(from me, OP):
A tip from the bottom of my heart: be a little more careful than you think you need to be, your future self will thank you.
Strong +1
Another Anonymous Account
Karma: 432
A woman in Europe:
I am a polyamorous woman engaging with multiple EA communities in Europe, consider myself highly engaged. I appreciate your post SO much. Thank you for sharing.
I wanted to add two points
1. Learning about poly, when it resonates with you and you’ve been monogamous before can be revolutionary and change your whole life. For me it emotionally felt like becoming vegan back in my teens, like I had uncovered something that makes so much more sense for me and finally I get to live my truth or something like that (obviously these two things are very different). It was for a while the only topic I was excited to discuss and I wanted to talk to everyone about it to see whether it resonates with someone else. Looking back this was problematic. I should have been more careful, I didn’t know better. It took about a year until I had a sense of what healthy poly looks like for me, until I had a sense of the full short- and long-term effects of my actions (I still don’t know.) It is really hard to figure out how to do poly well (especially when you’re engaged in EA) because we have few norms, scripts and role models. I relate with everyone who goes through their first poly year. A tip from the bottom of my heart: be a little more careful than you think you need to be, your future self will thank you.
2. The EA community is young and I think many people overestimate themselves in how well we will be able to navigate the complexities in relationships. I’ve heard people stress their rational abilities, and while I do think that having good rational and reflective capabilities is a huge plus for navigating poly, I have seen the exact same people become their most childish selves when they ended up getting hurt or when they experienced jealously (including me). It takes emotional intelligence and willingness for personal growth (including working on your attachment styles, developing an awareness for your own needs, sitting with your feelings and learning to take responsibility for them), which I think everyone should be aware of when they start exploring poly in EA contexts. If poly resonates with you theoretically, make sure to get an accurate picture of what poly will look like in reality and be realistic with your emotional resources. There’s books and podcasts (one that helped me early on: Polyamory uncensored, haven’t listened in a while so silently hoping they still produce great content), showing the realities of poly, not only the theoretical ideas and if that’s still for you—off you go (responsibly)!
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?).
From a woman who said NA to membership to a local EA community:
I’m a poly woman in the community. I’ve been poly for quite a while now (including before I was an EA), and feel quite deeply poly, like it’s a sexual orientation; being monogamous feels somewhat suffocating and dysphoric to me, like I’ve given up agency and control of my body and choices in a way that’s important to me. I feel pretty disrespected and patronized by some of the anti-poly comments I’ve seen recently; I think it’s really invasive and inappropriate for strangers on the internet to criticize me and other people for making unconventional choices about our sex lives just because we share some values. People talk about work-life balance in EA and for me an important part of that is feeling like there are parts of my life that I don’t have to justify on EA grounds.
I’ve had relationships with ~7 EAs over the years, and, though some of the relationships ended in a way that made one or both of us sad (as is common for relationship in general), I think they’ve overall been great; enriching, supportive, beautiful parts of my life that I’m deeply grateful for. I’m glad I’ve gotten to intimately share my life with different cool people that share some of my values, and I hope to do so more in the future.
Only indirectly related to poly, but when I was younger, I was hit on a lot by a lot of EAs. They were generally very polite and respectful in that, but it still got to be a bummer; I felt anxious whenever hanging out with a guy that he was just waiting for the moment to make a move, and was only interested in me sexually/romantically. That happens to me less now, for a variety of reasons. And, I didn’t consider it a big deal to begin with. But it is a bad dynamic that can emerge pretty easily.
From a male member of the EA Bay Area / DC communities on his experience with polyamory:
I used to be monogamous. I started dating someone who is ‘poly by orientation’ but I was dubious about it—in particular I didn’t know how well I would handle poly. As we started feeling more serious about each other as partners, we had a relationship-defining talk where we agreed to start off monogamous together. We felt that this gave the relationship the best chance of success—partly due to my uncertainty about poly and partly other reasons which pushed in that direction.
We agreed to be monogamous for at least 6 months and then reevaluate it then. In the meantime, I read up on poly. I liked Polysecure, and I also got a lot from the blog Polyamory School ([e.g., this post and others linked there]) After a bunch of reading as well as talking to my partner, I felt more excited about becoming poly myself: I felt like it would help me by giving me more social opportunities, expanding my comfort zone, improving my communication skills and becoming less dependent on my partner for social success. So when that 6-month deadline rolled around, I felt ready to dip my toe in.
We decided to opt for a quite autonomous version of hierarchical poly, meaning that we acknowledge each other as primaries and date independently, and are very transparent about our dating lives with each other. My partner doesn’t have a ‘veto’ on anyone I want to date, although if there was someone who it would make her sad that I dated, she gets to express those feelings and it is usually a good idea for me to pay attention to that. And if I started dating someone else who I thought had potential to become primary we would certainly have a conversation about it before I got too far into that other relationship.
So far (~ 8 months into the poly experiment) it has gone pretty well, maybe 66th percentile of my expectations? I’ve had a few emotional moments, but nothing that I couldn’t handle. I’ve grown quite a bit as a communicator. I think my relationship with my partner is stronger than it was, I’ve done some dating, and have developed other personal relationships more deeply.
Things that could be going better: I don’t find that I realistically have much energy for a lot of dating. I wish I had more. It feels a bit imbalanced; my partner is an attractive woman and lots of people want to go on dates with her, but it’s quite a bit more work for me and as a result I go on fewer dates. Also, I sometimes emotionally struggle in the moment when my partner goes on dates (but not always!) -- it helps to know that we’ll get a chance to talk about it afterwards, and it gives me a nice boost that she repeatedly chooses to keep me as her primary partner even as she dates a lot of other great people.
From a woman in EA (I initially wrote the question asking about local community confusingly, the language has been clarified now):
I was poly before I’d heard of EA or LessWrong. It felt incredibly liberating and validating to find out there were other people like me. Since joining the EA community, I’ve become monogamous because of how much it’s demonized here, both by the press and by a lot of EAs themselves. I can put up with judgement from family and friends, but if people are going to use what I do with other consenting adults in private as another way to try to trash EA’s reputation, as hard as it is to pretend to be something I’m not, it seems easier than stopping people being so discriminatory.
I obviously really don’t want people to feel pressured to be poly either or to do anything sexual that they don’t want to do, but could we please focus our dialogue on specific problematic behaviours rather than throwing in “poly” with a list of negative descriptors, or publicly debating whether my lifestyle is acceptable, or accusing women who make comments like I just have of being traitors who hurt other women?
From a poly woman in EA (I initially wrote the question asking about local community confusingly, the language has been clarified now):
Thank you SO much for this post!
I’ve been surprised at how few people have been defending polyamory from the recent attacks, but I guess a lot of them are scared and/or particularly busy right now. It sounds like a lot of people have been pressuring each other to change their relationship style—either from polyamory to monogamy or vice versa—and I think that’s bad.
I also really like your advice for dating in EA. Posts that see both sides of a debate seem to not be the norm on this forum any more, but I think it’s very valuable to acknowledge both that it’s not always bad for EAs to date and that it sometimes is and to offer advice on distinguishing one from the other. It’s unfortunate that EA is still so small and people change roles so much that having lots of conflicts of interest is practically unavoidable if EAs often date each other, but our worldviews are still kind of niche and it’s important for a lot of people that a partner has a similar worldview. I expect no one wants to go as far as e.g. my local church where people are ONLY allowed to date other Christians, but I can understand how sharing a worldview often makes for a much deeper, smoother relationship.
I especially like your guidance on how status can affect things. EA is quite a nerdy community and I think a lot of people are still getting used to how their new-found high status affects things. Plus it’s the kind of learning that I expect moves slowly because it’s not that amenable to direct feedback, so I imagine indirect feedback / general guidance like this is particularly helpful.
A few things I wanted to add:
1. I’ve seen a lot of reasoning recently that starts “Because polyamory means a lot more relationships / sex / flirting etc...” and I don’t think it’s fair to assume that. My non-poly years involved a much higher rate of these things, for example. The jokes in my family seem to assume that seeing ~7 people at once is typical, but in my experience the mean average seems to be about 2 and I personally hit on people a LOT more when I was single. Sure, maybe people are more likely to hit on you if you’re not wearing a wedding ring, but I know married people who are poly and unmarried people who are monogamous and I’m not sure if there’s much correlation. Maybe people are more likely to continue hitting on you if you can’t (truthfully) say, “Sorry, I’m in a monogamous relationship”? I just don’t think it’s obvious that that’s more effective than “I’m flattered, but no thank you.” You could argue that the first one leaves room for you still being interested (for instance, the person I’ve had most trouble with in my life knew I was in a monogamous relationship), but OTOH the second one is more likely to make them angry at you and therefore assault you? I don’t know what leads to less harassment/assault on balance, but I don’t think it’s clear.
2. Even if polyamory does mean a lot more relationships etc, I think Amber Dawn’s comparison to celibacy is illustrative; I don’t think someone else was right when they called it hyperbolic (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y9ELNXmLDSDi8Z6RX/in-mild-defence-of-the-social-professional-overlap-in-ea). A lot of people on the EA forum recently seem to think that as long as they’re not saying “Polyamory is inherently bad” then they can say what they like. But I don’t think many of those people would think it’s completely fine to say “I’m not saying sexual relationships are always bad, but they do lead to more harassment and assault, so it’s important for us to weigh up the pros and cons of whether EAs should be celibate” or “I’m just saying this wouldn’t happen as much if EAs were celibate” or “EA is about helping the world, not about making your life more fulfilling or protecting your feelings, so it’s fine for me to publicly ask whether you should be celibate.” (If your defence is that polyamory is “greedy”—I’ve had family tell me this before—I think it’s still arbitrary to draw the line at “more than one at the same time” when it comes to relationships, you could retort that monogamy is “greedy” because you want your partner “all to yourself,” and people seem to think it’s not appropriate to call me greedy for being bisexual and I don’t think they would if I remarried after divorce.)
3. If you ctrl-f for “poly” here, you can find three therapists familiar with it: https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/ (linked to from The Mental Health Navigator).
Please do feel free to share any or all of this publicly.
From a male member of the EA Melbourne community on his experiences with polyamory in EA:
“One person mentioned their two partners in a conversation about self care. It was appropriate and not weird. That’s my only experience”
Hi Sanjay, as a meta-level comment, you might want to specify at the beginning of your post which organisation you are speaking on behalf of, and possible use the name of the organization in the title as well to be transparent.
From a woman in the SF Bay Area: