Probably worth tabooing ‘poly’ here. As far as I can tell, basically every critic of poly is referring to relationships that are at open to new participants, and every defender of poly wants to defend those relationships also.
If you want you can come up with a new definition:
open_poly: a person in a relationship with someone else who is still open to more relationships.
The debate then becomes whether it is fine to be open_poly, or if there are significant costs and hence open_poly people should cease to be open. I think basically every critic of poly would be satisfied if the existing relationships continued but ceased accepting new members.
And based on your comment it seems like you basically think that open_poly does bring significant incremental risk vs a counterfactual of non-open.
What I’m getting at is the risk factor comes from open anything, regardless of whether it is poly or mono. Agree that tabooing is helpful here.
(Though to be clear I’m obviously not suggesting people stop trying to find romantic partners. Just like I’m not asking people to stop being male or young. Risk factors are risk factors even if they’re out of our control or have clear benefits.)
Probably worth tabooing ‘poly’ here. As far as I can tell, basically every critic of poly is referring to relationships that are at open to new participants, and every defender of poly wants to defend those relationships also.
If you want you can come up with a new definition:
open_poly: a person in a relationship with someone else who is still open to more relationships.
The debate then becomes whether it is fine to be open_poly, or if there are significant costs and hence open_poly people should cease to be open. I think basically every critic of poly would be satisfied if the existing relationships continued but ceased accepting new members.
And based on your comment it seems like you basically think that open_poly does bring significant incremental risk vs a counterfactual of non-open.
What I’m getting at is the risk factor comes from open anything, regardless of whether it is poly or mono. Agree that tabooing is helpful here.
(Though to be clear I’m obviously not suggesting people stop trying to find romantic partners. Just like I’m not asking people to stop being male or young. Risk factors are risk factors even if they’re out of our control or have clear benefits.)