Thanks for elaborating.

On some level, polyamory has always been part of my self-ideal; I have been committed to not being jealous, and to giving my partners whatever freedom they need to be happy. On the other hand, I've never felt a need for more than one partner, so for most of my life I've been monogamous because it was the norm, even if I made it clear to my partners that they need not be.

Discovering the polyamory community and, almost as importantly, the very term polyamory, representing a thing people could actually do changed that for me, and I've been in non-monogamous relationships for about a year and a half now.

However, my confidence has been a bit shaken by the degree to which I've seen problems. A girlfriend of about a year started acting very jealous of another girlfriend of about five years. The former has been outspokenly poly and in many relationships for more than seven years, and her self image was tangled up with being poly to the extent that she refused to admit that she was acting out of jealousy. She refused to talk about her feelings (unheard of for her, being a professional counselor), and would only say that she was "over it" and nothing was going to happen again. This ended up poisoning and eventually ending our relationship.

And while I've seen examples of this working---two of my other girlfriend's boyfriends have become good friends of mine (she knows how to pick 'em!)---I've also seen several examples of people who aren't being honest enough with themselves to make it work.

So polyamory, as always, matches both my own ideal of myself, and my idea for how a good relationship should be engineered, as you put it. However, I'm a little dispirited as to how many people can make it work, if the community is already so small that it consists of the people who most desperately believe in it, and they still keep falling down. I'm glad to hear of your continuing success.