes a counter-fictional Harvey that doesn't go fully dark-side, or recovers at some point to something like his former moral and mental self.
And no matter who you are, there's someone out there who thinks you're hot.
(while talking about the Harry Potter movies, before she'd started on MoR)
Erin: ...I did like the fluffy things, though.
Me: Fluffy things?
Erin: I forget what they're called.
Me: (thinks for a bit...)
Me: Dementors? The flying corpses in shrouds?
Erin: Yeah! Dementors are cute.
Me: Puppies are cute. Dementors are not cute.
Erin: Puppies are food.
Me: Help me, I've been shipped to Bellatrix.
Are there any paperclip-maximizer-lovers? How about paperclip-maximizer's-humanoid-robot-lovers?
In my experience, women generally much more naturally focus on good features and ignore average ones, though men do too. That said, I dated a hand model with a lazy eye...never saw nicer hands in my life! The eye was a bad feature from pretty much any human perspective, it's not logically impossible for a person to have all their features be such features.
Also, I think rats are adorable. Any other rat lovers out there?
There's possibly even someone out there who likes "<X" as a favicon more than "Lw". Outlandish, I know, but there's probably one person out there.
Rat lover here. They're adorable little creatures, and have distinct personalities and quirks. The only shortcoming of rats is that they don't live that long, so you're having to deal with the death of your cherished little friends every 2 or 3 years or so.
For anybody who likes rats or is just curious to learn more about them, I highly recommend the most awesome ratbehavior.org
I find this hard to believe.