Totally agree that mixing romantic relationships with professional ones can in certain contexts create conflicts of interest, but I really fail to see how this is unique to polyamory. Plenty of monogamous people develop romantic relationships with their supervisors, plenty of monogamous people unfairly favor their partners (or more often, their partner’s sibling or other close connection), and plenty of monogamous people have wide webs of deep platonic friendships that introduce complications that are completely analogous to polyamorous relationships. This attitude seems a bit dismissive of the reality of deep platonic friendships, which for many people are more committed and loving than the average romantic relationship.
The difference, from my perspective, is that the mixing of romantic and work relationships in a poly context has much more widespread damage. In monogamous relationships, the worst that can happened is that there is one incident involving 2 or so people, which can be dealt with in a contained way. In poly relationships, when you have a relationship web spanning a large part of an organization, this can cause very large harm to the company and to potential future employees. I, frankly, would feel very uncomfortable if I was at an organization where most of my coworkers were in a polyamorous relationship.
I agree with you that mixing romantic relationships with professional ones occurs among people who are monogamous or don’t identify as polyamorous.
I personally wouldn’t like to see EAs discouraged from being polyamorous. I’m not actively polyamorous myself, but I wouldn’t want to see people restricted to more traditional romantic styles, like monogamous marriage, because I think many of those relationship styles developed in a very different social and technological context than the context we have now. Our culture at large probably benefits from people pioneering and exploring relationship styles that are more suited to our current sociotechnological context. In addition, I think it would be somewhat of a human rights issue for, say, employers in the movement to be telling people how to order their romantic lives.
That said, what I mean to say was that if your romantic life involves more people—which I think it can in polyamory (that is the aim for many, perhaps!), you’ll have a larger and more complex web of romantic connections. If those people are also those you have professional connections with, then there is the potential for your professional and romantic webs to overlap. While this can also happen to people in monogamous relationships, to the extent they are romantically involved with fewer people, and their romantic networks are smaller, there’s less potential for an overlap of their professional and romantic lives.
And while I think an interaction of professional and romantic lives isn’t inherently wrong, it facilitates conflicts of interests, and even more importantly, power dynamics that can facilitate abuse or coercion.
I don’t want to dismiss deep platonic friendships, but I’d ask to agree to disagree on the relevance of those, perhaps, because just about by definition, they will not involve physical or sexual abuse, and so those aren’t consequences of coercive power dynamics that might arise in platonic friendships.
Okay, I think I misunderstood your previous comment to be relating more to conflicts of interest—I agree it’s important to be mindful of overlap between romantic connections and professional life for these reasons, and that it is especially important for people with many partners in the same field to be mindful of this (whether they have many partners because they are a serial monogamist, have a lot of casual sex, or practice a particular style of polyamory)
Another important difference with monogomy is that it’s taboo to make a proposition to somebody who’s already married or already in a serious relationship, so people don’t make them as often.
Totally agree that mixing romantic relationships with professional ones can in certain contexts create conflicts of interest, but I really fail to see how this is unique to polyamory. Plenty of monogamous people develop romantic relationships with their supervisors, plenty of monogamous people unfairly favor their partners (or more often, their partner’s sibling or other close connection), and plenty of monogamous people have wide webs of deep platonic friendships that introduce complications that are completely analogous to polyamorous relationships. This attitude seems a bit dismissive of the reality of deep platonic friendships, which for many people are more committed and loving than the average romantic relationship.
The difference, from my perspective, is that the mixing of romantic and work relationships in a poly context has much more widespread damage. In monogamous relationships, the worst that can happened is that there is one incident involving 2 or so people, which can be dealt with in a contained way. In poly relationships, when you have a relationship web spanning a large part of an organization, this can cause very large harm to the company and to potential future employees. I, frankly, would feel very uncomfortable if I was at an organization where most of my coworkers were in a polyamorous relationship.
I agree with you that mixing romantic relationships with professional ones occurs among people who are monogamous or don’t identify as polyamorous.
I personally wouldn’t like to see EAs discouraged from being polyamorous. I’m not actively polyamorous myself, but I wouldn’t want to see people restricted to more traditional romantic styles, like monogamous marriage, because I think many of those relationship styles developed in a very different social and technological context than the context we have now. Our culture at large probably benefits from people pioneering and exploring relationship styles that are more suited to our current sociotechnological context. In addition, I think it would be somewhat of a human rights issue for, say, employers in the movement to be telling people how to order their romantic lives.
That said, what I mean to say was that if your romantic life involves more people—which I think it can in polyamory (that is the aim for many, perhaps!), you’ll have a larger and more complex web of romantic connections. If those people are also those you have professional connections with, then there is the potential for your professional and romantic webs to overlap. While this can also happen to people in monogamous relationships, to the extent they are romantically involved with fewer people, and their romantic networks are smaller, there’s less potential for an overlap of their professional and romantic lives.
And while I think an interaction of professional and romantic lives isn’t inherently wrong, it facilitates conflicts of interests, and even more importantly, power dynamics that can facilitate abuse or coercion.
I don’t want to dismiss deep platonic friendships, but I’d ask to agree to disagree on the relevance of those, perhaps, because just about by definition, they will not involve physical or sexual abuse, and so those aren’t consequences of coercive power dynamics that might arise in platonic friendships.
Okay, I think I misunderstood your previous comment to be relating more to conflicts of interest—I agree it’s important to be mindful of overlap between romantic connections and professional life for these reasons, and that it is especially important for people with many partners in the same field to be mindful of this (whether they have many partners because they are a serial monogamist, have a lot of casual sex, or practice a particular style of polyamory)
Another important difference with monogomy is that it’s taboo to make a proposition to somebody who’s already married or already in a serious relationship, so people don’t make them as often.