This article makes a case against poly relationships. 'It’s good to have friends. It’s good to have multiple confidantes. But people aren’t just fungible widgets in a factory. You don’t just lump them in a shopping bag until your heart is full.'

rideoffalone · 2021-06-14T21:17:05+00:00

From the movie Take This Waltz: "Life has a gap in it. It just does. You don't go crazy trying to fill it like some lunatic."

freelancepsychic · 2021-06-14T21:42:56+00:00

That article says what I struggle to say when I think about poly relationships and casual sex. It truly is like you're paying for sandwich or something at the store. What's the point in having sex that many people? It's just weird. I fucking hate it. I wish people would stop using the terms non-monogamous and poly and just say what it is: I am so unsatisfied in my life that I need an endless supply of sex and affection from as many people as possible. The more I think about poly relationships the more it just seems like free prostitution

Pornruinedsociety · 2021-06-14T22:03:38+00:00

The other thing that I've noticed is many people these days seem to build their entire identity around their sexuality and everything has to revolve around it. These poly lifestyles seem very much this way to me.

GabbaG0ul · 2021-06-14T20:10:05+00:00

How come I have never met a couple that started out poly? They always start monogamous and then one if them rolls out an ultimatum.

PizzaNo7741 · 2021-06-14T17:36:56+00:00

the poly people in the community I was living in was kind of aggressive. I am open minded and gave it a shot, but it wasn't for me. It made me fall out of love with my partner and feel like crap to the point where I started crying mid-sex with a guy and ran out totally embarrassed. I was a lot more comfortable being with no one than being a part of their cuddle puddles. it was very much a few guys with enormous egos, and a large number of women who were very cool and had great taste in music, clothes, lifestyle, art, etc. who i wanted to be friends with and talk to. but there was always drama. someone was always heartbroken or jealous or suspicious. STDs. Betrayal. Drugs. Mushroom orgies. I picked up a hula hoop and started flow arts because it was otherwise kind of awkward to be a monogamous person in the midst of that. it's kind of insidious the pressure to join in because, if you aren't into the guy they become more interested in you. and when that happens, the girls no longer see you the same way, nice person, fun to hang with, etc. it's like, they think me just being me is "playing hard to get", or "think im better than them" or whatever. they started looking at me different and turning their back to me when i was talking, meanwhile the guy texts me trying to get to know me. it's just not possible to be friends even though we had so much fun laughing together and dancing. ughhh. The bad outweighed the good of hanging with them, so I decided this was fun but I'm not going down this path any further. At least I got to have a few great beach parties and picked up a new hobby :) im really glad I didn't get sucked into those drama traps. 1 guy's trouble is trouble enough. ive never regretted working through the fomo and fear of being rude and just ghosting that whole scene. I wasn't from that town anyways.

tl;dr it's totally fine to experiment with it and the philosophies involved. but use your own eyes and heart and brain when you've run the experiments, and don't let some scrote talk you out of believing yourself when you feel like it isn't for you. It's ok to need a dedicated, monogamous partner.

Golden_Lavender · 2021-06-14T15:30:19+00:00

Both men and women fall for it. Ive seen an uptick in polyamorous women on here and other social media platforms (willow smith comes to mind). But yeah this pretty much is the best explanation of how dumb it is. Like the polyamorous people need to have a partner for every single possible emotional/physical/sexual attribute and its weird. You don't "need" to have a smart boyfriend and a nerdy girlfriend and that one non-binary person thats really good at baking. What you need is yourself and the ability to grow as a person with your SO and discover something new about yourself.

Amazing_Wolverine_37 · 2021-06-14T15:39:06+00:00

Openness to other people's experiences is part of what makes me a great counselor. That said, from what I have seen as a couples counselor for predominantly straight dyads, it's often a woman wanting to open a relationship due to not feeling like they are enough for a male partner and/or not having their emotional or other needs met. For myself, I would rather invest in a closed circuit whether that means with someone who steps up when one of us is unfulfilled, or in lieu of that, just my damn self!

Bezzazz · 2021-06-14T21:37:24+00:00

Polyamory is becoming more common in the LGBTQ+ community too, and even without men involved, it's still toxic as fuuuuck in every situation that I've seen.

I'm very live and let live, but I'll pass on allowing myself to be gaslit, manipulated, and played favorites with.

frustratedmarxistfem · 2021-06-14T16:13:08+00:00

The fact that millennials are resurrecting polygamy and calling it a new name 🤮 you're not marrying multiple people but you're essentially practicing the same concept and like most things, its not progressive but deeply misogynist and disguising itself as progressive

dr_mcstuffins · 2021-06-14T16:13:54+00:00

Great article, thanks for posting it.

Polyamory is like waking up on Christmas morning and underneath the tree is a giant pile of shit. You get so excited, because it must be from the pony you asked for! You look high and low, inside and out, but you can’t find your pony. Finally you are forced to accept the truth. There is no pony. It was just a pile of shit all along.

Polyamory exists to benefit single men so they can gain access to more partners. I know men who deliberately go after married women to “convert” them so they can be homewreckers right out in the open. It’s a huge ego trip for them to pull a woman who is already attached, because he must be so amazing to convince her to do it. They don’t have the innate capacity to be with a single partner, or even alone, and are endlessly questing for more more more on their hedonistic treadmill. They leave a string of deeply disappointed, traumatized women in their wake. The women often lose their primary partner or they are left to pick up the pieces of their shattered relationship. The single males had no hobbies or aspirations - they spent all their time chasing or sleeping with women.

Good for you if it works for you, but stop patting yourself on the back about it and bragging to others. Poly ruins lives and marriages, and while you may tell yourself the marriage was troubled to begin with if it let you in, the odds are good poly never would have been an issue for the couple if you hadn’t seduced one of them. If you only go for other singles or poly people, good for you. If you have to give someone The Ethical Sl*t, chances are, you’re going to hurt them. I’m cool with poly people so long as they stick to their own community and allow people to find them. I am NOT cool with how common it is to seduce married people. Taking advantage of a couple with issues is even worse, even if you tell yourself they’d have problems whether you were around or not. Poly can sound extremely appealing to someone who hasn’t tried it, because the arguments for it seem to make so much sense.

At the end of the day, poly is about fear of abandonment and not being able to be alone. Of course no one person can be the perfect partner - it was never meant to be like that. We are meant to fill those gaps ourselves, through personal growth or external friendships. Humans are NOT evolved to the way we live today, especially not in such high populations coupled with more isolation than our species has ever known.

Is 100% perfect monogamy the solution? I don’t know - we are all just trying to adapt to the hellscape the planet has become and if we find someone we can suffer with, all the better. I don’t think we are meant to truly love more than one person, because it holds you back from giving your all to anyone which is ultimately hollow. I definitely don’t think open relationships are the answer, as they are even less committed than poly. Honestly, swinging makes the most sense, since it’s a couple-based activity. It’s couples engaging couples, and it completely removes single males from the equation.

It is a billion times harder to be alone or to be in a committed monogamous relationship, but the rewards are SO much greater. Being alone is a commitment to yourself, and a time of explosive growth. Commitment is something that deepens and becomes more complex over time. Love doesn’t exponentially - it’s a fractal - growing more and more complex as each new level is reached. It’s scary to get in a fight and feel so alone afterwards and face those abandonment scars head on, but there is a level that can be reached beyond that place where your own company is enough.

All poly brings to the table is drama. I’d rather be alone than with several people who all lack any desire to commit to me or make me feel like I’m special or precious to them. A true life partner is someone you can suffer with but still find things to laugh about together. It’s a person you can cling to when life is stacked against you both. Dealing with and growing from each person’s developmental and trauma background and their triggers is complex enough - adding more people to the mix is trauma soup and it isn’t worth how high the risk is of being severely hurt.

My apologies to any poly people who strongly disagree with my opinions. They are based in my personal experience of trying poly (more than once), monogamy, and being alone. I’ve seen a lot of people get hurt, and usually it’s the person who introduced poly to other people who is hurt the least.

Eva4ever28 · 2021-06-15T01:58:24+00:00

I got into poly as an excuse to date someone that wasn’t ready for a relationship. I feel like people use it as an excuse for shitty treatment…the person I like isn’t a great fit for me but if I have an open relationship, I’m not committing to that. Y’all deserve better.

splendieindependie · 2021-06-14T17:40:44+00:00

The problem with all of these things - non-monogamy, BDSM relationships, heck, even porn - is that advocates compare the best of their worlds to the worst of ours. Equating non-monogamy with love and monogamy with control and coercion. Equating BDSM with consent and 'vanilla' with rape. Equating porn with enlightenment and non-porn with repression.

But people are coerced in non-monogamy and love monogamously. People are raped in BDSM and consent to vanilla sex. There are (many) people (consumers, but also the people around the consumer and the actors and the people around the actor) who experience the harmful effects of porn and few (if any) who experience harmful effects from not consuming porn.

You can't compare 'A done well' to 'B done badly' and then say 'A is clearly superior to B'. It's a dishonest way of having a discussion.

pugaczalla · 2021-06-14T18:12:13+00:00

I’m 99.9% convinced that non-monogamy attracts a wide variety of emotionally immature people, both men and women. Some of them are narcissistic, some have low emotional intelligence, some are traumatised, some have low self-esteem, some are emotionally volatile, some are just lost. Most of them need a long-term therapy, not 5 relationships.

They don’t realise that they don’t need to have all of their needs met by external force (a person). Emotional maturity and resilience comes from the inside. When you are an emotionally mature person, you meet most of your needs on your own and you don’t expect people to fill a void inside you. You have needs and desires, of course. But they don’t come from a selfish place, like ‘my wife doesn’t have sex often enough for me. My needs aren’t met and I need to open up the marriage’.

I

PinturaMagnifica · 2021-06-14T18:33:30+00:00

"Polyamory is consumerism disguised as spiritual evolution."

Dang, that hit hard.

NotMyRealName814 · 2021-06-14T17:25:39+00:00

Porn also encourages men to think of women as commodities and collector items.

janeaustenfan99 · 2021-06-14T19:52:11+00:00

It seems like poly and ENM is mostly women giving into men’s sexual needs to keep him satisfied. Like a sort of, he’ll just cheat anyway and if I can’t beat him join him, cool girl kind of thing. Also the same mindset with couples seeking MFF threesomes. I wonder how many women truly deep down even want to do that, and just succumb to male pressure.

The funny thing about it is that these men want multiple women, but will eventually fail to fully satisfy any of them. Men just aren’t biologically or emotionally wired to provide consistently gratifying sexual and emotional experiences to one woman let alone many.

berrylikeova · 2021-06-14T19:36:44+00:00

Honestly while in the middle of “being poly” I tried to listen to the ethical slut and I just cried and felt sick. I didn’t make it past punching the pillow.

I should’ve walked away then. But we live and we learn.

larvikite_ · 2021-06-15T14:05:26+00:00

This article validates my thoughts that polyamory is for people who don't mind settling, people who are so adamant about not being alone that they'll be with someone they don't feel in love with, but comfortable with, the bare minimum. I'd rather be alone than not together with my one true love. I definitely don't need some "comfortable" relationship that allows me to fuck people I like better who won't even commit to me. One lover is enough anyway, someone please tell me how people have time and energy for several.. i truly believe if two "primaries" were actually in love, they wouldn't consider polyamory ever.

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