Polyamory doesn't Liberate; Monogamy doesn't Protect
Reflections and community quotes from a decade in the Bay Area dating landscape.
Live your life your way, and enter into any sort of consensual relationship you want. This essay is not a prescription — just a call to be conscious, and look at the big picture.
More Multitudinous Mores
I remember when I first heard about the concept of Polyamory. Having grown up in Utah, Polygamy was the butt of many jokes, but the idea of having multiple partners was 100% off the radar. My high school peers were a mixture of Mormon and ABC (American-born Chinese) kids, and neither group is known for their teenage promiscuity. I moved to California for college in 2009 — the land of free love — although at this point polyamory was still very counter-cultural. I think I was a sophomore when my friend Carlos (a super-senior with nose rings and glorious purple dyed hair) explained his polyamorous relationship to me. “We just have the perspective that we don’t own each other. Monogamy is kind of messed-up. Why should I get to decide what my partner can or can’t do, right?”1 I was generally pretty open-minded, and it seemed reasonable to me, though I had never felt like the exclusivity of my past relationships came from either partner’s desire to control.
The first relationship I had where exclusivity was not an assumed default was a year later, around 2012. I read The Ethical Slut, which at the time was a common entry point read. I took it as quite revelatory. I’m a sucker for philosophy, and The Ethical Slut argues about relationship dynamics from a primarily ideological perspective, though it brings in the experiences of the authors as well. It presents, as some of its core points:
Love is not a limited resource. Your partner loving someone else does nothing to diminish their love of you. If anything, the opposite can occur.
Jealousy happens and that’s ok. It’s naive to think that just because you are poly, jealousy won’t happen. But the healthy response to jealousy isn’t to structure your whole life around avoiding it, it’s to reassure your partner(s) of your commitment to them with good communication and affirmation.
Monogamy is coercive. Shouldn’t we want to empower our partners? People are not a thing to own or possess. Why should we get to tell our partners what they can or can’t do?
Make everything out in the open. The book argues that, with infidelity rates as they are, humans are not naturally monogamous — this is a societal construct, and a patriarchal one at that. We can be ethical by bringing this nature into the light.
Desire is Diverse. There is a rich world of experience available in the polyamorous context that is not available in monogamy.
The book paints a pretty picture. In the decade since reading it, I was in several polyamorous relationships, several monogamous relationships, and some things in-between. From my vantage point, what in 2010 was some fringe-culture hippie nonsense advocated by one of the punkiest kids I met in undergrad, became an everyday topic. “How do you feel about poly?” is now a standard early relationship question right next to “do you want kids?” and “why did you and your ex break up?”. Poly is common in my social group of 30-something San Franciscans, maybe even more common than Monogamy, at least in the available dating pool. However, we have to be careful with that statistic because of course poly people are going to be over-represented in the pool of people who are “dateable”: they don’t need to stop at one! So how common is it, really?
Some Poly Statistics
While my community is a weird Bay Area bubble, my experience of the landscape changing over the last decade is nevertheless representative. Polyamory has exploded into the public consciousness. See this Google Trends for “Polyamory” over the US.
21% of Americans have experimented with consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, far more than two decades ago2. This shift is also generational: 32% of Millennials express interest in polyamory, and roughly twice as many Millennials as GenX have been in a polyamorous relationship. The trend continues with roughly twice as many GenZ as Millennials having been in a poly relationship3.
Some of the other statistics fascinatingly contradict my community experiences. I have many female friends who want monogamy and complain about all the poly guys in the dating pool, with very few of the inverse. Similarly I have some poly male friends who complain about the difficulty in finding poly women to date, with none of the inverse. So I was surprised to find that there are more poly women than poly men. It’s almost 60/40. At first, I thought that lesbians were really pulling their weight here, but no: there are many more poly gay men than poly lesbians. (There are more total gay men than lesbians and also gay men are poly at a higher rate than lesbians4). So, if you look only at heterosexual or bi people — which I’m focusing on for this essay — the ratio is even more tilted towards women being poly - almost by a factor of 2.
You wouldn’t think that from the table-talk around SF, or, it seems, the internet. It’s easy to find posts complaining about all the poly-identifying men, or asking why men are naturally polyamorous. There are thinkpieces from the poly community debunking the myth that “women can’t be poly”. (which establishes that this is indeed a common myth) So…why do we generally have the idea that men are more likely to be poly, when in fact it’s dramatically skewed the other way? I have some ideas here. We’ll have to talk statistics, culture, and biology. But first, I want to give some background for those of you not in a poly hot-spot like SF. (Which is the Cultural Center of Western Civilization, a gentrified tech dystopia, or a progressive dumpsterfire, depending on who you ask.) What do people mean when they say they are polyamorous?
Poly Lingo
Courtship has always been a realm of cultural complexity, rich with fine distinctions and innuendo, and poly culture is no exception. Here’s a few of the more common terms (not all of these are poly-specific, they are just common in poly culture):
Metamour - Your lover’s lover. (“boyfriend/girlfriend in-law?”)
Primary - Your main partner. The idea is that this person is your long term commitment that takes priority, if your relational style has such a thing.
Secondary - Someone whom you have an ongoing commitment to (i.e. not a casual fling), but to whom your life is less woven than your primary.
Non-hierarchical Poly - An arrangement that specifically demands no specification of “primaries” and “secondaries”. In rebellion to a perceived norm of “hierarchical poly”.
Solo-poly - When someone does sort their partners into a primary and a secondaries, but the primary is their self.
Polycule - A connected graph of romantic bonds. (like “molecule”!)
Anchor Relationship - A relationship that forms a foundation. It provides a stability that frees each of you to explore elsewhere.
Compersion - Sympathetic joy at your partner’s joy found in other partners — like a very specific form of mudita.
Nesting Partner - A partnership where the specific intent is to live together and probably build a family together. (i.e. the default monogamy of ages past. The term exists to imply that it is not monogamous even though the intent of the partnership is similar.)
Thruple - Three people all mutually dating each other.
NRE - “New relationship energy”. The sparky Eros that comes from something new, that will eventually burn out.
Relationship Escalator (or Ladder) - Poly lingo critiquing Monogamy. It refers to the assumed cultural default that a relationship escalates in commitment to cohabitation, marriage, and kids.
Treadmill Relationship - The opposite of a relationship escalator. Something that just holds steady at a medium level of autonomy for years.
Polysaturated - Unable to date new people not because of relational rules, but because there is simply no more time. (I swear I coined this one independently, but so did the internet. *sigh*, it was too obvious.)
More Than Two Relationship Styles
The big issue I see with the relationship statistics I presented is that people can mean a lot of different things by the words “monogamous” and “polyamorous”. “Polyamorous” in particular is a wide bucket. To start to break it down, I have seen two main ways in which people call themselves “polyamorous”: identity and practice.
Poly as Identity
When someone treats polyamory (or monogamy) as an identity, they conceive of it as some inherent part of themselves. You’ll hear things like “It always seemed weird to me to only date one person.” or “I discovered I was poly when I saw my boyfriend kiss another girl and liked it.” or “I’m poly, but I’m in a monogamous relationship right now.”. This view can certainly confuse the statistics above, and can muddy our perception of how popular polyamory is. How many of the people in the nationwide statistics above have merely romanticized the idea of a polyamorous relationship without really living that way? Some community members I’ve asked have defined their poly identity as “The ability to feel deep romantic love for more than one person at a time.” - which I think most monogamous-identifying people are perfectly capable of as well; they just choose to not actualize those feelings into practice. I can certainly love multiple people at once, and do. That love can come in many flavors, and none of them ultimately demand that I have to date anyone at all.
At the end of the day, I feel like polyamory conceptualized as identity is a little silly, in the same way that most things conceptualized as identity are silly. We are a result of our environments, our past choices, and our experiences, and those things can all change with time. For the purposes of looking at poly as a cultural phenomenon, I’m going to say talk is cheap and identity is just a story you tell about yourself — polyamory is a practice; a style of a relationship, not a fact about a person. At most, being polyamorous is more like being “Christian” than being “tall”5. But just like a religion, it can be a heartfelt, important practice.
Poly as a Practice
That being said there are a LOT of different relationship styles. I’ve arrange a handful of them in terms of how much “restriction” is in each. “Polyamory” is quite vague, and probably covers most of the right side of the spectrum. I left out things like “cheating” or “figuring it out”, because those aren’t communicated, intentional, relationship structures.
I like conceiving of it as a spectrum, because in practice I find that most of the dating pool in the bay area has a “zone of acceptability” for what they want. Where exactly the relationship(s) they are in ends up falling will depend on a bunch of things about the situation, and how they feel about who they are dating, but the zone of acceptability tends to form a contiguous block on this line. For example, some people might be open to standard monogamy, monogamish (eroticism with others is ok, but only under particular circumstances), and open relationships (flings are ok, but nothing serious), but closed to restrictive monogamy as well as polyfidelity (monogamous commitment to a predefined set of multiple people) and anything to the right of it. Personally, I’ve been in relationships that are everything from standard monogamy to normative polyamory, and these days I’m open to monogamy or monogamish. I can conceive of this changing based on whatever life brings in the future.
What is Poly Culture Doing to Us?
On one hand: there is no single right way to have a consensual relationship. I said I wouldn’t be prescriptive and I won’t be. But I also don’t want to look at this dramatic cultural movement and say it’s all good, just because people have more more options. The dating market is a dynamic system. Our preferences are changed by the culture around us. Our choices create the culture of dating. The culture of dating affects everyone.
One tempting (and occasionally used) analogy for poly is that it’s like gay rights: embrace of polyamorous culture is the next big step in overturning the patriarchal and religious forces trying to control sexuality. But I don’t think this quite squares up. For one, despite what some of the sillier conservatives may think, you can’t “catch the gay”, and the actions of gay people mostly don’t affect straight people. In contrast, polyamory and monogamy are competing cultural norms. Through cultural induction, you can “catch the poly”, and there is tension at the edges. Many monogamous people (myself included) have been dragged into dramatic and unhappy situations because their partner decided that they wanted to experiment with poly. Many poly people have had a perfectly happy relationship get artificially ended because, their partner’s partner decided to be monogamous (thus forcing separation from the polycule), and their partner went along with it. Both of these things can be traumatizing. The cultural conflict is palpable.
Over the years I’ve listened to many friends struggle with this cultural edge. Below I’ve collected a sample of quotations. Some pro-poly, some clearly very frustrated by poly, but these quotes don’t come from a place of ideology or sexual puritanism. Instead, it’s just a complex reflection of of how poly culture has deeply affected the lives of everyone living here, and the tension between polyamory and monogamy:
Poly predominates my dating pool. The poly culture sucks people in and changes them and in my opinion makes them worse at finding a life partner, which is what most people want. It trains people to not accept and commit. I would like to see less poly pressure in our culture for that reason.
- Oakland Woman, 35, monogamous (poly-experienced)
I’ve learned that while there are many women who want to be polyamorous with me, and there are many women who would like to have children with me, there is 0 overlap between the two. I want children, but I know I can’t do monogamy, and I have to come to terms with this.
- SF Man, 40, poly
I think I end up just getting pulled by whatever is happening in my romantic life. A cute crush is poly? Well, then maybe I'm poly.
- SF Man, 33, polyflexible
In my experience, most people who say they are polyamorous are actually just “polyamorous” until they find the person that they want to be monogamous with — then they break up with everyone else.
- SF Woman, 39, poly
I am not poly, because I have an ambition and have hobbies. I feel like poly people’s hobby is dating. Sometimes it feels like they need endless other people to fill their inner void.
- SF Woman, 33, monogamous (poly-experienced)
There is a magical point you can reach, where everyone in the polycule feels like all their needs are being met, and it takes very little effort to maintain. It takes some work to get there, but it’s worth it.
- Oakland Woman, 33, poly, happily married
Most poly people are really bad at being polyamorous. Also I don’t know that you should follow my example.
-SF Man, 48, poly
Since it is “uncool” to ask your partner to alter their behavior for the sake of your comfort/feelings, some people use “concern” about STI risk as a cover for judging and controlling their partner's behavior.
- Oakland Woman, 33, open relationship
I am exalting in the simplicity of my dating life.
- Berkeley Woman, 37, newly monogamous
I think a lot of these quotes paint a real picture. Each of these people has years of experience in polyamory, in a variety of situations. There’s a way that The Ethical Slut (my exposure point), and literature like it completely fails to warn about the potential downsides of polyamory. The more recent More Than Two and Polysecure do better at discussing the difficulties, but as books that are fundamentally advocating poly, they never come out and say “Maybe poly isn’t for most people.”. In truth, our ideas about both Monogamy and Polyamory can be prone to delusion. There is a tendency to think “maybe this new relationship style will fix everything!”. If this essay has a thesis, that thesis is: it won’t.
The Poly Delusion
While both polyamory and monogamy are prone to being idealized and deluded, the type of idealization is rather different. There are patterns to the ways that people think polyamory will change everything.
To Have Enough
The classic poly delusion, is to think that via poly, you can get all of your needs met. Polyamory literature says you can’t expect one person to fulfill all of your emotional needs. This is true. The shadow implication of this statement is that you can expect a handful of people to fulfill all of your emotional needs. This is not true. Other people do not exist to fill our emotional voids. To quote Bo Burnham “If you want love, the love has gotta come from you.”
From Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker piece6:
However many people you have, it is never enough…One is not enough (this is part of the tragedy of monogamy), but neither is two, or three.
- Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds
This may sound dire, but I want to temper it with my own heartfelt belief: there is love for you. From friends, from community, and yes, from lovers…but if you are stuck in scarcity mindset, all the partners in the world can’t fill the void. If you aren’t in a scarcity mindset, then one (or zero!) partners definitely can give you everything you need from partnership. It has little to do with how many partners you have, and more to do with the quality of those partnerships, and the quality of your own relationship with yourself.
To Be Enough
To my experience, the less-talked-about but more common folly is the feeling that polyamory will free you from the expectations of others, or preserve your autonomy. On the surface this makes sense. If your sexuality is less “bound” to one person, and theirs is less bound to you, then expectation can be distributed across the network. Your partner will have backups, so it’s not all on you.
My girlfriend is new to the poly scene in the Bay. She’s also avoidant, and you know how avoidants leap onboard the polyamory train.
- SF Woman, 57, poly
But in practice, this is not how it works. Just like in monogamy, a partner might want to see you all the time and want you to do the emotional labor of calming their insecurities. Just like in monogamy, your partners will have expectations of you, and there is no saving grace but communicating and negotiating expectations and boundaries well. To state it one way:
The problem is that your partner expects too much of you…and the solution is to collect more people who expect things of you?
- SF Man, 34, monogamous (poly-experienced)
One thing the experienced polyamorists seem to agree on, is that the joy of poly is about sharing love, life, and pleasure. If you want to avoid emotional labor, (or value your “you” time) poly is probably not gonna help you with that:
Polyamory is choosing more emotional labor for more sex.
- SF Man, 36, monogamish
The Monogamy Delusion
Monogamists are prone to their own delusions, and with dark symmetry, they stem from the same anxious and avoidant attachment insecurities7 that we see from the poly folks.
To Have Enough
The major monogamy delusion is obvious. It is simple: the idea that you possess your partner, or that you even can - the idea that by irrevocably binding yourself to someone, you can avoid any possibility of abandonment or heartbreak. The desire to posses or control leads to the many tropes of toxic monogamy:
Esther Perel, a famous hexa-lingual author and relationship therapist, has much to say about modern monogamy in an age where most marriages end in divorce, rates of marital infidelity are as high as 20%, and non-marital infidelity is far higher:
The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable. As soon as we can begin to acknowledge this, sustained desire becomes a real possibility.
- Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity
Every romantic relationship you ever have will end in heartbreak, death, or both.
In the long run, a happy relationship cannot be sustained by rules. It is sustained by the people in the relationship believing in the relationship, and they believe in the relationship when it is mutually nourishing. And it can only be mutually nourishing when a balance between autonomy and connectedness is struck.
To Be Enough
Another, more subtle, monogamous delusion is that someone else choosing us imparts on us a specialness: we will have won romance, and we are done.
Monogamy, it follows, is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it is the marker of our specialness: I have been chosen and others renounced. When you turn your back on other loves, you confirm my uniqueness; when your hand or mind wanders, my importance is shattered.
- Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity
But the quest for specialness is completely unsatisfiable (and Brene Brown argues, narcissistic). Real security does not rest on our essential specialness in the eyes of our partner. It rests on a shared understanding that we have built a life together and are continuing to do so. The value comes from the work we put into it.
Monogamy is the toughest monastery.
- anon
Which Is More Natural?
Both polyamory and monogamy advocates argue that their preferred arrangement is more “natural”. On one hand, it’s a stupid argument: who cares? We can do what we want with our lives. On the other, we ignore nature at our folly. I believe that it is valuable to deeply interrogate nature, not because it is intrinsically right, but because it helps us to understand what materials we are working with.
Can We Learn Anything From Ethology?
It’s hard to find a better treatment of the complexity of human behavior from the biological lens (including human dating behavior) than Stanford Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s course on Human Behavioral Biology (or his book, Behave). Sapolsky speaks from many perspectives: genetic, evolutionary psychology, game theory, hormonal, and neuronal.
Sapolsky is a neuroethologist and primatologist, and he notes how the mating behavior of all non-human primates tend to fall into one of two basic strategies for passing on our genes: pair-bonding species (monogamous) and tournament species (polygynous). These two categories share a bunch of traits within themselves:
Tournament species (polygynous):
A small percentage of the males have most of the babies (and most the sex). There are lots of “one-night-stands”.
Large degree of sexual dimorphism. (The males are bigger, stronger, and look different)
Males are much more aggressive. (towards each other and towards females)
The males don’t care much for the kids, and maybe even harass them.
Females select males on the basis of their ability to compete with other males.
Males die early.
Twins never happen.
Females never abandon children.
Pair-Bonding species (monogamous):
Most males have about the same number of children, and the males are not particularly more promiscuous than the females. In many species, mates bond for life.
Little sexual dimorphism. (the males and females look about the same)
Males are not very aggressive. (to members of their own species)
The males care a lot for the kids.
Females select males on the basis of their parental competency/nurturing tendency, not on their ability to compete with other males.
Males live as long as females.
Twins are very common.
Females sometimes abandon children.
So, are humans naturally monogamous? You may notice Sapolsky’s punchline from looking at this list: humans are just about in the middle of these two categories. We are sexually dimorphic, but not nearly to the degree gorillas or chimps are. Our males die a little earlier, but not much, twins happen, but they aren’t common and…we pair-bond with lots of exceptions. Congrats! You and I are the confused product of an evolutionary mixed-strategy. Add a bunch of neuroplasticity, a ton of introspection, and culture on top of that, and humans have the capacity to create romantic forms endless and most dramatic.
The Elephant in the Room: Polygyny
Remember how I found it surprising that, to self-report, there are many more women who are polyamorous than men? (specifically among heterosexual people) Well, unless there’s some weird edge-of-distribution behavior, or an identification/practice mismatch, this implies that many poly relationships are one man with multiple women. There is a big disparity in how this trend is expressed by sex. Coming from the ideal of poly-as-overthrowing-the-patriarchy, this might be surprising. But from the evo-psych perspective, or the perspective of anyone who has ever dated, it won’t be surprising at all. This matches the history of many human cultures, as well as the patterns of tournament species. I wonder, if in some cases, we are rebuilding a rough approximation of a tournament species pattern, where many women seek to partner with few highly-attractive men, who only give them fractional attention? (Like Genghis Khan or Elon Musk.)
Recently I’m starting to wonder if I want to share a partner with other women, because women make better housemates and can gang up to keep the random dude in line. For the cursed straight-ish girls like me… If all men are going to contribute to a household in comparative advantage is money, why not just all take the man with the most money? It’s not insane.
- SF Woman, 35, poly
Polyamory, which aims to be sexually equitable, is not at-first-glance the same as polygyny (specifically when few men couple with many women). But it’s worth asking: to what extent is our liberal polyamorous culture recreating conditions similar to the many polygynous environments throughout history? (and a related question: to what extent is a large queer population — as exists in the Bay — necessary to prevent polygyny from becoming the dominant mode?)
Sexual Economics - Who Does Poly Benefit?
Who does poly benefit? And who does monogamy benefit? The following theory will probably be the most controversial analysis in this piece, and, full disclosure, it is my own expansion of a YouTube comment I read somewhere and found to be intriguing. No lofty neuroscience citations in this section. I want to present this not as “the explanation of everything”, but as one dynamic that may be occurring.
Sexual Market Value - We need to talk about “attractiveness”, but attractiveness is subjective and multidimensional. Emotional maturity is attractive. Money is attractive. Kindness is attractive. To my confusion, many (most?) people find particular nose shapes attractive, while I swear I have never seen a particularly attractive or unattractive nose. (lips and eyes are another story) What do we do? Enter “sexual market value”, or “dating market value”. It basically means on average, in market terms, how in-demand is your partnership? Sure, different people find different things attractive, but the classic “1-10” attractiveness scale ratings are possible because there’s at least some level of commonality. Unarguably, a 6’2”, rich, fit, nice, smart, man of 35 is going to have an easier time dating than a cranky, 5’6”, overweight, poor, 23 year old.
Now, imagine a world of fairly strict pair-bonding monogamy, but one where people still get to choose each other. (or rather, the men approach, and the women accept/reject as is often the case for mammals) Assuming everyone had a chance to check each other out beforehand, you’d pretty much get an even assortation. The 10s would marry the 10s, the 9s would marry the 9s, and so on. See the left side of this visual:
The right side of the visual represents both polygynous animals (like chimps) and human polygynous situations (like Elon Musk and his baby momas). The interesting thing is that it’s not symmetric with respect to sex8. The most attractive men receive a lot of attention from many women, and they are willing to give a little bit of divided attention to all of them. The women tend to focus on a fewer partners, and tend to go for men who are more attractive than they are. (the evobio term for this is “hypergamy” - it is also the pattern we see in dating apps9) The women do this while settling for only some of their attention. They might also date (or in chimps, have one child) with a man who is at their level. Is this situation better? It obviously depends on who you are: let’s zoom in on a hypothetical male and female “10” and a male and female “4” in both a monogamous and polygynous arrangement:
More attractive men and and less attractive women benefit from polygyny:
Under this theory, and in an evolutionary (procreative) sense, the most attractive men benefit more from polygyny. They get lots of attention and children from many women. But interestingly, there is a way that the less attractive women also benefit: In strict monogamous assortation, the “4” woman would never get any attention from the “7” guy, but in a non-monogamous situation, she can get at least some sex, some attention, and may have 1 child with his fancy genes. Mr. 7 probably won’t stick around - he has 3 other partners like her - but then she can have a second kid, financial support, and a stable relationship with the “4” guy, who is otherwise totally ignored. All in all, a genetic and material win for her.
Less attractive men and more attractive women benefit from monogamy:
Conversely, it is obvious that the “4” guy benefits from monogamy versus polygyny. (or in pair-bonding versus tournament species) In polygyny, he gets less attention from his hypergamous 4 partner, or he might get no attention from anyone at all. In monogamy he gets a balanced relationship with a lady who is “ranked” about the same as him.
However, while less obvious, “Miss 10” also benefits from monogamy. In either monogamy or polygyny she gets to date Mr. 10, but in monogamy she gets all of his time and attention, whereas in polygyny, his attention is split among the many women who are interested in him.
I have all these partners and I'm not sure if they even add up to 1.
- SF Woman, poly
What is the Point of this Thought Experiment?
Obviously, this is very simplified and possibly just wrong. Humans are not chimps. We have complicated social rituals, we build communities of emotional support that are unrelated to sex, we have birth control and therefore purely recreational sex, and sometimes we fall into a transcendent spiritual love that defies all material or genetic explanation.
Nevertheless, I think there are valuable takeaways from this idea:
Let’s watch our culture to see whether or not we are simply recreating polygyny, be honest about it if we are, and consciously choose to not do that if we don’t want it.
I think the thought experiment makes it obvious that different cultural norms can be good and bad for different groups of people. Not in the “everyone is a unique, do your thing” sense, but in the sense of sexual economics: every sexual assortation arrangement has winners and losers, and those winners and losers will be present in every subculture.
This discourages the idea that either polyamory or monogamy is more “natural”. When we look at the basic evolutionary incentives, we see that like much in nature, behavior is a tense interplay of competing strategies and differing incentives.
So What Do We Do?
There are as many paths to a broken heart as there are relationships in your life. Every relationship you have will end in either heartbreak or death. Yet it is still worth having them.
I am not a relationship expert. I aspired to be married with children by this age, and I am not. I have dated a handful of incredible women, and had my heart broken a handful of times. I have never cheated on anyone, but I have definitely disappointed some people. I might narrate about my own experience more in another essay, but to put it tersely, while I prefer monogamy at this point, I have at times been happily monogamous, happily polyamorous, unhappily monogamous, and unhappily in polyamorous situations, all with different partners (or sets of partners). There are multiple people I will love until I die that it didn’t work out with for one reason or another. A difference in values? A mismatch in timing? Being young and dumb? Fate?
But whether or not you choose to listen to everything I say, I hope that my 14 years of Bay-Area dating, endless gossip with my highly-experimental community, and an obsession with relational dynamics can give you something to take away with you. My learnings feel something like the following:
#1 - Dump the Ideology and Identification
The past decade of writing and thinking about polyamory in the culture has been laced with endless ideological posturing. On the internet, you can find countless impassioned essays on whether polyamory is core to feminism, or if polyamory is a tool of the patriarchy, or whether polyamorous culture is more or less moral or equitable or humanitarian or evolved than monogamous culture. I usually don’t curse on substack…but fuck all that noise. Monogamous commitments and polyamorous agreements alike are ancient. They are probably both in our DNA. They each can be rewarding or disastrous. Whatever choices you make, please, for your sake, choose based on what feels right to you, and what you think will lead you to the good life. Do not run your romantic life based on what some blogger says is progressive, or some philosopher argues is moral.
I also believe it’s helpful to drop any identification around it. It’s quite possible that one sort of arrangement works better for you. But I have met so many cases of people strongly identified with one of either monogamy or polyamory that shifted their view when their situation changed, that I simply don’t believe anymore that one style is essential to anyone’s being10. Relationship styles are practices not identities. One religion might resonate more with you for now, but you can always convert.
I truly believed that my romantic needs couldn’t possibly be met by one person, and was poly my entire life. Poly was natural and always made more sense to me…until I met my wife. Now I’d just always take more time with her instead of another partner.
- SF Man, 32, monogamous (poly-experienced)
When you're monogamous, you only get one person, so it's almost impossible to not have a checklist and put up a wall. Nonmonogamy takes the pressure off, so I can lower my own walls and be open to connection.
- SF Woman, 36, relationship anarchist
Be honest and be kind, but all relationships are agreements, and you can shape them however works for you.
#2 - Work on Our Attachment Wounds
As I hint at in the section on delusion, our attachment wounds can frequently lead us to dissatisfaction in our relationships. One thing I’m very confident of is that doing active therapeutic/somatic/mystical work on your attachment wounds will have a much better return of happiness than experimenting with new relationship styles. I advocate letting your relationship style be decided by convenience, practicality, or habit, and letting feelings of insecurity and dissatisfaction themselves be the primary focus for change. Check out Secure Love for a great, relationship-style-agnostic book on how to feel secure in relationships.
#3 - Maybe Choose One and Stick With It
Relationship styles I mean, not partners. Aella is a nerdy/sexy/alternative blogger who recently collected stats on poly (from her admittedly weird readership) . It’s a great read, and the sort of openly-curious probing into relationship style impacts that I’d love to see more of.
To summarize some of the main findings, polyamorous people:
have about the same amount of sex (until they get older - then they have more)
have fewer kids
have larger age gaps (men date younger women)
have shorter relationships (but not by much)
get married about as much
are more open to modification of the relationship
And finally, are about the same as monogamous people in levels of satisfaction and various markers of relational health.
One of the most interesting results of her surveys is that while by many measures, “fully monogamous” and “fully poly” report similar levels of satisfaction, there is a clear dip in happiness and satisfaction for the people in the middle.
This is very preliminary data, from a selected community, but something about it makes sense. It is not easy to live in the tension of this cultural edge. You might be better off if you pick a lane, find a partner who is on board, and stick to it. It’s easier to not have to negotiate transitions and the grey area.
#4 - Let’s Openly Discuss the Shared Culture
While this article is not advocating monogamy or polyamory, it is advocating something. It is advocating the thoughtful consideration of the way our choices are shaping our futures. In spiral dynamics terms, I want us to move past a level 4 (absolutistic - “this is right because it’s the norm”) or level 5 (multiplicitous - “this is the ideologically correct belief”) discussion, or even past a level 6 (relativistic - “it’s all subjective individual choice”) to a level 7 discussion. (integral) An integral discussion means we thoughtfully look at all the biology, social dynamics, and outcomes surrounding our collective norms, while holding that norms are nothing but a tool, and we act consciously to our own flourishing in that thoughtfulness.
Such discussion would be focused much less principles, and much more on what polyamory does, to a subculture and to a psyche. One of my favorite philosophers phrases the question of polyamory vs. monogamy in terms of the ways that engaging with Eros forces us to grow:
The soul works differently in both of these circumstances. It’s not that one is more expansive than the other, necessarily.
The value of monogamy is that it places on us an existential demand of expansion that would not happen otherwise. When we have options, we ask less from our engagements…When you have been married for 20 years…that is when the real growth begins. But if I am bound to another against the nature of my actual soul, then I’m not growing either.Polyamory will not set you free. Monogamy will not keep you safe.
- Zhenevere Sophia Dao
To collect quotes for this essay, I asked a bunch of people to tell me how they feel, told them it would be anonymous, and I got a response that is so much richer than any public discussion I’ve seen. In this current age, polyamory and monogamy have yet to be metabolized. Whatever norms we collectively choose to build, let us do so consciously.
Quote is a paraphrase. I can’t remember exactly what Carlos said, but it was along classic lines like these ones.
In terms of its immutability only — Christians don’t endorse polyamory :P
This essay is long enough already without seriously getting into attachment styles. But in short - anxious-preoccupied attachment comes from a fear of abandonment and maps well to the “to have enough” headings. Avoidant attachment comes from a fear of entanglement (or loss of autonomy) and maps well to the “to be enough” headings. See Secure Love for an in-depth treatment.
That human dating dynamics are not symmetric with regards to men and women should be casually obvious to anyone living in our culture, or anyone who has ever used a dating app.
Rudder, C. (2014). Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking). United Kingdom: Fourth Estate.
Right, right, so as a Buddhist I don’t believe that anything is essential to one’s being. Monogamous/Polyamorous identity is just another example of a thing people tend to strongly identify with where they’d probably feel freer in if they dropped it.