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.
Is there a trick to identifying gay male geeks? I find that sometimes I can go to four or five nerd parties and still have no idea about the sex lives of half the people there -- the shy male nerds I know tend not to talk about dating unless they're forced to. Maybe I'm going to the wrong parties.
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.
Did you actually mean ‘most women’, rather than (say) ‘most women of fertile age’?
I'd agree with your observations, except: is it wise to control for socio-economic conditions? "Well, [he/she] is gorgeous, brilliant and kind, but that's probably all because of being born within a family with positive attitudes toward physical and mental fitness, being given the free time and economic wherewithal to self-improve, and being placed in peer groups that would encourage such improvement, so I guess it doesn't really count."
Life doesn't work like a D&D stat Point Buy system - although you're right that it's sometimes similarly possible to trade INT for CHA or vice versa, that doesn't make them inversely correlated. Some people are lucky enough to have more of both to begin with, and many people are lucky enough to grow up with influences that increase both.
On the other hand, even physical beauty is partially subjective. Maybe Eliezer's perceptions of it are subject to some sort of halo effect? The "known well enough to observe them in any detail" caveat seems to suggest a factor in that direction. Aside from effects of fashion, lighting, etc., real physical beauty is a superficial thing that you can judge with a glance, not something that only becomes apparent after the more important characteristics have shown themselves.
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.
I always counsel young males with still-healing injuries that will leave scars to think of good stories. As for females, most straight men I know are attracted to signs of toughness that don't otherwise confound the usual health-and-fertility signs (skin and hair), so scars might not always work. But anecdotes from LW commenters are not likely to be representative of the general conversation. Many women I know in SoCal that have impressive degrees from awesome schools hide their credentials for fear of scaring off men, and are surprise than I am surprised. That's still the world we live in.
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.
Are there any paperclip-maximizer-lovers? How about paperclip-maximizer's-humanoid-robot-lovers?
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.
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. :-)
Actually, what's happening is they're giving the nerdy male 3-4 obvious body language signals telling him to approach. The nerdy male just misses them.
Fellow males, please learn to read body language so that all these hot nerdy girls stop feeling like they're ugly because nerdy men don't respond to their flirting.
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.
Well, sure -- but other people would likely have found him more interesting. Congratulations on things having worked out for you, of course, but there are a lot of other good people who each of you could have married.
Finding good romantic partners is very probabilistic. Does increased masculinity increase a man's expected attractiveness to a random person? I think that, for men who aren't already very masculine, it definitely does.
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.
Awwwwwwwww.
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)
This is a little bit more complex.
Sexual desires are not a constant for each invidual person.
It seems (in the poly community) that awesome sexual experiences with one partner make one want more sexual things with the other partners rather than less.
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...
Captains of football teams and cheerleaders do not want to be the 'primaries' of lots of people. That's an awful lot of work. They also wouldn't make particularly good primaries - given that they are always so busy fucking other people. Furthermore, when it comes to 'primary' status they will want to reserve that for people who they gain status for being affiliated with - other elites.
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..
Plots which are just about people not being rational are a subspecies of "Idiot Plots". Plots which are about people not behaving like SF con-goers are "Muggle Plots".
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)That sucks. A compatible partner that is successfully poly is some evidence that poly could also work for you, as well as being something that brings the possibility to your attention. Yet by meeting them you have instead cut off the whole possibility. You'd be better if you never laid eyes on them! :P
This is just the way I like to relate to myself but I'd decide I was allowed to switch to poly if it was a good idea but that I'm not allowed to date poly-inspiration-X. For at least as long as a limerance period could be expected to interfere with judgement and also long enough that I could see if poly worked for me without the interference. That way my infatuation biases don't get to subvert my decision making either by temptation or by defensive reaction.
... (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.
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 have familial feelings toward each other (unless the families I know are weird). The relationship being sexual on both sides rather than sexual on one side and blood on the other has no reason to change this.
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?
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.
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.
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)
I don't know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.
I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
Interesting benefit of polyamory: there's a lot less that can rock the boat (or sink it)! We enjoy a stability we did not have before.
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.
It does. Even though it doesn't refute the "You just went poly for the guy!" assertion at all. It could well fit with "I just went with poly for the guy and it is awesome! You should try it!"
From what I understand the default human tendency is is medium term monogamy (with cheating) combined with extreme promiscuity, particularly by the highest status males. Some polygamy thrown in too.
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 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.
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.
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 :)
We got married almost a year ago :D. I can't keep track of who-all spouse is dating (it fluctuates a lot) but I have three other nodes on the Big Unruly Chart Thing, one of whom is also dating spouse. Going very smoothly :)
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.
Imagine two islands, each with some tiny population - let's say, 10 each. Nobody ever interacts with anyone off-island, and the resources and living standards are the same. Now if I told you that people on island 1 are higher-status than people on island 2, does that strike you as a nonsensical statement? To me, it does not; it means that there is more mutual respect on island 1. I think that parsing that as "status" is justified, because it's not synonymous with how nice they are to each other, how much they like each other, or any other such variable (though of course it would tend to correlate with those).
You may disagree, but you should consider whether a definition of status which is tautologically zero-sum is likely to be blinding you to positive-sum interactions that are best interpreted as status-related (as opposed to friendship- or kindness-related).
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.
You can't derive an ought from an is; the hypothesis that a trait is "hardwired" (that is, that there exists a biological predisposition towards that trait) does not imply that the trait is blameless. Failure to appreciate this point leads to confusion: in particular, we must be careful not to reject hypotheses that might be true, just because they are unpleasant or even horrifying to contemplate.
TV Tropes explains male gold diggers:
If the hypergamy hypothesis is correct this isn't so at all.
Also consider these stats from the CDC:
I'm struggling to come up with a reason why female and male average tendencies wouldn't differ from each other on this.
Women's unavoidable investment in reproduction for most of our history is something that rewards very different strategies between women and men in nearly any sexual marketplace conditions that I've so far thought of.
Let me translate in to overt. The following statement-reply pair:
Is overwhelmingly strong evidence that your beliefs on this subject are not optimally correlated with reality.
Sure it is quite possible (and likely) that a lot of people are wrong about what sexual strategies are used. But not that there are sexual strategies and not that it should be startling to find that the sexual strategies turn out to be symmetric. It should be difficult for Konkvistador to think of reasons for that to occur, because it would be a miraculous coincidence.
I think the burden of proof is on one who claims that different things are equal. "Involve many partners" is extremely vague, it's not so fine-grained a similarity that for it to be a common strategy for both men and women would be miraculous, it's not a strategy at all any more than "theism" or "atheism" are philosophies.
If someone were to claim that Mercury has exactly as much mass as a moon of Jupiter plus or minus one kilogram, I wouldn't feel the slightest discomfort at not having a source to back up my expectation they'd be different, and I would not be convinced without a mountain of evidence.
Things don't magically align like that in nature. I could find out tomorrow that every study ever showing differences between men and women was too contaminated by culture to be useful, I'd still not believe that no significant differences exist. So long as I'm not claiming to know exactly what those differences are, I don't have the burden of proof.
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.)
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 multiple entanglements is more important component of poly than the desire to oneself have multiple entanglements. In the poly circles I am aware of, there is no broad agreement on either of these points though. I thought I should mention that there are a non-trivial proportion of couples who self-ID as "one of us is poly and the other is not" where the poly one is involved with other people.
This is similar to the labeling disputes that occur when (say) two bisexual women are said to be in a "lesbian relationship". They might reasonably object that people will hear "lesbian relationship" and assume they are... (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."
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.
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.)
No.
But I do expect that if humans become immortal superbeings, then given enough time, most people currently in fairytale monogamous relationships will switch to poly. (Though when people are immortal superbeings, I also expect it to become common that they'll spend a very long time if necessary searching for an instance of fairytale monogamy to be their first relationship.)
I guess my philosophy is that fairytale monogamy is optimal for the young (say under 200 years or so), while poly and other non-traditional arrangements are the choice of the adult.
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 should have added more context - the expression "more highly evolved" seems to pop up dismayingly often when talking about poly (and often bisexuality, too). I have long thought it seems to rely on notions of tribal Othering and the Geek Social Fallacies when used by poly people, but curiously it can also used by mono people being dismissive of poly.
It is so common a poly fail that if there were TV Tropes for poly, "More Highly Evolved" would be heavily referenced.
i.e. quite apart from it being arguably improper use of the term, it's objectionable for other reasons.
I tend to groan at just about any use of the phrase "More Highly Evolved" as applicable to humans. If the phrase means anything, it would mean something like "is in a line of descent that has been through more rounds of Darwinian selection than some reference line". And since bacteria can reproduce in ~20 minutes, and it takes humans ~20 years, the winner of that comparison is going to be in the former group, not the latter.
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?
I imagine the chief benefit of monogamy is that you don't need to compete for the limited resources of attention, and affection, and reproductive/nurturing capacity from the person you love -- a sense of competition which can manifest itself in feelings of sexual jealousy, possessiveness, etc.
Now imagine a hypothetical future scenario in which those resources are effectively unlimited; in the sense that each person is perfectly capable of perceiving the need/desires of their prospective partners, and satisfying them as best as possible, with capacity to spare; in which you don't need to compete for reproductive capacity or material resources are plentiful.
The benefits of monogamy then seem nullified, the benefits of polyamory seem without a downside to them.
That having been said, something being "evolved" in the sense of "What Would Immortal Superbeings Do" seems rather useless in determining what current-day people should do given their current-day emotional and physical circumstances.
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 -
I could weigh in on this. It's worth looking at the word normative -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative
"Normative standards" basically mean whatever is the baseline for comparison. So the taxonomy you set up is "21st century Western-style monogamy" vs. "not 21st century Western-style monogamy" - and by 21st century Western-style monogamy, I mean a single partner, choosing relationships individually through social exploration, choosing long term partners on the basis primarily of emotion ... (read more)
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)
Were there other social defaults you examined? If so, with what results?
Read this with great interest.
Upvoted, despite some status signalling cluttering the transmission up with noise.
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)Alicorn is describing here a specific type of polyamorous relationship (classified on wikipedia as having Sub-relationships) . There are other types polyamory for example
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
Their latest round of algorithm tweaks seems to have broken that. I now regularly match 95+% with people who are very insistent about only wanting single monogamous people.
By the way, this footnote made me very curious.
That might or might not be the same kind of thing that my brain responds to. If it is:
It is easier to keep in mind a consistent Rule than to remember occurrently what justifies it and check for those conditions every time. If there is a really good reason to break a Rule, it will intrude itself upon your notice without explicit checking, so it's safe to just go around following Rules until and unless that happens. Assuming you had a good reason to implement a Rule, it's correspondingly bad to threaten its force (by ignoring it when it's inconvenient, for example - inconvenience-related exceptions could have been built into the original rule if they were really worth the extra checking and if they are genuinely well-defined), and you should be highly suspicious of yourself if you start coming up with great reasons to change your Rules whenever they get inconvenient.
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.
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!
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.
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?".
Well, I suppose it's really a disadvantage to being known to be polyamorous...
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)Although I largely agree with what you've said here for the socially inept, I think the prevalence of the sentiment of that final statement may well lead to a great many people being disappointed when they arrive at university and find themselves more isolated than ever.
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.
Um... very often the real reason is unflattering.
"You are morbidly obese." "You are so tiny I feel like I'm crushing you." "You act like I'm your last hope of ever meeting a girl." "Your religion forbids premarital sex and that won't work for me." "Your conversation is just really boring."
Are you actually saying that people want to be told these things?
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."
The problem isn't in remembering social conventions, humans naturally do it and you're using oodles of them now.
If there is a problem, it is in consciously calling for the new social convention, as it's the less common way they form. I don't think there's anything wrong here, though.
There are some cases where I have made factual errors in which I'd like to be corrected. Like, if a necessary condition of my not wanting to date someone is "I don't do long-distance relationships and you are about to move to Bangladesh", and in fact the person is not about to move to Bangladesh because there was some change of plans, this is in fact a fine time to notify me. Or even "my model of you implies that you would, under $circumstance, do $behavior, even though I've never directly observed you in $circumstance".
But yes, if it's "you have $personal_characteristic", offering to change it - unless it's really trivial, on the order of "you use the word 'splendid' annoyingly often", which would rarely if ever be the whole reason anyway - is not a correct answer.
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)This one may not be as good as you think. Fat people are generally told repeatedly that they're fat.
The risks of being fat are generally wildly overestimated.
I've read a moderate number of accounts by fat people who found that their romantic success improved when they stopped pre-rejecting themselves.
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.
Congratulations and things! Thank you for posting this; I am sure I will refer friends to it in the future.
Thank you very much for writing this up. I did something similar to myself earlier, and I'm glad to see you helping other people achieve happiness in new, unfamiliar circumstances.
Sometimes, I find myself just smirking at this community with the sense of 'I fukken love this place'. Often I find it pulling out vague thoughts and concepts I hadn't fully thought out, and then add to it. This is one of the more useful thoughts that has been fleshed out for me; that polyhacking is a possibility and quite possibly worth considering in the future. It could be a way to suit something to myself, because monogamy seems impossible to work into a successful scenario. I would like some intimate romantic company, without the responsibility of bei... (read more)
Just out of curiosity, could you expand on that "Question dissolved on sufficiently skeptical inspection."? I think I understand what you mean, but I would like to be sure.
Brilliant. Have you read Ethical Sluts? great book for poly folks. Also, Sex At Dawn is a book that shows quite a bit of evidence that humans are very bonobo like and aren't really that prone to monogamy. It is not deniable that monogamy is the cultural norm for most of us, however, it seems pretty clear to me that it is a product of socialization and can be changed. Beautiful work, this post, both the words and the content.