I have a confession to make. The first thing I thought when I saw a recent viral article about a lady whose polyamory is the talk of the town was, you can have all that going on and look like that! Not because the woman in question was unattractive, but because she looked like a normal 50ish woman who has not gone in for much if anything in the way of interventions. And yet she is swinging, as it were, from more chandeliers than you’d think a ceiling could support.
I think there are quite a few older, divorced, settled women, kids out of the house, who are happy to never marry again and yet love companionship and going out to nice dinners, that have a poly-adjacent lifestyle, although they would never label it that.
I don't know if we can or should draw too many conclusions from this. Aella's best guess when I asked her is that "unusual" things tend to correlate together which seems fair to me.
I'm poly...sort of. Like you, I don't see myself spending the same effort on 2+ people that one would on a typical life partner. It's more like the Dan Savage "monogamish" with a strong streak of libertarianism. I don't care if my partner has sex with someone else, and I don't think they have the right to dictate my sex life, either.
Monogamy tends to lead to a lot of drama. Oh no was she flirting with that coworker? Did he like her photo on Instagram? My husband kissed someone at a party, do I have to get divorced now? Why not just relax? If the relationship is sound, it'll survive some sleeping around, just as sound relationships survive all kinds of worse stressors, like childbirth and unemployment and illness.
To reiterate: to each their own. Re: "drama" though, I think some not all of this is about different understandings of monogamy. If you (not you-you, but more like, a practitioner of it) view it as a lifelong performance of 'I am only physically capable of attraction to one person, I am a that-person-o-sexual, and so is my spouse' then yes, exhausting and setting everyone up for failure. The people who hound their partners, 'Do you think X is attractive?' and are only content if the partner is like, 'no, they literally do not enter my line of vision.' There are however monogamous people who take for granted that everyone involved is a human being.
YMMV, but for I suspect most people the emotional burden of suppressing my insecurities at seeing my partner with someone else seems VASTLY greater than the burden of suppressing my desires for people other than my partner.
Most of my knowledge and experience with polyamory came from my time in Boston during the less-puritanical time of 2007 - 2012. Some were through circles of friends with Burning Man or MIT connections. But most were through being a ravenous OK Cupid user. There was not much of an attractiveness-level distinction between the two groups (the burners had the edge, though). I think the reason why the online daters looking for unicorn #4 were more derided as Rascal-bound farmers and Renfaire obsessives was due to their defense of their lifestyle. They were very blunt - to the point of being unsavory - about how their lifestyle was inherently better than anything else on the shelf. This came through their online dating marketing. It was extremely easy to dismiss their nah-na-na-nah-nah because it only survived a few seconds of close-eyed visualization.
I think there are quite a few older, divorced, settled women, kids out of the house, who are happy to never marry again and yet love companionship and going out to nice dinners, that have a poly-adjacent lifestyle, although they would never label it that.
For what it's worth, Aella (who's a big time poly advocate) found a very distinct positive correlation between a high BMI and being poly (graph about 2/3rds down the page): https://aella.substack.com/p/bmi-and-personality-correlations
I don't know if we can or should draw too many conclusions from this. Aella's best guess when I asked her is that "unusual" things tend to correlate together which seems fair to me.
Also I recently wrote about how confused the language is that we use to talk about monogamy and polyamory: https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/monopoly-restricted-trust
I'm poly...sort of. Like you, I don't see myself spending the same effort on 2+ people that one would on a typical life partner. It's more like the Dan Savage "monogamish" with a strong streak of libertarianism. I don't care if my partner has sex with someone else, and I don't think they have the right to dictate my sex life, either.
Monogamy tends to lead to a lot of drama. Oh no was she flirting with that coworker? Did he like her photo on Instagram? My husband kissed someone at a party, do I have to get divorced now? Why not just relax? If the relationship is sound, it'll survive some sleeping around, just as sound relationships survive all kinds of worse stressors, like childbirth and unemployment and illness.
To reiterate: to each their own. Re: "drama" though, I think some not all of this is about different understandings of monogamy. If you (not you-you, but more like, a practitioner of it) view it as a lifelong performance of 'I am only physically capable of attraction to one person, I am a that-person-o-sexual, and so is my spouse' then yes, exhausting and setting everyone up for failure. The people who hound their partners, 'Do you think X is attractive?' and are only content if the partner is like, 'no, they literally do not enter my line of vision.' There are however monogamous people who take for granted that everyone involved is a human being.
YMMV, but for I suspect most people the emotional burden of suppressing my insecurities at seeing my partner with someone else seems VASTLY greater than the burden of suppressing my desires for people other than my partner.
Most of my knowledge and experience with polyamory came from my time in Boston during the less-puritanical time of 2007 - 2012. Some were through circles of friends with Burning Man or MIT connections. But most were through being a ravenous OK Cupid user. There was not much of an attractiveness-level distinction between the two groups (the burners had the edge, though). I think the reason why the online daters looking for unicorn #4 were more derided as Rascal-bound farmers and Renfaire obsessives was due to their defense of their lifestyle. They were very blunt - to the point of being unsavory - about how their lifestyle was inherently better than anything else on the shelf. This came through their online dating marketing. It was extremely easy to dismiss their nah-na-na-nah-nah because it only survived a few seconds of close-eyed visualization.
You'd think they'd get sore after awhile.
elm
i wonder how much the ten gallon bucket of lube costs
What an offensive comment.