Still feeling a little slighted, I am wondering, do most poly folks feel the same about someone like me? That we can't change? Have you always felt "poly", even when you didn't have the word for it? Thanks.
Hmm, see, I think that there are different groups of folks.
Some are monogamous, through and through. No matter how much they pretend to be poly (often to try to make their partner happy), they will never succeed.
Then there are the poly, through and through, that have known it all their lives. No matter how much they try, in order to make their partner happy, eventually they are going to feel closed in.
The middle class are those who have been brought up monogamous, and have managed to suppress the poly urges to convince themselves and others that they are monogamous. The question is, are they willing and able to deprogram themselves from what society has brought them up to think is right?
There have been a few One True Wayers who have maintained that there is no such thing as the first class, and that everyone is poly, it's just that some are hiding it better than others. I don't buy into that at all.
So for me, I didn't feel "poly", I felt unethical, immoral, untrustworthy and a whole bunch of other negative emotions because I didn't seem capable of "staying faithful", no matter how much I loved someone. I had no clue that poly existed.
As for the kink side of things, I have written elsewhere that sometimes the non-kink (vanilla) poly folks feel a bit left out because so many poly folk are also into kink. Kink changes the whole dynamic or relationships and sometimes to the point where "does not compute" starts flashing in the head when you try to grasp the concepts. We talk about how the old Mormon polygamy was bad because of how it was always one man, many women and how women need to have the right to have multiple partners too, and yet the d/s 24/7 TPE relationship is often structured exactly that way, OPP and all. That, somehow is ok, whereas the LDS version isn't. I'm not saying it's wrong, just cannot reconcile the two in my head.
We are talking in other threads on here about how bad it is to be a doormat in a relationship - to stand up for what we need, etc. And yet when it comes to kink, it's just fine to be a doormat and let your "master" dictate everything to you. I struggle to help folks in that sort of dynamic for that reason, I guess.
There is no question, though, that these folks make it work well for themselves, and that it is fully consensual. So it's not that I have a problem with it, just can't comprehend why someone would want that, and thus find it hard to contribute to discussions about it.