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.
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.
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.
This remains true for gay male geeks, by the way.
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.
Is it conceivable that some of them thought it was an invitation to socialize rather than a date?
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... (read more)
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.)
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.
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.
Your standards are probably higher than mine? As far as I can tell, most women are attractive. I can think of ones who aren't but they seem like exceptions. You can kinda see why it would work that way.
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.
Even if you do have 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.
I find that most people have some things attractive about them. If they are interesting and kindly disposed toward me, it is not hard to focus on the attractive features, and blur out the less attractive features. It works very much like the affective death spiral, but with no real negative consequences.
Once you find enough things attractive about someone, you enter the spiral, and you begin to notice the very attractive square line of Harvey's non-burned jaw, and just don't even notice the scary skeletor burn face anymore, or you might even find little parts of it that start to look interesting to you.
Well, this all assumes a counter-fictional Harvey that doesn't go fully dark-side, or recovers at some point to something like his former moral and mental self.
And no matter who you are, there's someone out there who thinks you're hot.
(while talking about the Harry Potter movies, before she'd started on MoR)
Erin: ...I did like the fluffy things, though.
Me: Fluffy things?
Erin: I forget what they're called.
Me: (thinks for a bit...)
Me: Dementors? The flying corpses in shrouds?
Erin: Yeah! Dementors are cute.
Me: Puppies are cute. Dementors are not cute.
Erin: Puppies are food.
Me: Help me, I've been shipped to Bellatrix.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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... (read more)
blushes furiously
/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.
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):
... (read more)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 al
This is true. Poly requires excellent communication skills to pull off successfully, even more so than ordinary relationships. I keep emphasizing that poly is not for everyone: not only because you need to be emotionally suited for it, but also because it often takes much more work than a mono relationship. For most people, poly is hard.
I've heard this claim before, but I can't help feeling that it's still thinking in a mono pattern even while trying to think about a poly world. The whole point of poly is that X dating Y doesn't necessarily make either X or Y unavailable to others. If the captain of a football team has five women, that means that he only has one-fifth as much time for each of them, meaning that t... (read more)
At first sight it seems that those women are 4/5 available for other men in the group. But this assumes that men and women have the same sex drive on average. If we assume that men have stronger sex drive, or that their sex drive increases significantly when many women are sexually available to them (I am not a biologist, but I think both of this is true), then there is less than 4/5 availability of these women for the rest of group.
In other words, to make all members of a poly society equally sexually satisfied, this society must have more women than men. With the same number of women than men, less successful men will be frustrated, even if all women are satisfied. (Of course, if you are a woman, or if you are the most attractive man in your poly group, this is not your problem.)
EDIT: In essence, "one fifth of time" does not equal "one fifth of sex". A woman may spend one fifth of her time having hot sex with the captain, and the remaining time in just-friends mode, or 90% just-f... (read more)
I find that my (female) sex drive is incredibly mutable; I've been perfectly happy going a year with no sex, and at other times, in other circumstances (and with different available partners), been motivated to have sex daily. I suspect that the female sex drive is much more situational and partner-dependent than the male, and to model women as like men, but less horny, is a mistake.
Now I will do the Subjective Speculation Dance of Shame.
(electric slide) I like to shake my butt, I like to make stuff up (electric slide) Is there published data? Maybe! Doesn't matta! I'll pull it out of my butt! (butt shake!)
Please consider writing full lyrics and choreography and putting this on youtube.
You guys I think I made the shame dance too fun.
Telling members of a social minority you're not part of what every member of that minority must do to be worthy of your time and consderation as a member of the social majority, is neither reasonable, rational or realistic. Just FYI. It's like asking "smart" queers to police the tendency of certain (stereotyped) gay men you have in mind to flame it up, or come to that, asking atheists not to be so militant...
Yes, many poly folks do think they're more evolved. Yes, this is just embarrassing at best, and sanctimonious and preachy at worst. No, the rest of us are not accountable to shut them down so you don't feel squicked by the whole thing.
This is a perspective some poly types share, that jealousy and polyamory are not compatible. I've never quite understood it; I experience jealousy sometimes (and I'm in five serious... (read more)
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.
As far as I know, explicit symmetrical anything hasn't existed for very long...
Since I first read this about a year ago, it had had an interesting side effect. I am less able to enjoy fiction where the plot requires a monogamous assumption to function. Plots and Tropes like "Love Triangle", "Who Will Zie Choose?", "Can't Date Them, Not the One", and some "Cheating Spouse" and "Jealous Spouse" now seem weird and artificial to me (unless the poly option is considered and discarded).
I was never a huge fan of romance or romantic comedy, so this is no great loss. It is an interesting minor memetic hazard though.
By analogy with an Idiot Plot which dissolves in the presence of smart characters, a "Muggle Plot" is any plot which dissolves in the presence of transhumanism and polyamory.
Shortly after generalizing this abstraction, someone at a party told me the original tale of the Tin Woodsman, in which there are two men vying for the attention of a healer woman who gives them replacement metal body parts while constructing a whole new body out of the spares. In the end, she decides that the men she's been healing are mechanical and therefore unloveable, and goes off with the new man she's constructed.
"Ah," I said, "a Muggle Plot."
They're surprisingly common once you start looking. I originally generalized it while watching the romantic subplot in Madoka. Blah blah, not a real human, blah blah, love rival..
This comment seems... fundamentally confused. It seems like it addresses me directly, so I'll reply instead of ignoring it.
This seems to be something about you. If that's not something you're comfortable with, go ahead and don't enter into relationships like that.
My goodness. My primary has a right to special status from me because I have the same from him. If we were monogamous, we'd be "egalitarian"ly so; but then my other boyfriends wouldn't get to date me at all. I think this would upset them. Neither of them are counseling me to dump them so I can commit fairly to my primary. (Or begging me to run away with them instead, for that matter.) But note that I can only "demand" special status from my p... (read more)
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:
- I would have to decide, for myself, that I wanted to be polyamorous before meeting some polyamorous male that I desired. That is the only way that I can reasonably trust myself to make a decision in my own best interes
... (read more)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.
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?
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... (read more)
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.
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.
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.
...I did just go poly for the guy. I just think that's okay.
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.
I platonically snuggle with some of my male friends too. And I have photographic evidence of some guys I know who are not dating each other snuggling, too.
I guess I don't know how typical it is. I don't know many normal people and suspect they're dull.
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.
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.
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'r... (read more)
Within the sort of of communities where polyamory is popular, I don't think it will be a big problem for the mating market. There is some evidence that highly intelligent people are more androgynous. If so, then sex differences may be less sharp between intelligent people, which anecdotally makes sense. If intelligent people are less gender-differentiated in general, then perhaps their sexual preferences are more similar, too. If there are less sex differences in mating preferences, then there is probably less sex differences in selectiveness and less hypergamy.
In poly nerd communities, I don't know if there is a winner-take all situation for men, but it's hard to tell, since the gender ratio is so skewed. Let's imagine a community with 10 men and 2 women. Under monogamy, woman #2 dates man #10, and woman #1 dates man #9. What happens under polyamory? Do both women date man #10? Or do they both date men #9 and #10? Or #8, #9, and #10? Those all seem like plausible scenarios, and in the last case, there are actually less male losers than under monogamy. With a high male:female ratio, the women have their pick of 80+ percentile men.
Of course, outside this particular androgynous phenotype, the differences between monogamy and polyamory are likely to be more stark. Average people are already doing plenty of non-monogamous mating, so we can consider how well it's going for them.
JulianMorrison:
This is a hypothesis worth investigating, but how much data seems to support it? The research I've read supports the existence of hypergamy in both modern societies, and in pre-agricultural societies without high levels of gender inequality.
The Dalmia study cited on Wikipedia supposedly doesn't find women "marrying up," but since I can't read the full text I'm not sure how they were operationalizing "marries up." For instance, perhaps the study found that women don't marry up in wealth. But that doesn't mean they don't marry up in education, which is what this study found:
... (read more)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.
When I was in high school, most of the girls around me seemed to me to be as beautiful as anyone I ever saw on television or in the movies. Most high school girls are significantly hotter than the woman of median hotness in the population as a whole (getting older tends to make women less beautiful), so they would have to be even hotter than that in order to stand out.
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.
Can we get a follow-up about how this working a year later?
Works great! Primary relationship still strong, have also three other boyfriends (primary has two other girlfriends). I am well pleased :)
(Data point: I am one of Alicorn's former secondaries and was not in any other romantic relationships at the time, and I can testify that I did not feel exploited. I have no particular reason to care about what you consider bizarre or unfair.)
first: fairness is not the same as morality*. (ignore this point if you think fairness is a crucial thing to measure in morality)
Second: Most people seem to be mutually primary. You're getting priority from someone and giving it to them in return, but you can also have others. It's rare that someone is poly amorous but demands monogamy from their loves. Even if they did, this leads into
Third: We're talking about consensual relationships here. If you want priority, then you can date only people who will give you priority. Hell, if you want to date someone and have them give you priority, and NOT give them priority in return, as long as they agree why should this be a problem?
fourth: You seem to be viewing this as unfairly advantageous to a poly person, because they get "priority" and also bonus sex, but it's also advantageous to all the secondaries, who presumably don't care about or at least don't need priority, and would have less romance without the poly person.
*to elaborate: People have different preferences, often vastly different. Unless you take this into account, naive views of fairness lead to perverse results. Imagine two people: Tom hates cake and loves pie, a... (read more)
Thank you for sharing this!
My own concern with being polyamorous is that having N times as many relationships seems like it will involve at least N times as much relationship drama, and the drama of one relationship seems to be about as much as I can handle. Much of the drama in long term relationships seems uncorrelated with jealousy, so it's far from obvious to me that poly relationships would involve systematically less drama.
I can only report from direct experience, and experience reported to me, that there certainly seems to be at least one geeky poly loose social web where this is said with a smile and a laugh... but is followed up with "you're welcome to contact them directly".
I have seen mostly-joking forms to do this in text, too. Yes, really. Again, while it's mostly not serious, there is a serious signal of "no skeletons in the closet".
I suspect this is more about a certain kind geeky attitudes and aptitudes than it is about poly. q.v. "geek flirt".
Oh, and I've also seen "references available on request" after an amicably resolved breakup. Again, within the sub-communities that have this geeky approach to sex and to relationships, it's a powerful signal.
(Enjoying the meta of posting this during a trip to the USA where I'm seeing LDRs, amicable exes and friends within these geeky sub-communities. There's a presentation in a tech conference in there somewhere too, but it's mostly about poly and friends-known-through-poly.)
I do this all the time. When I hang out with the correct subset of my platonic friends we casually flop onto each other and braid each other's hair and exchange backrubs. I have photographic evidence. One doesn't have to be weird about those things.
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've found that my jealousy, though much lower than seems normal, still varies considerably. And it correlates, as far as I can tell, with general self-confidence. If I'm feeling down about myself I feel much more possessive and attached to significant others. When I'm feeling good about myself I've been fine with open relationships. Of course, that doesn't mean that variable explains all jealousy variation in the population. As for testosterone: anecdotally I haven't noticed anything when my testosterone level increased following a change in diet and exercise.
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.
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.
I note that this treads close to a well-established poly fail: the notion that poly is More Highly Evolved.
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.
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... (read more)
Quite possibly not enough of your ancestors died before reproducing, leaving insufficient optimization pressure. :P
Damn you insufficiently culled ancestors!
Somebody needs to produce bumper-stickers that read "What Would A Bisexual Immortal Superbeing Do?"
So am I. We are talking about the "becoming an immortal superbeing" hack, right?
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 multip... (read more)
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."
Mono vanilla uptight people also have family members they have sex with. They're called "spouses". When someone mentions their spouse as part of their family, listeners rarely recoil in accusations of incest.
The relevant characteristic of marriage here is the long-term, committed relationship with frequent contact (not necessarily cohabitation). Close-knit poly communities have several of these per person.
If people who are indirectly related by such relationships (e.g. siblings-in-law) get along well and see enough of each other, they usually hav... (read more)
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 -
... (read more)People get hurt in all kinds of relationships, because entering in a relationship generally means that you open yourself up to being hurt if things go wrong.
In any case, regardless of the type of relationship, the golden rule is the campsite rule, suitably generalized to all relationships: strive to leave your partner(s) in a better shape than you found them.
Nope, I'm done trying.
Why is it OK for me to hire an employee and give them money in exchange for doing what I want, when I'm not willing to take money from them in exchange for doing what they want?
Why is it OK for me to work full time while my husband takes care of our household, when I'm not willing to take care of the household while my husband works full time?
Why is it OK to have sexual relations where what I want to do is different from what I want done to me?
Or are all of those things unfair and immoral also?
Or is this notion of "priority" in a relationship somehow the most important thing ever, such that nobody could ever consider other things more worth having?
I have no qualms declaring that claim to be blatant bullshit.
I have yet to meet a woman who required sex more than three times daily (on an ongoing daily basis) in order to be satisfied and I would assert that women with that degree of insatiability or more would be rare outliers. Yet even that kind of pace is not hard to keep up (so to ... (read more)
It is, more or less by the practical meaning of being a ranking of all individuals in the group in question. You really can't all come first in a (rat) race. Encouragement awards don't count.
The more interesting thing to consider is how our internal measures of status and outward indicators of status can be manipulated such that we can get better results from those instincts in a positive sum way. This is definitely possible, at least to some degree.
Read this with great interest.
Upvoted, despite some status signalling cluttering the transmission up with noise.
It is possible that your thinking and communicating on that subject really has sucked compared to other things that you have said.
Alicorn is describing here a specific type of polyamorous relationship (classified on wikipedia as having Sub-relationships) . There are other types polyamory for example
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.
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 reso... (read more)
Are you okay with having one or more Best Friends Forever you'd take a bullet for, while also having buddies you just enjoy hanging out with?
This comment is an excellent example of the typical mind fallacy.
This article had a big impact on me! I had never even considered the idea that mono vs. poly was a setting you could change, and I discovered that I didn't have nearly as much of an attachment to monogamy as I had thought.
One problem I'm having is getting started with polyamory in practice. I'm worried that adding another constraint on top of other requirements (i.e. women interested in men, around my age, in Tucson, looking for a romantic relationship, who are rational) will make it hard or impossible to find someone. Any tips?
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?
I like The Ferrett's take on it:
... (read more)If my husband had done that I likely wouldn't have been as interested in him.
I'm considering it, but I do have some concerns. Mainly, the community that I reside in would probably find it low-status, since the majority aren't interested in that. I'm wondering if anyone else encountered this and how they handled it.
I don't think the OP said they wanted to be top priority for all their partners.
I guess I do have that mental block of not feeling attractive. At least, it may be a mental block; but how would I know if I'm just... not actually attractive? (This is a problem for me. I want hard data and I don't see how to get it. Social norms explicitly forbid anyone telling you that you are ugly, even if you are.)
If it is a delusion, where does it come from? And how does one get rid of it?
Can you explain why being bizarre is immoral?
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.
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?
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.
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.
... (read more)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.
By the way, this footnote made me very curious.
My favorite part, at which there was actual LOLing:
"•[Imaginary Model Alicorn] 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."
I thought my brevity spoke for itself. When I learned it didn't, I did.
I edited the file with vim directly in the Terminal according to my wizard's instructions. I didn't restart my browser, which could be it.
I think rather than going down the Kantian track (deontology is not very convincing to me), I'd take the consequentialist angle:
If most people want to have special status (which seems fairly likely to me, cf the automatic jealousy reflex), you could sometimes end up in a situation where A wants to date B who is in a polyamorous relationship with C as their primary. B is willing to date A as a secondary, so A reasons (wrongly) that they'd rather be B's secondary than not date them at all, and A and B start dating. Eventually after some misery A and B break ... (read more)
Can you produce an example of someone who you know personally, or whose firsthand account you have encountered, who has been hurt by dating (a) poly(s) elsewhere-primaried, relative to how they would feel if the poly(s) were mono?
If you demand of anyone you are in a relationship with that you be their primary, then yes. I can see how it would be unfair to others. After all, you are demanding that each person in their relationships should make you their number 1 priority.
But, there is a large difference between wanting to be someone's primary, wanting to be in a relationship with them, and demanding that you be someone's primary.
Being in a primary-relationship is, for one thing, more work. Yes, your "favoritism" is higher, but so is the amount of emotional support you are ... (read more)
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The Nurture Assumption covers a lot of ground, reviews a lot of the scientific literature, and concludes that for many, many traits of interest you can divide the factors effecting them into non-parental environment and genetic factors leaving squat for parental effects. It's a great book.
Before you posted that I'd have said it was a pretty obvious idea. Can you develop your objection more?
The reason it seems obvious to me is that status is measured relative to the rest of the tribe. If you climb up the social ladder, that means someone got bumped down. Zero net change.
Considering I already, in the comments of this one LW post, apologized to various folks for being unclear and using terms inaccurately ("swinger"), you seem to be mistaken.
It isn't hard, when I actually agree that what I write is wrong, which certainly happens enough.
Why is it so hard for you to accept that your interpretation can be wrong? Especially given all the oft-repeated basic LW knowledge on miscomm... (read more)
Specifically, your assumption that having multiple sexual relationships negates the "specialness" of any sexual relationship that does occur.
Virtually any meaningful association of humans connected primarily by filial, affectional or social bonds could be described this way. It's not specific enough by itself to differentiate polyamory from monogamy.
I was responding to your actual objection:
... (read more)Raised an eyebrow at myself and asked what, exactly, was the added value of exclusivity. Question dissolved on sufficiently skeptical inspection.
Could you expand on "sufficiently skeptical inspection"?
Okay, imagine two of me standing facing each other in a blank space a la Elspeth so as to chat.
Skeptic: *raises eyebrow* Okay, so what is the extra value of exclusivity above and beyond top priority?
Flailing Brainbit: It is special! And and and exclusive.
S: Top priority is also special. And calling exclusivity exclusive is not informative. Come on. You can trust the rest of this brain, right? When we figure out what we want, we arrange to have it; we're not going to gang up on you unless you decide you want something more destructive than monogamy. We just need more detail for this one so we can see if there's a simpler way to get it.
FB: Uuuum, it would mean that he wouldn't go around kissing random girls.
S: Yes, I know, that's what it means, but why does that seem important?
FB: Um. Um um um. He would be miiiiiiiine.
S: Okay, so if I ask him, "Would it be a correct summary of the model of poly we're considering to say "you're mine but I'll share"?" and he says yes, will you calm down? We count as ours lots of things that we share, even things that we feel socially obliged to share.
FB: ...Maybe?
S: Okay, we'll ask him that, then. ...Say, look. He said that sounded good to him. You okay over there?
FB: Meep.
S: Are you going to give us any more problems?
FB: No...
S: Okay then.
Perhaps not. But I am having to draw on an atypical hypothetical to try and find our exact point of disagreement. I hope you don't mind?
Okay, so, refined hypothetical: The person you are dating is also, in their personal opinion, 'dating' an asexual man. This man has no interest in making out with them, let alone sex, but does enjoy romance, and cuddling up with them in order to share the feeling of emotional closeness.
Your partner considers this re... (read more)
A question before I continue: would you consider kissing, cuddling, snuggling, fussing, etc. as things you'd allow a partner to do with others or not?
Just so I can cater my examples to the exact region of the distinction.
While in hindsight my answer was too verbose, it is also true that the matter was important enough to deserve better than to be dismissed with a two line sentence. Alicorn's post went more in depth than that, and in my answer, I tried to be general in order to go beyond the simple "this works for me, so it must be the optimal solution".
In your previous post, you seemed to imply (and I apologize if that was not the case) that it was either "I require exclusiveness out of a selfish desire to be the sole reason of your happiness" or "... (read more)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zealotic
No, I meant what I wrote.
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 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.
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.
Note that on 10.7 and later the Library folder is hidden; the easiest way to work around this is to use Go to Folder… (Command-Shift-G) in the Finder and then type/paste a pathname such as
(Do I need to mention that all of this is far messier that, speaking as a designer of software, I approve of, even for a rarely-needed feature?)
This problem is partially amenable to a technical solution. By whatever means your browser provides, add this CSS stylesheet:
This will not, however, mark links which go to PDFs but have no extension or type hint, but in my experience nearly all PDF URLs have an extension.
Sex at Dawn is weaker than its citations. Its conclusions appear sound but you will find Dark Arts in it.
Actually, if your "utility function" doesn't obey the axioms of Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility, it's not an utility function in the normal sense of the world.
Downvoted for trying to argue against a principle that is actually irrelevant to your claims. ("The utility function is not up for grabs" doesn't mean that decisions are always rational, and is actually inapplicable here.)
Uncountable? Really? You have as many relationships as the cardinality of the real line? In that case you could end infinitely-many relationships and still have the same number left.
Snark aside, you're just redefining what a relationship is. My friend may not behave exactly the same in various contexts, but he's not a different person and it's not a different friendship. I don't have a thousand parents (or a thousand "parentships") just because my two parents interact with me in different contexts.
A much better point to make would be that people ... (read more)
But if someone's revealed preferences are irrational (as revealed human preferences often, nay typically are), then it doesn't serve anyone to follow them. So contrary to your assertion, you are assuming that these preferences are rational, or else you wouldn't be encouraging people to follow them.
So my question is this: Is a woman who has sex with Brad Pitt once and remains alone for the rest of her life actually happier than a woman who is comfortably married to an ordinary guy for several years?
If the answer is no---and I think it's pretty obvious that ... (read more)
Okay. Good for you. That doesn't make the entitlement any less stupid or annoying.
Note that "Whether I am doing something about this" and "Whether I feel like calling out stupid/annoying entitlement" are seperate questions. It is entirely possible to be aware of both. It is furthermore not necessary for me to prove my credentials on this point to the person making the entitled demand of me (even if only by implication).
In summary: I know what I'm doing about stupid memes within the groups I frequent, including my fellow polyamorists, a... (read more)
It moved on from there a long time ago and started being about the things literally represented by the characters contained in the comments instead of what side they affiliate with.
Edit: This gave Hairy an excuse to get confused. I should have, instead, written "The parent is almost entirely irrelevant to the point the grandparent is making".
Both, of course. The jealousy and hurt is, in part, a rejection to a fear of being left or rejected. And in part it's just base possessiveness, probably. I'm good with that.
I'm answering questions about these feelings because I'm in a discussion about them with people who presumable don't feel them (or not in the same way). I'm not confused or in the dark about the source of my feelin... (read more)
FWIW I've very rarely experienced anything like this reaction.
Especially the braiding the hair part...
Good thing I didn't claim, in my original statement, to be stating anything precise about polyamory or about my own list of preferences. Else I'd be in trouble.
It is the harm of not being Most Important. This is something I value -- it makes me happy to be the center of my partner's world, and her mine. I consider removal of things I value to be harms.
The term itself is not the problem. The problem was that your original post claimed that the only bit you objected to was the sexual aspect. Clearly, this is not the case, but, for reasons I am uncertain of, you still seem to be standing by your original statement as an accurate one.
I am trying to make it clear to you that what you are asking them to give up is NOT just about the sex. What you are asking them to give up is the option to LOVE other people. Which is very different from just asking them to give up the option to FUCK other people.
In the previous post your only restriction was that they not have sex with others. You have now stated that you have two restrictions*: that is a contradiction of your previous position.
*and the restriction requiring that they give up anyone that is of equal importance to you is a massive one, far larger, to me and many polyamorous people, than the sexual restriction.
This is what I meant by my last sentence, that humans are not perfect monogamists. Sorry I was unclear.
I think someone has the right to edit other people's posts, perhaps ask them?
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?".
Okay, seriously? This kind of "No you can't know what you did wrong, asking means you're even lower-status" dynamic to sexuality has probably been responsible for a number of geek/Aspie suicides over the last century. The existence and popularity of PUA isn't so much a response to men who feel deprived of sex, it's targeted at men who feel deprived of sex and romance and any idea of what they're doing wrong and any known strategy for even getting started on fixing things. A major reason why people hurt is that there's no known gentle slope into sex, and not getting any feedback is part of that.
I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before. (And my girlfriend has confirmed a number of these, so it's not just a unique nose.)
If you don't need to ask yourself, that's fine. If someone else does need to ask, try to be more sympathetic. And if someone asks you, TELL THEM.
I agree with everything you said, and with everything michaelsullivan said. They're not in conflict. Barring a Friendly Singularity and CEV people with poorer social skills are going to have worse lives, and worse, improving your own social skills or improving other people's social skills is not going to change the fact that there is a bottom 10%, and life is going to suck harder for them.
Life is a bitch and it is quite abnormal to act on any sympathy one may have with the creepy/awkward/annoying person near you.
For any young geek reading this, here are a few ways of improving your social skills/ decreasing mild to moderate social anxiety
succeedsocially.com has a lot of reasonably useful advice too, and if you're a romantically deprived male there's plenty of instrumentally useful advice in the PUA subculture but the lowest hanging fruit is
- Shower daily and use anti-perspirant. That
... (read more)Oh, interesting. That's the first explanation/justification for PUA that hasn't seemed creepy to me.
There is a significant difference though between wanting an explanation and feeling entitled to one. Anything that suggests a sense of entitlement, particularly when that crosses a privilege asymmetry, risks seeming threatening. "I've already said no and they have not unconditionally accepted that" is not that far a step from "they are giving vibes that suggest they think my right to a no can be overridden by their desires".
I don't think it's actually that hard to signal "unconditional acceptance and a harmless desire for more information if you're feeling generous", but if we're talking about a population with insufficient people/social skills, that will not be easy for them.
I agree it's a virtue to donate information in such cases, but I don't agree they're entitled to it.
Some do.
Some are stupid and will shoot the messenger even though they're emotionally better off knowing for certain than just wandering in an unhappy fog, wondering over and over what they're doing wrong.
If they ask directly, I'd say, tell them honestly.
Every time I have ever pointed out specific things I don't like in answer to "Why won't you date me?" (back when I was available) the guy has used my reply to insist that he will change and beg for another chance. Then I have to say, "No, I don't believe you will ever change in that way, and even if you did it wouldn't be anytime soon, and offering to change yourself for me is really weird." And then he argues that no, he can change right away, it's no trouble, please give him a chance. It's terribly unpleasant. I stopped giving specific answers, and instead said things like, "I guess we just don't have the right chemistry." Actually I think that's a perfectly good and honest answer, and it's the one that's always true even when there's no specific thing I can put my finger on.
I can't pick out exactly what about someone turns me on or doesn't turn me on because it's subconscious, it's my subconscious mind processing a million details all at once, and even when a person does have, say, bad BO, that's just something that I was actually able to notice consciously so I might think of that as The Reason but once they fix their BO, all the other stuff, the m... (read more)
Perhaps you could start by saying, "I can only tell you if you're asking for information and you promise not to argue." I don't know how practical that is in real life.
LWers could have a convention for saying to each other, "Please tell me so that I know how I was perceived by you. I will not argue and tell you that you perceived me differently, I will not blame the messenger, and I will not subject you to the unpleasant experience of hearing me offer to change."
Well this place is pretty infested with truth/information fetishists, so it might not be a good place to ask.
If they're asking, they deserve to be told.
If they don't want to know, they shouldn't ask. Lying to someone "for their own good" is, to me, one of the most disgusting concepts in existence.
I've been lied to "for my own good" several times. And every single time, all it really did was allow the person lying to me to feel good about themselves, while simultaneously screwing me over.
To illustrate, I'll go through some likely results of telling someone each of these things Vs. not telling them.
They are now aware that their weight is a major reason for lack of success. This is an extra incentive to lose weight. In addition, it's possible they weren't even conscious of how overweight they were previously. So, they gain health benefits.
They now know to be on the look out for either smaller partners, or partners who show signs of a crushing fetish, as opposed to continuing to ask large people who will turn them down.
You may need to give more explanation on this one; because it's likely that there's some specific part of their behaviour that's a problem. However, at least they are now aware that they are giving off vibes of desperation, and can try and change that (giving them more self-confidence, because they now know that the problem isn't something innate)
They get to feel morally superior to you.
... (read more)All but one of those are things that people can change. The most difficult one to change (being tiny) is something which people can adjust in part by bulking up and also carrying themselves better. Frankly, speaking as a really tiny male homo sapiens (slightly under 5'2) , if I were to ask someone out and to find out that that was the primary issue I'd be a bit relieved that it wasn't something else. On the other hand when I was told explicitly that people were not interested in me due to my height it has sometimes felt really awful. But it did cause me to focus more on people who were of below average height or not too tall and that seems to have lead to some success. So even that has been a general positive.
I don't mind being asked why. I sort of prefer the presumption that I do have reasons and am able to articulate them and will be honest about them if asked. Also, assuming that these things are all true, it's not strictly impossible for someone to come up with ways around all my objections, status signal or no. If I felt the question were intrusive or something I could just refuse to answer, but why would I refuse someone feedback, if I believe they actually want it?
Contrast this with the institution of the bug report in software. In programming, everyone expects that there are going to be some errors. Everyone learns from them, programmers, current users, prospective users... I consider the social institution of nonjudgmental bug reports to be, in and of itself, a substantial benefit from computer science to society at large.
"Could Not Reproduce"
At that point it's kind of too late to matter. The rejectee has already been liberated from the necessity to signal high status to that particular recipient. They are free to do whatever the hell they want and play whatever status they feel like in the moment.
Which is quite possibly a benefit, depending on the circumstances. Although there are less awkward, pointless and painful ways to go about it than 'why?' questions.
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.
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 possib... (read more)
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.
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.