serialmonogamist
New member
Hey, GS. Yes, I think this is a concept that people have lost in modern serial monogamy. I had relatives that were married and could no longer live together but they stayed married after separating and never got divorced. This is also the way it seems to have been done during the time the old testament was written - i.e. you were supposed to honor your existing marriages while taking on new marital responsibilities.Relationships are not defined/classified by their duration.
I'm not sure "love" ever "stops" ,but evolves. When we've truly loved someone there's a part of them - that piece we did love - that we'll always love. But like we say in so many other places and topics - life (or people) is/are not static. We can well 'love' someone - i.e. wish them nothing but happiness and success in their life and contribute to that when we can, and still not be able to live with them or tolerate negative aspects they've taken on.
No, that's my point. I'm not incapable of finding other people attractive or feeling love for past lovers. I just can't deal with the idea of having to reassure one person that my relationship with another isn't going to take away from my love for them and then go off and not worry that I'm doing something hurtful while having fun with someone else. In my mind I can reason that it's all ok, but when I see a person feeling a little guarded the next time I see her after being out with another woman and she's saying, "no, really I'll be alright," I still feel responsible for her pain on some level.You seem to state that you are incapable of literally 'seeing' another person when you ...........'love' ? one person. You become blind to the external world of love potential. i.e. the very definition of a monogamous person.
Monogamy technically refers to marriage, not love. If you would have true "monoamory," you would only be able to love one person, period. Can love totally end? I think you have to believe that if you truly believe in your own "monoamory" but in reality the part of you that loved someone always lives on somewhere inside your heart. So to say you completely stopped loving someone seems more like something you tell yourself to be able to move on and still view yourself as "monoamorous."It still seems to me that you see monogamy as something that is meant to last forever.
Because I'm trying to figure out a way to reconcile my desire for monogamy with my feelings of confusion at being potentially polyamorous. I don't think wanting to limit myself to one relationship makes me a hypocritical poly. It's just another poly choice, I think. What I don't want to have to do anymore is say things like, "I don't know what I ever saw in her," when I know darn well what I saw in her and I still see it in her, only I know nothing will come of it anymore. Or I don't want to say, "no, I never meet any other women who I find attractive and would like to date if I had the chance" when I would like to date them if I wasn't in a relationship. Such honest issues aren't as important as organizing time, households, responsibilities, etc.?Well, that's interesting. Never would have thought of it that way. But then you wouldn't need to learn about managing poly relationships, befriending metamours, sharing time, households, responsibilities, and so on, as many of the poly peeps here do. You'd really just be living monogamously and having memories and past experiences of former relationships to draw on -- nothing new there. I really don't think that's a very useful way of looking at sequences of monogamous relationships. What good does it do you to think of it as polyamory?
If monogamy was as simple as how you choose to live, then people would never ask if you ever thinking about being with someone else and care if you say, "yes." I see more honesty in polyamory than monogamy for the most part, which is why I'm attracted to discussing life and love in this forum.you can see that we can choose to be (in the sense of how we live) either one, in numerous relationships during the course of a lifetime.
Try telling someone monogamous when you start dating that you aren't interested in committing for life. If you say you can't know until later, they might take their chances but then you risk having to be the one to disappoint them and tell them to start their search for a life companion again. I don't want to do that to someone so I just tell them worst-case scenario, you're not going to become my soulmate because I already had one - but then they usually don't want to invest time and energy in a potentially temporary relationship.You know, if I meet someone, enter into a relationship with them and we choose monogamy as the structure for our relationship, it doesn't mean we are committing to be together for a lifetime (unless, of course, it reaches that point and we do make that commitment). But monogamy doesn't require that.
To me, "soulmate" means your relationship never ends with a person, even after they or the relationship dies, because that person has become an engrained part of your soul. This could happen for many reasons I think, but one big one is when someone is the parent of your child and you always see parts of them in the child you love.I don't believe in soulmates. I think of love as an endless pool within myself. When I love someone, it means I have let them get close enough to me to touch that pool of love I have inside me. Some people immerse themselves more deeply than others, but once they've reached it, it cannot be undone. But people change, move on, die, etc., and relationships end.
Nicely said. I look back on most relationships with gratitude for what I was able to learn and express through the interactions. Sometimes it takes me a while to arrive at the realization of what was positive that came out of it, but eventually I start seeing the light.And many loving relationships are just meant to bless my life for a finite period of time. The path to my heart will always be there, although with time it will eventually be overgrown with thickets and weeds. Then someday someone else will blaze another path to my heart. All the people I've loved, whether platonic friends, family, or those with whom I've been sexually intimate, all accessed the very same pool and each has made their own trail to it (and therefore, to the center of me). How sad if it wasn't that way. The love I feel, the depth to which I feel it, and the imprint they have made on me have nothing whatsoever to do with whether I choose to have monogamous or polyamorous relationships in my life.
You're absolutely right that love is energy inside you that you send out to others and express in other ways. It's just some people want to be structured into your life in a certain way and if they aren't, they would appreciate it if you'd please seek someone else to direct your love toward. With monogamists, this seems to occur typically when you can't/won't tell them they're the only person you can think about having in your life. Rationally, they might understand that you don't want to dump them or hurt them, but they can't handle the thought that you could be interested in others. Maybe that's natural polygamy, maybe it's jealousy, or maybe it's both. I just wish there was a way around it without having to deal with more than one relationship at a time.