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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)
blushes furiously
Awwwwwwwww.
/old shouting half deaf man/: Stop cluttering the comment section useless content! When I was young people didn't have emotions, and the ones that did didn't show them.
Still, if we ever need a counter example to the idea of rationalists as emotionless robots we can wheel them out.
[Edit, Clarification: meant that affectionately/positively, but seem to have got downvotes so that may not have come across, sorry.]
I have the feeling that this may not be the best post to show people who are predisposed to dislike rationality.
Read this with great interest.
Upvoted, despite some status signalling cluttering the transmission up with noise.
Do you mean the explicitly tagged bragging, or something else?
I'm guessing it's a reference to stuff like this:
I don't really have a problem with that, though. If you do something cool, bragging about it is something I'm perfectly ok with. Upvoted.
It read to me like Alicorn's title was commenting on the fact that many people perceive being poly as something you either are or aren't, and nobody could voluntarily switch and still be happy.
I would go further and say neither is something you are or aren't and one can't voluntarily "switch" because it's not binary.
What you're happy doing is a matter of the people around you, the environment you are in, and the person you are.
I think for most people it would be possible to plunk them into non-supernatural, not too different from present scenarios and have them be happy either way or unhappy either way.
Again, to be clear -- I'm just describing a perception. My own belief is rather like what you outline here -- that context defines much of the basis for even asking the question, let alone the spectrum of behaviours you'll find in humans living in that context.
Past behaviour is an excellent predictor of future behaviour as Roissy/CR would love to point out and I would agree. If one prefers monogamy it is not that irrational to seek people who lean towards it. Though in practice most people won't bother so I think your thinking is solid on this point.
Thank you very much for writing this up. I did something similar to myself earlier, and I'm glad to see you helping other people achieve happiness in new, unfamiliar circumstances.
Congratulations and things! Thank you for posting this; I am sure I will refer friends to it in the future.
By the way, this footnote made me very curious.
Writing up a full description would be time-consuming and probably only appeal to a niche audience. If you have specific questions I'll answer them for you.
I'm curious about the Rules. My wife and I have minor disagreements over things like parking neatly. I don't think it matters if it doesn't inconvenience anyone else (for example, early morning in a large parking lot); she disagrees. If that is an example of the kind of Rule you're describing, maybe you can help me relate to that mode of thinking and avoid some future squabbles.
Anyway, congratulations on the hack and best of luck in your relationship.
That might or might not be the same kind of thing that my brain responds to. If it is:
It is easier to keep in mind a consistent Rule than to remember occurrently what justifies it and check for those conditions every time. If there is a really good reason to break a Rule, it will intrude itself upon your notice without explicit checking, so it's safe to just go around following Rules until and unless that happens. Assuming you had a good reason to implement a Rule, it's correspondingly bad to threaten its force (by ignoring it when it's inconvenient, for example - inconvenience-related exceptions could have been built into the original rule if they were really worth the extra checking and if they are genuinely well-defined), and you should be highly suspicious of yourself if you start coming up with great reasons to change your Rules whenever they get inconvenient.
Fascinating, and well written. I can't imagine ever being able to do this myself, but perhaps you might have convinced me it's possible.
Of course, with the current complete lack of poly people I know, it may not be much of a problem.
On that note, if someone knowledgeable could chime in? I know precisely zero poly people; I know of precisely zero poly people (excluding Bay Area because that's not in my country). In fact I can confidently say I've never heard the lifestyle choice discussed, ever, where I live. Is it possible there simply aren't any poly people in Melbourne? Or is there likely to be poly people somewhere, and they've kept it quiet for social reasons? If so, how does one go about non-invasively finding such people?
I've met polyamorous people in Melbourne. In fact I've had relationships with a few of them. At once. ;)
I can say with some confidence that it is not possible that there are no poly people in Melbourne.
This is excellent news!
OKCupid is pretty good. If you're poly, and answer lots of match questions, you'll soon find yourself only seeing poly/poly-friendly folk.
Their latest round of algorithm tweaks seems to have broken that. I now regularly match 95+% with people who are very insistent about only wanting single monogamous people.
Dan Savage has coined the term "monogamish" to describe relationships that appear monogamous on the surface, but actually aren't, and speculates that there are a lot more of them than you'd think.
Last question here: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=9125045 . NSFW language.
Check out "PolyVic". They are rather prone to the "Geek Social Fallacies" but they would be a very good means of expanding one's social circle with more poly folk. That tends to yield better results than going there looking to hook up, BTW.
(Lived in Melbourne all my life, and poly for over half of it. :) )
My fiancee is in Syndey, so there are definitely poly people in your country. I'd be willing to bet that Melbourne probably has an active poly scene.
googles
Yep: http://www.google.com/search?q=polyamory+melbourne
I find this very interesting. Polyamory is something that I've toyed with intellectually for a while, but I have several ugh fields around it. Namely, and this one has been borne out by this very post, that "going polyamorous" seems like the kind of thing monogamous females do in order to acquire polyamorous males. Perhaps if one was a sufficiently status-y female, one would be able to convert the polyamorous male to being monogamous. Of course, this comes with all sorts of issues (namely, making the polyamorous partner unhappy). I just haven't been sufficiently convinced that being polyamorous would make me happy for any reasons other than using that polyamory to attract a high-status mate that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to attract. I, like you Alicorn, have been too long seduced by the monogamy aesthetic.
Now, I will try to imagine the conditions sufficient in order for me to hack myself into being polyamorous. I imagine that they would be thus:
As it stands, I haven't been in a monogamous relationship wherein I desired within that relationship that it was open so that I could date others. I also haven't yet desired someone who was (to my knowledge) polyamorous. I have already decided that I do not want the latter condition to be the catalyst for changing my worldview, so right now, I consider myself open to the possibility in the future, should I find myself in a situation where I wanted to date multiple partners. So thanks Alicorn, I am now significantly more luminous!
Seconded. Seems like Alicorn's reasons for going poly are not good -- being head over heels for MBlume and him not being willing to go monogamous in return... meh.
Alicorn, other poly folks, a question: I don't get poly (aside from the simple "some folks are just different from me" unhelpfulness). Don't poly folks want to feel special to their partners? Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness. How could you be special if you're so easily replaceable by others in the harem? Enlightenment me, please, for I am confused.
That said, if you're really happy, I'm happy for you, and I apologize for rocking the boat, if I have.
I wouldn't describe it as being "head over heels", at the time the decision was made. We'd dated before and I was very happy during that time, and I wanted it back. The universe is allowed to be set up so I have to make some changes to get things. It turned out to be set up that way. I wanted the gotten thing more than I wanted what I had to give up, and I had the power to make the trade.
I will be better able to answer the question if you unpack the words "special" and "replaceable".
I'll try. Not sure I'll succeed, though, as it screams obviousness to my brain, so it's hard to understand the outside perspective wherein it is not clear.
A partner stating he or she would rather not be with me than be with just me indicates that I am not particularly significant. Not special to him or her. Replaceable, pretty easily, considering how doable it is to not live like a swinger (the other side of poly, emotional & intellectual connection = good friends, no line-crossing necessary).
I enjoy feeling like I am more important to my partner than anyone/anything else. I am under the impression that this is normal in humans, and that it feeds the default human tendency toward monogamy. Do you not enjoy this / prefer this to being one-of-many?
From a different angle: If MBlume (or whoever your primary is at a given time) would be with you either way, monogamous or poly, which would you choose, given all the non-drama/non-jealousy & other apparent 'awesomeness' of your poly adjustment? Would you prefer to stay this way, or would you prefer an MBlume who was happy to give up all other men/women to be with just you forever?
I just looked over my shoulder and asked. Turns out your question is a practical one - MBlume says he would go monogamous for me if I wanted. If he'd said this before I hacked poly, I wouldn't have hacked poly. (He wouldn't have said it then - he needed the information of how our relationship has gone for the past month.) Given that I'm now poly, and that we both have other partners/prospects who we'd be somewhat distressed to give up, I'm not planning to reverse the hack. It's a matter of hassle and loss aversion mostly. But I do find it meaningful that he would monogamize himself if I were not sufficiently superpowered to have rendered it unnecessary.
Alternatively, he is able to offer this primarily because he knows it is unnecessary / your polyhack is an inseparable part of your value as a partner.
Sounds like a pretty definitive answer to the "You just went poly for the guy!" objection.
It does. Even though it doesn't refute the "You just went poly for the guy!" assertion at all. It could well fit with "I just went with poly for the guy and it is awesome! You should try it!"
...I did just go poly for the guy. I just think that's okay.
I find this oddly cheerful. Go for it, then!
From what I understand the default human tendency is is medium term monogamy (with cheating) combined with extreme promiscuity, particularly by the highest status males. Some polygamy thrown in too.
I think that "humans tend towards monogamy" and "humans don't tend towards monogamy" are both misleading, as they lump together two things which don't necessarily go together: being monogamous, and requiring monogamy of others. Instead, I'm inclined towards thinking that there's a tendency to require sexual/romantic monogamy from one's partner while still wanting to have sexual/romantic relationships with others.
Though some people seem to be strongly monogamous (in both senses of the word) by nature, others seem to be strongly non-monogamous (in both senses of the word), and some fall in between. So if there is a strong genetic component, there's also the possibility that some kind of frequency-dependent selection might be going on instead of just a universal tendency towards one thing.
Monogamous (for how long?) is probably a very important question in discussions of to what extent monogamy is natural for humans.
Is there a convenient term for raising that sort of question and/or filling in that sort of blank?
Yes, but they don't need to have a monopoly in order to feel that their product is sufficiently differentiated.
Yes. Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn't have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?
Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn't have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?
To quote Alicorn's original post:
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.]
We are talking about a real need, a real issue here. While I consider the answer essentially correct, I also feel that dismissing the implied concern out of hand, as if it was not there to be considered, would be a mistake (after all, many of those considering polygamy are bound to feel that same way). Note that, as remarked, even here we have different levels, different shades, there is a difference between being someone's top romantic priorities and just a generic "one of the many".
I guess that what the original poster meant was "unique", "exclusive", rather than "special". Alicorn's post remaked that being the "top" romantic priority is 95% of the deal. The fact that the relationship is not "unique", but that you are just one of two, six, n romantic interests might make someone feel as if they were easily repleaceable, interchangeable like a car's wheel, whereas, in fact, the feelings of those involved are no less real or intense. Simply because there are others just like you does not mean that you don't matter to your partner. In other words, it does not make you "not special", only "not unique", which, to some people, might appear like the same thing, but it is not.
The problem lies in that remaining 5% that distinguish "top" from "exclusive" romantic interest. To some people, that uniqueness -the fact that the bond is unique, involved only you and your partner, and no one else- is something special and valuable in an of itself. The fact of the matter is that the value one places on exclusivity is highly subjective, everyone has to draw their own conclusions.
An unstated question that emerges in these two points is "can two people be fully satisfied with only each other?" -the original poster seemed to imply (I apologize if that was not the case) that the very need to have a relationship with other people besides the current partner means that said partner is not the "right" person, otherwise you wouldn't feel unsatisfied (as I heard in the past, essentially using artificial measures to keep up a relationship that should have ended ages ago)-.
While I don't completely agree with that, I must say that I would likely not consider polygamy simply because of some feeling of boredom I might end up feeling in the future. In general, in that respect, I must say that I don't see poly as the panacea to save a not completely satisfactory relationship. In my opinion, it would be entirely possible for two people to be satisfied with each other without resorting to outside partners. Communication is the real issue, here -without that, even with ten different partners one would never be able to have a functioning relationship-. So, I don't necessarily see polygamy as the answer to lack of interest in an existing relationship, nor as some sort of magical solution that would ensure the surivival of a future one.
To put it simply, you could very well feel lonely in a crowd.
If nothing else, the increased number of people involved would make it harder to cope with possible attritions/jealousies that might arise in the future. It's all to easy to imagine the potential problems: your partner having a fight with her partner, and being irritable when she is with you, her partner becoming jealous with her and your relationship,... the mere fact that there are more people, and more variables to consider, make the list of "things that could go wrong" that much longer, negating pretty much any perceived advantage one might think to gain from such an arrangement, simply because of the increasingly complex dynamics.
Again, to summarize, put enough people together, and you will most likely end up saying something that one of them disagrees with. It's all too easy hurting someone without meaning to, even if you know him very well, and that problem is magnified if you increase the number of people involved (at least in my experience).
In the end, the only point I disagree with is the fact that polygamy might necessarily be the best way to have a satisfactory, lasting relationship. In my experience, that had not been the case, and in general, I think that, as a possible arrangement, it's not without its own share of problems, albeit different ones. It's not necessarily superior to a monogamous relationship, just... different. I guess that what I am trying to say is, don't expect it to be a magical solution to all of your problems, without proper communication, it will fail, just like anything else.
Yes. Which is part of why I allow competition. Personally, I find it easier to feel special when I know that my partner has other options, but still chooses to spend most/all of her time with me. I want my partner to be spending time with the person (or people) she is best matched with, even if it's not me. But if it is me, then I feel great, especially when I see my partner dropping one of her other options in favor of spending more time with me, or telling me that she enjoys spending time with me more.
To be perfecly fair, from my relatively brief poly experience, there is also the other half of the coin: the disappointment of not being the one said partner choses, the potential jealousy (irrational, but, undenyably not exactly an emotion that can be controlled at will), and, as Alicorn's post highlighted, the fear of losing said partner -breakups do happen, and, in relation to another post, the situation between a mother and her sons is quite different because that bond does not fit this particular requirement-.
But the reality is that they always have other options.
I don't know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.
I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
Interesting benefit of polyamory: there's a lot less that can rock the boat (or sink it)! We enjoy a stability we did not have before.
I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
Not the best example. Does it never happen that one child suffers because he feels that his sibling is "stealing" his parent's attention away from him? It's something I have seen it happen before, even when the mother does love her sons equally -while her love might remain, the same could no longer be said about her "undivided" attention, which is what causes the problem in young children, when they are informed that they are going to have "a little brother"-. While it is not a rationally sound stance, that kind of jealousy is certainly not an uncommon emotion.
Furthermore, does it never happen that one of the sibling feels slighted because he is constantly compared to his more successful brother? While the mother might, in theory, love them both equally, life is not always as it looks on paper. It's not uncommon to have a situation where there is a "preferred" child (maybe because he excells in sports, like the father, whereas the other brother doesn't even like football, and prefers classical music).
To put it clearly, it's also something Alicorn also underlined: # Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary. #. She later decided that the odds of that happening are lower than those that things might go wrong simply because of loss of interest. However, that does not mean that one should dimiss such concern out of hand with a "I don't know why you would say this", as if the fear of abandonment was not a real, "natural" emotion. Ultimately, the children in the example will always remain that mother's sons, no matter what. A romantic relationship is not like that. Breakups do exist, it's not as if the possibility that he/she might decide to pursue a monogamous relationship with a partner he/she met at a later date is might be a realistic concern. Not a concern that should necessarily stop you from pursuing a polygamous relationship, but certainly a concern to be considered.
I mean, I am just going off a tangent, here, but, first of all, we are comparing two very different kind of situations -the bond between a mother and a son, and the bond between two lovers-. While we might address the two bonds with the same words (love), that is, as Wittgensteing might have said, a mere problem of language -in practice, the romantic love between two people is different from what a child feels towards a parent, or a parent towards a child, or a sibling towards a brother-.
For example, take the bond between three siblings. If their parents were having another child, the relationship betweent he three children would not be affected -it's not as if what they feel towards each other would be changed by the arrival of a little brother-. On the other hand, in the case of a "best friend", it is implicitly assumed that the "position" is unique, exclusive. One cannot have many "best friends", one can have many "close friends". In and of itself, the position of "best friend" implies exclusivity, thought it might often be compared to the bond between brothers.
This is a fact that was also highligthed in the original post by Alcyon: she highlights the fact that there is a difference between being someone's "top" romantic priority and being someone's "exclusive" romantic priority. As she puts it, the first part is 95% of the deal. However, I ALSO agree with Eliezer_Yudkowsky's post:
Yes. Why would my being special to someone imply that they couldn't have sex and/or long-term relationships with people they found attractive?
The fact that he/she might be seeing other people does not automatically imply that you don't matter to her/him. Nor does it imply that what your share is any less real. However, it all boils down to how much value we attach to that last 5% that distinguishes "top romantic interest" from "exclusive romantic interest". Because "unique", "exclusive" obviously do not apply when the "position" is shared by two, six, n other people. At the same time, that does not mean that you should feel as if you were easily replaceable, like a car's wheel. You are still a person. Your partner chose to be with you because he/she feels something for you. You just have to decide how much value you place on the fact that the relationship you share should be truly "unique", "exclusive", keeping in mind that there is no right or wrong, best or worse decision here.
I suppose no analogy would be perfect, but saying that kids can be jealous doesn't seem to justify or explain rational adult emotion. I would certainly not agree that kids with siblings are ultimately worse off than those without!
Getting back to the original point of seeing one's partner with another makes one feel non-special... I still don't know why someone (some healthy adult with decent self-esteem) would say this. My guess is that I am finding it hard to understand because I have been in that situation, and the OP (jmed) hasn't. So jmed is trying to guess what it would be like, but because it is so far our of his/her experience, he/she isn't doing a very accurate job.
In my experience, such an event has no impact on my perception of my own specialness. Much like when a lover makes a new friend, or ... I don't know... discovers a new restaurant? These things are just (varying degrees of) nice and exciting.
I think that the issue here is something Alicorn explained in her post.
"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 guess that the original poster didn't mean to say "special", but rather "unique" or "exclusive". In Alicorn's post, it is made clear that they don't have a "bunch of undifferentiated" relationships, but in my opinion, that's what the first commenter understood, and probably, thinking about it, the idea of being so easily repleaced made him think "she considers me like a car's wheel: I am not there? No problem, someone else will be". That doesn't have anything to do with his perception of himself, but with the perception of him he believes his partner might have.
Maybe I should not have put there those comments about children's behaviour, because they seem to distract fromt he main point, I just wanted to note that even in a situation where fear of abandonment is not justified (the mother in question will always be their mother, even after the birth of her new child), there is still jealousy, as well as a subconscious fear. As pointed out by Alicorn, and considering adults and romantic relationship (which can, in fact, end), there is "Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary.". In this case, we are talking about an event that could actually happen, and has to be accounted for. In the end, Alicorn concludes that the odds of their relationship ending because her boyfriend might prefer another woman to her would be lower than those of them breaking out because of simple loss of interest.
Also, in the thread where Alicorn's partner talked about his view of the experience, occasional feelings of jealousy had been mentioned. Who said that emotions were rational? When had they ever been? Just because you intellectually know that you matter to a person, and repeat to yourself that you shouldn't be jealous, doesn't mean that you cant control what you are feeling. If being happy or angry, or sad, or jealous, was a simple matter of sitting down and pondering the situation, then it would be much easier. What could the original poster have been thinking about? I will try to make a wild guess: "if she loves me, shouldn't she want me to be in her current lover's place?" Or "how can I call this special, how can I believe that I truly matter to her, knowing that, had not I been there, she would be doing the exact same thing with someone else? How can I treasure this moment as if it was unique, knowing that I could easily be switched with any other element of a small set?" Or, even, "am I lacking something? Why am I unable to satisfy him, to not make him desire to be with other people? doesn't he love me enough because of some inadequacy? then maybe I am not the right person to be with him... ".
I am not saying that those feelings and thoughts are what one would call rational or logical, but I can easily see how they could arise. A simple bias? Maybe. Note that I am not stating that as a proto-argument against polygamy, I am simply trying to see where the original poster might have come from... I mean, try to think back to the time you first decided to give polygamy a try... did everything go well the first time, without problems or roadblocks? Reading some of the post in Alicorn's boyfriend's thread, it certainly doesn't seem to be that way. Jealousies, attrites, conflicts, all augmented by the sole fact that, well, with more than two persons the dynamics are more complicated. Not that anyone should get discouraged because of such things, but from the posts of other polygamists, well... they all make it seem such a fluid, natural things to do, as if we were simply talking about getting rid of old intellectual chains and they "never" mention any roadblocks, acting as if they had always been above such silly, mundane emotions like jealousies or fear of inadequacy (i.e. from knowing that their partner thinks they are not "enough"). In particular, with regards to this last point, I should note that Alicorn herself considers "significant" that her boyfriend later told her that, knowing what he knows now, he would have agreed to a monogamous relationship in the past. It's nice to know, even if you don't intend to return to that situation. Others, reading the posts, don't seem to have that problem, and actually are happy to know that there will be other people to "pick up the slack", so to speak, when it comes to satisfying their partner's needs (sexual, emotional,...) I must admit that I find that view admiringly selfless, but that in my brief polygamous stint that was an advantage I never experienced (rather, I had to deal with hidden and inexpressed resentment, feelings of inadequacy -at the time it made me think of one of Dario Fo's work, in which a man asked his partner if they could have an open relationship, and then was distressed by the thought that he could be so easily replaced-).
Personally, the only thing I disagree with is the view of polygamy as this sort of panacea to save a relationship (now or in the future) from lack of interest. In my experience, the main issue in such cases is lack of communication. Without it, you could very well end up "alone in a crowd". I would say that that's where the problem originates most of the time, in monogamous or polygamous couples. If, as Elyzier said, the presence of more partners could help take some weight off your shoulders, it is also true that it adds a new layer of complexity to the whole situation, and I would say that the more difficult dynamics balance out the potential benefits.
I must say that, for me, the experience has not been a very good one. Mainly because of the aforementioned problems, which I was not able to spot in time. Still, I am open minded enough not to base my judgement of all polygamous relationship on my failed one. Who knows, maybe it was not the right time, maybe I could even give it another try in the future... but, my experience has made it rather difficult to consider it somehow "superior" to a monogamous relationship. I would not say it is "inferior" either, just different. It has its own set of difficulties and drawbacks. Consider that the "inner monologue" was almost straigh out of my ex's mouth. I never heard a word of it while we were together (I noticed the unease, but, as people tend to do with uncomfortable truths, I left it alone at the time). All things considered I think that a polygamous relationship "could" work beautifully (some of them certainly do), and certainly, Elizier, for example, doesn't seem to be bothered by such thoughts (considering he never even mentioned something akin to "explicitly primary relationship instead of each having a bunch of undifferentiated ones"). However, I think that expecting every experience to be like that, and to go smoothly, without obstacles such as those mentioned above, would mean being a tad too optimistic.
I also dispute the fact that it should be considered inherently "superior" to a monogamous relationship. With respect to what measure? It seems like an awfully subjective judgement to make. If we took the ability of such an arrangement to keep everyone involved happy or satisfied, I would say that it does not fare better or worse than a monogamous relationship -it has its own set of "different" problems and complications, and I certainly wouldn't call it "fail proof"-. Apparently polygamy and bisexuality seem to be "better" from the point of view of "immortal superbeings". I must admit that I don't understand the reason why. Experimentally checking such a fact would be impossible (as there are no moral superbeings I know of), and I wouldn't know how to frame such a sketchy, undefined problem in a suitably formal fashion. The closest scenario I have ever seen depicted was Asimov's description of aliens with long life-spans, in his fictional works (and that sort of promiscous relationships did seem to carry its own share of problems -it seemed to make the whole business "devoid of meaning", as the original poster feared-, so I would call it a different, but not necessarily superior lifestyle). In general, when it comes to bisexuality or polygamy, I am open minded, but avoid attaching labels like "evolutionally superior" (as I saw in a post, I don't remember the exact wording) to them, and in general I cannot see how its diffusion could be tied to longer life-span and society's advancements (Ancient Greeks, for example, were largely bisexual, and yet nowadays, after Illuminism, and with much longer life-expectancy, that does not seem to be the trend, even in academic circles) or evolution (polygyny being the most common form of polygamy in verterbates, but polygamy being relatively uncommon amond human beings). Certainly, I could see how a more open minded society could be more tolerant towards those alternative lifestyles, and they could become more diffiused, but, for example, the fact that bisexuality is tolerated, nowadays, doesn't seem to be leading to a return to ancient greece's custom, despite the increase in knowledge and longevity, and the process of secularization.
Ok, then I would ask how the OP feels if their SO talked to another person. Or became friends with. Or found attractive. Or flirted with. There are some things that we can expect to be unique or exclusive in just about any relationship. (Certainly there are many things that are exclusive in my own primary relationship!) So it's more a matter of changing where that line is drawn.
And as far as this: "Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary." I would guess that monogamous relationships have to deal with this more (possibly far more) than do poly primary relationships. An appealing secondary is much less of a threat if your SO can get what they want from that person without having to break the primary relationship, if your SO can dispel the mystique, see that the grass really isn't so green, etc.
An event that could actually happen in any relationship, not just poly ones. And like I said, I believe it's more likely in mono relationships (whose track records are not stellar).
Oh, I'm sorry if I implied that! Certainly they are not. But dark, unhelpful emotions are to be overcome, not given into. The mono relationship model seems to encourage jealousy, while the poly model seeks to overcome it. I would guess that, as a group, monos are more jealous than polys, because polys must learn to overcome it!
No, we can't just reason away dark emotions, but we most certainly can illuminate them. Sometimes, upon examination, they turn out to be so silly that they just disappear. Other times they result from real problems that need to be addressed. But in any case, it's best to try to understand where they come from. Jealousy can often be dispelled or dealt with. We are not helpless before it. It isn't just part of the human condition, or "who we are".
Your guesses are probably accurate, and they make me a little sad... thoughts of mine in response: Loving others does not mean she loves you less. It most certainly does not mean that people are interchangeable!! (Hell, if people were all pretty much the same, then why would we ever bother with polyamory in the first place??) And why put so much pressure on yourself to be everything to one person? And even if you could be, would there be anything left of yourself?
Well, we all get their in different ways, and some come to it more easily than others. But perhaps it's a bit like learning to ride a bike, juggle, or program: it seems hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, the hard parts seem almost laughably easy. "Just look forward and peddle faster!" Isn't there a sense in which you, too, think that riding a bike really is just that simple? My 5-year-old certainly didn't feel that way.
Interesting! I very much feel this way, but I don't think there's anything selfless about it: it's a relief to me. A relief to know that I don't have to try to change myself to be everything to her (an impossible task), and a relief to know that she won't have to leave me (or cheat) to get the things I can't give her.
If I implied that it was superior, I apologize. Everyone should do what works best for them, of course. We have found that it was the right choice for us.
As would I.
Hmm... not sure I know enough to say, though monogamous relationships have a pretty awful track record, don't you think?
But is it more failure-resistant than monogamy? I would guess so, but I don't really know.
Also, I get the impression that monogamous couples would consider a happy 10-20 year relationship that ends in something other than death to be, in some sense, a failure. But I think many polyamorous people would consider such a relationship to be a huge success. My point being: if there really are different ideas of what constitutes success/failure, then it's hard to compare based on that.
With "superiority", I was not exactly referring to your post, but to a general trend I noticed in other posts, where bisexuality and polygamy were (I think, admittedly, half jockyingly) publicized as "evolutionally superior" (?), at least if we were "immortal superbeings". According to mdcaton's post (quote: "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.") that does seem to be a trend, though the Alicorn's post, nor your review seemed to contain any sort of "zealotic" element.
To restate my opinion, I don't think of the polygamous arrangement as necessarily superior, nor inferior, mainly because it's a highly subjective decision to make, and what could work for someone might not work for someone else. On paper, it sure seems to solve many problems -which is why I agreed to give it a try in the first place-. To name a few: the fact that, through you might feel jealousy and some amount of fear (because of the potential risk that your partner might change her mind and unceremoniously "dump" you to enter in a monogamous relationship, which, considering sex and the general level of intimacy involved with "third parties", would in my opinion increase with respect to a "proper" monogamous relationship -by that I mean one in which the people involved are faithful and sincere with one another-, at least if said partner was not exactly sure about what she wanted from a polygamous relationship -so, arguably, this woudl not apply to a "proper" polygamous relationship either, I guess-... but that's debatable, and not really the issue here), cheating would no longer be an issue (though, if you were comfortable and open enough to sleep with other people in a polygamous, I doubt that would have been a cause of worry), and certainly, if something was to happen to one of the two, the other would have the support of third parties and you wouldn't need to worry about him/her facing the situation alone -in that sense, the support-structure seems to be superior-.
That often clashes with the reality of things, and emotions like jealousy, anger, inexpressed fears, competitiveness gone out of control. Of course, those negative aspect could be handled through good communication,which would likely be the key to even a successful monogamous relationship, and therefore a generally good strategy when dealing with unsatisfaction, etc. ... which was one of the reason you stated in favor of polygamy: more often than not, unsatisfaction does not arise from an <impossibility> to give your partner what she wants, but from the inability of even acknowledging that such a need exists, either because of inattentiveness or a general desire to act as if "it was all ok". It was what happened in my case (ironically, at the time we had a polygamous arrangement she was unsatisfied with), through of course that is not enough to make a genetal case in favor or against polygamy.
The only question that remains is: could it have worked, with proper communication, but <without> the added pressures caused by the unfamiliar polygamous context? Or were there deeper problems? I don't really have the answer to that. I woulnd't go with the first answer or principle, because, to be fair, at the time "proper communication" was not exacly abundant (no thanks to my own unwillingness to acknowledge the problem, maybe spurned by the irritation that she had been the one to push me into that situation to begin with).
But in general... I don't know. For the moment, finding "one" right person to be with does seem like a difficult enough problem... falling deeply in love with more than one, and then trying to arrange a situation in which we could "all" be together? I definitively woulnd't say no on principle, despite the past experience (as a matter of fact, I think that it would be impossible to give a definitive qualitative judgement, and each situation should be judged on a case by case basis), but for the moment I don't like my odds (for me, in particular, "emotional" intimacy and the prospect to open up to another person do <not> come easy, and the prospect of developing that kind of connection with more than one person does seem unrealistic, at least in my case -before, it was mostly a physical or intellectual connection, rarely at the same time-).
20 years... on one hand, idealistically, I would say "forever", but looking at the statistics, well... and yet, 20 years... that's almost twice my age, trying to predict what could happen in such a long time span would be impossible -as pointless as trying to predict where I would have been now more than two decades ago would have been-.
The conclusion, I guess, is that if you are comfortable with it, it would be a wonderful arrangement, but that it wouldn't necessarily appeal to everyone (Alicorn mentioned people with her "mental makeup", and indeed I think that part of it is a matter of natural inclination, or at least deeply rooted cultural influence -i.e. bisexuality in Anchient Greece-). At this time, for example, I certainly don't feel the need to give it another try, through that's just me: if anyone is thinking about it, focusing on the worse case scenario won't do them any good, and would probably just end up paralyzing them. People like Alicorn and Elizier certainly seem satisfied by the outcome, so there certainly isn't any reason to dismiss it based solely on peer pressure -always keeping in mind, through, that it's no magical formula to save a failing relationship, nor a fool proof method that guarantees success, or improves your chances (as I said, the benefits are balanced by other kinds of complications, so I woulnd't necessarily call it a "more easy to handle" arrangement -it could be, if you are prepared for it, open minded, not jealous, suitably trusing (when it comes to emotional intimacy, for example, I am not, despite efforts to correct that)-)-.
I didn't understand this line of argument before I was poly, and I don't understand it now. Yes. Of course if you have multiple children they're individually less special to you! You have less time and energy for each, less brain-space to store facts about each, and you aren't even culturally allowed to have a favorite! There's a sense in which you "love them all equally", sure, but I'd be willing to bet that something like 75% of parents would be unable to claim that under Veritaserum.
As for why it should be different for lovers, the psychology about lovers and children is very different. It's a conceit of our current sensibilities that we even use the same word to refer to how we feel about those, our siblings, our pets, and ice cream. There is no reason in principle why we couldn't have been hardwired for extreme strict romantic monogamy and still love lots of children.
Hmm... perhaps we don't mean the same thing when we use the word "special". If I pretend that you used a word unfamiliar to me instead and had to work only on context, where you continue with:
...then I'd have to agree with you. Certainly, I have less time and energy to devote to each child.
For the record, I never claimed to love them all equally, or to not have a favorite. (They are all my favorites, in different realms, but even so... it would be absurd to claim that it just happens to all add up to be equal.)
But I don't see what point you are making here. My point is that my love for the first child was not diminished by the arrival of the second. For some other definition of special (importance in my life), I would say that the first is just as special to me.
The reason this is brought up (perhaps mostly by poly people with more than one child) is that one's capacity for love, for this "specialness" is not fixed! Another child comes along, and your capacity grows. Another long-term, committed partner, and your capacity grows.
That is the point of the argument: capacity is not fixed in size.
Certainly, but the point about specialness-capacity-increase is fairly general. I would apply it to lovers, to children, to favorite movies, to desserts, to symphonies... the more things we love (or are special or meaningful to us), the more our capacity increases. These things, these experiences make us grow. (Well, maybe not desserts; that's a different kind of growth.)
And we accept that this is how we work in terms of children, movies, food, music... why make an exception for lovers?
Ok. I suppose not. I suppose we could have been hardwired for extreme preference for only one flavor of ice-cream... Do you just really not like the comparisons between different categories of things we like/love/enjoy? Of course our feelings for these different categories are all very, very different, but the generalization seems valid enough to me.
And especially: if they feel similar enough to me for the generalization to hold, then I'm really not going to be convinced that I must love only one by the argument "romantic love is different because it's different". (Which isn't what you were saying, but it's the message this line of argument addresses.)
As has been suggested by others: different people need different things to "feel special" in the sense you mean it here.
Some people have their sense of relationship-specialness diminished when their partner goes out to see a movie without them, or when their partner expresses the sense that someone else is attractive, or when their partner goes to the office instead of staying home with them, or when their partner chooses to spend holidays with his or her birth family, or when their partner socializes with someone other than them, or when their partner kisses someone other than them, or when their partner has sex with someone other than them, or when their partner establishes a long-term sexual or romantic relationship with someone other than them, or etc. or etc. or etc.
It's not particularly helpful to talk about what ought to diminish my sense of relationship-specialness. If I know what does in fact diminish it, and I can find a way of operating in the world that meets my needs given that (either by changing my preferences to suit my current environment, or changing my environment to suit my current preferences, or a combination), then I will feel more special than if I don't.
The idea that there's some particular way of expressing relationship-specialness that is privileged, and people for whom that mode of expression is necessary and sufficient are somehow more correct than people for whom it is not, is often a consequence of mistaking one's own personal state (or one's culture's preferred state) for an ineluctable human condition.
Yes, and I do feel special to my partners; there's been one in particular with whom that's not fulfilled and often a source of tension, but that has more to do with the realities of our relationship and the differences in our neurology. The majority of the people I'm seeing could scarcely do more to make it clear to me how important, special and loved I am in their eyes.
You appear to be conflating non-monogamy with emotionally-shallow, superficial relationships undertaken primarily for sex.
That sucks. A compatible partner that is successfully poly is some evidence that poly could also work for you, as well as being something that brings the possibility to your attention. Yet by meeting them you have instead cut off the whole possibility. You'd be better if you never laid eyes on them! :P
This is just the way I like to relate to myself but I'd decide I was allowed to switch to poly if it was a good idea but that I'm not allowed to date poly-inspiration-X. For at least as long as a limerance period could be expected to interfere with judgement and also long enough that I could see if poly worked for me without the interference. That way my infatuation biases don't get to subvert my decision making either by temptation or by defensive reaction.
That's a massive deal to me too. I am far more careful with shielding myself from asymmetry when playing poly. My primary partner also has to be able to accept that us having other relationships means that she will get less of my attention. Bizarrely enough not everyone gets this. Seriously... being poly doesn't add extra hours to the day!
For myself I am also reluctant to get into situations where I'm seeing multiple people within the same social circle. Or, more to the point, where my partners are seeing other people within my social circle. Simply because it changes the nature of my interactions with my friends. Sex begets competition. It makes people more like humans (status hungry monkeys) and less like 'people'. It's hard enough balancing egos and rapport with potential rivals when you aren't fucking the same girl (or guy). That just isn't the kind of game I like to be playing with my own friends. I prefer Settlers of Catan.
Fortunately most of my core circle is made up of (awesome, open minded but sincere) Christians so there is no chance that we'll end up with love pentagons. Just lots of couples and me doing WTF I want. :)
You know, I had assumed that Time-Turners were invented by a Hogwarts Headmaster who despaired of getting the school schedules straight and one day before deadline stayed up until 6AM inventing the Time-Turner, and that he (gender coinflip-generated) succeeded because he was the first person to try for time travel just to get extra time and not to change the past, and that the invention within Hogwarts is why they get a traditional free pass on using them. But some polyamorous past wizard would be just as reasonable an inventor.
I like love pentagons and poly chains within the community. It creates a familial feeling. Of course nothing's actually gone wrong in my immediate poly family yet. You can easily see how this could go wrong.
And from my side I can see how it could go right. I visited Berkeley recently (bootcamp) and it was adorable.
There aren't many places where people would be comfortable making that comparison! But I suppose if it wasn't for the inbreeding risk, Westermarck effect and massive potential for abuse incest would be the perfect family bonding activity. You're living with each other already!
That's completely reasonable, I'll agree with that.
Congratulations on the hack. I would have expressed doubt that this could work, and am correspondingly updating my priors.
It happens that I agree with you on this, in fact I think tolerance of another's multiple entanglements is more important component of poly than the desire to oneself have multiple entanglements. In the poly circles I am aware of, there is no broad agreement on either of these points though. I thought I should mention that there are a non-trivial proportion of couples who self-ID as "one of us is poly and the other is not" where the poly one is involved with other people.
This is similar to the labeling disputes that occur when (say) two bisexual women are said to be in a "lesbian relationship". They might reasonably object that people will hear "lesbian relationship" and assume they are lesbians - "only lesbians can be in a lesbian relationship" is something I've heard some bi women say; but then again I can think of as many counter-examples where two bi women deliberately identify as being in a lesbian relationship.
So perhaps there is a similar scope issue with "poly person" vs. "poly relationship"; I was certainly startled to see you assert a poly person can only be involved with a poly person. I know many poly people currently involved in monogamous relationships with monogamous people, so perhaps this should be "one can only have a poly relationship with a poly person"?
Never mind tolerance, to me it feels better for its own sake to not be my girlfriends' only boyfriend. It was a surprisingly large weight off my mind to know that if I can't take her to Yosemite, or escort her to BENT SF, then she has other paramours who can do so. I know that I'm not personally responsible for matching every one of her sexual facets, just some of them, and that she won't be forever sexually unsatisfied if there's something I happen not to enjoy. If you asked me "Is it more important to your happiness that that your girlfriend be able to have more than one boyfriend or that you be able to have more than one girlfriend?" I might well reply "The former."
...I would never have thought of that in a million years. That's fascinating.
Decidedly a very admirable and selfless position. I guess that with tolerance the other poster wanted to highlight that many people in such a situation would feel a certain amound of jealousy, or, as Alicorn put it, fear of being abandoned.
An objection I could see coming is "doesn't it feel weird to be so easily repleaceable?" I guess that most people see this as being treated like a car's wheel, when the fact that the relationship is not "unique" or "exclusive" does not imply that the feelings of those involved are any less real or intense.
An objection that I often encountered in the past was something akin to "if you are not feeling completely satisfied by your current relationship maybe she isn't the right person". I often got the feeling that people thought that, simply because I was unable, or didn't feel like, catering to EVERY one of my partner's needs (i.e. she because of difference of interests, etc.), I was artificually sustaining a relationship that should have ended months ago due to incompatibility.
A more convincing objection was that certain acts, situations, gestures (not only sexual) acquired a particular importance and meaning simply because they were intimate, shared only among the two of us (i.e. a restaurant, a particular food, watching a movie I despised with her, and being happy all the same because it was something we shared with no other). Sexually, I have never had any problems in trying to accomodate my partner, I simply asked what she liked and proceeded to accomodate her, and she did the same... well, then again maybe I was never in a situation where I was asked to do something particularly strange or uncomfortable...
If anything I would imagine someone in a well-integrated poly is /less/ replaceable than either half of a typical monogamous pair. In the latter case, when one spouse dies, the survivor may well be expected to mourn for a while, get over it, and find a new one to fulfil the same duties; in the former, everyone still has to deal with individual feelings of loss, and then the whole highly-optimized system has to be refactored according to new comparative advantages.
A good answer to the wrong question -that's not what I was talking about-. Besides that, I don't think there would be significant differences in the case of the death of one of the partners, be it in a monogamous or polygamous relationship -but here, I am assuming the original poster's interpretation of polygamy, with a "main" relationship and other lovers on the side, who won't be involved in eventual marriage/production of offspring. Things could be different if their "position" in the relationship was similar, more simmetric.
What I was pointing out is that from Elizer's post, it was made clear that that interchangeability was an important aspect of this kind of arrangement: <It was a surprisingly large weight off my mind to know that if I can't take her to Yosemite, or escort her to BENT SF, then she has other paramours who can do so. I know that I'm not personally responsible for matching every one of her sexual facets, just some of them, and that she won't be forever sexually unsatisfied if there's something I happen not to enjoy>. It didn't seem like there was a dispute over the fact that another partner could "fill in" for him -he did say so himself, after all-.
What I was saying is that, while to him (or someone living happily in a polyamous relationship) that might be an asset, someone not accustomed to this sort of thing might very well feel that that very aspect of the relationship (i.e. the fact that on surface they could "do without him", in such a way that his presence is, in a sense superfluous) to mean that they are, in a sense, "not really necessary". That might be just a bias, but it certainly doesn't appear to be an uncommon position -as a matter of fact, it's what put the word "end" to my brief poly experience: while it might look good on paper, and logically is would solve many problems (i.e. cheating would be a non issue, and in general the whole relationship would be more open and honest, and in case anything happened that made it impossible for one partner to be there for the other, at least you would know that he/she was dealing with things alone), it fails to account for core "emotional" reactions such as jealousy and competition that goes out of hand or (to be perfectly honest and in the spirit of admitting one's mistakes least you become a "crackpot") the tendency to ignore uncomfortable truths and act as if everything is perfect until it's too late to be fixed-.
When you love someone, and therefore want them to be happy, how strongly do you want that happiness to be correlated with your own involvement in that person's life?
The answer to this question is bound to be highly subjective, and I don't think there even is a "right" or "wrong" stance on this issue. Of course, barring extreme cases, such as one partner being oppressive or controlling, or so unhealthily dependant on the other that he/she would, I don't know, be unable to live without him.
If you decide to say something on the lines of "anything goes as long as he/she is happy", you are not working under realistic assumptions anymore. Everyone is at least a little selfish, everyone, even in a polygamous relationship, has a "comfort zone" and determines what is okay and not okay for his/her partner to ask. Moreover, everyone has the right to be. Just like Alicorn had the right to decide to set those rules and boundaries with her partner. Pretending that nothing the other person does would "ever" cause disturb and discomfort, and you would be ready to accept it as long as he/she is happy about it is certainly very noble, but not very realistic. In practice, there are things we are okay with, and things we are not comfortable with, and that don't simply, automatically, become acceptable just because we value our loved one's happiness (for instance, in this case, by her own words Alicorn wouldn't be okay with her partner marrying someone else, or, eventually, having kids out of wedlock, because there are certain areas she want to be "just the two of them", something, for lack of a better word, "special", shared "just" between the two of them).
In the end, if I love someone I want them to be happy. Check. I don't wat that happiness to be entirely correlated with my involvement in her life -because, well, in that case we would fall in the previous rather unhealthy scenario-. That said, I don't think there would be anything wrong with desiring that a (hopefully not insignificant) part of the reason she is happy is because of my involvement in her life. After all, we are talking about a couple. Without a gesture, an event, a place, some form of special connection... without having something in common, shared only between the two of you, we wouldn't be talking about a couple. Maybe about a good arrangement for the purpose of sexual satisfaction and possible future reproduction. Otherwise, I could simply take this line of reasoning and bring it to its possible conclusion "I love her, I want her to be happy, I don't particularly care if any of that happiness is correlated to my involvement in her life, and apparently that doesn't seem to be the case -> we should not be together (you could say, since she doesn't mind your presence, either, you could still be an item, but we already established that we don't care at all is any of her happyness is connected to our presence, and we are for all intents and purposes unneccessary, redundant).
Of course, the point here is that in the case of an open relationship, or even a polygamous one, that is not the case, we are not going to the extreme where we say "I don't care how little time she spends with me, I don't care if she prefers to be with someone else rather than here with me, because all that matters to me is her happiness". You might be willing to do the sacrifice, but would a relationship where you never saw her, where no part of her happines was tied to your presence anymore (to the point where it wouldn't even matter if you were there or not) even be callen a "relationship" anymore?
Notice that, once again, that is not the case we are discussion. Reading Alicorn's post on polyhacking, she mentioned rules, boundaries, things that made her unconfortable, little priviledges she might want to have... like the fact that the "primarily" relationship (by her own words, 95% of the whole) is that between her and her partner, or the fact that she eventually wants to marry and requires "exclusive" rights when it comes to progeny, if nothing else, or the fact that she reserves the right (psychologically helpful trick) to stop him from going to see another woman, if she does not feel like it (thought she doesn't feel the need to exercise it).
Mono-poly pairs strike me as a recipe for bad drama.
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.
This this this. I've spent quite some time watching with amused detachment as several of my female friends bluster around this type of interaction without ever really understanding. My advice that "hey, acquiring sexual partners is really not hard if that's what you want" generally goes unheeded, but those who do "get it" end up being shocked as how easy things really are.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, what? That's definitely not something I would have predicted. What were their detailed reactions?
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:
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.)
Is it conceivable that some of them thought it was an invitation to socialize rather than a date?
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.
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.
Weirdly enough, I know someone who had their face seriously damaged (albeit not to the ludicrous extent shown by Two-Face) and he reported that it actually made him much more sexually successful, since it gave him an instant conversation starter with just about anyone and the story of how he got it painted him in a very good light.
I think that even in the current cultural context one should still expect the impact of "battle scars" on physical attractiveness to depend strongly on the gender of the person displaying them.
A good point; that said, a surprisingly large number of heterosexual or bisexual males I know are very much attracted to signs of "toughness" in females, including scars, fighting ability, etc.
I always counsel young males with still-healing injuries that will leave scars to think of good stories. As for females, most straight men I know are attracted to signs of toughness that don't otherwise confound the usual health-and-fertility signs (skin and hair), so scars might not always work. But anecdotes from LW commenters are not likely to be representative of the general conversation. Many women I know in SoCal that have impressive degrees from awesome schools hide their credentials for fear of scaring off men, and are surprise than I am surprised. That's still the world we live in.
If I were feeling super snarky I'd say "That's SoCal". But your point is well-taken.
I'm torn about saying this because this kind of message probably good for everyone's self-esteem and I think nerdy girls on average should be more confident, but... what's with all these pretty nerds? Is your standard for pretty relatively low or are you just really lucky? In my experience and in common stereotype nerds of both genders are, on average, less physically attractive than the rest of the population, once you control for socio-economic conditions that influence things like diet, hygiene and exercise. Good looking people tend to end up on anti-nerd life paths earlier in life, less good looking people have less of their time taken up by socializing leaving them with more time for nerdy activities and more incentive to develop other aspects of themselves (since they can't coast on physical attractiveness). I've consistently found that less physically attractive people are more intellectually interesting.
This doesn't mean your advice is bad- nerdy girls are awesome and totally are capable of getting together with lots of nerdy guys. But I don't think we need to mythologize the nerdy female this way and it seems a bit patronizing to pretend the self-assessment of nerdy women has no grounding in reality. Just like how not everyone gets to be smart, not everyone gets to be physically attractive.
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.
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. :-)
The "sheep dance " is likely a result of a huge amount of "happy" (Adrenaline, dopamine, Serotonin) hormones being released in the brain(or even "limerence" (see for example Physical effects section from the "limerence" article on Wikipedia)). It is a very enjoyable state which I would even try to prolongate as long as possible (meaning over the course of several encounters). Isn't it better to advice the male nerds to follow some of the courses on the bootcamps on how to dress or how to behave more masculine or to learn something from experts like lukeprog (for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvcuZhDWLgg or some of his other (earlier) posts on LW)
If my husband had done that I likely wouldn't have been as interested in him.
Well, sure -- but other people would likely have found him more interesting. Congratulations on things having worked out for you, of course, but there are a lot of other good people who each of you could have married.
Finding good romantic partners is very probabilistic. Does increased masculinity increase a man's expected attractiveness to a random person? I think that, for men who aren't already very masculine, it definitely does.
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.
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.
There are not such things as suggestive glances, eye-locking, inviting postures, etc.?
Nope. Not sure what to tell you if you're not already aware this isn't so.
Maybe a study documenting it?
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.
Obviously this is an issue where nearly everything everyone says is a generality and accuracy could be improved by hedging.
No.
But I do expect that if humans become immortal superbeings, then given enough time, most people currently in fairytale monogamous relationships will switch to poly. (Though when people are immortal superbeings, I also expect it to become common that they'll spend a very long time if necessary searching for an instance of fairytale monogamy to be their first relationship.)
I guess my philosophy is that fairytale monogamy is optimal for the young (say under 200 years or so), while poly and other non-traditional arrangements are the choice of the adult.
I note that this treads close to a well-established poly fail: the notion that poly is More Highly Evolved.
It's not? I mean, there's some people, though probably considerably less than half of the population, who are genuinely and naturally well-suited to monogamous closed relationships. But the point that immortal superbeings would do something polyish actually does strike me as a clear argument in favor of "poly is More Highly Evolved". I mean, you're then that much closer to doing things the way immortal superbeings would do it. This is why I've always felt vaguely guilty about not being bisexual, since immortal superbeings clearly would be.
I'd be very interested in hearing about that hack. I haven't been able to pull it off, myself, and also feel vaguely guilty about it. (Especially after seeing the grace and ease with which my wife pulled it off.)
See here.
So am I. We are talking about the "becoming an immortal superbeing" hack, right?
I was not, no. :-)
(But if you know that one, too, please share.)
But the point that immortal superbeings would do something polyish actually does strike me as a clear argument in favor of "poly is More Highly Evolved"
It is? What is the assumption that immortal superbeing would chose to do such a thing based on -seeing as there are no immortal superbeings around-? Talking about biases, this does seem to be one of those case where our personal choices might influence our judgement on a problem which cannot be investigated experimentally nor framed in a suitably formal theoretical model.
While I am not against poly, I am also not persuaded that it could be called "better suited" to superbeings -the same could be said about being bisexual-. Mainly, I think that it could certainly become more accepted -what with society becoming more open-minded-, but only as a choice amongst others, not as a necessarily "superior" choice. Then again, evolution is all about being better suited to one's environment, not about being "better" in a general term, and immortal beings would likely be freed by such external costraint, so... I guess that it would largely be up to each individual's personal preference. What I envision is a situation akin of the one we have nowadays, but significantly more tolerant. It's not that, simply because homosexuality is more widely accepted, "everyone" is becoming homosexual, there is just more freedom of choice, and it doesn't make sense, to me, to look at those kind of choices as "more" or "less" evolved.
From an evolutionary point of view, polygamy doesn't seem to be necessarily tied to "more evolved" -this is easily checked by browsing reseach in the field of ethology (through polygyny, being more common among vertebrated, has been studied far more extensively than polyandry)-. Us human being, being what you might call the "peak" of this process, are largely monogamous, unlike, for example, chimpanzees and bonobos.
Furthermore, consider that anchient Greeks were largely bisexuals, and look at the situation nowadays, after Illuminism, and with a singificantly larger life span. Those kind of choices does not seem to be tied to cultural or byological evolution. Tolerance for different life choices is.
Can you please use the standard quotation method of adding '>' before the text you're quoting? Those big letters are annoying. And why did you delete your account?
I wanted a new username. As for the big characters, I am aware that they are annoying, but I didn't know that using # would have had that effect, and now I don't know how to reverse it.
Well, if you had not deleted your account, you could just edit your comment and replaced them with '>'.
Are you blind (or otherwise visually impaired) by any chance? If not, it seems strange that you didn't notice the effect after the first comment you made.
No, I am not blind. Through,I wear glassed. No, that's not the reason I didn't correct it before. It seems like the # character triggers that affect only if used in a whole new paragraph, otherwise it simply prints #phrase#. Initially, I thought that it was a side-effect of quoting a phrase of the text whose user I was replying to. All things considered, I didn't think it was that annoying, it's not as if I wanted to irritate you specifically.
For what it's worth, while I didn't take it personally, I do find it distracting.
I'm not sure whether it makes more sense for you to correct it or to leave it in place so that the comments about it will make sense.
I changed account, so that's not really an option. If I could change it, I certainly would.
It's no biggie. You can click the "Help" link at the bottom right corner of the reply form, to see some notes about syntax (many people fail to notice that link).
His point wasn't that he couldn't see it, it was that he didn't know how to change it.
It's probably worth a longer essay, but confusions between what people can perceive and what they can change aren't exactly rare.
I imagine the chief benefit of monogamy is that you don't need to compete for the limited resources of attention, and affection, and reproductive/nurturing capacity from the person you love -- a sense of competition which can manifest itself in feelings of sexual jealousy, possessiveness, etc.
Now imagine a hypothetical future scenario in which those resources are effectively unlimited; in the sense that each person is perfectly capable of perceiving the need/desires of their prospective partners, and satisfying them as best as possible, with capacity to spare; in which you don't need to compete for reproductive capacity or material resources are plentiful.
The benefits of monogamy then seem nullified, the benefits of polyamory seem without a downside to them.
That having been said, something being "evolved" in the sense of "What Would Immortal Superbeings Do" seems rather useless in determining what current-day people should do given their current-day emotional and physical circumstances.
I think that would only be possible if the whole human race had the attentional resources to be a group marriage. I'm not sure it makes sense to say that everyone could be that good at modelling everyone one else.
My imagination only extends to raising Dunbar's number to 300, and I think that even that would produce large but hard to specify social changes.
I would assume that eventually the pleasurable feeling one gets from sex and love if completely separated from reproduction would slowly disappear or modified to fill something like is required in the scenario described here. Sure one can say that beings in that situation might be considered "bisexual" but is that really a useful word? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the sexes as we know them basically disappear in a world where anyone can make a descendant by themselves if they have the resources for it? Being "bisexual" dosen't really make sense in such a context since anything like what we currently understand as biological sex is gone and is replaced by several competing reproductive strategies that only loosely fit the current distribution of reproductive strategies of the sexes.
I would probably self-modify to be asexual if it wasn't for current societal norms and modes of reproduction. I could get much more out of my limited lifespan if I didn't waste so much time with matters related to it. I'd rather do some math, or read more books or do some research or just explore and have fun in a virtual world.
My revealed preferences seem to match this partially as well. Mostly unrelated story: In the past I've actually been so disappointed when I ask people what's the funnest thing they can imagine and I get the answer "sex". Once I couldn't stop myself from saying back "Come on you can do better!". I got a blank stare and clear confusion. What is extra funny is that looking back I realize that in that particular context her answer of "sex" was clearly just one of the more obvious flirting signals that I had completely missed for over two weeks. Where in the fraking ancestral environment did I get maladaptive genes like that? Heh.
Quite possibly not enough of your ancestors died before reproducing, leaving insufficient optimization pressure. :P
That sounds a lot like Shaw's Back to Methuselah, in which people lose interest in most (all?) social interaction, including sex, by about age 200 and prefer mathematics.
I don't know what people would do to get enough novelty in much longer lifespans-- it's possible that sex could be made more complex and intense as well as mathematics becoming more fascinating.
Um, that no more follows than that a hypothetical sapient mayfly can be "more highly evolved" by learning how to knit winter clothing. The problem does not apply, so the solution is not especially useful.
I'm surprised to see Eliezer being so liberal with throwing about "More Highly Evolved". This is a more misleading usage than what he condemns vigorously in (for example) No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices. That is, if it is not-ok to overload the 'evolve' word to include corporations and nano then it is definitely not-ok to stretch it to evolving to immortal superbeings either (it's less like evolution in practice but far more like it in how the word is used).
"Immortal superbeings" aren't more highly evolved. Evolution kind of doesn't work very well as individuals approach immortality. More importantly even if evolution can be said to be evolving in a direction ('higher') it certainly wouldn't be in the direction of immortal superbeings. Or in the direction of sexual behaviours optimised for fun. Immortal superbeings are things we as present day humans think it would be cool to be.
Poly is "something we imagine our idealized fantasy people doing". This is some evidence about what our preferences are, along the lines of visualizing a eutopia. Particularly because it seems these immortal folks are nothing more than a target for projection. I mean, out of the set of all possible immortal superbeings how exactly was the 'are bisexual' trait identified? It's certainly not an objective feature of the class, or one that all humans would attribute to them.
Does the "highly" in "highly evolved" ever make sense to use? It seems like an archaic term leftover from a teleological interpretation of evolution where Homo Sapiens were the ultimate product.
JoeW introduced the term, not Eliezer. It seems a bit unfair to me to criticize Eliezer for trying to continue the flow of the conversation instead of explicitly correcting JoeW in what I would consider a fairly annoying manner.
Somebody needs to produce bumper-stickers that read "What Would A Bisexual Immortal Superbeing Do?"
It's not entirely clear that those wouldn't be the original stickers in the "WW[X]D?" series by another name.
I don' see from where you conclude that " immortal superbeings would do something polyish" . Why it is not as likely that they will evolve to have a series of monogamous relationships? The science of falling and staying in love is even now quite well understood . All it takes is few hormones. (see http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/lovesex/sciencelove.htm and the references therein). By using them only when with your partner you can make a love relationship monogamous relatively easy.
That said, do you have references for " though probably considerably less than half of the population, who are genuinely and naturally well-suited to monogamous closed relationships" ? If the monogamous love is determined by hormones, which have been in humans for millions of years doesn't it make it more likely that nowadays and few millions years future humans are more likely to be monogamous. A possible explanation for the "polypartners" people could be that because of the abundance of choice they are likely to make wrong decisions (see Human motivation :(http://lesswrong.com/lw/71x/a_crash_course_in_the_neuroscience_of_human/) I would expect future humans to be busy with more interesting and challenging things then finding the next sexual partner.
By the way you can experiment to hack yourself bisexual by trying to fall in love with a man with the three simple steps described in the end of the reference.
What evidence do you have that immortal superbeings would be bisexual? I mean, I'd be willing to bet quite a bit on the proposition that immortal superbeings would have few if any consistent species-wide sexual preferences, since the role of sexuality in promoting reproduction would no longer be relevant at that point, due to inescapably logical demographic consequences of 'immortality' and the prophylactic options implied by the term 'superbeings.'
In short, please unpack this "immortal bisexual superbeing" concept a bit more, so we can all figure out where you went wrong.
I'd expect it to go in cycles.
And yet, the vast majority of poly people are well under 200 years old... I doubt they would agree with you on what is optimal for them.
I suppose you could counter that the vast majority of people under 200 years old are monogamous, but that seems more due to monogamy's enormous head-start in modern western culture than due to what is optimal for the young.
I volunteer to be the evil villain who goes about poisoning damsels and locking them up in towers so that they role play rescues by knights in shining armor. I'll turn a few guys into beasts too in case they are feeling left out.
Thank you for volunteering this invaluable service ^_^
This post is magnificent. So much candid introspection on an area most people are very private about, and so much clear analysis instead of just going with emotions/aesthetics/cultural preferences. Wow.
On this -
I could weigh in on this. It's worth looking at the word normative -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative
"Normative standards" basically mean whatever is the baseline for comparison. So the taxonomy you set up is "21st century Western-style monogamy" vs. "not 21st century Western-style monogamy" - and by 21st century Western-style monogamy, I mean a single partner, choosing relationships individually through social exploration, choosing long term partners on the basis primarily of emotion rather than purely pragmatic concerns (the pragmatic concerns become more of a baseline filter, as opposed to the whole consideration) - etc, etc.
There's other things that move outside the taxonomy you set up. 18th century American monogamy, for instance, was highly pragmatic and about specialization of labor. George and Martha Washington often advised younger friends, colleagues, young army officers, and the daughters of their friends to marry purely "checklist style" - good character, good family person, solid income or housekeeping skills, good family, etc. Love/lust/affection came last on the checklist, if at all.
I mention that, because it's kind of subtly buried in the post the assumption that 21st century Western-style monogamy is the normative standard. Maybe not. Maybe 18th century American monogamy would be recognizable in the taxonomy as "monogamy" - but there are things outside of it.
Going a little further, "polyamory" - from my limited understanding - conveys "-amory" - love, emotion, etc. - not, say, a purely pragmatic arrangement of having multiple partners to the end of some objective. Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan and his family ruled the island 250 years. He had 19 wives and concubines. The historical record isn't completely accurate, but one gets the impression that he had serious genuine affectionate with 3-4 of his wives in his life, and the rest were political arrangements or for having children and paternity.
You could say Tokugawa 19 wives/concubines (who almost certainly would have been exclusive to him under serious penalty if caught doing otherwise) were "a low-key flavor of being poly oneself, not a variety of tolerant monogamy" - but I think that looks at the 21st century Western-style monogamy as the normative standard, notes that Tokugawa's wives don't fall into the cateogry, and puts them in the poly category. But that doesn't seem quite right...
I agree that there's "monogamy" and "everything else" in Western culture right now, but it hasn't always been the case, might not always be the case, and I don't think polyamory is the only alternative to monogamy. One dichotomy worth looking at is whether partners are picked more coldly and dispassionately, or with warmth and affection and emotion. Both polyamory and 21st C Western-style monogamy both tend to assume the emotional connection there, which I get the impression actually still isn't the case everywhere in the world, like Africa or the Middle East, and times might be changing elsewhere in the world. In fact, I'd strongly suspect that there will be a trend towards more Tokugawa-style dispassionate choosing of non-monogamous partners for political, economic, and hereditary reasons going forwards. It still will be a small minority of the population, but probably a larger small minority than now. And it probably doesn't make sense to add that in with any "-amory" grouping, being that those arrangements are chosen not for the warmth and connection, but for other reasons.
This was rather surprising for me to read, since after some thought I realized that I may be pretty close to this style, since I use some of the criteria you mentioned for screening and am not currently monogamous.
I find your speculation intriguing. I could imagine strategies like that becoming more widespread due to different tactics people will use to deal with the sexual marketplace. Greater knowledge of heredity, and perhaps even its acceptance, will mean that those hoping for upward social mobility will need to think long and hard about the lifestyle and mates that will be best for achieving their goals. Also I expect that some strategies will gain simply because children will tend to emulate parents, but in which way this will be working will depend on their fertility.
Have you explained those details in another post, and if not, why not? I have some similar feelings, comparable by metaphor to thixotropic clay, and am curious as to the extent of the similarity.
Could it be said that you are simply interested in exploring social dynamics, and tend to stir them up when you're bored as a means of gathering information from the increased contrast? After all, many systems are best studied when at their most chaotic. Polycules seem to have a certain unavoidable degree of ongoing turbulence, and include more explicit communication besides, so it would not surprise me at all that such a thing scratches the same itch.
I think it's more along the lines of finding modeling complex social objects, with lots of belief states and preferences and dispositions and personalities and interrelationships and history and predictions for the future to keep track of, being an interesting sort of challenge that feels more weighty and meaningful than juggling similar fictional things.
Thank you for clarifying.
I normally take it as implicit that if someone is fascinated with a given phenomenon, they will prefer direct observation / experimentation on real-world examples of that phenomenon (to the extent that such a thing is feasible) and consider fictional examples a cheaper/safer but less satisfying substitute.
Interesting. Very vivid insight into how the hacking was accomplished. A question I have from the outside looking in is about motivation, what makes people want to be poly in the first place?
Alicorn, you said that your primary motivation was MBlume. (Or generalized, 'a specific person.') MBlume, what was your primary motivation?
Other poly people please feel free to reply also.
Here's a response to roughly that question from when I was just starting out, though I should add that I am now much happier practicing polyamory under a "committed primary" model as described in Alicorn's first and third bullet points in section two.
I and my partner sat down as very earnest 16 year olds (23.5 years ago and yes we're still together) because we both agreed we were annoyed by unexamined defaults inherited from society and upbringing. We said we were fine with being monogamous if after careful consideration we decided we wanted it, but we didn't want to just drift into it.
Thus we sat down and spent quite some time cataloging what we thought monogamy would provide us, and how much we valued those things. Week after week we seemed to keep coming back to the conclusion that we didn't actually think we needed or even greatly wanted those things, and so we started considering whether that meant we wanted explicitly to not be monogamous. It remained an ongoing (low-key, non-fatiguing) discussion for a few months, and then we said, ok, non-monogamous. (This was really before "poly" had gained much traction as a term.)
It remained a theoretical construct for maybe another six months until there was a convergence of opportunity and interest for one of us, and we took some first steps. In hindsight we made a lot of rookie mistakes that I think people would avoid more easily today given there are now many poly resources and communities online and in realspace. (For example I helped vote for the creation of the alt.polyamory newsgroup which I think was very important in its day for developing poly discourse.)
I guess I've answered the "how" but not the "why". Our motivation was actually not what it gained for ourselves but how we felt about the other. No doubt this will sound hopelessly idealistic but a quick summary is that we wanted someone to have more opportunities in their live due to us loving them, rather than fewer. I had trouble reconciling what it meant to me to love someone with actively preventing other good relationships in their lives.
(This by the way is why "being untroubled by one's partner(s) being with others" is more critical to my concept of poly than "being involved with more than one person". Consider that monogamous cheating satisfies the latter.)
Were there other social defaults you examined? If so, with what results?
I sort of stumbled into poly when I was 17, but I was motivated to continue with it because I frequently found myself dating one person while also being attracted to others. Why deny myself people I want when I could be dating them? If I had to be dishonest or hurt people's feelings or otherwise act unethically to do so, I wouldn't; this is why I'm generally opposed to cheating. Being poly lets me have the relationships I want to have, and it lets the people I love have the relationships they want to have, too.
You do have to hurt people's feelings. That's a rather unavoidable part of romance. :)
Oh, well, yes. But not specifically about dating other people. And it is generally something I try to avoid where I can.
:) Of course. Or at least the hurts that come from dating other people have analogous hurts for the monogomous where you hurt them by not dating them even though the feelings have developed.
I'm not poly., but I'd like to be—it seems by far the most functional outlook on relationships. It takes many potential problems with monogamous relationships and completely eliminates them without introducing new problems in their place.
It just seems better. I hardly have any relationships as a monogamous person, though, so . . . there's not a lot there for me to be poly, LOL
I've actually been poly for most of my adult life. I only ever had two monogamous relationships growing up, one of them an LDR that evaporated when it became clear we weren't going to be able to relocate to be with each other. At this stage in my life I had already heard of polyamory and had grown up vaguely wondering why nobody ever seemed to do it, and suspicious of the general refrain from adults I asked that it was impossible or unethical.
It seems to be an instinctive matter of orientation for me -- I love deeply and intensely, but I don't seem to stop forming such connections once I'm in a relationship, and once I started dating other poly people, I never really went back. I find it difficult to conceive of being in a monogamous relationship now; I'm sure there are at least somewhat realistic scenarios where pragmatic factors could cause me to not pursue other relationships, if I were living in such a situation with a single primary partner who wanted monogamy -- but that's not where I find myself today, and I have absolutely no desire to trade my current life for it. I'm also quite sure I wouldn't be as happy, in such a situation, as I am in my current relationship network, and would regret the sense of lost opportunity.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I know what you're talking about and I think it's a mistake. Specifically I think it's an exemplar of a larger category of cases where a marginalized group's adaptation to unfavorable circumstances is mistaken by culture (and by evo psych, which has an alarming tendency to make excuses such things) as being a fundamental facet of their nature.
Historically male chances of successfully reproducing have been significantly smaller than female chances, at least this is what the difference in genetic legacy shows.
Also male variation is greater than female variation on practically any trait.
This together with our (perhaps culturally maintained) intuitions about unexceptional men being worth less than unexceptional women point to men being disposable.
I'm confused by you using the word 'adaptation' and differentiating that from a fundamental facet of their nature. If women predisposed to be hypergamous outcompeted women predisposed to not be hypergamous (because hypergamy is the game-theoretically correct plan), then shouldn't we expect there to be more women predisposed to hypergamy now? The counterargument would have to be that sexual selection strategies can't be inherited.
I was perhaps confusing in my use of language. To clarify, I mean volitional behavioral adaptation, not evolutionary adaptation. Or to spell it out, the people in the marginalized group have made a (contextually) sensible decision to advance their agendas by seizing the opportunities for power, resources, status etc which the restrictive social system leaves open to them.
For example, a poor Indian woman gaining resources through marriage (because she can't dream of being independently rich by her own effort), or a working-class woman in England trying to marry a footballer and raise her status (because social mobility is broken and it's that or a career in Asda).
Because people can and do adapt their behavior very simply and quickly, and we have an inheritance for this kind of flexibility, there isn't a need to produce a hypothesis of inherited behavior. And in fact, producing that hypothesis pretends that a social misfeature, sexism and its side effects, is somehow hardwired and thus blameless. Which is hogwash.
How do you explain men marrying down?
They don't care about status so much?
My previous flippant response misread Jack's comment
One assumes- but why? Surely there are just as many poor Indian men who can't dream of being independently rich by their own effort, shouldn't they be marrying the daughters of footballers?
Maybe because the culture tries to influence men into not depending on their wife's family for money? An example of vows made in some Indian weddings:
During kanyadaan, the bride’s parents give their daughter away in marriage. The groom makes three promises – to be just (dharma), earn sufficiently to support his family, (artha) and love his wife (kama).
Of course, this kind of expectation is hardly unique to one culture. My thinking is that many cultures that encourage women marrying up will encourage men marrying down. In a culture that encouraged women to marry down, men would likely be encouraged to marry up.
You can't derive an ought from an is; the hypothesis that a trait is "hardwired" (that is, that there exists a biological predisposition towards that trait) does not imply that the trait is blameless. Failure to appreciate this point leads to confusion: in particular, we must be careful not to reject hypotheses that might be true, just because they are unpleasant or even horrifying to contemplate.
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.
If the hypergamy hypothesis is correct this isn't so at all.
Also consider these stats from the CDC:
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
I think a PUA would say: 5 minutes of alpha is worth more than 5 years of beta.
I can't resist...
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.
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.
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.
That article draws too much conclusion from a very weak analogy.
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.
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.
As far as I know, explicit symmetrical anything hasn't existed for very long...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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 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".
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?".