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.
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?"
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 debunk... (read more)
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... (read more)
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 adu... (read more)
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 ... (read more)
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... (read more)
She posted this essay back in 2024 on her old personal site
Could it be that polyamory selects for people genetically predisposed to feel jealousy less intensely? Maybe due to some degree of inhibited oxytocin signaling?
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 ... (read more)
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 broadl... (read more)
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 ag... (read more)
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 n... (read more)
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 les
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 ... (read more)
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.
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.
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-d... (read more)
Hmm. Non‑monogamous relationship systems have always interested me precisely because they require more sophisticated ways of regulation.
You WILL have to learn to communicate effectively in order to function in conditions where this task is not carried out by just two agents (+, ideally, their relatives, but that’s not mandatory), but by more than two.
It’s like a challenge.
A more complex social structure, and the reward for this is the fruits of a more complex social structure — social connections and the resources you can mobilize through these connectio... (read more)
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?
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.