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.
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.