Why would you assume that because you have more than one lover that they have to be temporary?
I don't. I thought you did, and so I was asking you. It seemed that you equate monogamy with life-long and polyamory with... not that. Here is where I tried to figure you out on that point:
. . . here he seems to say that a life-long partnership automatically means monogamy, as if polyamory could never be that:
. . . when you commit to a potentially lifelong (monogamous) relationship
It still seems to me that you see monogamy as something that is meant to last forever.
My view is that serial monogamy is a type of polyamory where you exclude past and future lovers from your life while being with one at a time.
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 you think of monogamy and polyamory as structures or blueprints for relationships and not (or not just) a personality trait, you would see it is possible!
I'm not sure what you mean here.
I was offering another perspective. What I meant was this:
relationships can be either monogamous or polyamorous. Those are structures or mating practices. If you look at it that way, instead of whether or not someone identifies as poly or mono, 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. The practices within a relationship, whether it is two people devoted only to each other or any number of people in a poly tangle, does not determine whether it lasts forever or not. It is simply a reflection of desires and parameters for a certain type of commitment. This was my answer to your question about how someone could call themselves mono "if they can feel attracted to and date more than one person in their life." 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. It's a just a structure for a relationship of two people to be only involved with each other and no one else. Doesn't mean there can't be other mono relationships to follow.
(I don't believe people inherently are or are not polyamorous or monogamous, although I do believe we can have certain experiences, cultural influences, and/or levels of open-mindedness or rebellion that would sway a person toward one practice or another)
I think of true monogamy as meaning you can't ever stop loving someone enough to find another person. . . . what do you call positive memories where you find the same person who loved them deeply still living inside your heart? I don't think that person is ever going to die so am I really monogamous considering I am lonely and would like a new relationship?
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. 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.