And since the topic's been bumped, I may as well go back to address a couple of posts I meant to say something about but never did:
When I was in college, I saw people practicing polyamory, and I went "OMG, they are so totally idiotic" -- because for the most part they were. Their relationships were disasters and they were hurting people right and left. One sweet friend of mine who was about 19 or 20 got invited into a relationship with a married couple in their 40s, who thought introducing her would solve their problem. Shockingly, it didn't. A marriage on the rocks with two people, was still a marriage on the rocks when they added someone naive and new. Babies don't work to heal old wounds, and neither do new sexual partners.
This might be the most significant paragraph in the whole thread. It's a very important point, and I've seen it too. People who think they can "fix" broken relationships by making them more complicated with more people -- or, worse, people who were already cheating and declare themselves poly in an attempt to justify it. This trick never works. A decision to be polyamorous can make healthy relationships better
if both people are on board with it. But it will only make unhealthy relationships worse.
One common behavior which has become a cliché in the poly world is to decide you're poly by saying "Oh, ho-hum, our marriage has gotten boring, let's find a hot bi babe that we can both sleep with to liven things up." This is almost always the man's idea -- go figure. Not only is it a dumb idea, it's very difficult to implement. Hot bi babes do exist (I know several) but they are, on the whole, spectacularly uninterested in being objectified as somebody else's marital toy. HBBs willing to go along with this are referred to as "unicorns" because they're widely believed to be mythical.
I think polyamory is probably more prone to drama than monogamy *in our culture* because it's less understood. We have fewer rituals embedded in our culture for how to adapt to the problems when we come up. Polyamory is great because it's flexible and new, but it also means that there's less of a pool of experience to draw on when things go bad. Responsible polyamorists think a lot about the ethics of their actions, and try to minimize the drama that comes up.
That's true, but to be fair, I also think that there very often
is more drama when there are more people involved in a relationship and things turn sour. That's just mathematics: more nodes on the network, more bridges that could burn. And that's before you bring in extended networks of friends, who in poly circles may be more intimate with the participants than usual, etc. It
can get really, really ugly, and hurt more people in more colorful ways than a typical monogamous break-up.
It's a risk. As you say, smart people try to avoid it by acting ethically and by dealing with problems
as they come up rather than letting things simmer under the surface.
However, I think sometimes polyamory is judged by an impossible standard -- one informed by confirmation bias. We monogamists assume that polyamory is laced by drama, so whenever we see some drama, we go "Oh, yep, there go those dramatic polyamorists." At the same time, we ignore the same stuff that's happening in monogamist communities, because it doesn't fit into the same narrative in our heads about what monogamy is.
Yes. Exactly. There aren't any statistics out there to say whether poly relationships last longer on the whole than monogamous relationships -- there may
never be good statistics on it, given how many poly people stay closeted in their public lives. But I can't help looking at the U.S. divorce rate (currently around 40% by my best-effort research) and thinking, "Wait, monogamous marriage is the model that everyone says
works?"
When it comes down to it, I think most people are just bad at relationships. We're never
taught how to have good relationships, and the interpersonal skills it takes to find one and keep one. Schools don't teach it; the books that exist on the subject are rarely read by anyone unless there are problems; counselors who specialize in it only work with people whose relationships are on the brink. Some religions and If you're lucky, you might have some good examples growing up; but people don't necessarily learn best by their family's examples, and it shouldn't come down to luck.
If people learned better how to have relationships, how to listen and talk, and how to fairly match their needs up with the needs of the people they care about, I think we'd have many more successful monogamous relationships
and many more successful polyamorous relationships.
