Only if they won’t let you throw it away.
ChrisPine
Karma: 246
It’s a cautionary tale about Norwegian food.
The second part is largely a filtering effect, yes. I probably should have left that part out. But the first part was a study done on Mormons, not ex-Mormons. Extreme sexual guilt is a big part of growing up Mormon.
I’ve heard a number of stories of “good” Mormons getting married and finally being allowed to have sex, and… they can’t do it. They can’t handle it. Or they manage to, several days later, only to end up feeling horribly guilty about it, locked in the bathroom, crying...
It’s not a happy religion.
I read this, and thought of Wednesday: “Among all American religions, Mormonism is the single most sexually guilt ridden. Mormonism scores 37%% higher in sexual guilt than even Catholics.”
from here: http://www.atheismresource.com/2012/sex-god-a-new-and-fascinating-book-by-darrel-ray
I don’t know how many ex-mormons you’ve talked to, but I’ve talked to quite a few, and in nearly every case we were miserable in the church, and much happier outside of it.
Took the survey.
Which got even more upvotes… [sigh]
Please don’t become reddit!
I only just got into town. :-)
See you there. :-)
Just took the survey. It was odd how only the word “Other” was translated into the Norwegian “Andre”… and everything else was in English.
I see your murder analogy as less useful than the child-parent analogy, FWIW.
Anyway, I asked, and you answered:
Why would your partner need to leave you for another if they could just have you both?? Because they might like the other more, which would hurt me enough that I would not want to stay.
Whoa, whoa, whoa… that is not an answer to the question I asked! You see, already, by examining the hypothetical situation, we are getting somewhere. :-)
So are your fears truly about being left, or about feeling a level of jealousy and hurt that you don’t think you can live with?
(You don’t have to answer me; the point is that, through asking these kinds of questions and examining your feelings, you can find the source of these feelings. And sometimes it’s a surprisingly small thing that you really need!)
You lost/left your partner because they committed a dealbreaker. I just have different dealbreakers than you do.
You choose (and are allowed to change) your deal-breakers.
And for the record, in case it sounds like I’m trying to convince you to try polyamory again, I’m really not. Not at all. While I don’t think the reasons you gave are very good ones for avoiding polyamory, the fact that you are in a successful mono relationship that you are both happy with is all the reason you need, of course. :-)
Have you ever felt jealousy? Romantic or otherwise?
Yes, both. But I don’t see jealousy as this big emotional dead-end. “If you see jealousy, run the other way! Only evil will you find here!” Jealousy is a response. Like a rash or something. It’s an indication that something needs to be dealt with. It could be the emotional equivalent of skin cancer… but it’s more likely that it’s the equivalent of a need to use a different brand of soap. Upon further inspection, it’s often not that big of a deal.
Having multiple children doesn’t threaten the loss of your previous children. That’s why.
See, I think we are just looking at this from very different perspectives. Why would your partner need to leave you for another if they could just have you both?? It seems to me that monogamy and its “all or nothing” treatment of partners is what causes people to leave. Monogamy is not immune to partners leaving, to which divorce statistics attest. No, I would say that monogamy encourages leaving! Sometimes even demands it.
if you’re more secure in your primary relationship than I would be in a poly scenario, I feel like you may not be updating sufficiently given available information about human relationships.
I’m guessing we are updating on very different data. Monogamy is a disaster, contributing to tremendous misery and pain (not to mention waste of resources). And the polyamory I’ve seen has been largely positive. Not universally, but largely. On more than one occasion, I’ve even seen it save what monogamy threatened to destroy, with its insistence upon jealous, fear, and punishment.
I have no idea what you are talking about with Tortuga, so cannot reply to that (sorry).
But yes, it seems we have very different experiences with polyamory, and in both cases mostly anecdotal evidence. (Perhaps I have just been lucky!) But before you write off polyamory altogether, I would suggest that you take a harder look at monogamy and what it has left in its path.
I was not, no. :-)
(But if you know that one, too, please share.)
I guess that the original poster didn’t mean to say “special”, but rather “unique” or “exclusive”.
Ok, then I would ask how the OP feels if their SO talked to another person. Or became friends with. Or found attractive. Or flirted with. There are some things that we can expect to be unique or exclusive in just about any relationship. (Certainly there are many things that are exclusive in my own primary relationship!) So it’s more a matter of changing where that line is drawn.
And as far as this: “Anxiety about the possibility that my primary would be stolen away by some more appealing secondary.” I would guess that monogamous relationships have to deal with this more (possibly far more) than do poly primary relationships. An appealing secondary is much less of a threat if your SO can get what they want from that person without having to break the primary relationship, if your SO can dispel the mystique, see that the grass really isn’t so green, etc.
In this case, we are talking about an event that could actually happen, and has to be accounted for.
An event that could actually happen in any relationship, not just poly ones. And like I said, I believe it’s more likely in mono relationships (whose track records are not stellar).
Also, in the thread where Alicorn’s partner talked about his view of the experience, occasional feelings of jealousy had been mentioned. Who said that emotions were rational?
Oh, I’m sorry if I implied that! Certainly they are not. But dark, unhelpful emotions are to be overcome, not given into. The mono relationship model seems to encourage jealousy, while the poly model seeks to overcome it. I would guess that, as a group, monos are more jealous than polys, because polys must learn to overcome it!
Just because you intellectually know that you matter to a person, and repeat to yourself that you shouldn’t be jealous, doesn’t mean that you cant control what you are feeling. If being happy or angry, or sad, or jealous, was a simple matter of sitting down and pondering the situation, then it would be much easier.
No, we can’t just reason away dark emotions, but we most certainly can illuminate them. Sometimes, upon examination, they turn out to be so silly that they just disappear. Other times they result from real problems that need to be addressed. But in any case, it’s best to try to understand where they come from. Jealousy can often be dispelled or dealt with. We are not helpless before it. It isn’t just part of the human condition, or “who we are”.
What could the original poster have been thinking about? I will try to make a wild guess:
Your guesses are probably accurate, and they make me a little sad… thoughts of mine in response: Loving others does not mean she loves you less. It most certainly does not mean that people are interchangeable!! (Hell, if people were all pretty much the same, then why would we ever bother with polyamory in the first place??) And why put so much pressure on yourself to be everything to one person? And even if you could be, would there be anything left of yourself?
from the posts of other polygamists, well… they all make it seem such a fluid, natural things to do, as if we were simply talking about getting rid of old intellectual chains and they “never” mention any roadblocks, acting as if they had always been above such silly, mundane emotions like jealousies or fear of inadequacy
Well, we all get their in different ways, and some come to it more easily than others. But perhaps it’s a bit like learning to ride a bike, juggle, or program: it seems hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, the hard parts seem almost laughably easy. “Just look forward and peddle faster!” Isn’t there a sense in which you, too, think that riding a bike really is just that simple? My 5-year-old certainly didn’t feel that way.
Others, reading the posts, don’t seem to have that problem, and actually are happy to know that there will be other people to “pick up the slack”, so to speak, when it comes to satisfying their partner’s needs (sexual, emotional,...) I must admit that I find that view admiringly selfless
Interesting! I very much feel this way, but I don’t think there’s anything selfless about it: it’s a relief to me. A relief to know that I don’t have to try to change myself to be everything to her (an impossible task), and a relief to know that she won’t have to leave me (or cheat) to get the things I can’t give her.
but, my experience has made it rather difficult to consider it somehow “superior” to a monogamous relationship
If I implied that it was superior, I apologize. Everyone should do what works best for them, of course. We have found that it was the right choice for us.
I also dispute the fact that it should be considered inherently “superior” to a monogamous relationship.
As would I.
If we took the ability of such an arrangement to keep everyone involved happy or satisfied, I would say that it does not fare better or worse than a monogamous relationship
Hmm… not sure I know enough to say, though monogamous relationships have a pretty awful track record, don’t you think?
-it has its own set of “different” problems and complications, and I certainly wouldn’t call it “fail proof”-.
But is it more failure-resistant than monogamy? I would guess so, but I don’t really know.
Also, I get the impression that monogamous couples would consider a happy 10-20 year relationship that ends in something other than death to be, in some sense, a failure. But I think many polyamorous people would consider such a relationship to be a huge success. My point being: if there really are different ideas of what constitutes success/failure, then it’s hard to compare based on that.
Yes. Of course if you have multiple children they’re individually less special to you!
Hmm… perhaps we don’t mean the same thing when we use the word “special”. If I pretend that you used a word unfamiliar to me instead and had to work only on context, where you continue with:
You have less time and energy for each, less brain-space to store facts about each
...then I’d have to agree with you. Certainly, I have less time and energy to devote to each child.
and you aren’t even culturally allowed to have a favorite!
For the record, I never claimed to love them all equally, or to not have a favorite. (They are all my favorites, in different realms, but even so… it would be absurd to claim that it just happens to all add up to be equal.)
But I don’t see what point you are making here. My point is that my love for the first child was not diminished by the arrival of the second. For some other definition of special (importance in my life), I would say that the first is just as special to me.
The reason this is brought up (perhaps mostly by poly people with more than one child) is that one’s capacity for love, for this “specialness” is not fixed! Another child comes along, and your capacity grows. Another long-term, committed partner, and your capacity grows.
That is the point of the argument: capacity is not fixed in size.
As for why it should be different for lovers, the psychology about lovers and children is very different.
Certainly, but the point about specialness-capacity-increase is fairly general. I would apply it to lovers, to children, to favorite movies, to desserts, to symphonies… the more things we love (or are special or meaningful to us), the more our capacity increases. These things, these experiences make us grow. (Well, maybe not desserts; that’s a different kind of growth.)
And we accept that this is how we work in terms of children, movies, food, music… why make an exception for lovers?
There is no reason in principle why we couldn’t have been hardwired for extreme strict romantic monogamy and still love lots of children.
Ok. I suppose not. I suppose we could have been hardwired for extreme preference for only one flavor of ice-cream… Do you just really not like the comparisons between different categories of things we like/love/enjoy? Of course our feelings for these different categories are all very, very different, but the generalization seems valid enough to me.
And especially: if they feel similar enough to me for the generalization to hold, then I’m really not going to be convinced that I must love only one by the argument “romantic love is different because it’s different”. (Which isn’t what you were saying, but it’s the message this line of argument addresses.)
I suppose no analogy would be perfect, but saying that kids can be jealous doesn’t seem to justify or explain rational adult emotion. I would certainly not agree that kids with siblings are ultimately worse off than those without!
Getting back to the original point of seeing one’s partner with another makes one feel non-special… I still don’t know why someone (some healthy adult with decent self-esteem) would say this. My guess is that I am finding it hard to understand because I have been in that situation, and the OP (jmed) hasn’t. So jmed is trying to guess what it would be like, but because it is so far our of his/her experience, he/she isn’t doing a very accurate job.
In my experience, such an event has no impact on my perception of my own specialness. Much like when a lover makes a new friend, or … I don’t know… discovers a new restaurant? These things are just (varying degrees of) nice and exciting.
Because seeing my partner being emotionally or physically intimate with someone else (or knowing they were, even without seeing it) = immediate non-specialness.
I don’t know why you would say this, and I strongly disagree.
I have three children. Does loving one mean that the other two are not special to me?? Does a parent only have enough love for one child? Why should it be so different for lovers?
I apologize for rocking the boat, if I have.
Interesting benefit of polyamory: there’s a lot less that can rock the boat (or sink it)! We enjoy a stability we did not have before.
I guess my philosophy is that fairytale monogamy is optimal for the young (say under 200 years or so)
And yet, the vast majority of poly people are well under 200 years old… I doubt they would agree with you on what is optimal for them.
I suppose you could counter that the vast majority of people under 200 years old are monogamous, but that seems more due to monogamy’s enormous head-start in modern western culture than due to what is optimal for the young.
This is why I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about not being bisexual, since immortal superbeings clearly would be.
I’d be very interested in hearing about that hack. I haven’t been able to pull it off, myself, and also feel vaguely guilty about it. (Especially after seeing the grace and ease with which my wife pulled it off.)
While “acquire” and “harem” are words quite conflicting with the spirit of polyamory (and I know you were kidding), it’s a good point.
Though, as a flirty poly nerdy guy, I have no personal interest in this message getting out. :-)
You have to like to learn how to be a wizard.