1. I disagree. The number of partners has to do a lot with the depth of any given relationship. The reasonable analogy is learning a skill. The more time you spend on it, the better you become. The more time you dedicate to other disciplines, the more broad interdisciplinary knowledge you gain. It's a tradeoff. And I don't see why this cannot be applied to people.

2. As far as I can tell from everyone else's experience (haha) there are always issues. Issues is not something to be ignored, but rather something to be discussed, otherwise they grow into something you can't actually solve. The more partners you have, the less time you have to discuss those issues.

1. While your basic idea is good, the aspect that you're missing is that relationships with one person can actually enhance your relationships with another. Poly actually encourages the very skills that make relationships work.

2. From my actual experiences, there are always issues, yes. However, they're not as big, because you quickly get very good at communicating and resolving those issues.

I didn't mean to imply that issues should be covered up, sorry. That's absolutely not the case. What I meant was, you can appreciate a relationship with different people for different reasons.

Okay, points taken, they sound valid. Although the problem for me is, I can't take your word for it. I wish there was some research on it with some real data. That would rule out any speculation. For now, there'd be mostly subjective views and opinions with no evidence. If there was some evidence, then we could probably see the general pattern of relationship changing over time and see how humans would handle this in future.

It's true.

It's hard to find out about this for a few reasons. First of all, it's really hard to get good data. This thread is actually the most I've ever spoken about it on the internet, because I'm not really 'outed' in public except to the people who know me in real life. This is largely due to the stigma (and probably some holdover Catholic guilt) that's associated with poly.

Secondly, the data is tainted by people who aren't _really_ practicing open relationships, and only do it to 'spice up' or 'save' a slowly failing monogamous one. I largely attribute my own success to it being one of the preconditions on my relationship being formed.

I'd like to just throw my hat in the ring in support of Steve here, who wrote exactly what I would have in response to you. And I'm talking from experience as well. Your assumptions are quite common though, so it's nothing unusual.