Recently Amanda Bethlehem published comparing monogamous jealousy to kidney disease. Eneasz Brodski doubled down on this. I disagree with a lot of their implications, but today I’m going to focus on the implicit claim that jealousy is the only reason to be monogamous. Here is a list of other reasons you might choose monogamy:
Your sex and romance needs are satisfied by one person, and extra isn’t that valuable to you (aka “polysaturated at 1”, or in the case of one guy I know, at 0)
You + your partner are capable of allowing cuddling with friends and friendship with exes without needing to make everything allowed.
You are busy.
You hate coordination labor/value simplicity. I have been with my partner for over 4 years and we have never shared calendars. He knows when my D&D night is and I know when his house meeting is, and otherwise we work it out over text. The only reason sharing calendars would occur to me is exposure to poly.
You hate the idea of people you didn’t choose having a significant effect on your life.
Or maybe you’re conceptually fine with that, but you/your partner are bad at that kind of coordination
You are immunocompromised. STDs get all the attention, but poly also facilities transmission of simple respiratory illnesses. Your primary’s close secondary’s tertiary relationship is probably not going to give up concerts even if colds are devastating to you.
You take breakups really hard. Maybe to the point that dating isn’t worth it for you, or maybe it’s worth it for you but only because your partner supports you through it and they’re not up for 4 months of avoidable depression per year.
You landed one great primary relationship but have shit taste in general. If you date, it will be a shitshow.
You really want the benefits of a strong primary/mono relationship, and are incapable of keeping secondary relationships small. The easiest way to protect your relationship is to not start another.
Your job requires a clean public image and you value that more than extra relationships
You lack the communication skill to do it well, and developing it is not your top priority.
Having your partner as your only source of sex/romance makes you try harder in ways you endorse.
Maybe you’ll be poly someday but right now you want to establish security with each other.
You could get over your jealousy but other emotional growth opportunities are higher priority.
These reasons seem drawn from a very individualistic, modern perspective. From a historical, more community-driven perspective, it seems that two other major reasons would be:
You do not wish to “dilute” your value to your partner in some way. (Whether that be in terms of affection, economic impact, social status impact, parentage of a proportion of their children vs all of them, etc)
You believe a monogamous couple generally provides the best context for successfully raising your own children. (Whether that success be defined more in terms of the children’s life-outcomes, or more in terms of them being willing & able to care for you in old age, etc)
Those are mostly “analytical” reasons. I’d say sometimes people just have a psychology that is drawn to monogamy as an ideal (for reasons deeper than just struggling with jealousy otherwise), which makes them poorly suited for polyamory.
It’s said that love has three components, intimacy/romance, passion/lust/attraction, and commitment. I would say that the people to whom monogamy feels like the obviously right choice have a psychology that’s adapted towards various facets of valuing commitment. So commitment is not something that they enter if they’ve analytically gone through the pros and cons and decided that it’s net beneficial for them. Instead, it’s something they actively long for that gives purpose to their existence. Yes, it comes with tradeoffs, but that contributes to the meaning of it and they regard committedness as a highly desirable state.
If someone(’s psychology) values commitment in that way, it’s an unnatural thought to want to commit to more than one person. Commitment is about turning the relationship into a joint life goal—but then it’s not in line with your current life goals to add more goals/commitments that distract from it.
I don’t mean to say that polyamrous couples cannot also regard commitment as a desirable state (say, if they’re particularly committed to their primary relationship). If anyone poly is reading this and valuing commitment is ~their primary motivation in life, I’d be curious to learn about how this manifests. To me, it feels in tension with having romantically meaningful relationships with multiple people because it sounds like sharing your resources instead of devoting them all towards the one most important thing. But I haven’t talked to polyamorous people about this topic and I might be missing something. (For instance, in my case I also happen to be somewhat off-the-charts introverted, which means I see various social things differently from others.)
To me, it feels in tension with having romantically meaningful relationships with multiple people because it sounds like sharing your resources instead of devoting them all towards the one most important thing.
I feel like a life always consists of needing to distribute resources between multiple commitments. Job, community, friends, children, principles, ambitions, and your partners. I feel like dating multiple people is only in as much in conflict with commitment as any of these other things are (though of course via their similar nature are in competition over somewhat more similar kinds of resources, but IMO only to a limited degree, e.g. someone who does not have a job does seem to me likely capable of doing their part in multiple romantic relationships).
Without being sure of how relevant it is, I notice that among those, job and community are also domains where individual psychologies and social norms that treat a single slot as somewhere between primary and exclusive seem common, while the domains of friends, children, and principles almost always allow multiple instances with similar priority. I’m not sure about ambitions. What generates the difference, I wonder?
Why juggle two jobs that pay the same wage, when ypu could just work twice the hours at one and grow your career much faster?
Why be an absent parent and spouse of two suspicious and frustrated families when you could be the top notch spouse and parent in one?
Kids are always growing and changing, so having more than one kid lets you experience different phases of life at once. Kids spend a lot of time away from parents as they age, so having multiple gives you some ongoing kid time.
Adults have many competing demands and the value of friend time can saturate pretty quickly, so it makes sense to have a lot of friends you can slot in to spare hours.
Poly people say they get a lot of extra value out of having multiple partners—different kinds of conversation, sex, emotional connection, and so on. They seem to experience low enough coordination costs that things work fine, and to find the experiences they enjoy through polyamory to be worth any tradeoffs in other areas of life. Makes sense to me. I just have different experiences and priorities.
Overall, I think people are mainly trying to just optimize the quality of their time on earth as best they know how.
Many of these can complement a romantic relationship (people are often attracted to someone’s having passions/ambitions, and having a job provides stability). By contrast, dating multiple people is competing over largely similar resources, as you say. For example, you can only sleep in one person’s bed at night, can only put yourself in danger for the sake of others so many times before you might die, etc.
Just knowing that you’re splitting resources at all will be somewhat unsatisfying for some psychologies, if people emotionally value the security of commitment. I guess that’s a similar category to jealousy and the poly stance here is probably that you can train yourself to feel emotionally secure if trust is genuinely justified. But can one disentangle romance/intimacy from wanting to commit to the person your romantically into? In myself, I feel like those feelings are very intertwined. “Commitment,” then, is just the conscious decision to let yourself do what your romantic feelings already want you to do.
That said, maybe people vary in all the ways of how much these things can be decoupled. Like, some people have a signficant link between having sex and pair bonding, whereas others don’t. Maybe poly people can disentangle “wanting commitment” from romantic love in a way that I can’t? When I read the OP I was thrown off by this part: “You + your partner are capable of allowing cuddling with friends and friendship with exes without needing to make everything allowed.” To me, cuddling is very much something that falls under romantic love, and there’s a distinct ickiness of imagining cuddling with anyone who isn’t in that category. Probably relatedly, as a kid I didn’t want to be touched by anyone, not hug relatives ever, etc. I’m pretty sure that part is idiosyncratic because there’s no logical reason why cuddling has to be linked to romantic love and commitment, as opposed to it functioning more like sex in people in whom sex is not particularly linked to pair bonding. But what about the thing where the feelings of romantic love also evokes a desire to join your life together with the other person? Do other people not have that? Clearly romantic love is about being drawn to someone, wanting to be physically and emotionally close to them. I find that this naturally extends to the rest of “wanting commitment,” but maybe other people are more content with just enjoying the part of being drawn to someone without then wanting to plan their future together?
Anyway, the tl;dr of my main point is that psychologies differ and some people appear to be better psychologically adapted for monogamy than you might think if you just read the OP. (Edit: deleted a sentence here.) Actually point 10 in Elizabeth’s list is similar to what I’ve been saying, but I feel like it can be said in a stronger way.
A lot of these are the reasons to not have more than one partner. I think the definition of polyamory through “I allow my partner to have other partners” is more practical than through “I have many partners”. (because intuituvely “polyamorous” should be the property of a person and not of a person and their social situation)
7, 12, 14 and 15 are still totally valid.
4-6 would be valid… but only to the extent that they are the reasons to not allow your partner to have friends and it’s usually considered Not Okay.
I sort of agree, but in practice, if I’m only going to have one partner, then I want to reap the benefits of that, which include minimizing the coordination and emotional costs of my partner’s love life. Easiest way to do that is often to look for a partner whose also monogamous.
Emotional costs are jealousy? Then it’s just not the topic of Elizabeth’s post.
And coordination costs… why this part doesn’t apply to partner’s friends, again?
My interpretation of polyamory is basically that “my partner went to play boardgames with friends” and “my partner is on a date with someone” are in the same category.
My interpretation of polyamory is basically that “my partner went to play boardgames with friends” and “my partner is on a date with someone” are in the same category.
I think if I had this perspective I would be poly, but also I am not convinced that this is a meaningful way to understand ~any poly people? For the following reason: all of the primary poly relationships I’m aware of are pretty explicit about what they do and don’t allow—certain dates are okay, certain types of sex are okay, other things require prior notification, some things require discussion, etc. It seems like every configuration of “some types dating and sex are okay but other types of dating and sex aren’t, or not by default” exists (which to be clear is cool and reasonable). But I’m not aware of any poly relationships where the rules are “we can’t date other people or have sex with other people at all but we can play board games with other people”, which makes me think that in practice, poly people recognize and use a distinction between these things.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “category” here? Or perhaps the polyamory I’ve encountered just doesn’t resemble yours?
But I’m not aware of any poly relationships where the rules are “we can’t date other people or have sex with other people at all but we can play board games with other people”
I agree, this is my point! If being poly means “my partner going on a date with someone else and my partner playing board games with someone else aren’t separated by a category distinction”, then I would expect there to be poly spectrum people (that is, people who understand these categories the same way you do and identify themselves as poly) who treat these things as if they’re in the same category; that is, who treat them both as a valid place to have a relationship boundary if there’s mutual agreement that this is the best way forward. But I’m not aware of any poly people who do this. A person who is fine with their partner dating others but maybe not going home with them is clearly some amount of poly, and a person who isn’t fine with their partner dating others but is fine with their partner having a board game night is clearly not poly, poly people would I think ~all agree with this, and this is obviously a category distinction! So it seems like while poly people might not care about the category distinction much, and might treat the categories more similarly than I would, they all recognize it and use it and in fact it’s impossible meaningfully be poly without recognizing and using it, so I’m a bit confused as to why you claim not to recognize it.
EDIT: Arguably this a minor point. I make it anyway because I think poly people are generally somewhat to largely mistaken about what polyamory is, and this causes (a) many poly people to try to argue that monogamous relationships are fundamentally flawed and (b) many people to try to be poly when it doesn’t actually work for them. The posts that Elizabeth is responding to exhibit (a) and your original comment reiterates them (you accept as valid reasons to not be polyamorous: physical/social/emotional deficiency, and this is all). And when the justification for being poly ends up being (b) (in this case, a claim I see as being obviously wrong about whether a certain category distinction exists), this makes me worry that some people are poly as a matter of matter of ideology rather than as a matter of preference, and so may try to convince themselves or others to be poly against preference, and in fact this is exactly what we see.
By “in the same category” I basically meant “both are OK”.
Like, “play boardgames with friends” is kinda obviously bad place for a relationship boundry (in general, by default, yes, we probably can invent some far-fetched scenario) and for me being poly is first of all that I and my partner treat “dating/being romantically involved/having sex with someone else” also as a bad place for a relationship boundry.
If I didn’t want to play boardgames with anyone else, I would still think that forbidding my partner to play boardgames with anyone else is Not OK. And if I didn’t want to date/be romantically involved/have sex with anyone else, I would still be poly.
And there are possible relationship boundaries around other partners that I think are OK, even some we don’t practice. But they are kinda “positive” and not “negative” boundaries. Like, “you have to give me X”, not “you have to not give X to anyone else”. Does it make sense?
(Also, yes, I’m sure some people try to be poly when it doesn’t actually work for them, but I think a lot more people try to be mono when it doesn’t actually work for them. But that’s offtopic.)
Sure, this seems more plausible. I’m sure I’d still object to your understanding of some moral and practical dimensions of monogamy, but I’m also sure you’re aware of that so talking about it is unlikely to be productive for either of us. I’d ask that you reconsider the use of the word “category” if you have this discussion with others in the future, this is just not what it means.
My own reason to prefer monogamy is that I’d like to be by far the most important person to my partner (other than themselves) in the same way that they would be the most important person to me. Polyamory would make the boundary between “us” and the rest of the world a bit less sharp and that doesn’t seem worth the benefits (the first reason also applies to me, the benefits don’t seem that great).
Being poly means you have to date poly people, and also you probably end up with far more poly friends; the average poly person disproportionately is/does [various personality factors and hobbies] in ways you disprefer to the average monogamous person.
16. You believe men and women have different age-based preferences, and this will lead to relationship instability over time in a relationship structure that prioritises need/preference optimisation vs. committing to one person giving you the “whole package” over time.
I wonder if most of the population accepts these as valid reasons. I don’t feel much jealousy and fear it’s ruining my dating prospects to even be open to poly, even though it’s plausible that I would rarely or never date additional people
To rephrase more neutrally: there’s a trade off between optionality and the opportunities that can only be unlocked through long commitment (analogous to rabbit hunters vs stag hunters, but over a prolonged period). Assume there’s a Pareto frontier and one’s position on it is morally neutral: high-commiters/stag-hunters are still better off if they pair with each other than with high-optionality-types/rabbit-hunters (although the reverse is much less true). It sucks wanting to stag hunt when everyone around you wants rabbits. Monogamy can be useful as a costly signal of “I want to stag hunt” even for someone who would be fine being poly with another stag-hunter.
I can think of at least one friend who self-describes as not feeling jealousy and being more naturally poly, but chose monogamy for basically this reason.
REASONS BESIDES JEALOUSY TO NOT BE POLYAMOROUS
Recently Amanda Bethlehem published comparing monogamous jealousy to kidney disease. Eneasz Brodski doubled down on this. I disagree with a lot of their implications, but today I’m going to focus on the implicit claim that jealousy is the only reason to be monogamous. Here is a list of other reasons you might choose monogamy:
Your sex and romance needs are satisfied by one person, and extra isn’t that valuable to you (aka “polysaturated at 1”, or in the case of one guy I know, at 0)
You + your partner are capable of allowing cuddling with friends and friendship with exes without needing to make everything allowed.
You are busy.
You hate coordination labor/value simplicity. I have been with my partner for over 4 years and we have never shared calendars. He knows when my D&D night is and I know when his house meeting is, and otherwise we work it out over text. The only reason sharing calendars would occur to me is exposure to poly.
You hate the idea of people you didn’t choose having a significant effect on your life.
Or maybe you’re conceptually fine with that, but you/your partner are bad at that kind of coordination
You are immunocompromised. STDs get all the attention, but poly also facilities transmission of simple respiratory illnesses. Your primary’s close secondary’s tertiary relationship is probably not going to give up concerts even if colds are devastating to you.
You take breakups really hard. Maybe to the point that dating isn’t worth it for you, or maybe it’s worth it for you but only because your partner supports you through it and they’re not up for 4 months of avoidable depression per year.
You landed one great primary relationship but have shit taste in general. If you date, it will be a shitshow.
You really want the benefits of a strong primary/mono relationship, and are incapable of keeping secondary relationships small. The easiest way to protect your relationship is to not start another.
Your job requires a clean public image and you value that more than extra relationships
You lack the communication skill to do it well, and developing it is not your top priority.
Having your partner as your only source of sex/romance makes you try harder in ways you endorse.
Maybe you’ll be poly someday but right now you want to establish security with each other.
You could get over your jealousy but other emotional growth opportunities are higher priority.
These reasons seem drawn from a very individualistic, modern perspective. From a historical, more community-driven perspective, it seems that two other major reasons would be:
You do not wish to “dilute” your value to your partner in some way. (Whether that be in terms of affection, economic impact, social status impact, parentage of a proportion of their children vs all of them, etc)
You believe a monogamous couple generally provides the best context for successfully raising your own children. (Whether that success be defined more in terms of the children’s life-outcomes, or more in terms of them being willing & able to care for you in old age, etc)
Those are mostly “analytical” reasons. I’d say sometimes people just have a psychology that is drawn to monogamy as an ideal (for reasons deeper than just struggling with jealousy otherwise), which makes them poorly suited for polyamory.
It’s said that love has three components, intimacy/romance, passion/lust/attraction, and commitment. I would say that the people to whom monogamy feels like the obviously right choice have a psychology that’s adapted towards various facets of valuing commitment. So commitment is not something that they enter if they’ve analytically gone through the pros and cons and decided that it’s net beneficial for them. Instead, it’s something they actively long for that gives purpose to their existence. Yes, it comes with tradeoffs, but that contributes to the meaning of it and they regard committedness as a highly desirable state.
If someone(’s psychology) values commitment in that way, it’s an unnatural thought to want to commit to more than one person. Commitment is about turning the relationship into a joint life goal—but then it’s not in line with your current life goals to add more goals/commitments that distract from it.
I don’t mean to say that polyamrous couples cannot also regard commitment as a desirable state (say, if they’re particularly committed to their primary relationship). If anyone poly is reading this and valuing commitment is ~their primary motivation in life, I’d be curious to learn about how this manifests. To me, it feels in tension with having romantically meaningful relationships with multiple people because it sounds like sharing your resources instead of devoting them all towards the one most important thing. But I haven’t talked to polyamorous people about this topic and I might be missing something. (For instance, in my case I also happen to be somewhat off-the-charts introverted, which means I see various social things differently from others.)
I feel like a life always consists of needing to distribute resources between multiple commitments. Job, community, friends, children, principles, ambitions, and your partners. I feel like dating multiple people is only in as much in conflict with commitment as any of these other things are (though of course via their similar nature are in competition over somewhat more similar kinds of resources, but IMO only to a limited degree, e.g. someone who does not have a job does seem to me likely capable of doing their part in multiple romantic relationships).
Without being sure of how relevant it is, I notice that among those, job and community are also domains where individual psychologies and social norms that treat a single slot as somewhere between primary and exclusive seem common, while the domains of friends, children, and principles almost always allow multiple instances with similar priority. I’m not sure about ambitions. What generates the difference, I wonder?
I mean, that’s kind of obvious right?
Why juggle two jobs that pay the same wage, when ypu could just work twice the hours at one and grow your career much faster?
Why be an absent parent and spouse of two suspicious and frustrated families when you could be the top notch spouse and parent in one?
Kids are always growing and changing, so having more than one kid lets you experience different phases of life at once. Kids spend a lot of time away from parents as they age, so having multiple gives you some ongoing kid time.
Adults have many competing demands and the value of friend time can saturate pretty quickly, so it makes sense to have a lot of friends you can slot in to spare hours.
Poly people say they get a lot of extra value out of having multiple partners—different kinds of conversation, sex, emotional connection, and so on. They seem to experience low enough coordination costs that things work fine, and to find the experiences they enjoy through polyamory to be worth any tradeoffs in other areas of life. Makes sense to me. I just have different experiences and priorities.
Overall, I think people are mainly trying to just optimize the quality of their time on earth as best they know how.
Many of these can complement a romantic relationship (people are often attracted to someone’s having passions/ambitions, and having a job provides stability). By contrast, dating multiple people is competing over largely similar resources, as you say. For example, you can only sleep in one person’s bed at night, can only put yourself in danger for the sake of others so many times before you might die, etc.
Just knowing that you’re splitting resources at all will be somewhat unsatisfying for some psychologies, if people emotionally value the security of commitment. I guess that’s a similar category to jealousy and the poly stance here is probably that you can train yourself to feel emotionally secure if trust is genuinely justified. But can one disentangle romance/intimacy from wanting to commit to the person your romantically into? In myself, I feel like those feelings are very intertwined. “Commitment,” then, is just the conscious decision to let yourself do what your romantic feelings already want you to do.
That said, maybe people vary in all the ways of how much these things can be decoupled. Like, some people have a signficant link between having sex and pair bonding, whereas others don’t. Maybe poly people can disentangle “wanting commitment” from romantic love in a way that I can’t? When I read the OP I was thrown off by this part: “You + your partner are capable of allowing cuddling with friends and friendship with exes without needing to make everything allowed.” To me, cuddling is very much something that falls under romantic love, and there’s a distinct ickiness of imagining cuddling with anyone who isn’t in that category. Probably relatedly, as a kid I didn’t want to be touched by anyone, not hug relatives ever, etc. I’m pretty sure that part is idiosyncratic because there’s no logical reason why cuddling has to be linked to romantic love and commitment, as opposed to it functioning more like sex in people in whom sex is not particularly linked to pair bonding. But what about the thing where the feelings of romantic love also evokes a desire to join your life together with the other person? Do other people not have that? Clearly romantic love is about being drawn to someone, wanting to be physically and emotionally close to them. I find that this naturally extends to the rest of “wanting commitment,” but maybe other people are more content with just enjoying the part of being drawn to someone without then wanting to plan their future together?
Anyway, the tl;dr of my main point is that psychologies differ and some people appear to be better psychologically adapted for monogamy than you might think if you just read the OP. (Edit: deleted a sentence here.) Actually point 10 in Elizabeth’s list is similar to what I’ve been saying, but I feel like it can be said in a stronger way.
A lot of these are the reasons to not have more than one partner. I think the definition of polyamory through “I allow my partner to have other partners” is more practical than through “I have many partners”. (because intuituvely “polyamorous” should be the property of a person and not of a person and their social situation)
7, 12, 14 and 15 are still totally valid.
4-6 would be valid… but only to the extent that they are the reasons to not allow your partner to have friends and it’s usually considered Not Okay.
I sort of agree, but in practice, if I’m only going to have one partner, then I want to reap the benefits of that, which include minimizing the coordination and emotional costs of my partner’s love life. Easiest way to do that is often to look for a partner whose also monogamous.
Emotional costs are jealousy? Then it’s just not the topic of Elizabeth’s post.
And coordination costs… why this part doesn’t apply to partner’s friends, again?
My interpretation of polyamory is basically that “my partner went to play boardgames with friends” and “my partner is on a date with someone” are in the same category.
I think if I had this perspective I would be poly, but also I am not convinced that this is a meaningful way to understand ~any poly people? For the following reason: all of the primary poly relationships I’m aware of are pretty explicit about what they do and don’t allow—certain dates are okay, certain types of sex are okay, other things require prior notification, some things require discussion, etc. It seems like every configuration of “some types dating and sex are okay but other types of dating and sex aren’t, or not by default” exists (which to be clear is cool and reasonable). But I’m not aware of any poly relationships where the rules are “we can’t date other people or have sex with other people at all but we can play board games with other people”, which makes me think that in practice, poly people recognize and use a distinction between these things.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “category” here? Or perhaps the polyamory I’ve encountered just doesn’t resemble yours?
I’m aware. They are called “monogamous” :)
I agree, this is my point! If being poly means “my partner going on a date with someone else and my partner playing board games with someone else aren’t separated by a category distinction”, then I would expect there to be poly spectrum people (that is, people who understand these categories the same way you do and identify themselves as poly) who treat these things as if they’re in the same category; that is, who treat them both as a valid place to have a relationship boundary if there’s mutual agreement that this is the best way forward. But I’m not aware of any poly people who do this. A person who is fine with their partner dating others but maybe not going home with them is clearly some amount of poly, and a person who isn’t fine with their partner dating others but is fine with their partner having a board game night is clearly not poly, poly people would I think ~all agree with this, and this is obviously a category distinction! So it seems like while poly people might not care about the category distinction much, and might treat the categories more similarly than I would, they all recognize it and use it and in fact it’s impossible meaningfully be poly without recognizing and using it, so I’m a bit confused as to why you claim not to recognize it.
EDIT: Arguably this a minor point. I make it anyway because I think poly people are generally somewhat to largely mistaken about what polyamory is, and this causes (a) many poly people to try to argue that monogamous relationships are fundamentally flawed and (b) many people to try to be poly when it doesn’t actually work for them. The posts that Elizabeth is responding to exhibit (a) and your original comment reiterates them (you accept as valid reasons to not be polyamorous: physical/social/emotional deficiency, and this is all). And when the justification for being poly ends up being (b) (in this case, a claim I see as being obviously wrong about whether a certain category distinction exists), this makes me worry that some people are poly as a matter of matter of ideology rather than as a matter of preference, and so may try to convince themselves or others to be poly against preference, and in fact this is exactly what we see.
OK, that’s a misunderstanding.
By “in the same category” I basically meant “both are OK”.
Like, “play boardgames with friends” is kinda obviously bad place for a relationship boundry (in general, by default, yes, we probably can invent some far-fetched scenario) and for me being poly is first of all that I and my partner treat “dating/being romantically involved/having sex with someone else” also as a bad place for a relationship boundry.
If I didn’t want to play boardgames with anyone else, I would still think that forbidding my partner to play boardgames with anyone else is Not OK. And if I didn’t want to date/be romantically involved/have sex with anyone else, I would still be poly.
And there are possible relationship boundaries around other partners that I think are OK, even some we don’t practice. But they are kinda “positive” and not “negative” boundaries. Like, “you have to give me X”, not “you have to not give X to anyone else”. Does it make sense?
(Also, yes, I’m sure some people try to be poly when it doesn’t actually work for them, but I think a lot more people try to be mono when it doesn’t actually work for them. But that’s offtopic.)
Sure, this seems more plausible. I’m sure I’d still object to your understanding of some moral and practical dimensions of monogamy, but I’m also sure you’re aware of that so talking about it is unlikely to be productive for either of us. I’d ask that you reconsider the use of the word “category” if you have this discussion with others in the future, this is just not what it means.
Yes, sure! That comment was not very thoughtful.
My own reason to prefer monogamy is that I’d like to be by far the most important person to my partner (other than themselves) in the same way that they would be the most important person to me. Polyamory would make the boundary between “us” and the rest of the world a bit less sharp and that doesn’t seem worth the benefits (the first reason also applies to me, the benefits don’t seem that great).
Being poly means you have to date poly people, and also you probably end up with far more poly friends; the average poly person disproportionately is/does [various personality factors and hobbies] in ways you disprefer to the average monogamous person.
16. You believe men and women have different age-based preferences, and this will lead to relationship instability over time in a relationship structure that prioritises need/preference optimisation vs. committing to one person giving you the “whole package” over time.
I wonder if most of the population accepts these as valid reasons. I don’t feel much jealousy and fear it’s ruining my dating prospects to even be open to poly, even though it’s plausible that I would rarely or never date additional people
Not wanting to date habitual defectors
To rephrase more neutrally: there’s a trade off between optionality and the opportunities that can only be unlocked through long commitment (analogous to rabbit hunters vs stag hunters, but over a prolonged period). Assume there’s a Pareto frontier and one’s position on it is morally neutral: high-commiters/stag-hunters are still better off if they pair with each other than with high-optionality-types/rabbit-hunters (although the reverse is much less true). It sucks wanting to stag hunt when everyone around you wants rabbits. Monogamy can be useful as a costly signal of “I want to stag hunt” even for someone who would be fine being poly with another stag-hunter.
I can think of at least one friend who self-describes as not feeling jealousy and being more naturally poly, but chose monogamy for basically this reason.