I think another often overlooked consideration is how, on a mundane non-romantic logistical level, monogomy allows for more of a "total alliance" with your partner.
When you only have one partner and you make a lifelong commitment to stay together permanently, and there's a culture around you to uphold that institution, it allows you to both "mutually disarm" and redirect capacity you used to spend on protecting your own interests/competing in the dating market toward more productive positive-sum efforts.
A traditionally monogamous couple can more easily make major concessions to each other (e.g. doing large amounts of domestic labour to support the other's career, agreeing to have more/fewer children, or moving to a different city for your partner's sake).
They can share money and assets, become full-status members of each other's families, credibly insure each other against ending up alone or impoverished after falling on bad luck, etc.
This might also be somewhat the case for certain kinds of polly where you still have a heavily preffered primary partner and have robust rules in pace to prevent their "primary" status being erroded over time - but for most kinds of polyamory I think you generally do benefit less from the logistical advantages of coupling.
I don't see how polyamory contradicts "lifelong commitment to stay together permanently". I mean, more than monogamy, this lifelong commitment isn't credible in any case.
The commitment to stay together permanently is a limited resource. What happens if your wife and your boyfriend get into an argument?
It's not incompatible with poly--you might have a hierarchical poly structure, where the marriages are durable and take precedence, but this makes the secondary relationships precarious and some poly authors dislike this structure accordingly.
Also, if everyone is together on the basis of "making the decision that's best for me right now", monogamy doesn't encourage building alternatives and poly does. Maybe you'll end up liking your boyfriend more than your wife; maybe your wife will end up liking her girlfriend more than you. In mono, the choice is instead "do I start an affair, which will maybe blow everything up, or do I stick with the thing that's good and work to improve it?"
I think ensuring that your explicit commitments don't conflict with each other and spending some effort to minimize the risk that your implicit commitments will conflict with each other and with explicit ones is not a requirement of polyamory specifically, more like the requirement of being a decent person.
Also, you focus on cases where mono choice works in favor of "stick and improve" and kinda ignore the cases where it works in favor of "start an affair", which happens quite often.
If your partner’s lover is having a mental health breakdown, is it OK for your partner to go comfort her when it’s your day with him?
How is this a poly specific problem?
What if your partner's close friend is having mental health breakdown and needs support?
When ever I see people writing about the downsides of poly, there is always one or more items like this on the list, i.e. things that would apply if you have more than one human in your life that you care about.
I'm not saying poly is for everyone. If you experience strong sexual jealousy, then don't do it. I'm just saying that (it seems to me) some of these arguments proof too much, since they suggest you only get to have one important person in your life. E.g. this reasoning would imply that no-one should have more than one child.
I’m one of those people for whom poly works, and I agree with you. I’m one of the lucky ones for whom jealousy doesn’t feel especially salient, and that’s a fairly rare trait. I‘ve known people that grew into polyamory, but they’re pretty rare, and all of the examples I know of are folks that are neurodivergent. Including my metamour.
He struggled for a while until our partner got injured, and she needed a lot of care. We worked together. He lives with her, so he had a lot of the burden, but I was there a lot, and picked up for him when it was especially hard. We played a lot of video games together too, and really bonded in that time.
How much of that generalizes? Very little. He wasn’t doing any real self-work or what not. Somewhere in that hard time, his brain switched to seeing me as family.
There is a lot of pseudoscience within the community, mostly because of a lack of real studies, and even fewer that can offer practical advice. I remember when Sex at Dawn was a big thing. I read it, and found it really interesting, It‘s premise was that for the majority of humanity’s history (pre-agricultural revolution) monogamy wasn’t the norm. Cute story, but it’s been pretty well debunked.
That isn’t to say that there hasn‘t been any real work done on understanding our communities. I know of a couple of researchers at least—and knew a few personally—but it’s been over a decade since I really looked for any of it.
I used to be really active in the poly community, but I got pretty burned out on the drama of the new folk. I don’t like drama, and have little tolerance for it now.
In any case, I’m glad you’re happier now. At seven years, no one can say you didn’t give it a real try.
Roughly 85% of human societies (out of all the ones anthropogists and sociologists have studied) are not (officially) completely monogamous. (The widely-quoted numbers come from George Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas: of 1,231 societies coded, 186 (about 15%) were monogamous, 453 (37%) had occasional or limited polygyny (involving <20% of married males), 588 (48%) had common polygyny (>20% of married males, but still generally <50%), and 4 (0.3%) were polyandrous.) Polyandry-accepting societies are very rare (and still tend to involve fair number of couples, plus some cases of a woman married to two brothers) — such societies are generally found in environments where resource constraints are tight, and a throuple may find it easier to gather enough resources to raise children than a couple would. The numerical majority of all societies are polygyny-accepting ones in which most people are in couples, but (generally) successful/rich men (the ones with sufficient resources to afford this) have two-or-more female partners (either multiple wives, and/or a mix of one-or-in some-societies-more official wife and one-or-more concubines/mistresses). There is variation between societies in: the proportion of married men who will have multiple wives at some point, in whether polygyny generally involves a man marrying two-or-more sisters, or the female partners are typically otherwise-unrelated, and also in whether female partners generally cohabit, or live in separate quarters (see the Ethnograpic Altlas link above for a detailed breakdown). What are almost unknown is societies where most women are in a polyamorous grouping and most men are alone, like gorillas (early Mormonism is a notable exception, perhaps enabled by being embedded in a larger society that it could export unwanted males to): even in societies where polyamory is socially acceptable, actively being in a polyamorous grouping is generally uncommon rather than being the default. Extended "polycules" are also rare, at least as socially-acknowledged groupings.
This fact suggests that humans are likely evolved so that they are emotionally capable of polyamory, as an atypical but viable-under-certain-social-circumstances arrangement. What is clearly a good deal harder, at least for most people (and clearly for the OP), is growing up in a culture that expects monogamy and provides a set of social scripts for it, and then attempting to instead build and maintain a fair, ethical polyamorous grouping.
It also suggests that the most easily viable form of polyamorous grouping might be a one-man-two-women throuple, where the man is the primary breadwinner, or at least in some way unusually successful or impressive or charismatic, and both women feel that an ~half share of his time, attention, and resources means more to them than the alternative of having some other man all to herself would. This is obviously most viable if a half share of his resources is still well above the median male resources in that society, and is also comfortably enough for them to be able to raise children.
(To translate this into anime terms, both harem and reverse-harem anime are valid genres, but harem anime is anthropologically far more popular/widespread, the man generally needs to be unusually impressive, and a realistic harem sizes is 2 unless the man is particulalry impressive.)
For anyone curious about the obvious massive gender bias in these figures, the ecological/evolutionary root cause is that, in most societies, the most important resource that women bring to a marriage (apart from a source of their eggs) is their childbearing/breastfeeding capacity, which doesn't vary that much between women, while in most societies the most important resource men bring to a marriage (beyond a source of sperm) is their economic resource-earning potential, which in many societies is often a lot more variable between men. So generally a one well-off man multiple women grouping makes more sense than other non-monogamous variants: two men marrying one woman are sharing her finite childbearing capacity, which is (evolutionarily) less than ideal even if they're brothers (so the children not directly descend from them will at least be nephews/nieces, half as related to them), and for non-brothers is (evolutionarily) an even less good an arrangement.
Interestingly, in modern society, decrease in infant mortality and the availability of milk formula has caused childbearing/breastfeeding capacity to no longer be a limiting resource (most women no longer spend much of their adult married life before menopause either pregnant or lactating), and increased female education and employment participation has made families less reliant on economic resources from a male breadwinner, since women can also bring in comparable financial resources. So that opens up a lot more freedom to vary the composition of a family grouping. With artificial insemination and surrogacy, even two-or-more men or two-or-more women can now viably raise a family.
So basically, in modern society, all the constraints go away. The obvious ecological consequence is that humans will start doing whatever they personally feel like (both for raising a family, and for recreational sex with contraception), i.e. a culture in which both monogamy and wide range of forms of polyamory are all considered acceptable (and likely also casual sex, hookups, swinging, etc). Which does indeed seem to be the way society has been heading: ecologically, this is not "the breakdown of society", it's just society adjusting to a different set of incentives. Hopefully, this will come along with the gradual development of a set of reasonable social scripts for what behavior is and isn't generally acceptable in a polyamorous relationship, so this doesn't have to be endlessly and tearfully renegotiated from scratch.
I think most of your reasoning makes sense, except that I suspect reverse harems have always existed as well. Mostly based on the fact that my mother does a lot of genealogy research and has shown me a lot of records of people in unusual living arrangements that were clearly actually just gay or poly, but no one was calling it that. You just kinda squint at the arrangement and go ... ah yes, indeed. And that's what your neighbours did as well.
Basically I think society repressed recording 1 woman with more than 1 man, but I don't think this was substantially less common actually in practice. It was just among other demographics than the rich.
1I assume that what the enthographers are coding is what's considered socially acceptable and can be openly acknowledged in a particular society, and that what actually quietly happens there on occasion is always going to be wider than that, except perhaps in societies so tight-knit that it's really hard to quietly get away with anything.
For example, Western (WEIRD) societies have been officially monogamous for many centuries: yet I think you'd be hard-put to find a time or place out of that where there weren't some (generally rich/successful) men with a mistress as well as a wife, and out of those some cases where the arrangement lasted and was reasonably amicably on all parts. And yes, if some of the people involved are homosexual or bisexual, things can easily get more complex/nonstandard. Well-off women with "live-in female companions" were also often quite common in recent centuries, and some proportion of those will likely have been more than was widely acknowledged.
It does seem a bit of a slippery slope / misleading to equate polyamory too cleanly with polygyny. The latter was certainly widespread throughout human history but also often associated with misogyny or outright abuse or mistreatment of women, as well as rigidly hierarchical or authoritarian sociopolitical structures.
One perhaps lesser known aspect of monogamy is that historically it’s actually a marker for increasing societal egalitarianism, for precisely this reason, and likely a stronger societal solution in terms of collective happiness to the tricky and sometimes dangerous problem of single men vs broadly hypergamous culture.
Polygyny is just a specific subset of polyamory: specifically cases where there's one man and two-or-more women, so it doesn't seem particually inaccurate to split polyamory into polygyny, polyandry, and combinations of the two; that's basically just a list of the possibilities. Yes, the social arrangement commonly meant by "polyamory" in modern western societies is probably more gender-egalitarian than polygyny was in most traditional polygynist societies: western cultures are famously WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic).
I suspect there's more variation than you're assuming: a lot of different cultures have had a lot of different attitudes to polygyny. But specifically on an anticorrellation with egalitariasm: yes, agreed, one of the predictors of polygyny being more likely is a society in which male wealth/income varies a lot (less egalitarian between males), so that two wives' half shares of a rich/successful man's resources is still generally more then a single wife's share of an average man's resources. In a sufficiently egalitarian-between-males society, there's somewhat less motivation for the women, unless the man is unusually talented in some other way.
Polygyny is just a specific subset of polyamory
This is precisely what I’m objecting to and disagree with. Polygyny throughout human history was roughly never an arrangement of legal or moral equals, but founded generally on sociopolitical traditions that treated women as property or prizes. To suggest that the prevalence of this state of affairs is attestation of how natural what we in the modern era call ‘polyamory’ is strikes me as misleading or inaccurate — it is attestation that dominant males who had achieved a monopoly on local violence were able to trade it for reproductive privilege by force.
That societies that did valorize egalitarianism or the rights of women as autonomous beings generally moved towards relative monogamy is further evidence along those lines.
I do not see how % of societies across all of history that have allowed polygamy is informative of what percentage of people across the world today polygamy is better than monogamy for.
Since polyamory (specifically, polygyny) has historically been common, people are likely to be adapted to be capable of it. I.e. they should generally be able to learn to handle issues like jealousy, insecurity and negotiation. (For instance, women's sexuality seems to typically be significantly more fluid than men's: most of the heterosexual women I know have at least thought about bisexuality, even if they never acted on it.) Conversely, if polyamory was impractical for most people, it would presumably be rare, whereas (in situations where it makes economic sense) it's rather commonplace, outside Western-style societies.
As for whether it's better for people, that's up to them, and they're unlikely to know without trying it. Obviously the interpersonal relationships of polyamory are more complex, that's just combinatorics. On the other hand, it opens up a larger space of possibilities to optimize over.
Why do you equate % of societies with common? Do you understand the difference between % of societies where polyarmory was allowed and % of people who practiced polyamory?
The ~15% of societies that didn't practice polyamory in that extensive anthropological survey were primarily ones dominated by the Abrahamic monotheist religions. Those are sociologically rather atypical, and before about 2000–3000 years ago, they didn't exist. So across human evolutionary time, non-polyamory was probably under 15% by both population and society count (not that we have detailed anthropological surveys of all historical societies across the millennia). In the last couple of millennia, and especially in the last few centuries when European populations expanded a lot and European-origin cultures spread, these societies became increasingly common by proportion of world population, where yes, they eventually got way past 15%, probably approaching 50%. (It won't even have been over 50%: Hindu and Islamic culture both allow multiple wives (if you can support them), and Confucian similarly allows one wife and one-or-more concubines, so there were always multiple large-population polygynous cultures.) But a few centuries is only roughly ten or twenty generations: the amount of human genetic evolution that happened during that period is negligible. So for things like human innate tendency to feel and ability to deal with jealousy, they're a minor effect.
What isn't is negligible the amount of cultural evolution involved: Western (WEIRD) societies are drastically short of social norms and scripts for viable, emotionally practical, equitable polyamory. Outside anime aimed at Japanese teen boys (not exactly the most emotionally accurate source!), a few films and books from the 70s, and a few breathless articles in magazines, you barely see it. Rich guy with a mistress (or having sex with a maid) is about the only social script. And as the OP noted, specialist advice books on the subject often tend to be written by fairly recent converts who are in a flush of enthusiasm. Having known some polycules, the OP is correct that relationship drama (all too common for anyone in teens and 20s) is dramatically increased by polyamory: the number of direct relationships goes up roughly as a the square of the number of people involved (and the number of ways for A to be upset about what B and C are doing as the cube), plus operating without tried and tested social scripts makes things way harder on top of that.
Are you talking about polygamy? Or serial monogamy?
I'd be bery surprised if 85% of societies were polyamorous. Polygamy is indeed quite common, and same with serial monogamy.
Would love to read the study you're referring to if you have a link?
I remain undecided despite having studied and thought about this as much as anyone I know of. It's complicated. Guessing which people would like poly under what circumstances is really hard.
I think this post is amazing because it's backed by evidence in a way almost no writing on poly/mono is. You have demonstrated a capability of changing your emotions. Your failure to change your jealousy much is pretty strong evidence that most people are going to fail at that. It has shifted my opinion pretty far toward thinking you could be right, at least given how people do poly on average right now.
However, I'm not sure we should go from this to "most people" let alone "most people even if we were better at poly".
A brief aside if we were better at it: Poly is not a developed technology. You sound like you were indoctrinated in the More than Two era which most poly theorists have now recanted (arguably because the idea that everyone's feelings are their own responsibility is and always was stupid). If we had the same cultural reservoir of poly skills and examples and wisdom that we do for mono, or dare we hope, basic emotional awareness and communication training in elementary school, things could look a lot different. But your claim here is about the world as it is, so I'll primarily address that.
It seems quite possible that some people who are wired differently and/or who used different techniques could change their jealousy just like you've changed your anxiety and sadness. When I checked your section on changing your jealousy, there's something weird: you don't say what you did to change. And you use the passive voice "happened for some people" while you use the active voice for "reduced my anxiety" "reduced my sadness".
I assume you did do similar sorts of active things to reduce your jealousy? Your comment guess that it's biological is another hint that maybe you didn't? I'm genuinely curious how much dakka you put on this.
When I've seen poly work for people, it's usually a combination of them being low-jealousy by disposition (often by way of being avoidantll attached), and they've done some real study and work to understand jealousy as a step toward reducing it. AND they have particular poly partners that don't tend to create lots of triggers for jealousy. Here again I wonder if you've done this; your treatment of jealousy doesn't seem sophisticated. This is not a criticism! This is hard work and you and other people have a lot of priorities. We have very bad emotional awareness/skills as a culture, so getting them requires fairly heroic effort.
Every poly person I know of who's stuck with it for long has experienced jealousy. But for many of them, it's an acceptable tradeoff for the more and sometimes better highs you get.
Your point about bias in the literature is a good one; however, there's an opposite bias from non-poly writing about poly; someone tried it for a moment or had a friend who did, and they had a bad time, and their writer friend with a platform wrote an underinformed piece reaching the same conclusion you do.
Anyway, I remain undecided,
The way I put it is something like "poly is hard" and "if you think poly doesn't take work you're gonna have a bad time". Being aware of your and your partners' emotional makeup is a big part of the work. I recommend people who've experienced significant jealousy in their lives should probably avoid poly. For others, you need to weigh the upsides and the substantial work you'll need to do. One selling point for some people is that poly really demands improving your emotional awareness and communication skills, and those can pay off in other areas of life. But you have to expect that it's like having around two relationship plus a hobby in terms of time commitment. If you have other priorities in life, a mono partnership will probably support them better as long as you find a healthy one - which is also nontrivial but not as tricky nor as time-consuming as creating healthy poly.
1A brief aside if we were better at it: Poly is not a developed technology. You sound like you were indoctrinated in the More than Two era which most poly theorists have now recanted (arguably because the idea that everyone's feelings are their own responsibility is and always was stupid).
Curious what‘s the current literature that is favored by the community?
I feel like I have read a half dozen articles saying roughly the same thing. I guess I’m surprised you’ve never seen this kind of critique before? I suppose our bubbles are different. Well, congrats on finding what works for you!
I read it back in 2024 and felt the same way. It seems to be addressing a niche within a niche. Nothing wrong with that if it finds the right audience, but certainly a surprising perspective to me.
Could it be that polyamory selects for people genetically predisposed to feel jealousy less intensely? Maybe due to some degree of inhibited oxytocin signaling?
I agreed with large parts of this despite being pretty happily polyamorous. And I do think the community default should be "oh you're feeling jealous, have you considered you might be monogamous" not "oh you're feeling jealous, you should read 100 self help books." This seems unlikely to happen though because poly people benefit from a dating pool where the majority of people are poly (as do monogamous people with monogamous dating pools). One piece of push back I have is that you say that "Imagine every time you started or ended a relationship, you had to establish every social norm from scratch," I don't think monogamy really solves this problem it just puts the negotiation in a slightly different place. For example, you have to decide,
"Can my partner have opposite gender friends"
"Can my partner cuddle platonically with members of the same sex if they are bisexual"
"Can my partner be friends with their exs"
"If they can, are they allowed to have sleepovers even if they sleep in separate beds"
"If a girl tries to give my boyfriend her number, is my boyfriend allowed to keep talking with her"
Maybe the answers to all of these questions is obvious to you, but for me they aren't, and part of the reason I like being poly is that it starts with the presumption that everything goes unless you say something about it, which is a norm I like better and, second it opens up space to have these discussions explicitly instead of relying on a bunch of social norms that I don't understand the justification for, and don't know if or when I am breaking.
My personal opinions, in a monogamous context, YMMV:
"Can my partner have opposite gender friends"
Yes
"Can my partner cuddle platonically with members of the same sex if they are bisexual"
Hmmm… borderline. I'd say "whatever the answer would be for cuddling platonically with members of the opposite sex". For many monogamous couples I'd expect the answer to be "no", but some people are more casual.
"Can my partner be friends with their exs"
Wherever possible, everyone should be friends with all of their reasonable exes (and none of their unreasonable exes). But then I dated mostly in a couple of specific compact social circles, where remaining civil was taken seriously, so I might be odd about this.
"If they can, are they allowed to have sleepovers even if they sleep in separate beds"
All three of you under one roof: assuming everyone involved is a reasonable adult who doesn't strongly dislike each other, and isn't going to wake up at 4am to go cheat in the next room, yes. Otherwise, no. He sleeps over at her place in your absence: how responsible are they and how well do you trust both of them?
"If a girl tries to give my boyfriend her number, is my boyfriend allowed to keep talking with her"
Even outside poly circles, this isn't clear evidence of being being a rabid hussy: it's basically "I liked talking to you". Assuming you trust your boyfriend, yes, subject to a possible veto. But better etiquette would be for her to share her number with the two of you together.
The amount of time that I had to spend processing my own emotions or helping other people process theirs went down by about 97%.
My working theory has always been that Poly can work for anyone, but only with significant effort. It's a lifestyle suited for very extroverted individuals who will enjoy the meta of multiple relationships (i.e. who are excited to spend significant amount of their down time talking about their relationships, as an extroverted person might do anyways). I have always found the power of monogamy to be that it frees you to spend more effort on other things. You gain greater emotional security and a team mate for life's day-to-day struggles, and also for the really big things that might otherwise rock your life. Sure you can create the same support structures in a poly relationship, but you're almost guaranteed to spend more time maintaining those multiple threads.
I dunno. I tried really hard for 7 years and it didn't work. I think that there's decent flexibility in what can work for people if they put in enough work, but there are also limits.
To take an extreme example to illustrate it, I don't think anybody could be happy in a relationship where their partner had tortured and killed their children, no matter how much work they put in.
Something that struck me (decidedly non-poly) when reading your post was just how strongly you seemed to feel about jealousy. That is to say, you really seemed to want to avoid it. On one level I can understand why one might want to avoid extreme jealousy: in the same way as love is good, but 'too much' leads to obsession.
But like love, healthy jealousy seems to me a very good thing! I very much want my partner to be jealous of me, and that feeling of being their 'special someone' is wonderful and unique.
Do you still feel this way, that jealousy is broadly negative (regardless of whether you can or cannot get rid of it) or would you say that it was part of the polyamorous experiment?
I totally agree that there can be a healthy amount of jealousy that makes you feel loved or is expressed because you love the person. That's been a fun thing getting used to in monogamy. :)
But yeah, it's a totally different level than the feeling you get when your partner is constantly falling in love with and having sex with other people. Some of the most intensely negative emotions of my life.
It's such a different feeling that I'd almost call them totally different feelings, but I do think it's just the intensity dialed up. Like, the difference between having a nice massage compared to being crushed to death. Both are "pressure" but one is pleasant and the other is doing genuine damage.
My personal opinions, in a poly context, YMMV:
Is it OK for partner to have sex with your best friend?
I'd say "that depends". I recommend having vetos but using them rarely. Is said best friend capable of being poly? Losing a best friendship to poly relationship drama would be sad.
Is it OK to kiss somebody else in front of your partner?
Everyone already knows who's having sex with whom. Less kissing makes the world less fun. If your partner can't cope with seeing this, then poly probably isn't for them. Similarly for hugs. (Necking/making out is a separate negotiation, assuming you're not having threesomes.)
What about them having sex in your bed when you're out of town?
For a throuple, having a separate large bed for each pairing of members who have sex might be economically viable (2 or 3 beds), for anything beyond a throuple this is impractical unless you’re very rich and live in a mansion. A more reasonable discussion would be whether they need to change the sheets before you get back: people feel differently about scents/cleanliness.
Is it OK to have sex with another person then tell your partner the details?
Assuming your partner wants to hear the details, and you're OK with sharing them, this is a matter for prenegotiation with the other person before the sex happens. If they're poly, they should be expecting this conversation, and aware of the fact that if they say no you might then turn them down.
Also, details can be informative: learning useful things is always a possibility.
Is your partner allowed to bring his lover to Christmas with your family? What about your kid’s birthdays?
Depending on how open your family, or your kid, are about poly, maybe, but this is starting to impose poly relationship situations on non-poly people, which tends to be socially fraught in our culture. During the visit, who can do PDA, who gets which room/bed, and so forth? Probably best avoided.
If your partner’s lover is having a mental health breakdown, is it OK for your partner to go comfort her when it’s your day with him?
A genuine mental health breakdown, of course it is! Emergencies obviously take precedence (and can be made up for later). Yet another drama from a drama-queen, not so much.
These are the sort of stuff where society already having a set of reasonable scripts would be helpful. Clearly what we need is more poly soap operas!
Upvoted because I agree on several points (as a poly person). Thanks for sharing your experience.
- Poly is not for everyone; if it doesn't feel natural and like an "ah ha!" moment where you can Just Do Things, then it might not be a good fit.
- Jealousy is a real emotion that often precludes polyamory from working. I think it might be a multi-dimensional group of emotions some of which are primary and others are secondary; I think "working on" secondary jealousy emotions might allow some people to truly benefit from poly, but primary jealousy emotions are less likely to change at all.
- I think it's virtuous to be a voice for monogamy and encouraging monogamous people to be happy with their relationships and not yearn for poly out of misguided ideals.
Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
Most people cannot reduce sexual attraction to people other than their partner much or at all, either, so how much people can "reduce" feelings doesn't appear to be a good argument either for poly or mono.
I've honestly spent a decade wondering why more people didn't agree with me about complexity of poly relationships, so I greatly appreciate reading that - and I'm happy you've figured out what works for you as well.
The combinatorics are brutal:
Size of group . # of A feels about B relationships . # of A feels about B feeling about C relationships
2 . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0
3 . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4 . . . . . . . . . . . 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
5 . . . . . . . . . . . 20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
… . . . . . . . . . . … . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …
IMO, stick to threesomes at most, and/or have a very clear primary / secondary division. Trustworthiness, trust, and emotional maturity help a lot.
Isn't it a general argument against having several close relationships of any kind, not only romantic/sexual?
Oh, people actually feel jealousy. I've been not grokking monogamy: falling in love with a second person seems to be a wonderful thing for exactly the same reasons it's wonderful to fall in love with a first person. If jealousy is a big thing for other people, though, that could be the perspective I haven't been understanding.
Of the half dozen people in polyamorous relationships I know well, one feels some jealousy, it's not anything significant for the others. Personally I don't think I've ever really felt jealousy. Could someone who has describe what it feels like? Is it a primitive emotion, or a combination of things like the following?
- "My partner is having a great time with a new person. I'm worried they like the new person more than me, which would be bad solely because then I'd get to spent less time with them."
- "I feel insecure about myself. The fact that my partner wants to date someone else too suggests that I'm not good enough for them."
- "Since my partner and I are in a monogomous relationship, we have an implicit contract that we won't kiss other people. Despite that, my partner kissed someone last night and hid that fact from me. That is bad because it's a betrayal of trust and because they knew that that kiss would endanger our relationship and went for it anyways. Though if we hadn't had this implicit contract, the kiss wouldn't have been a big deal."
Anyways, yeah, if you have a strong negative emotional reaction to your partner having a good time with other people, maybe don't do polyamory. Sorry that you were told otherwise.
Roughly: jealousy is an emotional primitive and the feelings you're describing here are sums of jealousy(+other things.) I of course can't know what's in your head, but if you're anything at all like me and you have had these feelings before, I suspect that you do experience jealousy, but are inserting arguments to project all feelings that involve it into a non-jealous subspace.
(Maybe addendum: I find it very easy to apply reasoning to my emotions, but very hard to causally intervene this way. Descriptions of the sort you provide here, something like '[emotion] feels like [fact, extrapolation of consequences, judgment of the expected intervention that fact will have on my goals]', are exactly backwards to me. In my case this is a thought pattern that I've only ever used when I'm failing to admit that my idealized, goal-directed, reasoning self is not my realized self. I expect that this is not true for you, but is probably true for most people, and it's possible that this difference in experiencing emotion is a driver of the dynamics described in OP.)
1The thing about jealousy is that its basis is an entirely reasonable fear: fear that you're going to be abandoned, or at least lose a share of the resources (time, attention, money, sex, child-raising help, etc) you were getting/expecting from your partner.
It is possible to have a situation where there are little-or-no grounds for fear. For example "he loves and wants both of us, he's very happy with the two of us, he's not going to add anyone else or leave either of us, and I'm happier with a half share of his attention, plus some of her attention, than I would be with some other guy all to myself". But a throuple is a more complicated situation than a couple, it has more moving parts, there are thus more ways for it going wrong, and there are more people who need to be reassured. Larger polycules are even more complicated.
I have never felt any of those three examples, I constructed them as things that might get glossed to jealousy if jealousy were a fuzzy category rather than an emotional primitive. They all bottom out at a different emotion because they're based on the premise that jealousy isn't primitive, and the reasoning is there to explain why you might call that other thing "jealousy".
If jealousy really is a primitive, I have definitely never felt it.
Very fair! That's a difficult mindset to conceptualize for me, but having positive testimony like this is useful and informative.
And here, despite having heard the word "jealousy", I remained baffled why people thought monogamy was a good idea because I couldn't quite imagine it being a primitive emotion nor strong enough to actually matter.
The typical mind fallacy is strong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
Does jealousy have a physical correlate? That is, if you imagine being really jealous can you track what changes in how your body feels, like how anger raises your heart rate and tenses your muscles?
Does jealousy have a physical correlate? That is, if you imagine being really jealous can you track what changes in how your body feels, like how anger raises your heart rate and tenses your muscles?
Yes, it definitely does have a physical correlate!
I mean, they are pretty generic effects of increased sympathetic nervous system activity. Among other things:
- Increased heartrate
- Shallower breathing
- Sweating
- Increased muscle tension
- Nausea
To me, it feels like my heart is being crushed in an ice-cold Iron Maiden while my limbs are being simultaneously pulled off.
At least at the levels of jealousy I’ve experienced in the poly world - times someone you are deeply in love with is actively courting someone else and you are supposed to “do nothing about it”.
I experience jealousy, though not in a romantic context, and I don't feel like it is a primitive emotion but rather, always caused by another concern like the ones listed.
IIRC the data is that there isn't much difference between self selected monogamy and polyamory. So the thing we can be slightly confident of is that it's fine if you choose it for yourself. I think we should be less confident to tell other people to be polyamorous.
Polyamory is such an a priori stupid idea that one wonders what kind of epistemic shortcomings a community that embraces it, even temporarily, must have?
Perhaps it is that explicit written arguments about why polyamory goes wrong are quite complicated but ultimately correct, or at least they are complicated in the language that we use. But arguments in favor of it such as that 'jealousy is "irrational"' and 'we don't have to worry about actual paternity uncertainty any more' are fairly simple to state.
But perhaps there's an aspect of political prejudice against people who defend what is seen as a conservative or reactionary idea: that the socially most time-tested ideas are probably the best.
Another possibility is that people (even and especially ones who are aspiring rationalists) are biased, they get stuck in their beliefs and then just spend their time socially punishing people who disagree with them or who collect and surface countervailing evidence, and that this is basically why the Polycule epidemic hit rationalist culture with little pushback, causing much damage to the lives of people involved.
I am open to suggestions about why Polyamory got any serious buy-in in rationalist and EA groups.
I wish more people would be willing to discuss the really interesting game theory that might lead a certain type of person to prefer polyamory. One of the major problems with monogamy is, obviously, that people defect. They do it all the goddamn time because sex (and specially new partner sex) is such a huge dopamine hit for some people. And the longer-running and more stable and trusting a relationship is, the more the opportunities and low-risk occasional defection/cheating can become (specially if sexual reward or frequency drops). It's why infidelity-driven divorces can be so incredibly petty and bitter (and, occasionally, lethal) - it's not "irrational", spite as a cognitive stance evolved for a reason.
If you're polyamorous that doesn't go away completely (see the original post's discussion about boundaries etc.) but it does force you reconceptualize how you view sexual and emotional relationships.
To put it another way: you go from being poly to being mono, because the constant drama from poly was too burdensome. That's fair- you have now traded a chronic irritation for the potential for an extremely acute injury and a level of suffering you might not have known was possible to experience. That's a hell of die roll to make, might still be worth it though if you get 10+ years of domestic bliss.
This isn't meant as a pro-poly argument. I agree with the OP's premise that most people are not neuropsychologically able to sustain it.
If for almost all people poly is net negative but you are somebody for whom it is net positive, should you really be poly? Aren't you in expectation hurting people?
Depends on a lot of things, e.g. if most of the people who poly is bad for wouldn't try it anyway, the cost of promoting it goes down. And given that some people find poly to be very good for them and mono to be very bad for them, a blanket prohibition on poly would also be very bad for the people who need it. If the people who are unsure of what type they are can experiment and then sort themselves into the kinds of relationships they prefer, that trades some short-term pain (trying out a relationship that doesn't work) for long-term happiness (finding the one that does work for you).
This study says that of people in the United States, "1 out of 9 people (10.7%) have engaged in polyamory at some point during their life". Its table 2 says that out of those 10.7%, 30.4% say they would be in another polyamorous relationship and 29.3% would not be. That's basically the same amounts, which would be compatible with a "there's a reasonable chance that if you are the kind of person who's willing to try poly in the first place, you might prefer it". Also, those numbers imply that 40.3% were unsure.
One complication is that the numbers only sum up to about 60% because of the survey methodology - if you checked any of "I have been in a polyamorous relationship and I would be in another", "I have been in a polyamorous relationship and I would not be in another", "I have tried polyamory and found that I was too possessive to cope with it", and "I have been polyamorous but found that all of the emotional side effects were too difficult to navigate", you were counted under "have engaged in polyamory at some point during your life". Someone might have checked "I was too possessive" and "I would be in another", if they thought a different situation could trigger their possessiveness less. You could read that as being a case of the kind of wishful thinking that Kat describes, or a case of people having learned from their experiences and avoiding the kinds of problems that they ran into before. The data doesn't tell us either way.
But I would generally be wary of any moral rules along the lines of "don't try to figure out what works for you and what makes you happiest, because some other people might imitate you and become unhappy". I'd rather have everyone explore their available options and then settle into whatever makes them happiest, even if that involves some short-term suffering.
What does seem clearly bad is the kind of blind advocacy that this post is criticizing, that only says that poly can work for everyone and that anyone can overcome jealousy if they just try. It's not exploration if people are told to ignore any data that doesn't support a predetermined outcome.
I'm almost sure that in the current society almost all people for whom polyamory is net negative are monogamous. And almost all people for whom monogamy is net negative are also monogamous.
I remember seeing a lot of people on LessWrong fifteen or so years ago who were very excited about polyamory. There seem to have been very few retrospectives from anyone later on in lines of "I tried it, it's still working great for me", "I didn't end up trying it because [reasons]" or "It didn't work for me for [reasons]".
Thanks, this was super useful! I think drama drains/upsets/frustrates me a lot more than the average person, so even more reason not to go for it.
Do you still think more people should try polyamory, but that they shouldn't try to keep being polyamorous so hard?
I am wondering why do I feel I've read this a while ago despite the fact that it says it was published yesterday? (both here and on the Substack)
This is crossposted from my Substack
TL;DR:
-Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
- It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
- For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a distorted view for newcomers.
OK, let’s get into the nuance.
Background: I was polyamorous starting with my first boyfriend and was polyamorous for about 7 years. I was in a community where probably over 50% of the people around me were poly.
Unfortunately, poly was extremely bad for me due to its very nature and structure, and my experience is not uncommon but it is not commonly publicly talked about.
Poly makes some people very happy. I am sharing why I think it was bad for me and many other people in the hopes of letting people make an informed choice.
Premise #1 - Most people can't just stop being jealous
If you look into the poly literature, you’ll always find some variant of the story “yes, jealousy will suck at first. But if you work on yourself, eventually it’ll go away or reduce a ton. Maybe you’ll even start feeling “compersion”, where you feel happy that your spouse is falling in love with and having sex with somebody else”.
I have no doubt this happens to some people, but it is by no means the norm.
I was poly for 7 years and I was trying to fix my jealousy for almost that entire time.
And not to brag, but I am good at self-improvement. I’ve reduced my anxiety by about 85% and my sadness by 99% over my life. I have an emotion spreadsheet I’ve filled out nearly every day for the last 11 years. I'm pretty good at optimizing my emotions.
And that was my downfall.
I just couldn’t admit to myself that I couldn’t change this part of me.
After all, I’d read Ethical Slut and More Than Two and they’re full of stories saying “I used to be like you. But I just worked on being a more confident person and trusting my partner and did some CBT, and now I have compersion!”
And that just seemed so much more enlightened.
If they can do it, surely I can too.
But the thing is, most people can’t.
Even for all the stories you read there, you’ll find that they usually say they just reduce jealousy, not eliminate it. Or they started off with a low baseline of jealousy to begin with. Or they found one configuration of poly that’s working for them at the moment but later, you find out it exploded in an awful mess, but they don’t write about that update.
The thing is, jealousy, whether it’s biological or socialized (and my bet is mostly on biological), is hard to change.
Most people just dip their toes into poly, feel intense jealousy or experience jealousy from their partner, then go back to monogamy. Or they try for a bit, continue to feel like shit, then go back to mono.
You just don’t hear about them as much because they don’t write about it.
Premise #2: poly causes way more drama
Poly causes drama due to its very nature.
Which, people say, happens in monogamous relationships too.
To which I say sure, but at different scales.
It’s like saying that sure China has put approximately 1.8 million Uyghurs in prison camps, but the USA has Guantanomo (around 780 people total).
Yes, they’re both bad. But one is much worse.
Scale matters.
And my claim is that poly causes a whole different scale of drama compared to monogamy.
First off because it’s dealing with the main source of drama - humans with strong emotions.
And poly brings up strong emotions.
Of course there’s the intense jealousy. Some of my worst emotional experiences have been being wracked with jealousy and shame for even feeling jealous in the first place.
Then there’s the strong emotions of falling in love.
Which would be nice, except you’re feeling jealous because your partner is falling in love with somebody else. But don’t worry, you just need to work on yourself. Obviously they won’t leave you for this new shiny person (which, btw, is a lie. This happens all the time. People are very bad at predicting their emotions. It’s one thing to promise they won’t leave when there’s nobody to leave to. It’s a different story when they’re in love).
Then there’s all the secondary emotions that stem from these. Anger and resentment. Stress. Fear.
And poly causes more drama because there’s exponentially more moving parts.
When your partner starts dating a new person, that person can’t just have drama with your partner. They can have drama with you. And your partner can have drama with their other partner.
It gets complicated fast.
I remember once I had drama caused by my boyfriend’s wife’s boyfriend’s girlfriend’s girlfriend (my meta-meta-meta-metamour).
There’s just exponentially more surface area for drama. And it shows.
It’s actually the primary reason I decided to become monogamous.
I remember once in our polycule there was an explosion of proportions that can only happen in poly. Me and my partner at the time decided to become monogamous for a bit, to protect our relationship till things calmed down.
This was the first time in my life I’d been monogamous.
And it was amazing.
The amount of time I had to spend on relationship drama went down 99.9%.
The amount of time that I had to spend processing my own emotions or helping other people process theirs went down by about 97%.
I ended up going back to poly because I was convinced that I just hadn’t found the right poly configuration and I just hadn’t tried it with the right people and I just needed to work on myself more.
The drama went up instantly.
There were occasional reprieves where I thought I’d finally found the right configuration, and then I’d be going around telling people about the joys of poly.
Then, inevitably, a few months later, it’d be drama again.
For example, once I was in a configuration that seemed good. But then I broke up with one of the parties and it went from “wow, this is incredible” to “wow, I didn’t know humans were physically capable of crying this much”.
I’ve now been in a monogamous relationship for 4.5 years and I’ve had less relationship drama with him in that entire time than I had in almost any randomly chosen month of my poly career.
Drama is also increased by the fact that there are no defaults people can fall back to, so there’s room for disagreement and fighting constantly.
Imagine every time you started or ended a relationship, you had to establish every social norm from scratch.
Is it OK for partner to have sex with your best friend?
Is it OK to kiss somebody else in front of your partner?
What about them having sex in your bed when you're out of town?
Is it OK to have sex with another person then tell your partner the details?
Is your partner allowed to bring his lover to Christmas with your family? What about your kid’s birthdays?
If your partner’s lover is having a mental health breakdown, is it OK for your partner to go comfort her when it’s your day with him?
The list is endless, and so will your arguments about it.
That really is so much of poly.
Just so many emotionally fraught conversations.
Even if you are low jealousy and high emotional stability, that is no guarantee about your partner, your partner’s partner, you’re partner’s partner’s partner, etc.
Premise #3: there is massive bias in reporting about polyamory that makes it look better than it is
The people who write books about polyamory are the people who it works really well for. Which makes sense.
The people who had a bad experience tend to not tell the public about it.
I can’t tell you the number of times poly was making me miserable but I didn’t tell anybody but my partner.
I’d sometimes even be singing the praises of poly to people.
Why would I do something like that?
So many reasons.
People would naturally be curious about my lifestyle. They’d ask me why I did it.
And what was I going to say?
“Yes, it does look like a crazy lifestyle choice.
And yes, I’m currently spending many nights crying alone in bed while my partner is out falling in love with another woman and having sex with her.
But do you know what, I read in a book that if I just work on myself, I won't feel so bad. So yeah, I think it’s the right choice in expectation.”
They’d think that my partner was a bad person because of dumb cultural expectations. They wouldn’t be able to get past the gut reaction of “your partner’s cheating on you” feeling, especially if I’m a crying woman. Even though I’m a grown-ass adult and am making a choice.
(Which I stand by. If consenting adults try poly, it’s not cheating at all and if people get hurt, that doesn’t make any party a bad person. People are allowed to consent to do things that end up hurting them and they end up regretting.)
They’d tell me that obviously I couldn’t change my jealousy, but I knew I could change it. I just needed more time. I just hadn’t found the right technique yet. The poly culture told me I just had to do the work.
If you are doing something outside of societal norms, you have to justify it. You can’t go around doing something eccentric and say “yes, it is actually hurting me and I'm wondering if I actually hate it but don't worry. Everything is fine”
Then, when people leave, they don't tend to write about it. They don't write about it because it's not like it's this big problem that people need to fix. Polyamory is still incredibly rare.
They don't write about it because they blame themselves. They just couldn't handle it. It's fine for other people.
Which, I do endorse. In a certain sense. I do think some people actually do like poly and it is net good for them and they should do it. I just think they are the minority and most people will suffer a lot, lose a relationship or two, experience a ton of drama, and be worse for wear.
They won't write about it because they're worried about seeming prudish. Anybody who tries poly tends to be incredibly progressive and liberal, and it goes against their values to seem like somebody who's against polyamory.
They won't write about it because they're worried that people accuse them of poly shaming. I am definitely worried about this myself.
I am only writing this because I’ve become the go-to person in my community where there’s a little bit of whisper network. I’ve probably had about a dozen people reach out and say “Hey, I heard you tried poly and think it’s a bad idea for most people. I’m considering being poly, and I’d love to hear your take.”
Usually I write something up if just 3 people ask me the same question, but it took way longer in this case because I was worried that my poly friends would think I’m saying they’re dumb or unethical. Which couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I think consenting adults should be allowed to do practically whatever they want.
I think poly is net positive for some percentage of people who try it.
I just think the percentage is small and there’s a bias about how it’s written online.
Also, I have recently worked on myself such that online hate hardly bothers me anymore.
So I’m going to use my newfound powers for good and try to help balance out the poly coverage online.
Maybe consider it to be similar to my advice about running a startup. I think the vast majority of people would hate it. They will suffer a ton, then they will fail and go back and get a regular job.
Does that mean I think founders are dumb or unethical to try? Absolutely not. I think for the people who like it, it’s a massive good.
But I certainly don’t recommend running a startup to most people.
Who is more likely to like poly?
I don’t really know.
I think it’s broadly for people where the upsides are really high and the downsides are really low.
So if you’re naturally very low jealousy, this can help.
Although it certainly is no guarantee. I am actually incredibly low jealousy. That’s why I tried poly.
I didn’t even experience jealousy almost at all for the first 2 years or so. But that was because I hadn’t encountered my triggers yet.
I’ve also been with somebody who never got jealous - except for the one time they did, when it caused some of the largest drama I’ve ever seen, including multiple lost jobs, permanent enemies, and multiple ended relationships.
On the flip side, I think for some people the upsides are so high that it’s worth it to them.
Some people are 99th percentile on valuing freedom, including the freedom to have sex with and love whoever they want.
Some people value sexual diversity a lot more, which you can’t get in a monogamous relationship.
Some people appear to find the upsides of the relationships to be worth it, even if it causes more drama.
I don’t know for what percentage of people polyamory is net positive. It’s certainly non-zero.
And I’m not saying “nobody should be poly” or “being poly is bad” or “we should shame poly people”.
When people try to criticize a community by saying it’s filled with “polyamorists” and they try to make people squeamish, I jump in and tell people off.
People should be able to do almost whatever they want with consenting adults.
Even if there’s a person on the internet who thinks it’s a bad call for most people.
I mean, I could be wrong.
Or you could be the sort of person it’s net positive for.
And if you try poly and it's not for you, I hope you also share your experience. So people can make their choice and not only hear the people saying good things about it.