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.
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.