The books I've seen on polyamory are self-help books not memoirs and in that they seem to be sincere attempts at helping people think through what kinds of resources and capacities a person might need to have on board to pull it off successfully. Those books make it seem like a second full-time job to pull it off responsibly, and not a lot of people have that kind of time or capacity. For the people that do, or who pull it off well regardless, there's nothing to hate it seems to me.
I do wonder if there are two kinds of people doing polyamory (just to oversimplify for a minute) -- those who are doing it to try and solve problems in their monogamous relationships and those who are proactively setting out to create polyamory from the start because that's what they want.
As a therapist (and from talking to colleagues) many of our client bases tend to select I think for the first kind, and that does give us a biased view because in that context, polyamory looks like people putting a lot of energy into new and exciting romantic and sexual liaisons while they're having trouble communicating and being emotionally present for their primary relationship. And for a while that may bring a kind of breath of fresh air back into the primary relationship, but it also brings a ton more emotional and psychological complexity which the primary relationship is not equipped to manage. I've seen multiple situations, with and without kids, where polyamory was a transitional step to divorce (and of course that's not an indictment of polyamory itself).
Therapists also see situations where even if the parents manage polyamory well between them, it's very time and energy intensive at a time developmentally when their small kids need a lot of care. Young kids can have a hard time getting enough care anyway with two working parents in late-stage American capitalism with all its demands outside of the family. So seeing the parents' spare going to nurturing second and third romantic interests when the emotional needs of the kids (or the grownups for each other or themselves individually) are not adequately met seems like not a helpful thing.
Now of course polyamory in that frame can join all the other things that people choose or have to put energy into -- substance use, very involved hobbies, workaholism, economic precarity, media consumption, emotional avoidance, etc.
On the other side, the nuclear family in our current culture is pretty widely insufficient for parents and children. As well that narcissistic self-gratification is not an adequate motivation to sustain a marriage. So to the extent that polyamory might offer more social connectivity for people and to the extent people in it create a larger sense of purpose for it than just self-gratification, then maybe it's a good alternative social structure, including maybe for raising kids.
My bias is that many of my data points make it look like people engaging in emotional avoidance by finding another arena in which they can pursue self-gratification. I'd be interested to hear from people happily in polyamorous situations and who have more data points any reflections about whether they see these two kinds of people doing polyamory and any guesses about what the ratios are (and really anything else they might want to say).
Agreed. Almost all articles in the press are about mono couples "opening up". I've never been in one of those, nor have some of my poly friends. Also, some people open a mono relationship, it falls apart, but then they're poly thereafter. We're out here, we're just less exciting, I suspect.
The books I've seen on polyamory are self-help books not memoirs and in that they seem to be sincere attempts at helping people think through what kinds of resources and capacities a person might need to have on board to pull it off successfully. Those books make it seem like a second full-time job to pull it off responsibly, and not a lot of people have that kind of time or capacity. For the people that do, or who pull it off well regardless, there's nothing to hate it seems to me.
I do wonder if there are two kinds of people doing polyamory (just to oversimplify for a minute) -- those who are doing it to try and solve problems in their monogamous relationships and those who are proactively setting out to create polyamory from the start because that's what they want.
As a therapist (and from talking to colleagues) many of our client bases tend to select I think for the first kind, and that does give us a biased view because in that context, polyamory looks like people putting a lot of energy into new and exciting romantic and sexual liaisons while they're having trouble communicating and being emotionally present for their primary relationship. And for a while that may bring a kind of breath of fresh air back into the primary relationship, but it also brings a ton more emotional and psychological complexity which the primary relationship is not equipped to manage. I've seen multiple situations, with and without kids, where polyamory was a transitional step to divorce (and of course that's not an indictment of polyamory itself).
Therapists also see situations where even if the parents manage polyamory well between them, it's very time and energy intensive at a time developmentally when their small kids need a lot of care. Young kids can have a hard time getting enough care anyway with two working parents in late-stage American capitalism with all its demands outside of the family. So seeing the parents' spare going to nurturing second and third romantic interests when the emotional needs of the kids (or the grownups for each other or themselves individually) are not adequately met seems like not a helpful thing.
Now of course polyamory in that frame can join all the other things that people choose or have to put energy into -- substance use, very involved hobbies, workaholism, economic precarity, media consumption, emotional avoidance, etc.
On the other side, the nuclear family in our current culture is pretty widely insufficient for parents and children. As well that narcissistic self-gratification is not an adequate motivation to sustain a marriage. So to the extent that polyamory might offer more social connectivity for people and to the extent people in it create a larger sense of purpose for it than just self-gratification, then maybe it's a good alternative social structure, including maybe for raising kids.
My bias is that many of my data points make it look like people engaging in emotional avoidance by finding another arena in which they can pursue self-gratification. I'd be interested to hear from people happily in polyamorous situations and who have more data points any reflections about whether they see these two kinds of people doing polyamory and any guesses about what the ratios are (and really anything else they might want to say).
Agreed. Almost all articles in the press are about mono couples "opening up". I've never been in one of those, nor have some of my poly friends. Also, some people open a mono relationship, it falls apart, but then they're poly thereafter. We're out here, we're just less exciting, I suspect.