Well, I'm not very experienced with poly, but my last three relationships were with gentlemen I met online, so I thought I might offer my own experience here:
I've been going through this thing where 60-70% of the men who contact me are married. This happened even when I expressly ask for no married men. I generally try dating on cupid or craigslist.
Does this happen to other women a lot?
The percentage of married men who contact me is quite a lot lower, but I think that is mostly because I am younger, so most men my age just aren't married. But yes, some guys who visit my profile do seem like they are there to cheat. I just do not respond to them.
How do you avoid these men?
I ask questions and try to understand a man or woman's situation before I get involved with them. I will not get involved with someone who is currently cheating or has cheated in the past, or someone who will not give me information about their circumstances. Of course, anyone could still be lying to me, but I want to at least make it harder for them. To my knowledge, I have not been with a cheater or been cheated on yet.
Are you ever tempted to get involved?
No. Just thinking about cheating is emotionally triggering for me. My mother cheated on my father when I was a child, and he pulled a knife on her when he found out. Then their relationship became even more abusive on both sides, and they got a divorce.
My mother proceeded to cheat on almost every man she dated for the rest of her life, and also physically abuse some of them. When I was 12, for example, she cheated on two men with each other, then had no idea who my half-sister's father was, and apparently decided not to abort based on an incorrect assumption. Once it had been confirmed her assumption was wrong, she asked the incorrect "father," who was cheating on his own wife, to sign the birth certificate anyway so that she could deny parental rights to the actual biological father. The biological father fought a legal battle to gain any rights over his child. Now my little sister gets a new father figure every time my mother cheats on a guy and I cannot help because she threatens me with violence if I try to interfere.
As for my father, he never dated or, to my knowledge, became physically or emotionally intimate again after being cheated on. He seemed to believe that most women cheat and often said misogynistic things. He disowned me at 14, after I told him I was sexually interested in women, then left the country and stopped paying child support. That was the last time I saw him.
Sorry if that was TMI. I just feel sick if I dwell on cheaters or cheating. Even typing this is making my heartbeat feel irregular.
If you mean where do I meet folks online, I generally join online forums or communities that relate to my interests or hobbies and end up getting to know people there. That also allows friendship to develop first, and ensures that I have something in common with people I meet. This is probably not the best choice for casual encounters, though.
Also, if you have dated a cheater, can you ever be friends?
I do not know, as I would not want to be friends with a cheater, since just the thought of cheating is upsetting to me, as explained above.
Also, I wanted to reply to this post:
I read an article recently in which researcher Eric Anderson interviewed a number of college-aged men who were in ostensibly monogamous heterosexual relationships of at least 2 years' duration (past the NRE stage). Almost all of the interviewees expressed a desire to have sex with people other than their partners. Roughly half of the interviewees acted on that desire at some point during the study. (The stronger the expressed desire for sex outside the relationship, the likelier the interviewee was to act on it.)
Thank you for posting about this article. I had never seen it before, but I looked up information about it after reading your post.
Here is a link that tells more about the study, if other readers are curious:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vicki-larson/why-men-need-to-cheat_b_1170015.html
While it is certainly interesting, my issue is that is Dr. Anderson still seems to be speaking from a monogamist perspective himself, at least according to the interview.
For example, he writes:
Rather than marrying 20 times or more in one's life via serial monogamy, we can keep one emotional lover and just have casual, meaningless -- and hot -- sex with strangers. This gives us the long-term emotional stability we desire psychologically, alongside the hot, carnal sex we desire somatically.
But what about people who want or have more than one "emotional" lover? From what I have seen, that is the situation that many people on the forum are in, including me. Isn't it basically monogamist to say that "we" desire "long-term emotional stability" with "one emotional lover"?
Also, here's another direct quote from the interview:
People in open relationships structure their engagements as to reduce emotional intimacy. But, yes, of course it can happen. What I find from those in open relationships, however, is that once they have had sex with that person they fancied, they tend to get over them.
If we really want to prevent our lovers from developing the lust of others, or worse, emotional intimacy with others...
Wow, that's quite a lot of generalizations. People in open relationships structure their engagements as to reduce emotional intimacy? There seem to be many exceptions to that on the forums here. People's fancy for others diminishes after sex? It is "worse" for a lover to have "emotional intimacy" with someone else than sex?
That certainly sounds like it comes from an emotionally and romantically monogamous perspective.
Anyway, I still really enjoyed reading the about the study; I just wanted to comment on the fact that apparently even people studying exceptions to monogamy seem to be doing so from an essentially monogamist standpoint.