That's a matter of your perspective. You assume that the concepts are ontologically separate to begin with, and are then collapsed, simply because in this case they are made conceptually distinct by being named differently. I disagree, I say the conceptual distinction is artificial, used to avoid the full scope of the issue by ruling certain facts a priori irrelevant without having to consider them.

I'll repeat something I alluded to before: a happily married woman who listens to her sister's dramatic dating stories and feels relief that she no longer has to worry about all that. This is an example of how removing choice and flexibility can be the source of happiness. This requires us to see choice in negative terms, which is actually quite difficult to do, because the problems of a lack of choice have been dramatized in movies and novels so often that we have a strong emotional resonance with them - for example, the familiar narrative of the son who is forced into the family business by an overbearing father, deprived of his opportunity to explore and pursue his dreams. The plot of the movie Ratatouille is something like this. We know intellectually that problems of too much choice exist, of course, but strong cultural narratives have deformed our cognition such that they appear insignificant to us. Just noticing and critiquing these values when they appear is a very useful thing to do.

One good example of this is a recent book called Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough. The thesis is that women have extremely high expectations for potential husbands, to the point that they reject perfectly good men in the hopes that something better will come along. Eventually their options dwindle and they find themselves childless and unmarried in their 40s, which was the experience of the author. The problem here is buyer's remorse. Given the wealth of options as well as the emphasis on getting the very best for yourself, this translates into a need for flexibility: form less secure, more temporary relationships until you find the one that gives you everything you want. I don't really know what an improved decision-making process would be exactly, but the fact that our gut reaction to the title "Settle for Mr. Good Enough" is that this sounds patently absurd is a good gauge for our thinking. When this seems like wisdom rather than absurdity, we will know we have made progress. Having said that, I think the book is flawed because it doesn't go far enough in it's critique which forces the author to compromise the thesis.

Polyamory might posit itself as a solution to this problem of excess choice, diagnosing this situation as a problem of inflexibility within the social obligation to choose one person. If one person doesn't have everything you need, you should find someone else who does, but why not have both of them? So polyamory addresses the problem of excess choice with still more flexiblity and choice, which in turn generates more crises which are then addressed by the proliferation of rules. To me, this points to the general unsustainability of flexibility as a single guiding norm, and also the undesirability of polyamory itself - in order to sustain this "freedom", excessive regulation is required. This last point is of course a personal judgment; if others prefer heavily regulated sex lives, I have no reason to prevent them.

There's a kind of knee-jerk analysis that happens: we see a difficult situation, and conclude that the ultimate problem is a lack of flexibility: things that are easy to change are always good, and things that are hard to change are always bad. Politically, this translate into support for right-wing economic policies, which are ideologically rendered as more flexible than the restrictive constraints of government action, and therefore preferable. And yes, I am aware that I am drawing another counterintuitive connection, between right-wing economic policies and left-wing sex politics, but I think there are unconscious shared assumptions underlying much countercultural politics that posits itself as radical, left-wing, etc.

I continue to feel that the established definition is wrong, and I've made many points justifying that, none of which you've actually refuted. Instead, you simply insist that I restrict myself to your preferred definition. This is exactly my point - by defining the terms in advance and making them incontestable, you are trying to lead us to where you want us to go.

If you read carefully, you'll see that I didn't attribute the claim "monogamy is unnatural" to you. My point was to indicate the value of my observations about social norms and their relevance to general common claims about monogamy and polyamory.

Furthermore, you seem to be contradicting yourself. On one hand, you object to me deviating from the standard definition of polyamory, but also accuse me of mischaracterizing your viewpoints when I attempt to refute that definition. Do you or do you not subscribe to the standard definition of monogamy?

You claim that society prevents individuals from forming polyamorous relationships. My goal here was to show that tacit prohibitions and rights have strong efficacy and should be considered part of the social order. This supports the idea that the tacit toleration of infidelity is part of the social order, and given the very high rates of marital infidelity, it's reasonable to say that polyamory, in a certain sense, is already a widely accepted practice. This is intended to clarify the specific claims that polyamorists are making as well as in what sense it can be said to be a nonconformist lifestyle. This also goes to the common claim by polyamorists that monogamy is unnatural & people are more naturally polyamorists.

Interesting that Sniffnoy observes that there will always be some people who take the rules too literally, the "nerds", which is where we find the highest rates of polyamory (in the countercultural sense).

Are you implying that the movement has changed its philosophical presuppositions? If so, please provide a citation to back this up.

But, the general reaction to learning about violations of monogamy seems to generally be, "They did that?" rather than "They let themselves get caught?"

I think for many people, infidelity only can be said to have happened if someone was caught. This is the logic of "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." Another interesting aspect of outrage over rule-breaking is that it's possible and even common to be openly outraged about a transgression that you don't care about and even do yourself.

This is not really hypocrisy, it's actually the way belief often works. An example of this is an Israeli politican who is an atheist. She was asked if there was any problem with her being an atheist, and she said "I don't believe in God, but I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God." Or maybe that you don't think there's anything wrong with infidelity, but you are outraged that someone made it public because it will corrupt the morals of the youth or something. It's even possible for no-one to literally believe that infidelity is wrong, and yet the belief still works because everyone assumes that someone else believes and wants to preserve their belief. This explains the phenomenon of a pastor of a church who is an atheist, but nonetheless every Sunday promises the congregation they will be together in the afterlife. In order for belief to be operative in a culture, it's not necessary that people actually believe, only that they assume someone else does.

I'm not claiming that the actual rule is "Don't get caught." If that were the case, the authorities would simply say that. This kind of rule is like the rule against public nudity: you are allowed to be nude, just do it discreetly, in private. You are only prohibited from letting yourself be seen nude by others, from being caught. Or other examples, like urinating, defecating, etc. No-one thinks that people aren't ever naked, or that they don't defecate, we know it's just done privately. People use euphemisms and say they are going to the "restroom" (to rest?), but we know what they are doing, they just don't say it directly.

But this is not how the rule against infidelity works, which has to retain this dual character of official prohibition, supplemented by unofficial toleration. Another example might be the KKK - by day, good upstanding Christians, model citizens, etc., by night, raping, murdering thugs. Or military discipline which is supplemented by homo-erotic rituals, hazings, dirty jokes, and so on. Far from being a simple tribal bonding of no real consequences, military life could not exist without these hidden obscenities. If you remember the plot of A Few Good Men, when it revealed that a marine was murdered in the process of an extrajudicial punishment for breaking the unwritten rules. At the end, the Colonel on trial says "You can't handle the truth!" The truth of those unwritten rules must be repressed. This is a case where those rules results in a much more serious punishment that simply violating the standard rules, in just the same way that you'd be shunned if you were revealed to be an atheist in a small provincial town in the South, but this would be nothing compared to what would happen to you if you crossed the KKK.

(1) Yes, but also I claim that WrongBot's claim of nonconformity is simply false. He's just applying a very widely held value in a slightly novel way.

(2) I think monogamy can be justified rationally, but this involves reconstructing certain values that have been eclipsed by consumerist logic

(3) The demand to justify our sexual practices or risk being put into stigmatized position of conformist is unfair.

Some further points: the debate of polyamory vs. monogamy is not, strictly speaking, a debate about whether it's best to have one partner or multiple partners. It is partly about whether society should stigmatize the open deviation from the norm, but that is not the thrust of the argument here. There's a stronger claim lurking here, that many people consider maximum choice and flexibility the royal road to happiness and since polyamory more adequately embodies this ideal, it is superior to monogamy, at least for those people. Once people examine their beliefs in the cold light of reason, they will choose what works for them, etc.