preciselove
New member
I think people who think with that mono perspective tend to forget that you already give some of your time and/or attention to other things and people. You spend time at work, you spend time sleeping, you spend time enjoying your hobbies. You spend time with your family, with your friends, or on an Internet forum. It's quite possible to be mono and have much less time and attention to give your one partner than a poly person does with each of theirs.
Yeah you've hit the nail with the hammer here I think. Mono people just immediately jump to some romantic notion in their head, like you're always on the beach at sunset sipping wine with your loved one and a new person is taking time away from that.
But as you say, you don't really WANT to spend every living moment with one person. Most people need alone time to formulate their thoughts. I think anyone that was so needy and attached that they would get the shakes if I went to the toilet and was away from them is someone with some issues.
And then sometimes there is a quality aspect to it as well. When you're together, especially for a long time, not all time spent together will be quality time. It could be spent doing the laundry while your partner is in the next room, or things like that. Yet when you have more partner, it's possible that the quality time is simply condensed. You spend less time with each partner, but it's also much more intense than it used to be. Things like that.
Ultimately, it will depend on the situation, the people involved, the type of relationship, but it's not as easy as "dividing" the amount of love by the amount of partners.
There are a lot of activities in life which are just "group" activities that won't matter if you're doing them with one or two people. Once it goes past two people though, I can see where people can realize it can take things away from you.
An example would be watching a movie. I can hold two girls on me when watching a movie and they both feel loved. I couldn't fit a third. Some poly people would say "yeah but one of the other girls could cuddle the third" and that would be true, however if someone wanted to cuddle me they couldn't in all group activities. This is never a problem with only 2 partners. I can also see where quads can work here, but they suffer from the needing to swap rather than the group being able to be contained within itself at all times if it wanted.
But there are many group activities where you could have say 3-10 loves actively involved. Eating. Talking. Playing sport. Sex. Driving. Cafe. Bars. etc.
I'd like to know how many "serial monogamists" there are in the poly scene compared to people like myself that are actively involved with more than one person at all times. Because I think a lot of "love is infinite" talk comes mostly from the serial monogamists. Where you have one or two partners you see most of the time (with boundaries), but have a boyfriend/girlfriend every month type situation.
Once you live the nitty gritty of handling multiple people at the same time you realize that there is no way you could handle an infinite amount of it on anything approaching a close relationship.
*HEAVILY OPINIONATED GENERALIZATIONS FOLLOWS*
To me at least, people that compartmentalize their relationships and are only with one love at a time aren't poly people as I define them as you're only using monogamous skills in the relationships. In essence it's all about finding base partners that are ok with their addiction to NRE. I can see how people that constantly taste NRE can think thoughts similar to that of other drug users. A NRE addict "love is infinite man" . A 1960s hippy on LSD "make love not war man".