Negative and second hand: Some couples were sharing a large house. One of the couples added a third person, who turned out to be very bad news. That marriage ended, and only one of the couples lives in the house now.
Positive and second hand: A triad which has worked well for many years.
Negative and second hand: Triad where the third was emotionally destructive and also brought in a very serious STD.
I've wondered about the risks of polyamory which aren't exactly about fidelity, but more about the risks of giving a great deal of trust to a person who might defect. The more people you add, the greater the risk of something like that happening.
The more people you add, the greater the risk of something like that happening.
I'd believe that, for example, any given relationship participant has some arbitrary likelihood of one-place defection, and the likelihoods stack proportional to the number of participants. But I'm not sure that any given participant is more likely to defect the more people they are also in a relationship with -- if defection is two-place, it seems like cooperation should be too.
Related article: Polyhacking
Although polyamory isn't one of the "official" topics of LW interest (human cognition, AI, probability, etc...), this is the only community I'm part of where I expect a sufficiently high number of members to have experience with it to give useful feedback.
If you go looking for advice or articles about polyamory on the internet, you mostly get stuff written by polyamorists that are happy with their decisions. Is this selection bias? Where are the people whose relationships (or social lives, out anything) got damaged or ruined by experimenting with Consensual Non-Monogamy?
I'm posting this hoping for feedback, negative AND positive, on experiences with polyamory. I considered putting this in an Open Thread, but it occurred to me that many other LW readers might be interested in whether polyamory has drawbacks they need to be aware of. If you have experience with CNM (including first-hand witnessing, which has the added bonus of not requiring you to out yourself if you don't want to), please comment with your overall impression and as much detail as you would like to include (I am also putting my experiences there rather than in this post). If you've seen multiple poly relationships, multiple comments would make tallying slightly easier. (ETA: I will also try to upvote people who feed me data, a la LW surveys) If there are sufficient comments, I will periodically go through them and post a rough ratio of good to bad experiences at the bottom of this article.