Comment on Ritual 2012: A Moment of Darkness

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:51:40 GMT

Gotcha.

WRT why we privilege monogamy: well, we certainly haven't always done so, so were I interested in the question I'd probably look at the history of marriage and the decline of polygamy and see what other factors were in play at the time.

WRT researching relationship quality, I would probably start by asking how I can tell a high-quality relationship apart from a low-quality relationship, then by going out in the world and seeing what kinds of relationship structures correlate with relationship quality.

The relationship between that second question and the "how many partners?" question is tenuous at best, but if I focus on the overlap as we've been doing (and thereby ignore the majority of relationship-space) my expectation is that I'd find nominally poly relationships correlate better with relationship quality than nominally monogamous ones, based on my observations about how easy it is to stay in a low-quality monogamous relationship vs. a low-quality poly relationship.

My expectation is also that this would be dwarfed by other factors we would see if we weren't ignoring the rest of relationship-space.

Also, if we found anything remotely resembling a normal distribution of happiness around a single "ideal relationship type" that wasn't a confounding artifact around some other factor, I would be amazed. To the point that I'd pretty much have to discard all of my current beliefs about relationships. I would probably defy the data instead.

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