Poll: If polyamorous, are you spiritual or scientific?

Spiritual or Scientific?

  • Male, and I believe in endless love (Spiritual)

    Votes: 1 4.8%
  • Female, and I believe in boundless love (Spiritual)

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • Male, and it all makes sense (Scientific)

    Votes: 11 52.4%
  • Female, just fuck me already, idiot! (Scientific)

    Votes: 3 14.3%

  • Total voters
    21
I think these simplistic, dichotomizing statements say much more about your assumptions than reveal anything about the poly community. (Or better yet, the poly communities, as I am learning.)
 
Troll
 
I'm not taking a poll when the OP is using it to make an assumption about the people that participate here. It makes me feel manipulated. MFN the vagueness of your responses in regards to the purpose of this poll and in regards to what the poll actually is asking make me nervous and if you don't give us some answers I will be advocating for giving you infractions as a troll. You've had a couple of days to "collect your data" Its time to give us the information that has been asked for.
 
Well you must admit your poll assumes that spiritual and scientific are some how mutually exclusive or dont overlap. Whether you're a scientist or a philosopher, you have to define your terms -what you mean by spiritual and scientific. The way your poll reads, you don't mean either. You seem to mean physical vs. emotional.

So what are you asking:
Are people poly because they believe it is more compatible with our biological instincts?
Are people poly because it gives them certain social or economic advantages, such as not trashing a marriage, disrupting a family unit, or selling a house?
Are people poly because they realize life is finite and don't want to miss out on certain life experiences?
Are people poly because having more than one person makes them feel more emotionally secure?

What is it you want to find out?
 
So far, with only 13 votes, the results are inconclusive at best.

However, there's still an interesting bias showing up. Only one male chose spiritual. Most females chose spiritual, and most males chose scientific.

Does this reveal much? No. And the first post mentions as such.

For example, a poll asking "Would you prefer to be partnered up with somebody physically attractive, OR would you prefer to be partnered up with somebody intellectually stimulating?" would not answer the question of whether or not people, in general, prefer a nice mixture of those two feats.

But if such poll did show a strong bias, it would be interesting to note, at the least. If such poll was, let's say, expanded to include options for men and women, and then showed an unambiguous bias, the results would further be interesting.

I came in with the assumption that polyamorous people are just like all other people: subject to the same forces of nature. What the results are currently leaning towards is that males either are, or prefer to be, objective, etc., and that females either are, or prefer to be, emotional, etc.

If indicative of any truths, the results are only something worth noting. They are not hard-and-fast rules, and to follow them blindly would carry much peril.

On another note, I find it interesting that not everybody voted. The prevailing reason given by those who've commented was the refusal to be neatly grouped into a category, further to be dissected by somebody of no consequence.

I hope this answers a question or two.
 
. . . I find it interesting that not everybody voted. The prevailing reason given by those who've commented was the refusal to be neatly grouped into a category, further to be dissected by somebody of no consequence.

I hope this answers a question or two.

No, it doesn't. You haven't answered any of our questions.

And the reason you got very few responses in this poll is not just because people don't want to be categorized. It's because YOUR POLL MAKES NO SENSE! And neither does your "explanation."
 
Here is an experiment that might interest you

although it's not related to polyamory per se. Psycologists asked men and women which situation would bother them the most, if their significant other was falling in love with some one else, or if they had sex with someone else. More men than women said they would be more upset if their partner had sex with someone else. More women than men said they would be more upset if their partner fell in love with someone else. Which seemed to prove the common sterotype that women are more love-oriented, and men care more about the physical aspect.

But there are two problems with psychological experiments that ask people to self report:

1) People consciously or subconsciously may not be telling the truth. For example women may believe they should, or society expects them to, care more about love and feelings than sex, and answer the question in way that reflects that idealized version of themself, or what they think society feels is normal or right. And guys may feel its unmanly to care about more about love than sex.

2) The second problem with self reporting is something the researchers called inference. For example, a woman might infer that if her partner was in love with someone else, chances are they would be having sex as well, and perhaps it is really the sexual infidelity that is most disturbing to her. Or the man might infer that if his partner was having sex with someone else, she must be in love with him as well, because he assumes that his partner or women in general just wouldnt have casual or meaningless sex like men do.

So the researchers re-designed the experiment. They told the subjects they were actually conducting an experiment about memory. They asked the men and women to memorize an 8 digit number, and said they would be asked to recite it back at some point during the experiment, after being asked some other "unrelated" question (which was actaully the question described above) The idea behind this approach, is that when a person's brain is preoccupied with another mental task, it will interfere with other thought processes like considering social norms or drawing inferences, and the "truth" will come out.

In the second experiment, the difference between the men and womens answers almost completely diasppeared. The percentage of men reporting they would be more upset by emotional infidelity increased, and the percentage of women reporting they would be more bothered by physical infidelity increased. A higher percentage of both men and women reported that they would be more upset by physical infidelity than emotional infidelity. (I can't remember the exact number- I think it was around 60-65%.)

I just thought this was interesting.
 
Last edited:
Here is an experiment that might interest you

In the second experiment, the difference between the men and womens answers almost completely diasppeared.

I just thought this was interesting.

I think that's interesting, too.

I can see what you mean about the inference. In my case, my husband is what I describe as "barely monamorous" in that he doesn't inherently care for romantic relationships, but I'm special so he makes the effort.

So if I found out that my husband was falling in love with another woman, that would be a disaster, not because I'm "polyamorously hypocritical" but because I know what my husband is like, and I know his emotional capacity.

Now, if I found out he had been sexually infidel, I would just be pissed off. He knows that if he talks to me about it, I'll be supportive, barring any major upheavals in the rest of my life that require immediate support and attention. So if he went sneaking around behind my back, I would be hurt and confused.
 
So the researchers re-designed the experiment.... The idea behind this approach, is that when a person's brain is preoccupied with another mental task, it will interfere with other thought processes like considering social norms or drawing inferences, and the "truth" will come out.

Seems a little more complicated, but I guess it was a cheaper alternative to getting everybody drunk.
 
I agree that this poly is confusing and somewhat useless. Try reading some books on statistics and doing survey research. If you don't have good questions, your data will be meaningless.
 
Seems a little more complicated, but I guess it was a cheaper alternative to getting everybody drunk.

What? Nobody stocks sodium pentathol any more?
 
The questions are silly, frankly. The cultural assumption that science and spirituality are separate realms has been breaking down for the last decade or two.
This is interesting. Are you referring to any of the Copenhagen multidimensional theories of a transferrable consciousness or perhaps to the sort-of-spiritual aspects of Singularitarianism?

I assumed the survey was asking me if I was more scientifically-minded or spiritually-minded.
 
I assumed the survey was asking me if I was more scientifically-minded or spiritually-minded.

If it was, I think I could happily answer that question. But, as a female, I have two options:

I can say that I "believe in boundless love" (whatever that means). I can't answer that I do, because... what the hell is boundless love and why would I "believe" in it?

Or I can say that I am scientific, and that as a corollary to that, I am impatient to be fucked and think my partners are idiots. I can't honestly answer that this is true, either.

I assume that in this survey, the scientifically-minded females don't boundlessly love their idiot sex partners? But this is not clear.
 
Oh, and I forgot to point out that the choice is even harder for males!

For the man answering this survey, he must endlessly love all of his partners to count as a spiritually-minded partner. Endlessly. If he has ever fallen out of love, for instance, he is obviously not spiritual in this survey.

So he must be scientific! This also means that "it all makes sense" to him. By "it all", we're not informed whether that means all of polyamory makes sense, or everything in the entire world makes sense.

I am rather shocked that any man answered that they were scientific. Since science thrives on experimentation and the unknown, it is very unlikely that a truly scientifically-minded man would claim that everything makes sense to him. But miraculously, this survey has managed to find nine men who know everything and never experience doubt or confusion.
 
Back
Top