I'm just suggesting that you take a look at what your criteria is for mono or poly being a "better way" as well as consider what you're using as your evidence.
I've been on holiday with my family and have been watching relationships and thinking about this while I've been away.
I think that my criteria for a "better way" in relationships centre around most pleasure and least drama for everybody impacted. Mostly for me - I tend to put my own wants first in my life. Also, to varying degrees, I want to be having a peaceful, happy time in all of my relationships and that wouldn't be likely to happen so much if, for example, I announced that I'd fallen for a mass murderer living death row and was spending all my spare time and money on campaigning for his release.
To me, romantic relationships (by which I mean those where there is an intertwining with my life and that of the other person and we are engaging in sex together) seem to be a source of difficulty as well as pleasure and to entail a higher level of drama than other relationships.
So - to me - logic would suggest that keeping those sorts of relationship to a minimum is a way of maximising the pleasure got from that way of relating while minimising the pain and drama. It seems logical to me that multiplying romantic relationships is likely to mutliply the pain and drama as well as the pleasure and that it is therefore likely that pain and drama become more prevalent than pleasure. That is what I see when I read these boards and what I hear when I talk to my previously poly friends about their experiences - so I hear my suspicion confirmed regularly. Crucially too I see little evidence to the contrary. There is some but it seems to me that the probability is that multiple romantic relationships will result in more pain and drama than pleasure.
(I should say that I very much agree that FWB type relationships can be excellent. Lots of fun and little drama. I could very easily imagine having several of those if my circumstances were different).
I fully appreciate that this perspective is very personal to me, very dependent on my current experiences and that it could very easily change if I were to have different experiences.
The thing is that I can't step out of those experiences or deny my own thought patterns. None of us can. The idea of the person who approaches life from a position of rationality and is unswayed by anything other than facts is a myth. We are all profoundly influenced by what we experience and by the living circumstances we are in. This has been studied from many angles in lots of different fields. Phillip Zimbardo's was studying psychology and his prison experiment shows with frightening clarity just how easily people are influenced by their environment. He cites many other examples in his book
The Lucifer Effect
Ben Goldacre writes about medical research. In his book
Bad Science he talks about how medical studies have to double blind because if they aren't, researchers will without meaning to influence the results of the study. He also talks about how results have to be analysed using statistics because the human mind's need to look for patterns has a strong tendency to misinterpret results. There is much in his book about the need for research to be set up so that it - as far as possible - removes the human influence because we cannot stop ourselves from allowing our own biases and preferences to impact on what we do.
Bruce Lipton is a cell biologist who also writes strongly about the influence on the environment on how people perceive and behave in the world. His book
Biology of Belief has many examples from a biological perspective.
Everything that the philosopher Noam Chomsky writes and says about the manufacturing of consent by the media and government is along these lines too.
For me, the evidence that I cannot pretend to make rational decisions about an objective reality is impossible to ignore.
The conclusions I've drawn about romantic relationships are heavily influence by what I see and hear around me as well as by my upbringing and my past experiences. My conclusions may or may not change in time.
I'm comfortable with that. It means that somebody who wants an open relationship is not going to be able to have one with me. That's perfectly okay. Most people in the world don't want to have a romantic relationship with me. I can deal with it. Similarly, it's not a massive loss to anybody who can't be in a romantic relationship with me. I'm really pretty ordinary, nothing amazing about me that couldn't be found with somebody else.
I've made no promises to my partner about always being the same and have asked him for no promises about always being the same. If we find in time that our life paths have diverged sufficiently that we must revert to being friends, that is okay. We'd both be very sad about it but it's far from the worst thing that could happen. Equally if we find that we change in the same direction and that results in a change to how we approach our romantic relationship, that would be fine too.
I'm in a comfortable position for me right now and while I'm open to change in my attitude toward romance, I don't seek it.
IP