Time in Poly vs Mono

apophis

New member
Hi everyone,

I really appreciate a forum like this which allows for open discussion on a topic that it can be hard to find people to openly discuss with.

There's a subject that I'd like to address which I think gets thrown around a lot in somewhat less than valid ways. I see many poly people referring to how the idea that "commitment" or "love" is enhanced by exclusivity and heightened in the monogamous relationship is nothing more than a myth. Now I can see where people are coming from in that respect. Of course the feeling of love can be experienced just as highly in a poly relationship as a monogamous one, and by no means could we say that a poly partner does not hold a high level of commitment. The problem is I think when addressing this what's too often being looked at is the fairy tale version of monogamy. I think too much of the poly versus mono discussion centers around the version of mono presented by cultural norms and those embodying the exceptionally high divorce rate. However I think most of us can also agree that there are perfectly healthy mono relationships where both partners recognize that it's not a fairy tale, that they are choosing that lifestyle, etc.

The tendency to compare mature poly to immature mono strikes me as unfair and misrepresenting the issue. The truth is I think the argument that exclusivity at the very least results in a different kind of relationship actually holds a lot of weight.

The bottom line is this: human development and understanding comes from experiences (in the broad sense: thinking about a problem counts as an experience), experiences occur over time, and time is limited. So I think in this instance whether to be poly versus mono comes down to more of a lifestyle decision of how you want to use your time and what experiences you want to form to push forward your development.

Now of course there are those who argue that personal development is best enhanced by either poly or mono, but I think both arguments are non-existent. It depends on what you're focusing on. However I think there is weight to the argument that a poly relationship in some respects cannot match up to a mono relationship (again assuming both are of the mature variety) and vice versa.

Hypothetically, you (of the metaphorical variety) and I both have a strong ability for writing, we both take it seriously, and when we do it we are fully committed to it. We handle it well as a profession and represent the utmost of adults. I don't think there is any argument at all to be made against the idea that if I spend three times the amount of time writing than you do, that I will end up with a far more intimate and experienced understanding of writing than you. This doesn't mean you love writing less than I do or that you are less committed to it, but that doesn't have any effect on the point. However you also can be involved with one or two (not specific use of numbers) other careers that are highly interesting to you where I'm far more limited to hobbies.

It seems to me that being poly is more than just a choice of loving multiple people. I am at a personal crossroads of fully understanding that love for more than one person is not only possible but probably normal (neurologically pretty well demonstrated), but I don't see that as an ultimate argument for becoming poly. I think it's worth acknowledging that the decision to be poly is not only the decision to engage in a broader spectrum of relationships of a wider variety but also the decision to sacrifice the potential of the single relationship in favor of that. The decision to be mono is, of course, the reverse.

If I decided to be poly with my current partner, and we were to develop other partners and relationships, then the reality is that no one, including me, would ever know her as well or have as many experiences with her as I would if we didn't become poly. If I don't decide to be poly, I sacrifice the potential of what I could learn and experience with other partners in favor of what I could develop by devoting all of my time and effort to the single partner.

What strikes me as unfortunate is that I see this discussed almost nowhere. Even for those who articulate that mono is not lesser than poly, they seem to avoid the idea that mono has something that poly doesn't. It's brushed under the rug in favor of espousing all of the benefits of poly without a serious investigation of the benefits of mono. I am not making the argument that poly people love their partners less than mono people, but in a technical practical form of commitment (rather than the fairy tale immature form) I would have to argue that a poly relationship is, in fact, less committed than a mono one.

The development of poly seems heavily based on looking at practical reality. It's the recognition that the myths of monogamy are unfounded and unnecessary as well as that love of more than one person in a variety of ways is fully possible and has great potential to be life-enhancing. This is all using the practical reality to refute the mythology, but in some respects it looks like at least some poly groups have developed their own mythology wherein poly achieves everything monogamy does and more. That's just as nutty as the idea of a one true all-encompassing love that poly seems to try to refute. On a practical level, any fraction of the time or experience devoted to something cannot result in the same level of that thing.

So poly, then, would seem to be the choice between the benefits of maintaining a more full individual freedom in terms of sexuality and romance in order to experience the potential growth caused by the variety of partners or the benefits of complete devotion of time and energy to another individual at the expense of other potentials in order to fully explore that individual and everything they have to offer you. Both are alluring, and I think that they are mutually exclusive (not to imply that they are black and white...shades of gray entirely possible). I also think that they are equally mature when neither of them is taken to be a fairy tale ideal.
 
I like the discussion. I think you bring up interesting things. I don't agree with your every premise, but unfortunately, I don't have the chops to delve into right now. I'll be back. :)
 
Your thread inspired me to create one of my own, asking for advice from the other side of the fence, being in a poly relationship but missing the focus that came with monogamy.

I tend to feel like no amount of additional relationships can really make up for people having to divide their attention among lovers, at least for me, being someone that wants to constantly be with my lover and focus on shared activities with the main time apart being when we have to be separate for work. My wife Ginko and I have been very compatible in this preference, though opening up to dating other people necessarily changed that a bit.

Polyamory seems to work better for people that need a bit more time to do their own thing. My wife's boyfriend J would feel crowded if he got as much attention from my wife as I do, while I find myself missing the level of attention I received when it was just the two of us. Someone I spoke to Friday night was telling me that he'd much rather be someone's 2nd or 3rd priority than their first. I could see polyamory working well for him.
 
I don't know many people who spend all of their time with their mono partners, and the ones I do know seem to have unhealthy, co-dependent relationships to me.

When I have a single partner, I spend some time with that partner, but most of my time is spent without them. Work, hobbies, hanging out with our respective friends...

When I have more partners, I feel I spend the same amount of time with each, and less on my own.

So I guess in my case, I'm the one who gets to know myself less? I guess to be with more people I sacrifice on reading, playing games, watching movies, etc. But then I make the same "sacrifice" when I'm in a monogamous relationship rather than being single.

Now, I agree that with a third relationship, then I would have to split my time differently, and I assume there would be a reasonable amount of time spent with two or even all three partners at once. I would always want some quality, one on one time though.

Do you think people who are poly and childfree still have that "problem"? Because monogamous people who have children have to give their children more time, as well, and that would take from their partner's. It seems to me that if you have two partners, you spend more quality time with each of them than with your single partner if you have one partner and four kids, because everyone knows how much work, time and investment kids take, more than partners I would say.

EDIT: hell, for that matter, do you think that people who have one child get to know that child better than if they had two? What about parents? Do you get to know your single parent better than if you had two parents? (In that case I'd say it's a trick question. They'd most likely have to work more and therefore you would see less than either parent if you had two. Still, on their days off you'd be with just them I guess).

I don't place enough important in knowing someone perfectly, I guess. I feel like I know Seamus well, but I don't feel that I know him better than I did a year ago. I think there is a curve line at which point you just know someone and you're learning so much less and so much slower, and if you spend the appropriate quality time with them, you might just learn just as much in less time, anyways.
 
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NovemberRain: Looking forward to it.

turtleHeart: I agree. My thoughts and feelings on the subject run very similar to what you seem to be experiencing.

Tonberry: You seem to have side-stepped the argument through analogy without really addressing it. I'll take this piece by piece.

Certainly there are mono partners who are co-dependent and spend all of their time together. There are also mono partners who are not co-dependent who still spend the majority of their time together because that's how they want to engage with someone. As turtleHeart mentioned, it's popular within that framework to consider the time you spend away from your partner your work time. Of course you also take time to be with friends and family, but the majority is still spent with your partner. This is really quite similar to most poly relationships where the majority of time is still spent with a much more limited number of people. It's just divided amongst those people instead of spent with the one. As I mentioned, I think it's important to compare mature mono with mature poly rather than immature mono with mature poly.

I agree that you sacrifice a fair amount of your alone time to be with a partner. In essence what you are doing is saying that I will learn and benefit more from being with this person than from being by myself. In the case of many poly people I think the belief is that being with multiple people in loving relationships will cause the most self-growth. For mono people it's that being with one person will. For someone who thinks that their greatest growth is done on their own, they'll likely remain single or keep small relationships on the side while maintaining the majority of time to themselves.

I mentioned the one on one time in my initial examples. I just took it further and said that you can't inherently compete in certain ways with someone who has far more one on one time than you do.

The argument about the child is an interesting addition, but I think it depends on how you handle it. First of all, of course I think people who are poly and childfree are still sacrificing the time commitment of the mono relationship. We can look at how children affect both mono and poly dynamics, but my initial argument was based on neither having children so as to simplify variables. That being the case, no part of my argument was dependent on either sort of relationship having children. The addition of children also does not affect my initial argument. Even if you could prove mono people have to focus on the child more than their relationship, my initial argument of mono being more time-committed to a partner than poly and what results from that would still be unaffected.

However I think that there are ways to address a child without losing your partner in the process. I have seen couples who can create an interaction with the child that is also romantic and intimate for the couple in the process. I think it really depends on how the child is handled. If the child is handled as something that needs to be dealt with on a regular basis and the partners simply trade off on the responsibilities then the child will take a tremendous amount of time away from the couple. However if the child is handled as an opportunity for shared experiences with something that you have equal responsibility to raise then I think you can continue to spend most of the time together that you initially did. Of course the dynamic will change to some extent and will sometimes be interrupted by the child doing something unexpected, but I think the integrity of the relationship and amount of commitment put into it can actually be preserved.

In the instance of multiple children, I absolutely do think that parents with multiple children end up knowing their children less well than parents with a single child. As with poly, that may be perfectly fine to those parents. It doesn't mean they love them less, and their goals in raising the children may not require the constant interaction of the single child. For instance to want your children to grow up physically and mentally healthy feeling supported in what they do is a very noble parenting goal. However it's also one that can take less of a one on one time commitment allowing for multiple children (though I think there's a limit to how many). On the other hand if one wants to consistently engage with the single child for one reason or another then having more than one child will become a detriment to that. Just like my argument for poly versus mono, this depends on personal choice of what's desirable to gain from the relationship.

It seems clear to me that what would be gained from a mono relationship is simply not desirable to you. I just want to note that I'm not faulting that. As I said in my initial post, this is really a personal choice. It doesn't mean you love your partners less, but I think it's necessary to articulate the realities of the benefits in both directions. I actually disagree on learning just as much by spending appropriate quality time with them even if it's less time. Part of the challenge of the mono relationship is reinventing your understanding. I think it's heard a lot in the negative of finding the new spark or things that failing couples need to do, but there's a grain of truth lying behind it. In a healthy mono relationship part of the enjoyable challenge becomes how to get to know the person you're with in ways you haven't already.

The reason I'm in a mono relationship is so that I can spend the majority of my time with my partner and turn as much of that time into quality time as possible. Thus my contention is that the more limited amount of quality time to be found in poly cannot compete with that in certain respects. Those respects may be less, and likely are less, desirable to the poly person in favor of the quality time spent with multiple people and what can be gained from that. However being that in the mono relationship my reason for being mono is to gain as much as I can from the one partner, that demands that we put a lot of effort into reinventing our understandings.

Mono relationships will easily stagnate on the basis of the same things being repeated. To go back to my example from my first post, it's sort of like if as a writer I was just using exactly the same formula over and over to whip out story after story. Eventually I would probably start to hate writing or at least be very bored by it. However my commitment to writing as a single career is based on the idea that I want to gain everything I possibly can from it. So I'm going to find as many diverse and fascinating new ways to use writing as possible.

Mono isn't based on the fairy tale. It's not about finding someone who fulfills your every need or someone to be co-dependent with. It's about the fact that both partners think the most they can individually gain will be gained from dedicating the majority of time and energy to each other. It's about the exploration of one person versus the exploration of multiple. Of course this demands exploration. You can't just both sit around not really doing anything and expect that the relationship will just happen. That's the immature fairy-tale idealism again. It's necessary to be looking in the relationship at what haven't we talked about before, what haven't we done together, what interests you that we haven't explored, and so on. By constantly pursuing those things with one person you will gain a level of experience and understanding with them that is logistically impossible in any other way. A poly relationship is still based on doing those things in the quality time, but the mono relationship has a lot more quality time. Also the mono relationship never has to focus on how to divide the quality time or any of the resulting conflicts.

So as I said in the first post which I don't think has been refuted, poly is the choice to sacrifice what can be gained from a person in a mono relationship for what can be gained from multiple people in poly. Mono is the choice to sacrifice what could be gained from the multiple people for the total exploration of the one. They both have benefits. I don't think either one is right. I don't think poly people love their partners less than mono people or wouldn't put themselves on the line for them. It's a personal choice, but I do think it's entirely necessary to articulate the differences and that there are benefits and sacrifices from both styles of relationship.
 
It is quite possible that the benefits you mention would be lost on me, yes. I was in a monogamous relationship for a long time, but I still spend most of my time alone (not at work, either, I didn't have a job for most of that time, and my partner's schedule was such that he mostly spent night at work - sleeping - and so his days were spent at home too).

I guess I feel that when you spend too much time with someone, you benefit less from it (you're just hanging out at best, getting in each other's way at worst) and there is learn to learn about them, as they can't really tell you about their day if you were there the whole time.
I like spending time with my partners, but I like spending time alone so that I have things to share with my partners once I'm with them. I think that going to a movie as your date is a bit of a waste of time, as you're not interacting at all, and you could have seen the movie on your own and gotten the same out of it. When I watch a movie, or I read, I like doing it on my own, and then talking with my partners about it if they have done the same, or friends who have.
I guess TV is a bit different because you can talk about it as you watch without it bothering people. Still, I think you get less out of the experience because you miss what is going on due to talking over it. When I watch a show or movie on TV with my partner, I always end up having to catch it on my own so I can see what I missed.

I think some activities that get people closer can work with more than one partner. Videogames, board games, card games and sports come to mind. Basically, games. Actually, many require more than two players, and therefore are better with more than one partner.

I have noticed from talking with partners on skype (I've been in a few long-distance or partially long-distance relationships) that there is such a thing as spending too much time together. At some point you just have nothing to talk about, and being together just takes away from other things you could be doing that would enrich you - taking a class, reading a book, working on a project.
I do like working on projects together when it applies, though. For instance building a desk or a bed.

I guess in the end it comes down to the fact that after being around people all day (or one person for a long time), I need to be alone to recharge my batteries, relax, and get ready to face more people again. But when it's about being with the same person for too long, being with someone else fills that same needs, and so going back and forth between two partners rather than back and forth between one partner and being alone would help me deal with the stress as well. I would probably need a small amount of time alone every day, but definitely not as much, and I would see both partners as much as I would see a single one, as far as quality time is concerned.

It's probably simply that we work differently. My analogies were not meant to go around the issue, I find that I can discuss things better with analogies, trying to see if such and such situation would be the same or not, hence my suggestions.
I guess everyone balances between feeling crowded and feeling lonely differently. Some people could spend days or months without interacting with another soul and be fine, others could spend that amount of time without being alone for a second and be fine. I'm somewhere in the middle but definitely closer to the former.
 
I agree with Tonberry. I just don't work the way that you do. Three months ago, Runic Wolf (my hubby of 12 years)'s motherboard fried. We weren't in a financial place to fix it, so that meant that he had no reason to spend time in his office. Which lead to us spending all of our non working hours together. Now normally, I enjoy spending time with him, but I need a break every now and then. And it isn't just Runic Wolf I have this problem with, my son does it too. I don't think I could ever be one of those people who spends the majority of their time with a single partner. I wouldn't have anything new to share with them and that would make life very boring.
 
Tonberry: I appreciate you sharing your perspective. It's very interesting to hear what it's like for you in practical terms. I'll try to respond in kind and see if I can demonstrate more of what it's like for me and thus why I find there's more quality time for me in monogamy.

It's interesting what you said about just hanging out with someone. You're right that you can't tell someone about your day if you were there the whole time. It is important to still do your own things, but it's possible to have your own time and quality partner time at the same time (to overuse the word time).

Naturally my partner and I do not read together. We read mostly different things and at very different rates. That would be too much of a loss of the individual. We do, however, sometimes enjoy reading near each other at the same time. What this provides in a monogamous relationship is the opportunity to share things as they occur in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Every time either partner reads or experiences something that they find fascinating, the other partner is often nearby and happy to hear about it. Rather than hearing about a number of things in summary later, the opportunity is there to share them a little more in-depth as they occur.

Both of us have careers which are very independent and often lonely careers, but we are not lonely people. I write and compose and she paints and draws. Of course we have hobbies, but those are our primary pursuits. If we're at home working on something, we have the opportunity to interact as we work. She can get my opinion on something or share something she's discovered with me as it happens and vice versa. There's a great deal of intimacy and familiarity in that. Rather than trying to split our discoveries and understandings between multiple people, we have one person who has heard all of the previous ones who we can also share the new one with.

I also think that going to a movie on a date is a waste of time, but I don't think going to a movie with a partner is a waste of time. We do not talk while watching a movie or a tv show except for maybe a very occasional one sentence side comment to point out something we really like, but there's still an intimate involvement in the shared experience. I know when she gets excited about something or nearly any of her reactions to various things. In choosing to share the experience of watching a particular movie or show (which of course we don't always do) I can see how she reacts to the new thing. It's not a during-experience conversation that's important to me. It's that I know she has certain kinds of reactions to certain things, and I like being around to see them. I wouldn't be jealous if she shared those reactions with someone else, but I would feel like I was missing out on them. Then our conversations immediately after the movie or show discussing what we thought with the reactions still fresh in our minds would also be lost.

We do eventually want to play some board games together, but those sorts of activity oriented interactions are not important to us. We both like adventures, exploring new places, trying new foods, going for walks, etc. So when we want to share an experience and spend time with each other we do these things that we know we'll find mutual interest in. In fact, so many of our interests coincide that it would be terribly hard to find something we didn't find mutual interest in.

In doing those things by ourselves most of the time and just sharing them later, we would lose what we value out of it. What I value isn't discovering the really interesting tree or path and then telling her about it. It's being there when we discover it together. We talk and play with each other while exploring something and share in the exploration. If either of us are out by ourselves (which we often are as well) and discover something interesting, we often rush home to drag the other person out to see it (a desirable experience on both our parts).

We want to do all of our traveling together (and already have so far) for the same reasons. The shared experience of the exploration and adventure with someone who we've shared the vast majority of the other exploration and adventure with is what is desirable. It's all quality time for us. Of course we'd go off at various times and do our own thing, but the point for us is to do most of it together. We get a tremendous amount out of the actively shared perspectives.

In sexuality the exploration is the same. We both value having someone who we're entirely committed to. In fact, it seems a bit of a hassle to have to deal with other people. We have a growing understanding of each other's responses. We're always trying new things. At the same time, we understand each other sexually. The interrupting work for quick sex is just as desirable as the longer play at other times. To attempt to bring another person into those cycles and understandings would be...annoying.

When she goes somewhere I'll often pick her up when she comes back and vice versa. The sharing of the financial burden (though we maintain strictly separate bank accounts) is valuable for us both. It provides support when work ebbs and flows for either one of us. It also means we can buy each other gifts without worrying about buying gifts for anyone else. We're always noticing what the other responds to, and I'll pick up a surprise gift that she doesn't know exists based on a new interest she has just because I can. I could never even afford to do that with multiple people, and the sheer exertion of trying to keep even two people in my head on that level would be exhausting. When I go to a book shop I browse for both me and her because I'm so familiar with what she's reading and what her current reactions to books are. I couldn't add another person into that.

I also could never do an ebb and flow of financial support with more than one person. Additionally there's the issue of care. Both of us value having the consistent person around who's familiar with everything to help when something goes wrong. There's no question that the person who knows her best won't be there when she's having trouble with something, is sick, or even is in the hospital and vice versa. There would never be an issue of she's sick but my other is in the hospital so they take priority or that both were in the hospital and time had to be divided.

I couldn't divide my time between the things that she wanted to be involved in and the things that someone else wanted to be involved in. I'm far too focused on the person I'm with for that, and she is as well.

This is really what I mean by quality time in monogamy as well as getting to know someone on a level that's really impossible in any other way. Of course it seems that for you this isn't even something that's desirable which is great. Some of my early reactions to poly were that it was breaking all the rules and norms and moving relationships forward. I think it has created valuable discussion in relationships, but my perspective is more balanced now.

What I think is really moving forward is the understanding that there is no fairy tale relationship of any kind, and that a relationship is based on what the individual desires. What was most important to me here is to articulate my personal discovery that monogamy is not just some outdated immature fairy tale way of looking at the world but for some of us provides a mature, realistic and practical method of forming a relationship with another person. It doesn't inherently work on codependency or ideas that you could never love another. The mature understanding of it takes all of the available options into account, and then makes a decision based on them.

Finally, I felt it was necessary to articulate that, just like any variant of polyamory, monogamy also has a lot to offer for the right person that couldn't be found for them in another style of relationship.

You mentioned how different people feel crowded, lonely, etc. My preference is to divide my time between me-time, time spent with a single partner who I live with, and somewhat more minimal (not too minimal though) interactions with others. In that sense I like to be alone sometimes, love being with a partner I know intimately and trust, and don't like frequent amounts of strong interaction with other people. I'd rather keep them to friends, acquaintances, and people I have interesting conversations with where the majority of time will still be focused on myself and my partner. Some time would still be set aside for friends but possibly the amount of time devoted to a single poly secondary relationship for all of the friends combined.
 
So poly, then, would seem to be the choice between the benefits of maintaining a more full individual freedom in terms of sexuality and romance in order to experience the potential growth caused by the variety of partners or the benefits of complete devotion of time and energy to another individual at the expense of other potentials in order to fully explore that individual and everything they have to offer you. Both are alluring, and I think that they are mutually exclusive (not to imply that they are black and white...shades of gray entirely possible). I also think that they are equally mature when neither of them is taken to be a fairy tale ideal.

I don't have time to respond deeply so I'm just chiming in so I don't lose the thread.

But I agree in this quickie sense...

1) Poly and mono are both valid rship structures

2) Yes, there can be immature ways to do mono and immature ways to do poly. Yes there can be mature ways to do mono and mature wats to do poly.
Yes, I do not think mono is not just automatically the "immature" form of poly.

3) When you go mono, you have the possibility of going deep. When you go poly you have the possibility of going wide. Neither is guaranteed, of course because people are not things and the other partner's have their own wants, needs and limits. They may be mono but not WANT to let you know them deep. YKWIM? Ditto poly -- how far wide? Everyone has a polysaturation point, and I view this both in terms of number of partners and how deep you can even get to go with them because of that number.

Now I have to run, but I'll enjoy mulling all this over some more later. Thanks for the food for thought! :)

GG
 
do you think that people who have one child get to know that child better than if they had two?

As a divorced parent, I'd frame the question differently - having to share my children's time with my ex certainly does make me have to do much more work to keep up on the things that are going on in their lives (they see me on weekends).

When around both kids as often as possible, sure, I knew both just as well (and knew what was going on pretty well, too).

It's not two kids versus one. It's about time-sharing however many kids there are. That's my angle, anyway.
 
And as for the original post, I don't have the wherewithal to talk to all the points (great post, though!), but I know that in my partner's case, he "goes deep" with both me and his OSO. He gets close to friends and family as well, and if he had the time and energy to "commit" to everyone he loves (friends, family, etc.), he probably would. He's had a hard time in the past when he can't be there for one or the other of us as much as he'd like.

The boy's got a big heart, which I love, but which pretty much got me into a relationship structure that I never expected. Funny that. :)
 
My wife and I generally pick activities that we can both enjoy and grow together doing, like partner acrobatics, aerial dance, weight lifting at home, Toastmasters, cooking, martial arts, hiking, volunteering to fix bikes together, doing Habitat for Humanity, travelling to various cities on my weekends off, etc. We're even looking forward to taking an academic class or two together sometime, once we can do it just for fun. Also, it's good simply being together even when we're having a lazy day.

At home we have a large papasan cushion on the floor that serves as a little island for us to both sit on with our laptops in front of us, so even as we surf independently, or she's showing me her tumblr, we can be cuddled up together. We both like to be in nearly constant physical contact, as we fall asleep and throughout the day.

Growing up, I was used to dating people that were also dating someone else, but since I generally only got to see them once a week or so whether they were dating someone else or not, I didn't see it hurting my relationship for them to see other people, but I did notice that I was never as close to them as I wanted to be. I used to think I needed to be with multiple people in order to get all the affection/closeness I desired, but ended up finding the experience of going deep with one person to be preferable, provided that one person also wants to follow that route. With Ginko, since we both love being with each other as much as we can, I finally felt sated for time and affection shared (quality time and touch are my two love languages), but with her seeing someone else, though we still spend more time together than most monogamous couples, the difference is notable to me.

We still do much of the above, but if I don't assert my preference for one on one time, particularly on weekends, I get much less of it, as we may spend all weekend hanging out with J at his place or ours. This weekend actually went really well as I made it more clear what I was wanting and when it'd work well for me for her to see J, and for once no one ended up feeling shortchanged. I'm looking forward to seeing how we can do next weekend. Even if I prefer monogamy, I'm feeling more hopeful that we might find a way to be happy with the current relationship structure in the meantime.
 
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As for the parenting analogy, any kid my wife and I have would be the child of both of us, meaning it'd be something we'd both be strongly involved with, not a separate relationship that one of us is building while the other is off at work. I favor the idea of equally shared parenting, where both parents strive to dedicate similar amounts of time to child rearing, home making, and work outside the home, regardless of difference in salary. If I have kids, which I plan to, I want to be very involved in raising them. Ideally Ginko and I will reach a point where we can each work less than full time, and we're pursuing careers that should make this doable.

I'm often in favor of the idea of sticking to having one kid, but suspect we'll see how Ginko feels after the first and whether or not she strongly wants any more at that point. She was an only child, and I feel my parents should have stuck to one as well, even if it wasn't me. The poly equivalent for child rearing might be said to be megafamilies, as described in A Sane Woman's Guide to Raising a Large Family. I enjoy reading books/articles on both only child and many child families. It seems both can work.
 
Wonderful posts and wonderful thoughts.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write them.

I support much of your processes in thinking, and not to suggest you are at the end of that process, it is all a journey of course..

I now practice the lessons and values I have taken on by exploring polyamory as a way of maximizing the value of all personal relationships with every person around me. Clients, children, colleagues, aunts, friends, teachers, students, the bus driver or the woman at the coffee shop.

I am lucky to have these increased skills... And my feelilngs of connectivity to the world and it's people are higher because of it.

I feel grateful to have learned so much about what it is to love, and to be loved.
At the moment.... That is what I am grateful for..

I don't feel anything lacking, I look around my life and see blessing after blessing.
I am happy directing deep intimacy in terms of building a life in one direction.
And I feel lucky about that too :)
 
We do, however, sometimes enjoy reading near each other at the same time. What this provides in a monogamous relationship is the opportunity to share things as they occur in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Every time either partner reads or experiences something that they find fascinating, the other partner is often nearby and happy to hear about it. Rather than hearing about a number of things in summary later, the opportunity is there to share them a little more in-depth as they occur.

I have done that in the past, too, but it seems to me there is no need for a single partner to be there to hear you. There could be one partner on a computer, one reading, one doing yet another thing, and each saying "hey, guess what?" at relevant times to the other two. I don't think this example requires exclusivity.

As for sharing all of my experiences with one partner, well, the way I see it, there are two ways to share experiences. Actually living them together, or sharing them later with one another.
I am not going to live everything with my partners at the same time. A lot of it already has been lived without them, whether as a child (and shared with my family... and I don't feel I know my brothers less because there are 3 of them, really their interactions and how the related to one another showed important aspects of who they are, too) or later on with other partners, before I was in my current relationship.
I like living things together, and referring to them later, and having private jokes. But I also like telling someone important about something that happened to me, something important and personal that they don't get to know just because they happened to be there at the time, but because I made the conscious decision to share it with them.
Both can be very important, both make my connections grow deeper. I definitely wouldn't want to trade one completely (or mostly) for the other.

Sometimes, splitting up helps experience more. Seamus and I have mostly different tastes in books, but we have found that the stories themselves interest us. It's usually the writing style or the sheer amount of volume that turns us off. We each read on our own, but we tell each other about the story. The kind of stories he reads, I enjoy his retelling of them way more than I would ever enjoy the books. I have tried reading a book he had summed up to me before, it didn't compare to the experience of hearing him tell me about it.
He seems to similarly enjoy when I tell him about what I read.
Yet, our tastes overlap some, and when there are books we have both read, or often I have read the book and he has seen the movie (he works long hours and reads slowly, so it's much more practical for him), we talk about it on another level that is very enjoyable too.

I don't like movie dates much, but Seamus went to one recently. He went to see a movie I wouldn't have been interested in, and that he said sucked. She wanted to see it, he wouldn't have on his own. But when he told me about the most ridiculous parts, and how they made fun of the movie mercilessly after it was over, to me it was a bonding experience, too. It was over something that happened with another partner, but it was bonding for me too, just like I'm sure they bonded in the car on the way back from seeing it over how stupid some of the scenes were.

So, that's more insight into my personal views on this :)

About raising kids when you're divorced, I believe being divorced, even when in good terms although especially in bad terms, implies more of a dichotomy, a separation. You rarely all live together when it's a divorced family. You rarely all hang out together. There might be a sense for the kid(s) of being split into two, and possibly less sharing of what happened with the other parents, because saying positive things about the other parent might annoy the current one, but the kid doesn't want to say something bad about their own parent, either.
I think even when this isn't something the parents are doing (going against one another), children often feel "in the middle" and might be less likely to share in the same way you might share what you did with another partner, for fear of just creating more drama between the parents.

I do appreciate the analogy though. I think the two analogies (several children vs children in a divorced family) show two different kind of poly, the former a more communal, live-in, co-primary form of poly, the second one a more separated, two-lives, less contact between metamours (or even none except through the hinge) form of poly.
 
You're right. The example does not require exclusivity, but you're missing the point (or at least didn't directly address it). My point was not to illustrate individual things that can only be done if exclusive. That's impossible. You'd never find something. Depending on what poly people choose to spend their time on, they could always do some of the same individual things that the mono relationships are doing. My point is the sum total of all of those things happening the majority of the time cannot be replicated. That's the fundamental difference. So it would never be about pointing to some specific thing that mono people can do which poly people could never do. Arguably the whole point of being poly is the freedom to do anything. The point is that the level of understanding and individual focused commitment created in a mono relationship cannot be replicated in a poly relationship for reasons of physics.

It's interesting what you gain from relating the experiences, and of course all humans gain something from some form of stories. However we are physical creatures. Your brain rewires in accordance with what you interact with. A great deal of your self and perception is based on stored memories. Love I think is separate from that. It's an emotional state or a state of feeling. It may also be an ethical state for some people where they define love by the ability/desire to make sacrifices. However from a realistic standpoint a mature and committed mono partner will always end up knowing their partner better than a mature and committed poly partner. I don't think there's any way around that. I agree with (and I'm too lazy to scroll back and find out) the person who said that not all monos will be willing to go deep and not all polys will be willing to go wide. I think that's very accurate. However in the instance where you had two polys willing to go deep and wide currently in multiple relationships, they cannot achieve the same depth of understanding and knowledge of the other person as two monos willing to go deep and not going wide. That has nothing to do with how it feels to the individual. It's just the practical reality of it.

Again, to bring the argument out to other situations, a particle physicist must be constantly on top of her field. She has to be reading journal articles, constantly tracking the latest experiments, and also consistently researching and publishing her own work. If she were to try to keep up a career in genetic engineering as well, she would be in a constant battle to keep up with pioneering research in both fields as well as her own. She might be brilliant, but I don't think there's a case to be made that someone equally brilliant focused on one field would not achieve a greater understanding of it and more research within it than she would.

To bring that back to the relationships, removing a certain amount of the complexity (what I've been referring to as depth though the word has unfortunate connotations) from it is fine. That's what I mean when I say you could replicate any of the individual experiences but not all of them. That's removing part of the complexity. Also to hear a summary of the experience later does remove some of the complexity of actually having that experience yourself. Thus no one who reads adventure books has a portrait hanging in the Royal Geographic Society. The experience of the story is an experience and even a shared one, but it does not hold the same level of complexity as the actually shared experience. So you can share any experiences with a poly partner that you want to, but you can't share all of the experiences that mono partners do. Due to the way we're wired and the boundaries of linear time, that means mono partners will end up with a greater level of depth and complexity in their relationship than poly partners. A sacrifice that I think is made for the greater level of complexity in one's individual life where the poly individual has multiple relationships and thus arguably a more complex individual exploration than the mono partner.

I think the choice for poly versus mono comes down to complex individual exploration versus complex relationship exploration. I use the word individual not in the sense that the mono relationship does not enhance the life of the individual. Rather what I'm saying is that the poly person is choosing to explore their responses to a variety of people in relationships, intimate connections, and/or sexual experiences. This is in line with more of an individualistic philosophy thus the usage of the word. The mono person finds more to be gained, as I've said before, from the complete exploration of the single partner and gives up other explorations they could have of most levels of outside relationship/intimate/sexual connections in order to do so. I'd also like to note again for posterity that I am not saying these are black and white. There is a spectrum. Polyfidelity with a minimal number of people would seem to provide a much greater opportunity for relationship complexity than a totally open and individualistic polyamory. I simply think that mono and totally open poly represent the ends of the spectrum in that sense.
 
You're right. The example does not require exclusivity, but you're missing the point (or at least didn't directly address it). My point was not to illustrate individual things that can only be done if exclusive. That's impossible. You'd never find something. Depending on what poly people choose to spend their time on, they could always do some of the same individual things that the mono relationships are doing. My point is the sum total of all of those things happening the majority of the time cannot be replicated. That's the fundamental difference. So it would never be about pointing to some specific thing that mono people can do which poly people could never do. Arguably the whole point of being poly is the freedom to do anything. The point is that the level of understanding and individual focused commitment created in a mono relationship cannot be replicated in a poly relationship for reasons of physics.

It's interesting what you gain from relating the experiences, and of course all humans gain something from some form of stories. However we are physical creatures. Your brain rewires in accordance with what you interact with. A great deal of your self and perception is based on stored memories. Love I think is separate from that. It's an emotional state or a state of feeling. It may also be an ethical state for some people where they define love by the ability/desire to make sacrifices. However from a realistic standpoint a mature and committed mono partner will always end up knowing their partner better than a mature and committed poly partner. I don't think there's any way around that. I agree with (and I'm too lazy to scroll back and find out) the person who said that not all monos will be willing to go deep and not all polys will be willing to go wide. I think that's very accurate. However in the instance where you had two polys willing to go deep and wide currently in multiple relationships, they cannot achieve the same depth of understanding and knowledge of the other person as two monos willing to go deep and not going wide. That has nothing to do with how it feels to the individual. It's just the practical reality of it.

Just to clarify, as I'm not sure you understood what I meant, I didn't mean that you can be with one person doing something, the way you described, and later do that with someone else. I meant that all three people can be together, and suddenly say "hey, in my book, this happened", and arguably gain more from it because instead of just one response they'd have two, and more back and forth and insight into one another.
So to me, your example is a case in which a polyamorous relationship would bring all the partners closer rather than bring them less close. There are more books being read, therefore more potential comments being made by one of the partners, and more responses to your comments due to there being two partners. I'll learn more of partner A is partner B responds and then partner A reacts to it than if there was no partner B around to begin with.
 
I don't necessarily dispute that point though I'm not sure what the capacity is in that situation to really keep both other people in your head all the time with a high degree of focus. I think even if you were spending most of your time with both of them together, focus would still have to drift from one to the other. There isn't really anyone in psychology or sociology who thinks that three doesn't change from a one on one dynamic to a group dynamic. So in that specific example it might be interesting to have the three people together, however I don't think I've seen an example of three-person live-together polyfidelity that looked like a three-person monogamous relationship rather than taking on a group dynamic with associated divisions in focus and a necessity for time sharing.
 
I dont have time to delve into all of this thread-but great topics!

I did want to say,

one of the key things for me that is VERY clear to me is that I could not "do poly" in a manner where any of my partners weren't part of my immediate household.

My reasoning is that it would take away our day to day interactions and that is a critical component of a romantic relationship for me.

I have 4 kids. 2 still live at home and a grandson who is with me a few times a week. My husband and boyfriend live with me.
We operate as a single family unit.
OCCASIONALLY I will have a one-on-one date with one or the other of them. But, the large majority of our social time is all together (including kids).

The one caveat is that during the school year, my boyfriends work schedule is evenings (husbands is always 7am-3or 5pm). So during the school years I have mornings with boyfriend and kids, evenings with husband and kids.
But, weekends are family time.

We reserve our couple anniversaries as "personal couple dates" and we try to make a date every couple months that is strictly one-on-one for each couple.

(we are a V, not a triad, they are both straight men with no interest in one another).
 
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