In my club this was done informally, by just telling people the rule, and telling people to knock it off if we saw them violate it, which was sufficient for us.
EA is larger, so you’d have to think harder about enforcement/communication, and the various edge cases. It would certainly depend on the different contexts of different places. The goal of such a policy would be to:
Reduce the number of extreme power imbalance relationships.
Avoid turning off new members.
Reduce the number of people treating EA primarily as a dating service.
You have to balance this against the risks of being overly burdensome. Relationships and sex are good, and I don’t think two compatible people should be kept apart forever just because they entered a community at different times. If you ban relations forever, then people will just ignore the rule entirely. (I find suggestions such as “stop being polyamorous” to be unhelpful for these reasons.)
So if I were to craft a policy, or norm, I’d be thinking about how to strike the balance above. For example, I think a 1 year ban on relations might be appropriate for a university club where new members are also very young and inexperienced at dealing with bad behaviour, but is probably excessive for a place where people are older and the power dynamics are more balanced.
In my club this was done informally, by just telling people the rule, and telling people to knock it off if we saw them violate it, which was sufficient for us.
EA is larger, so you’d have to think harder about enforcement/communication, and the various edge cases. It would certainly depend on the different contexts of different places. The goal of such a policy would be to:
Reduce the number of extreme power imbalance relationships.
Avoid turning off new members.
Reduce the number of people treating EA primarily as a dating service.
You have to balance this against the risks of being overly burdensome. Relationships and sex are good, and I don’t think two compatible people should be kept apart forever just because they entered a community at different times. If you ban relations forever, then people will just ignore the rule entirely. (I find suggestions such as “stop being polyamorous” to be unhelpful for these reasons.)
So if I were to craft a policy, or norm, I’d be thinking about how to strike the balance above. For example, I think a 1 year ban on relations might be appropriate for a university club where new members are also very young and inexperienced at dealing with bad behaviour, but is probably excessive for a place where people are older and the power dynamics are more balanced.