A man with experience in the London, Bay Area, online communities:
I’m monogamous, and had never encountered polyamory before interacting with EA. My early experiences consisted of:
1. A strong presumption that I either would become polyamorous on further thought, or if not that I simply wasn’t that smart.
2. Predatory men using polyamory to defend their behaviour, in a ‘you monogamous simpleton wouldn’t understand’ kind of way; some of these people have since been excluded from the community.
3. People denying their feelings of insecurity or abandonment; trying to do what was ‘rational’ but not doing the communication or introspection necessary to make poly work for them. I don’t think I’m overstepping to observe that many EAs are poor communicators and very poor at being in touch with their feelings; weirdly I feel like poly would have been a much better fit for some of my pre-EA friends than for some of the EAs I’ve seen try to make it work.
4. Very little in the way of healthy relationships. With hindsight, I think people in healthy polyamorous relationships simply didn’t need to advertise, whereas the people in (1) needed to show off and (2) needed a shield.
I have since encountered many perfectly healthy polyamorous relationships. I doubt I would have stuck around to find that out if I were female; as it was the people in (2) were at least not a direct threat to me.
I write this because I think people are acting like humans form conclusions in this area via arguments, when I think humans mostly form conclusions via experiences and especially via first impressions. This cuts both ways; monogamous people who experience 1/2/3 will write off polyamory as a whole way too quickly and potentially be quite nasty about it, conversely people in healthy polyamorous relationships are (to my eyes) often wilfully blind about the likelihood of a new community member experiencing 1/2/3.
Given the resulting stickiness of everyone’s views, it would be nice if we could simply coordinate to suppress specific patterns that I suspect almost everyone would agree are toxic behaviours and pressures, and have the ‘mono vs. poly’ debate less (or, preferably, never?).
A man with experience in the London, Bay Area, online communities: