On Polyamory

For me polyamory is a non-starter, for reasons I believe for once I can detail in brief. But more than that, it's a misnomer 'poly' meaning 'many' and 'amory' meaning 'love'. That word would best describe something else, and I guess it's kind of what Esther Perel might be getting at when she points out that monogamy used to mean that you had sex with one person for life, not 'one person at a time'. Such that I would never describe myself as 'polyamorous' because of what it has come to mean, but monogamous in the modern western era probably actually means what polyamorous means.

Anyway, for me polyamory is a non starter because...

It is poor risk management

By that I mean, it conditionally breaks Warren Buffet's first rule of risk taking: don't risk something important, to gain something unimportant. However, I must concede there's value judgments in that assertion, and there's obviously a way by which one could have an open relationship without violating this rule. 

Given though, that in my experience most polyamory occurs through people in an exclusive relationship making a decision to move into an 'open relationship' and often open relationships sort of have a primary relationship as anchor, my feeling is one of two inferences can be made. The first is that bad risks are being taken, that primary relationship is important and the participants are overconfident that they can open up the relationship without needlessly risking the loss of the primary relationship. The other inference is that actually the primary relationship is not important, and therefore a low risk wager to put it on the table. 

If the later inference is a strong one, what we are looking at is a person who is afraid to be single. A process of hedging against that fear, such that they can explore novelty, or even an escape from an unhappy relationship without having to suffer their being alone. 

For me, it seems more charitable, that what most people are doing is miscalculating the risk. They underestimate the potential impacts of introducing unknown variables into their own relationship, like one partner being more in demand than the other, meeting a new partner with absolute advantage over the extant partner, sexual jealousy becoming unmanageable by one of the parties etc.

Successful Infidelity Exists

To be clear, the risk-reward relationship is sufficient for me to be a non-starter on polyamory. But what of the people who come testify that they or someone they know, make it work? 

My problem with that testimony, is that unfortunately, by age 17 I had already lived long enough to know there are people who make infidelity work. That is, not even people who cheat on their partners and get away with it. But people who cheat on their partners, get caught, and get away with it.

In which case, what I believe I am looking at, is a power imbalance in the relationship. I've never had someone come to me and insist that 'domestic violence can work' yet there are couples where physical abuse is going on and the abused partner cannot bring themselves to leave. What am I to make of a friend that says to me 'Look I cheat on Jennifer all the time, and she even catches me, but we make it work.'?

For me, because of the inconvenient fact that people endure dysfunctional relationships mean I can never exclude that a working open relationship testimonial is actually just testimony of a power imbalance within the relationship. 

Of course what is "success" in terms of a relationship. I'd be more inclined to definitions of success that focus holistically on the health and well being of the participants. The reality of attachment styles mean that if someone who is anxious avoidant pairs up with someone who is anxious preoccupied, a relationship can be both incredibly toxic and incredibly stable.

From the outside of anyone else's relationship I can't of course, know what is going on in someone's head, but under conditions of uncertainty there's actually an agreed upon rule - which is all possibilities are not equally likely, thus the way to bet is generally Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true.

What this translates to in my experience is often I am hearing something complex and convoluted involving choosing to be less like Chimpanzees and more like Bonobos and overcoming biological programming through enlightened thinking etc. in the place of a much simpler explanation 'One of us at least is unhappy in the relationship but I prefer the pain of infidelity to the fear of being alone.'

Monogamy is hard, Polyamory by extension must be harder

This is perhaps the most frustrating thing to endure with open relationship enthusiasts/apologists. Where we agree often enough, is that monogamy is hard. Relationships are hard, with one person to deal with, attune to. 

Monogamy is no picknick. Sure, the statistics bare that claim out. Life experience in most cases, will bare this out. But there's an extent to which people who advocate for open relationships sound like this to me:

'I can't serve, I can't return serve, my backhand needs work and boy do I lack lateral mobility... so I decided to enter the Australian open.'

There is probably an analogy out there in the ether, where increasing the difficulty can reduce the errors. The best I could think of is trying to play a musical composition at a slower tempo is often more difficult than a faster tempo, because there's more margin to make timing errors. I don't really have the musical aptitude to testify to that with any confidence though. Maybe it's easier to juggle three potatos than two, I don't know.

But really, if you have a history of toxic, or failed relationships with acrimonious endings or estrangement. I am highly dubious that your downfall was not having enough variables to get wrong.

'I'm bad at relationships, but maybe I'll be great at juggling multiple relationships at once.'

"A Bad Beginning Makes a Bad Ending."

So says Euripides, playwright who gave us 'Medea' perhaps the most popular and well known of the surviving Greek tragedies, a tale of marital neglect and jealousy. Systems engineers more contemporaneously might be found to say 'garbage in, garbage out'. 

So if you don't feel you are risking anything particularly important in opening up your relationship to the potential rewards of exploring new and numerous people. Which is to say, if you cared at all about my implicit approval, you had established you were gambling with something (your relationship) that you are prepared to lose. Que responsible.

But that's not the only thing you stand to lose. If you are risking something unimportant, to gain something important - that something important says to me, that you should actually just write off the unimportant thing. Just ditch the relationship you have to pursue the possibilities of something not just novel but better.

I suspect, the polyamorous must have a strong conviction that comparative advantage is more common than absolute advantage, and little conviction in attachment theory (which predicts we aren't good at finding new partners that are more than superficially different from our last partner). 

For those that don't habla economics, comparative advantage is a real thing, where two parties offer different things. Like a dumb athletic jock, and a brainy asthmatic nerd. One has brawn but no brains, the other brains but no brawn. However, life is crueler than that. Often we can find cases of absolute advantage, the brainy athletic jock and the dumb asthmatic nerd. 

So the bad beginning is actually what happens when in your open relationship you start dating someone who is not so much different to your extant partner, but superior in every way. Here the bad beginning is the self same event as the bad ending.

This is the broken risk-reward payoff, the open relationship limits the downside (in case of failure, you won't be alone) but it simultaneously limits the upside (in case of success, you aren't free to go for it). Admittedly I don't know how the logistics of open relationships work, but I suspect rare is the case where invigorated by the passion of a new flame, you get to spend the first three months sleeping over at their place only dropping in to grab a change of clothes.

This 'polyamory' is such a non-starter for me, that I have little to no interest in delving into the logistics. All I know, is that I really enjoy falling in love and those early days of a new relationship where everything comes so easily, and how fantastic it is to not have a former romantic partner in the equation to manage. The biggest reward (and this is just my opinion) is being free and clear of any and all romantic obligations to other people in a new romance. To basically just be able to strap in, switch off and enjoy the ride.

That is wonderful to the point of sacrosanct, so for me, that's the other contravention of 'don't risk something important, to gain something unimportant.' in which case it's actually that first dose of passion for a new interest that is being gambled with, to retain a relationship sufficiently uninteresting to want to explore avenues with new people.

Of course, the second bad ending, is that I think we are always communicating on an unconscious level, without realizing it. Thus the polyamorous is communicating to the new partners 'you're not worth being single/exclusive for' and the new partner is replying 'you're not worth having exclusively'.

This shit, I feel with some confidence, comes back at some point. Whether it's a thought that festers, or an implicit memory, a feeling that gets triggered down the track, it's putting a bullet in the chamber that has nothing to do but wait to go off and it never needed to be there.

It Reminds me of Free Market Economists

In my Economics degree, I had demonstrated to me quite articulately and compellingly, why tariffs, subsidies and quotas are all sub-optimal trade policies. I couldn't recreate these arguments, and I can't recall whether a tariff is better than a subsidy or subsidy better than a tariff, because fortunately my highschool Economics teacher made the point that the wealthiest countries in the world also tended to be the most protectionist. So it's like learning an impressive way to argue yourself into a mistake, hence my memory dispensed with the theory, because I'm better off losing the argument.

The relevance being, that Economists have a knack for making things work beautifully, on paper, that don't work at all in practice. It's usually for one very persistent reason - Economists tend to assume away everything we actually know about human psychology. Hence the depth and extent of the great depression, hence austerity and hence free market economics.

In the same way, whenever people talk polyamory the tend to assume away biology, psychology etc. I'd be really impressed if someone making a case for open relationships opened with 'I know the most common motive in domestic homicides is sexual jealousy but...' instead sexual jealousy tends to be not discussed as an emotional reality so much as a defect free to be disregarded. 

I'd be impressed of someone arguing for an open relationship ever opened with 'Here's why I'm confident the human body is equipped to comprehend birth control.' etc.

Jonathan Haidt doesn't really talk about open relationships to my knowledge but he has these hypotheticals to test the extent of people's morality (I will spare you the darkest iterations). One of which is 'Billy and Sue are brother and sister, while on a holiday in Greece they decide it would be fun to have sex with eachother. They use birth control methods and protection such that there is no risk of pregnancy - is this fine?' and I believe Haidt's point of his hypotheticals is to confound people's moral reasoning. 

What I'd say in my defense is that eliminating the risk of an unplanned pregnancy isn't sufficient to eliminate the risks of lasting emotional trauma from (even consensual) sex with a sibling. The effects of one sibling wishing to continue the incest and the other not. The effects to play out over time. How as a sexual experience it might imprint and impact future sexual experiences etc. 

And largely this would be based on my assertion that our biology doesn't really get condoms, the pill, IUDs etc. Advocates of open relationships kind of assume that our biology is right there with our conscious minds. Just like free market economists though, these are assumptions that have been tested and I am underwhelmed by the results.

Isolating Variables

My experience resulting in anecdotes I've taken pains not to tell of friends and strangers experiments with open relationships, is rather similar to my experiences of Tinder (of which I have more direct experience) which is to say, most of the anecdotes are bad. On the better end of the spectrum, the experiment is brief before a couple realize open relationships aren't for them. The worse end of the spectrum thankfully has never reached the worst I can imagine happening, generally its involved introducing more debilitating mental illness into an equation.

Tinder has one distinct advantage though as a cultural phenomenom, which is I could point to some reasonably stable tinder success stories. Couples that have met via tinder and it's resulted in some mid-term relationship goal like marriage. Here by comparison I must plead ignorance as to I'm not sure what the goal of open relationships are. There's really no clear endgame in terms of human flourishing or development apart from being liberated from an exclusive relationship.

But there is a challenge I wouldn't shy away from, a wager if you will. Which is 'chances are this relationship was going to fail anyway, opening it up may have proved to be something we could have done to save it. How can you say open relationships are a bad thing, when you've had a string of failed monogomous relationships?'

Without rehashing that 'monogamy was hard, maybe I'd do better if there were more people involved.' let's talk about the core value of failure which is learning. 

Depressingly, there's some evidence that many people don't learn from their relationship failure. Multiple divorce phenomena and what not. But if one chooses to seize the opportunity here's what one is dealing with on the autopsy table of monogamy:

All I can control ultimately are my thoughts and actions, when I combined these thoughts and these actions with person B, here's what happened.

When a polyamorous experiment is concluded here's what you are dealing with as coroner:

I really liked B for these reasons, and C for these reasons, and B was dealing with me and D and E. Assuming I want to succeed in the future with B, did it fail because of my thoughts and actions towards B, or my thoughts and actions with C, and had B not been involved with D, then would my thoughts and actions towards B (or C) been appropriate or not? Or does B's involvement with E really fundamentally change the equation? 

Confused? I am. But the point I'm trying (and probably failing) to illustrate is, that you can't really know anything because there's too many variables interacting. You've created a situation where in the event of failure you don't really know anything.

Think about, if you have a failed monogamous relationship then it's (relatively) easy to adjust for the next monogamous relationship. Any of your thoughts and actions can be fine tuned - don't date someone unemployed next time, don't go out every friday and get black out drunk, don't look for a renovation project etc. 

What I never hear is this: 'I was in an open relationship with Betty, but eventually she had enough of it and dumped my ass. Now I'm in an open relationship with Veronica and I'm so much happier.' like, never. I've never heard anything vaguely resembling this. I suspect it's because when an open relationship comes crashing down, suspect number one as to why it didn't work, is because it was an open relationship.

Congratulations, You've found a way to be Rejected while in a Relationship

For all my disapproval, I don't actually begrudge anyone trying out an open relationship. I just judge you, file it away as something I can know about you and your behavioral propensities. I do begrudge people who feel they can demand of me that I suspend my judgement of them, that's an imposition and an usurpation.

I also, want no part of what you are doing. My self worth puts the idea of sharing a partner with another man or woman beneath my dignity. 

That said, I ran my own experiment with an open relationship once, with my first relationship. I told her that I didn't care if she cheated on me, so long as she came back. That's when I learned the power of my own sexual jealousy, and never made such boasts again.

I had the girl though, and found a way from that position, to feel rejected by her. But that's not quite what I'm talking about in this subsection. 

So you've opened your relationship up? What next? All but sexually entitled people and the ignorant tend not to hit on people they know to be spoken for. Do you disclose on your tinder profile or not that you are in an open relationship? Where's the boundary between privacy and secrecy? Privacy and deception? How much do you disclose? Do you include a snap of you with your partner so tinder swipers can see what your standard is? Some impression of who they are sharing with?

And then the more traditional approaches, like asking a crush out. Which is worse: not knowing if your crush would be interested in you if you didn't have a partner? Or discovering your crush wouldn't be interested in you if you didn't have a primary partner to do 'the relationship stuff'. 

It's another reason I am skeptical of polyamory arguments, to minimize the risk of rejection, open couples have to sell, sell, sell that what they are doing is cool and fine and won't blow up in any third parties face. This leads to another drawback, where like other lifestyle choices you may find you are constantly talking about open relationships at parties, just like veganism and islam, because of all the haters and the skeptics.

Unfortunately, if true, that in turn means you are constantly reminding prospects about the partner they are prospectively sharing you with. I'd be inclined to forget about the visceral unpleasantness of being rejected, and worry about the profiles of people being in an open relationship selects for.

It Takes Two to Open a Relationship

By way of conclusion, I would share something personal. I had one particularly messy breakup in my early 20s. Completely natural, completely normal given my age and emotional immaturity. What was most devastating though, was not my partner leaving me nor how quickly she attempted to move on. It was the revelation that she had been unhappy for some time before the actual breakup, and just did not have the will to break it off. That felt most violating, like my life and a relationship had been stolen from me under false pretenses. 

I did not, and do not want to sleep beside someone who is sneaking off to the bathroom to cry about the fact that they are sleeping beside me. 

The point being, that the simplest and most likely explanation someone is into an open relationship is because they have the double coincidence of fearing commitment and fearing being alone. The simplest and most likely explanation that their partner agrees is that they share their fear of being alone, and possibly the fear of commitment.

But it will create a power imbalance where we might discover (but if we love someone, should never test) that our partners will put up with a lot of shit from us sooner than leave. Many people might be dating someone that wouldn't leave them if they beat the shit out of them every night and took all their paycheck and spent it on heroin. We never discover this because we never test it out.

But what some couples do test out, is partners that wouldn't leave them if they knew we were out on a date with someone else and they quietly cried at home while browsing netflix to distract themselves.

And it's easy and tempting to think of the person out having the date as the villain of the piece, and the one crying at home as the victim of an abusive relationship.

But if you say 'you know what, I'm okay with it' when you aren't, that too is an act of deception and a betrayal of trust. 

Writing this post, I found myself thinking 'Oh shit, x is going to think this is about him.' and this was almost always followed by 'oh but y is going to think I'm talking about her.' followed inevitably by 'and z, z will definitely think I'm having a dig at them...' and what reliably gave me confidence was how often I became convinced, that all my friends and acquaintances who've dabbled in open relationships would think I'm referring specifically to them, when the truth is, I wrote much of it from a hypothetical first principles perspective and then discovered upon reflection that these principles were quite descriptive and/or predictive.

Thus I would urge any who may be reading this thinking I am talking about they, (first of all congratulations on reading this far into what must be quite an unpleasant post) that if you are worried I and others must be talking shit about you behind your back, it is less an indication that anyone's pried into your personal lives, and more indicative that you've been behaving quite predictably.

What I am reasonably confident though, is that in the current times it is quite in vogue to disregard evolution in favor of intelligent design, or nature for nurture. Furthermore, that it is considered impolite to not accommodate others anxieties and instead challenge them. 

Regrettably, it is the height of barbarism to not accept people for who they present themselves to be, and crudely opt to observe how they actually behave. 

I wish I could be even cruder than that though, and be able to go down to the bookies and bet against some of my friends relationships. I suspect secretly, that a lot of us share this desire.