Cool to see this getting some spotlight. It’s important to remember that just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s around you.<p>IME you’ll rarely just stumble upon someone poly. There’s usually some community involved which helps keep out bad actors and cool people safe.<p>Older people tend to be of the swinger variety (which technically isn’t poly iirc) and a little more hush hush.<p>Younger people in cities are often more open about it. And I’ve seen it more in explicitly queer-friendly spaces. If you come to a certain city in the PNW it’s everywhere.<p>I tried it for a few years. There’s pros and cons. It’s ultimately not for me.<p>This is going to be another big fight for marriage equality. New terms will be thrown around but the fight is all the same. Legalize (consensual) love.
Polyamory will never become popular. I'm not going to judge anybody for what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom, but I will say that very few people are going to be okay with their partner having sex with other people, and you need at least 3 such people for a polyamorous relationship. Also, maintaining a normal relationship is hard, and the number of relationships between 2 members within a polyamorous relationship increases quadratically as the number of members increase linearly. If even one of those inter-relationships go sour, I imagine that it could lead to serious consequences for the entire poly relationship. Again, good for you to any poly people reading this that happened to make it work, but the odds are stacked against poly relationships.
> How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?<p>Housing prices. Seriously.<p>Polyamory is on the rise, and divorces are at a 50-year low[0]. This isn't a coincidence.<p>Where a couple would have divorced in the past, it now is financially infeasible in many cases. Living with a partner you're no longer compatible sucks, but not being able to afford rent sucks worse. So couples are pulling out all the stops to be not-divorced, including looking for other partners and keeping a marriage-in-name-only.<p>[0] <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-us-divorce-rate-has-hit-a-50-year-low" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-us-divorce-rate-has-hit-a-50-...</a>
I'm deeply cynical that polyamory is "popular" outside of select corners of the Internet. Why? I'm just going to be blunt and say it: very few men are going to tolerate a situation where their wife or girlfriend is having sex with several other guys and they aren't having sex with several other women for long. Given how supply and demand for casual sex works, that's going to be what happens, more often than not. This is the sort of situation that could turn very explosive, very fast.<p>And that's before we to whether most people are temperamentally suited to the emotions of "sharing" something this intimate, or the child-raising angle. Just because it can work for some doesn't mean it'll work en masse for most people.
I thought this issue was settled in the late sixties and seventies. As "hot" as threesomes sound, the result of polyamorous consequences was once considered settled when the early '80s struck. i.e., Drug-resistant STDs and the emergence of HIV. Monogamy can turn into a boring gated garden whereas a threesome is a potential vector threat if not an emotional threat as well.
I think people are confusing poly with open. Open is just consensually fucking other people typically without any commitment. Poly is basically a serious relationship with multiple people. The biggest challenge to real poly is dealing with legit feelings of jealousy, commitment, loyalty, authenticity… I think they two are confused often.
I wonder how middle-aged couples deal with the sexual desires. Numerous reports, let alone anecdotes and shows, mentioned that couples with each other for many years lost sexual desire towards each other, while their libido still flowed free. To quote one of such publications: "Sexual arousal and desire appear to decrease in response to partner familiarity and increase in response to partner novelty".<p>I guess it's a little price to pay for a stable marriage?
I’m convinced this is the next big legal/political marriage change after gay marriage. Though, this one might be a bit harder for developers. I imagine most government databases are setup to assume a 1-to-1 marriage relationship rather than a many-to-many relationship.
If I felt secure in a relationship, having a partner that wants to experiment with others/date others wouldn’t really bother me. Everyone likes a little novelty from time to time.
Aella has collected some great stats on polyamory<p><a href="https://aella.substack.com/p/polyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relationships" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://aella.substack.com/p/polyamory-vs-monogamy-how-relat...</a>
It isn't. I don't know of a single couple in my personal life or extended group of friends that went poly and remained a couple past 5 years. They all eventually split up. Why get married if you're going to be polyamorous. Seems like a bit of a hassle to tie yourself up legally and financially when you've otherwise thrown all other parts of the relationship to the wind.
I know one person who tried this and in their experience it's something that's gender-unbalanced. That is, as an average male, you need to invest much more work to enjoy the same level of connectivity when compared to an average female. This might be related to the fact that still after so many decades of sexual freedom males are still expected to be the initiating side, by and large.<p>Another difficult aspect is that apart of your "main" partner, your "secondary" ones either need to accept that you already have a partner, hence also be open to polyamory, or you have to lie to them, which is definitely not a game for everybody. Overall, seeing all this, I wouldn't recommend it unless you have your emotions like jealousy well under control.
The article hints throughout that polyamory is just for the rich. I don't have the data but it's not clear to me that the rich are having more non-monogamous sex than the poor.<p>As far as the concept itself goes, I don't think it's possible to divorce possessiveness from sex. I'm suspicious of people who claim to have conquered jealously.<p>And then there's children. It's hard for me to see how polyamory won't be a disaster for children. I hope polyarmory is a fad and I suspect it is, just like "free love" in the 60s.
A lot of disbelieve in the comments if polyamory even exists for real. However, I know a long time married (+/- 30y) couple where the wife has a second partner. Her husband knows and approves. They are very good friends of us.<p>At the beginning (+/- 15y ago) it was hard on the husband, the alternative basically was to divorce. But he loves her and stayed. She also loves him very much, but she missed something more spiritual in their relation. She now is mainly with her husband, only not on Fridays (although all very flexible). The couple has no children themselves but the other partner has three. The husband and the other partner know each other and occasionally meet on Birthdays and such. We also meet up with her and the other partner.<p>As a side note, the wife is writing a book on her own life. My own wife did some proof reading and she says it is beautifully written (my wife reads many, many books). Hopefully she can get it published.
Anecdotally, I know a few people that have been in open relationships.<p>Most of them are because the girl has berated and worn down their partner and really only stays there for the meal ticket.<p>I know precisely 2 couples where it works in a functional and mature manner. I would honestly not recommend it for anyone
Hot take: Google Calendar.<p>No, really. UX rule: Facility drives frequency.<p>The main barrier to normative polyamory, it turns out, was the sheer logistical challenge of maintaining elaborate, reliable structures of commitments.<p>Google Calendar, and tech in general, have made it easier for people to scale in precisely the same way databases and ERP allowed corporations to achieve Amazon-scale.<p>This tech-dependence is also the reason that poly is de-rigeur in tech culture, where in some circles (esp. queer-flavoured varietals) it can be surprising to meet someone who is mono.<p>A good app to build would be a SaaS platform like Tailscale for maintaining polycule/solo-poly relationships and resources; incidentally, Tailscale is already used for this in nerd 'cules. But I'm thinking some sort of Bring Your Own Storage
By this I think they mean “ethical non monogamy” in the US?<p>People have been screwing around on their partners throughout history. Some cultures turn a blind eye so long as proper discretion is exercised. In others, polygamous marriages are explicitly sanctioned - usually to the detriment of women. The US tends to be a bit puritanical when it comes to sex.
I'm not that surprised alternative relationship structures like this are becoming more attractive in our commitment phobic "I want it now" culture.<p>Basically it allows you to believe you can have your cake and eat it too. The mindset of "I <i>deserve</i> intimacy/sexual fulfillment whenever I want it, and if you love me you'll accommodate that." That's not love, that's selfishness.<p>I can speak from personal experience that most that try it fail, largely because they have other relationship problems, the kind that keep them from doing the work to actually grow and nurture a deep relationship with another human being. It's a lot easier to f*ck the pain away.<p>Sure there are exceptions to the rule. You will always be able to find people that make it work for them. But it will never work for the masses.<p>Myself, I eventually realized the root cause of my dissatisfaction was inside me. As I worked on myself, I found my desire for poly/open relationships went away. It's way too much work to truly "love" that many people. Commitment is hard work. It takes, well, commitment.<p>Trends like this are just a sign of the times. People are becoming more disposable to each other, and we want to normalize social structures that embrace this idea. We'll pat ourselves on the back as we do this, telling ourselves it's so cosmopolitan.<p>Ultimately most of these people aren't capable of maintaining a real long term relationship, just a relationship of convenience. When things get hard, the relationship is jettisoned.
This HN thread is such a mess of logical fallacies<p>Things can increase in popularity without your bubble noticing<p>Things can also exist in your bubble without you noticing<p>But to contribute my own (equally meaningless) support to the validity of the question: I definitively know a lot of people who are poly now who were not 20 years ago, and excluding them - I also know a lot more poly people than I did 20 years ago (no idea if they were poly back then). And for bonus points, I also know a lot of people who have experimented with poly life in the last 10-15 years who hadn't previously.<p>Clearly some kind of shift or at least blip in culture
When two incomes are not sufficient to live somewhere. When it takes a town to raise a child and the local town is ... cruel ... When people get less attached to mythical ideas like "nuclear family" (which is a pretty modern myth), or like the myth of "man and woman" as only model to a family.<p>That some of the really old male-centric cultures are coming out more visible with polygamy, along with some of the "free love" movement and their crossover with the libertarians with (eg) Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" ideas, well that's likely happening too.<p>I think a lot of reasons people explore this. Likely multiple often. All of the sustained groups I've encountered though have been mixed, distributed and really supportive of both each other, and others. A joy to be around.
It's an interesting discussion. The male body was made to have multiple partners, how did it end up that monogamy is the main way to have partners?<p>Granted I know why for myself, but it seems to go strongly against biology