By "relationship" here I mean both a sexual relationship and an emotional relationship. Just sex makes one a fuckbuddy, just emotion makes one a friend (or maybe a tragic unrequited love interest :-/). In the poly context I use "relationship" to mean that people are both sleeping with each other AND are emotionally involved.
I thought the point of polygamy is to be able to have sex with multiple partners. This makes me feel a bit weird because I can have a relationship with a female friend and not kiss her or hug her too much or whatever. More like a friendship but you get the point.
Still though, I don't see how it refutes my point of them just wanting to have sex with more than one person. I suspect this might be because I place more weight on the sex rather than the relationship.
Related article: Polyhacking
Note: This article was posted earlier for less than a day but accidentally deleted.
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 while still participating in the dialogue), 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. I will 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.
PSA: The Username account is available for use by any who wish to remain anonymous. The password is left as an exercise for the reader. Hat tip... Username.