I've only ever met one single couple where true polyamory worked over the long term, and they just celebrated 20 years together. They are an odd awesome couple that are extremely well matched.
I even worked for Kink[dot]com (NSFW) for 4 years and I've thrown hundreds of sex parties with hundreds of people going bonkers all night long (and often into the next day). I've tried it myself in a few relationships and I'm happy that people experiment with it.
But, I strongly doubt it'll ever be mainstream. I'm pretty convinced at this point that it'll always remain a fringe fantasy for the majority of the population. Especially outside of the bubble of certain very small parts of the world.
...and then the punchline is that you should be doing that in a mono relationship, too.
So many conflicting calendars, and scheduling issues to deal with. Especially if some/all of you have children..
Many couples see the death of one partner, many couples lack a full and complete skill set to teach children all that they might want or need to to know, etc.
Leaving communities and extended families out of the picture is some post WWII idealised nuclear family fantasy.
But are all those other people on the same 'level' of attachment for the child, or is there a 'hierarchy'?
Further, not that having community is bad, but it can 'devolve' into tribal/clan thinking, which is probably not good for society as a whole (can lead to nepotism, which is generally highly correlated with corruption) and something the West is relatively unique in 'breaking out' of:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...
That just adds to the chances of instability between parents. 2 parents is essentially a stable maximum
So is real friendship (not like in "we just having fun together eventually").
It gave people a whole bunch of rules and ideals for polyamory to replace their rules and ideals around monogamy. Rather than freedom, it’s just trading one dogma for another.
The Esther Perel approach of couples consciously co-creating their uniquely ideal relationship structure seems much healthier and applicable to broader society.
There are far better books out there now thankfully.
There is sometimes an assumption that you are not banging other people once you start sleeping w someone but even that is usually best left to confirmation.
I have!
I'm not poly so idk if people use couple beyond the literal sense of Exactly Two. (I also don't know if poly people actually say "throuple" or if that's just something the rest of us made up to amuse ourselves, lol.)
this
I recently found out that some elderly friends of mine have been in a polyamorous relationship for almost a decade (we should note that there is inherent bias in finding successful polyamorous relationship, since the social stigma means that people are likely to hide it).
This couple has been married for 50 years and raised two children. When the wife retired, she decided she was done having sex for the rest of her life. The husband still wanted to have sex, so they agreed that he would get a girlfriend (a widow of the same age bracket). By all accounts it appears to be working out for all involved.
Interesting! Doing what?
My parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next year. I am pretty sure if they were younger there is no way they would not have got divorced. They are not unhappy but they are so different that there is no way one would not have thought they could do better if the early part of the marriage had been lived in modern times.
For me, being single is the ultimate form of being poly. I am committed to all the shorter relationships I have yet to experience in my life.
I have had several chances to be in true poly relationships but there has always been at least one, really annoying person with nothing else going on than being poly. Then every topic of conversation is about being poly and that is when I check out.
The idea of poly being mainstream is ridiculous because it is hard to find a single compatible person in time. True poly just multiplies the amount of incompatibility.
Polyamory doesn’t spark disapproval so much as skepticism.
One red flag is anyone wanting to open a monogamous relationship that isn't more-or-less rock solid. Polyamory isn't something to try if you're uncertain about your current monogamous partner.
The ideal case is for someone to go into the dating pool as openly polyamorous. But this will take a couple more generations, I think. Most people don't have the opportunity, because the idea that we need to choose a single partner has been hammered into us from the moment we were born. So I'm sympathetic to people who want to put in the work of exploring whether polyamory is possible within the bounds of an existing relationship.
The most important thing is communication. There will be misunderstandings, but at no point should someone feel like something is being hidden from the other. That's different than respecting each person's individual relationships – one is underhanded, the other is a social contract.
This isn't directly related to your point, but https://www.unicorns-r-us.com/ was an interesting read.
My hypothesis is that most people are generally monogamous, but not to the same person indefinitely, and that transition is either marked by divorce/breakup if socially monogamous, or an odd transition period where they haven't really broken up with their last committed partner but have functionally done so if they're polyamorous.
I've certainly seen both ends of this specific spectrum work for those involved, but it seems about as general as anything else about human sexuality.
Polyamory isn't some sort of magic flag that makes things not infidelity, and most outwardly monogamous people who are in relationships with multiple people aren't closeted polyamorous people, they're just selfish/abusive partners.
Some animals have lifelong monogamy where they have one fixed breeding partner (many birds). Some animals have couples cooperate and raise offspring for a breeding season and then look for another partner in the next season, others mate for multiple seasons.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Mon...
Submitted for your consideration: https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1708600990658711685
If anything, it's a relic of the Abrahamic faiths and their influence over Western cultures. Many other cultures have practiced polygamy since antiquity.
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"Remember," she [Easter] said to Wednesday [Odin], as they walked, "I'm rich. I'm doing just peachy. Why should I help you?"
"You're one of us," he said. "You're as forgotten and as unloved and unremembered as any of us. It's pretty clear whose side you should be on."
They reached a sidewalk coffeehouse, went inside. There was only one waitress, who wore her eyebrow ring as a mark of caste, and a woman making coffee behind the counter. The waitress advanced on them, smiling automatically, sat them down, took their orders.
Easter put her slim hand on the back of Wednesday's square gray hand. "I'm telling you," she said, "I'm doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf."
"And you wax fat and affluent on their worship and their love?" he said, dryly.
"Don't be an asshole." Suddenly she sounded very tired. She sipped her mochaccino.
"Serious question, m'dear. Certainly I would agree that millions upon millions of them give each other tokens in your name, and that they still practice all the rites of your festival, even down to hunting for hidden eggs. But how many of them know who you are? Eh? Excuse me, miss?" This to their waitress.
She said "You need another espresso?"
"No, my dear. I was just wondering if you could solve a little argument we were having over here. My friend and I are disagreeing over what the word 'Easter' means. Would you happen to know?"
The girl stared at him as if green toads had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said, "I don't know about any of that Christian stuff. I'm a pagan."
The woman behind the counter said, "I think it's like Latin or something for 'Christ has risen' maybe."
"Really?" said Wednesday.
"Yeah, sure," said the woman. "Easter. Just like the sun rises in the east, you know."
"The risen son. Of course -- a most logical supposition." The woman smiled and returned to her coffee grinder. Wednesday looked up at their waitress. "I think I shall have another espresso, if you do not mind. And tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?"
"Worship?"
"That's right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk?"
Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, "The female principle. It's an empowerment thing. You know."
"Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?"
"She's the goddess within us all," said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. "She doesn't need a name."
"Ah," said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, "so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon, while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the sea-foam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?"
"You're making fun of me," she said. "We don't do any of that stuff you were saying." She took a deep breath. Shadow suspected she was counting to ten. "Any more coffees here? Another mochaccino for you, ma'am?" Her smile was a lot like the one she had greeted them with when they had entered.
They shook their heads, and the waitress turned to greet another customer.
"There," said Wednesday, "is one who 'does not have the faith and will not have the fun.' Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passers-by know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Let's see -- I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don't know you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favor here -- this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets."
Her green eyes looked at Wednesday. They were, Shadow decided, the exact same color as a leaf in spring with the sun shining through it. She said nothing.
"We could try it," continued Wednesday. "But I would end up with ten fingers, ten toes, and five nights in your bed. So don't tell me they worship you and keep your festival day. They mouth your name, but it has no meaning to them. Nothing at all."
Tears stood out in her eyes. "I know that," she said, quietly. "I'm not a fool."
-----
Just as in the book's depiction, your parent comment has managed to confuse a practice that a culture older than Christianity imposed on it with one that Christianity imposed on the older culture.
For starters, it’s true that the name “Easter” probably comes from a Germanic goddess, but in most other languages the name of the holiday is related to Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover. (As a holiday, Easter is directly descended from Passover, as that’s when Jesus died.)
The English name for Easter derives only indirectly from the pagan goddess, because Germanics used the name Easter for the springtime month of April. Similar to how Good Friday took its name from the day of the week, not because it had any relation to the worship of Frigg.
Easter eggs aren’t a “fertility ritual” either—they came to Easter via Persian New Year celebrations.
It's not making statements about history. Elsewhere in the book it states that the Ancient Egyptians traveled to America, which is why Thoth has a presence there. It's a fictional world.
> [Easter eggs] came to Easter via Persian New Year celebrations.
Is this something we know? I had the impression that Easter eggs were attested for the Kievan Rus.
What? Monogamy was already mandatory in Western culture (meaning classical Greek and Roman culture) before there was any influence from Judaism. And Jewish scripture is explicitly polygamous.
Monogamy in Christianity is obviously the result of the influence of Western culture on Christianity and not the other way around. For Judaism that is not so obvious, since it, unlike Christianity, at least predates Classical Roman culture.
Meanwhile, in the third Abrahamic faith, Islam, monogamy is not even an element of the faith today.
Given how radical their “immigration” system already was it would have been untenable to allow citizenship for multiple wives.
Second, traditional polygamy was never akin to modern polyamory. It included contract/commitment, not short-term engagements.
I am guessing at what you mean here... Is forming a couple that is oriented to raising kids no longer an evolutionary advantage?
"Honey, remember that mistress I was banging last month?"
"Yes... darling"
"She has HIV, you probably have it now too..."
"Ok darling...no problems"
Infidelity rates in "monogamous" partnerships are already substantial (~10-25% depending on study) [2], poly only changes the honesty and logistics.
And there are other STDs to worry about than just HIV. Numerous drug resistant bacterial infections are on the rise.
If the increased risk doesn’t bother you, that’s cool, but you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
> poly only changes the honesty and logistics
The data shows monogamy is aspirational, from a sexual perspective. Poly folks are more intentional about safe sex, at least in my experience.
Of course, having no sex or being in a strictly monogamous relationship where you’re 100% positive no one is being unfaithful is the lowest risk activity. But with 40% of pregnancies unintended annually in the US, infidelity rates, STD stats reporting from state public health systems, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I am a scholar basing my thesis on the data.
(hard to take the monkey out of the human, we are simply fancy mammals)
> I extrapolate out accordingly
> I am a scholar basing my thesis on the data.
Those statements are entirely contradictory. You’re methodology is not even remotely in the vicinity of scholarly.
>The data shows monogamy is aspirational
If 75-90% of monogamous relationships are successfully monogamous, I’d hardly call that aspirational.
> But with 40% of pregnancies unintended annually
Without know how many of those are monogamous couples, that statistic is useless.
If you want to get pretty close to the actual risk difference, take a look at the difference in STD rates between single and married people. Even adjusting for age, race, and income, single people are astronomically more likely to contract STDs than married people.
This isn't always the case. My sample is a bit biased as I rarely interact with cishet folks outside of work, but in my circle, quite a few nonmonogamous folks are quite stable with the 1-3 partners they have for years or decades at a time. As others point out, scheduling is a real limiter and unless you're just doing one-night-stands, it's easy to get "polysaturated" where, yeah, that boy looks cute but I don't have time for him. But what I can do, that I couldn't in a monogamous relationship, is come home and gush about the cute boy I flirted with.
I've even had partners in the past with HSV1 or HSV2 and have tested negative for years after, because we were safe and worked around outbreaks.
I'd say the primary use case would be sex work, outside of that I know a freakin ton of people who aren't slightly interested in missing out on the full experience.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harem_(zoology)
[2] https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
I haven't seen any convincing arguments that it does in humans. If women and men are equally polyamorous, that actually means more sex available broadly speaking, and when you aren't dating to reproduce or settle down forever, your standards can be looser as well.
Now, I don't believe polyamory will ever be dominant, or even mainstream, I just despise the "loser need sex for cohesion" argument.
Say the "successful on Tinder" group of 5%-er men who go to the gym nonstop, and have won the genetic lottery. There is also the "influencer" group of women with countless thirsty men in their DMs. Not every woman manages to become an influencer, but many are extremely beautiful.
Are people in these harems happier being delulu than in some monogamic relationship? I'm not really sure.
Industrialized society has managed to deliver lots of high quality products by replacing the human component with machines... relationships are something entirely between humans however, so they are hard to improve with industrialized processes. Until robotic girlfriends/boyfriends arrive of course :).
If resources are constrained, it’s a toss up if it’s better to have one dedicated partner with a strong bond, or multiple partners with weaker bonds. Depends I imagine on a lot of other dynamics, and if there are kids involved.
There certainly are dynamics where many weaker bonded partners is worth the risk, or prostitution wouldn’t be the world’s oldest profession.
It's loser need marriage.
Somehow I think we've found the sticking point.
Then you have not made a sincere attempt to date multiple partners as a man in the bottom 60%.
Notably, they follow pre-birth control setups and are male centered (one man, many wives), and do indeed exclude large swathes of men from the economy and relationships.
One woman, many husband type setups are quite rare outside of nomadic/pastoral communities.
As to with birth control? Harder to say.
Many<->Many setups seem to have a lot of historical precedent, but mostly in societies without strong property rights (nomadic tribal) as they tend to be unstable over time and unpredictable. No large scale societies exist like that I am aware of.
As a woman who’s been extremely successfully poly for almost a decade, I feel like I fight against the grain whenever I am able to explain how well it works for myself and the other women I’m with…with various relationship styles in there.
It’s sad how skeptical and dismissive folks are, and how unwilling they are to see how it can work for some, but not all.
The lessons of radical honesty and communication skills that come from practicing polyamory can improve monogamous relationships as well. I feel it’s just too challenging for some.
How many children do you have? (i.e. are you passing on your lifestyle to the next generation?)
Memetic reproduction need not coincide with biological reproduction. Of the non-monogamists I know, almost all of them come from monogamous pairings.
For a couple generations, maybe. But if the meme is extremely detrimental to the evolutionary fitness of its hosts, eventually adaptations conferring resistance to the meme will become common. Like how sickle cell is more prominent in places where malaria is common, because it confers resistance.
This phrase is doing so much work, the rest of your comment was able to retire in the Bahamas. Sounds a lot like the argument that gay people don't exist because they don't reproduce.
There is a common view of cultural norms as at worst tyrannical or at best random and arbitrary, rather than the sophisticated and curated product of billions of human lives.
Social iconoclasts dismiss organized religion, marriage, sexual norms, gender roles, and cultural traditions. Base human psychology and sociology must bow to their intellect and are theirs to shape as they choose.
> For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
> Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
> Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
> Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
> For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,
> Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
It's important to recognise that western organised religion stomped on a great many multi-millenia gender roles and cultural traditions about the globe via colonisation.
Promoting what might made right as "the norm" severely downplays the alternative collective learning of uncountable generations.
Sure, but let's be honest that the majority of humanity stabilized around a man and woman having children in a monogamous relationship, with a minority practicing polygamy. The rest were tiny outliers numbers wise.
That's not quite the blank slate that some people imply humans are, imho.
You have to get into pretty small and obscure populations before you come across meaningfully “alternative” constructions.
Polygamy has been widespread throughout history, eg:
In accordance with the marriage-customs of the Egyptians the priests have but one wife, but any other man takes as many as he may determine; and the Egyptians are required to raise all their children in order to increase the population, on the ground that large numbers are the greatest factor in increasing the prosperity of both country and cities.
It's been widespread throughout the western christian church also - Popes weren't the only ones with multiple families.
> What grinds my gears about this is that it’s always some white American invoking the moral sanction of unspecified black and brown people.
What grinds my gears is the sheer number of idiots that assume the internet is made up of white American males.
Some of us were tagging along on logistics runs and meeting the Minangkabau, the Bugis, the Fore, and many many other people in the 1960s.
To the best of my recollection Paul Gauguin wasn't hanging out in Tahiti for the grinding monogamy.
Still, it's hard to bame people in a post missionary world for having culturally blinkered views formed by the pinhole of white saviour pamphlets.
> Some of us were tagging along on logistics runs and meeting the Minangkabau, the Bugis, the Fore, and many many other people in the 1960s
See my point about small populations. Indonesia has 278 million people, of which the Minangkabau comprise 8 million. What’s the gender norms of the dominant Javanese culture? Are they accepting of polyamory?
And white travelers like Gauguin really have little insight into foreign cultures. Sex tourism is much more a legacy of colonialism than monogamy.
Still too early to tell otherwise.
If you want to quote from the Bible:
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
So even looking at porn or thinking sexual thoughts about anyone else is engaging in a poly relationship. By that standard, nearly everyone is in a poly relationship.
"For by grace you have been saved through faith."
Because of Christ's grace, your belief is sufficient even if your acts are not.
Don't you find it weird that doing the bad thing but agreeing that it is bad is... okay, while deciding the thing is okay is... heresy?
In one, you try to be better but aren't always successful. In the other, you've embraced the bad.
otherwise you're <insert name of belief>, in name only.
mercy and justice are apprioriate outcomes for breaking the rules, not just 'yolo whatever i believe so everything is permitted'.
There what someone believes, and what someone says they believe.
People are (ought to be) in state of continual improvement.
There is a difference between what things are common weaknesses and what things are social ideals. Just because sloth is not unusual, doesn't make it culturally acceptable.
> looking at porn or thinking sexual thoughts about anyone else is engaging in a poly relationship.
It is a poly relationship in your heart, which a step in the direction of an actual poly relationship.
Lust/adultry, anger/assault, envy/theft, etc.
"For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he."
Or, later in the same letter, Paul speaks about his own struggles:
“For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Rom 7:18-19
> Social iconoclasts dismiss organized religion, marriage, sexual norms, social duty, gender roles, and cultural traditions.
Some of the cultural norms you named there are millions of years old and show little variance across cultures and time. Others only a few millennia old at best and show very high variance.
Examine any of these “fundamental norms” and see that they were not so fundamental after all. With their narratives built to enforce cultural norms today, not genuinely explore lessons from the past.
My grandma will _insist_ that homosexuality simply didn’t exist when she was younger. This is the “sophisticated” product you speak of - a blatant denial of reality.
There are tradeoffs to every path, many only visible long after the path is taken.
It’s easy to reject the old path because the tradeoffs are visible and it’s clearly not perfect.
That doesn’t mean the new path is going to be better - just less known.
I agree in this case, but only because I think marriage is an institution that we’ve learned needs (sometimes strong) active endorsement and it’s pro-social.
My view is that cultural norms are at worst tyrannical and at best the essence of being human.
> Social iconoclasts dismiss organized religion, marriage, sexual norms, social duty, gender roles, and cultural traditions.
This is just true. But this is all of us: we all have a relationship with society around us and dismiss parts of it. As we should.
Wisdom in one context can be foolishness in another. To live a good life it is necessary to re-evaluate the actions of your forebears and determine if it is still applicable to your modern context. That doesn't make someone a "social iconoclast", it makes them wise. Our ancestors did the same thing to their ancestors. Homo sapiens is 300,000 years old, and our societies have changed a lot since then, and will continue to change.
Note that I personally have no desire to be anything other than monogamous, but I know several people (both young and elderly) who are successfully polyamorous. I also know people who have catastrophically failed at polyamory; but then, of course, I also know people who have catastrophically failed at monogamy.
As far as I'm concerned, normalizing polyamory will strengthen monogamy. It seems like some people out there just aren't cut out for monogamy, and in a monogamous world they inevitably become cheaters. Let the polyamorous people remove themselves from the monogamous dating pool and you will exclusively remove people who would otherwise be compelled to cheat.
To be clear, in my example, polyamorous people are only a problem for society because that society has decided that polyamorous people are a problem. I am advocating for basing our societal mores on reasonable consideration from first principles rather than simply tradition.
> But I think there’s a much larger group of people that could do it in a society that offers them strong support and reinforcement, who will fail and flounder in a society that leaves them free to make choices.
While it is certainly possible to argue against the notion of such-and-such freedom, this appears to be making the following argument: "it is possible to imagine that individual freedom will result in undesirable collective outcomes, therefore, all of our traditional restrictions on individual freedom are necessary and may not be challenged." I find this argument to be unconvincing.
The support for this argument that you have given is of the general form: "I am incentivized to be a good husband because I would suffer socially if I were not; therefore, monogamy incentivizes positive relationships." I will counterargue that in a society where divorce is met with social ostracization, this disincentivizes being a good spouse, because you know that your partner is stuck with you even despite your bad behavior. My in-laws are proof of this: my mother-in-law refuses to divorce for religious reasons, despite the fact that my father-in-law is both abusive and a proven cheater. Her misery and guilt over her husband's infidelity does not benefit society in the least. And lest you think that this is a problem of society failing to properly ostracize the husband, rest assured that his children refuse to speak to him and he does not care in the slightest.
I’m pretty sure that no kid has thought to themselves “I wish my parents had a bunch of unstable relationships with many different people.” That’s not a social construct. Monogamy is one of the most universal social constructs, embraced by different, unrelated cultures that differ along many other dimensions. How did all those different societies reach the same arbitrary “decision?”
> will counterargue that in a society where divorce is met with social ostracization, this disincentivizes being a good spouse, because you know that your partner is stuck with you even despite your bad behavior.
Empirically, American subcultures in where divorce is taboo, such as Asians, Mormons, etc., are more successful—e.g. their kids have higher economic mobility—than other Americans. Indeed, divorce as a phenomenon has largely affected the lower classes. In affluent WASP circles divorce may not be as openly condemned the way it was, but it’s still taboo in a way that it isn’t among, say, Appalachians.
You're begging the question. Polyamory doesn't imply instability any more than monogomy does. I know people who have been in decades-long poly relationship.
What I do see happen often in poly and poly-adjacent communities, especially those with children, is that children become a more communal responsibility, somewhat mimicking the effect of larger, multi-generational households you see in Asian and Hispanic communities, which usually leads to higher stability and better outcomes.
It’s doesn’t logically imply it. But statistically they are much more unstable. There’s studies that show 90+% of open marriages end in divorce.
The study you're citing doesn't actually have a methodology that one can interrogate about how it reached this figure, and there's some fairly common patterns like opening a marriage in response to infidelity, that would create a misleading correlation between open marriages and unstable ones.
That's vastly different from entering into a relationship with the intent to be non-monogamous (and perhaps already having multiple partners), but is probably much more common, because, for whatever reason there's less of a taboo on sleeping around while married than on having multiple committed romantic relationships.
Not that normal marriages are sunshine and rainbows. But I have yet to see a poly marriage with kids that wasn’t deeply disturbing. Though of course the primary folks said everything was fine.
We don’t have enough data to tease out the cause. We can only say that open marriages, for whatever reason, are less stable than closed ones.
Asian multi-generational family structures are often invoked to justify fatherless children raised “by the community,” etc., and it drives me nuts. There is nothing liberal about us—we have some of the most rigid marriage norms and gender roles around.
You're again begging the question!
Non-nuclear doesn't imply non-durable!
Any problem for the society is like that. You can say robberies are a problem only because society decided it is. That's how society works - there's no some external source where it could be checked, so the implication that it's arbitrary baseless decision because it is social is wrong - all rules of thd society are such, so if you want to have any rules at all, those would be the ones you'd have. It's impossible to have a society where everyone derives their morals from the physical laws anew all the time.
I agree this is decidedly positive for the monogamous folks. There is now less risk of them connecting with and falling in love with someone who isn’t a good match.
Birth control is a radical invention and it is shocking that it hasn’t led to even more rapid cultural change than it has.
One also needs to separate generalized cultural knowledge from individual knowledge. As people mature, they should tend to individuate and discover “what works for them” vs “what works for society”.
That individual knowledge can be bootstrapped on cultural knowledge, but ultimately we may each need to reject aspects of our culture in order to discover our unique path.
The information surface area and processing power of 8 billion people far exceeds the few bits representing your “handful of archetypes and social roles”.
Anyone who believes that Western civilization has been largely functional should soundly reject these ideas and agree that individuation is a fundamentally Good Thing.
And Asia has its own distinct issue, which is that development coincided with population control evangelism from the west.
And yes, it begun in the second half of the 20th century, but I don't think that makes it spurious.
I wouldn't be surprised if western cultural influence played a meaningful role, but I can't imagine that explaining the entire phenomenon.
---
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility (see the graph at the top)
* https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#total-fertility-ra...
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034075/fertility-rate-w...
As you might know, Malthus was quite concerned about the issues of overpopulation. His solution was to educate women. This seems to be working surprisingly well !
Really? I never knew this! Can you expand on his rhetoric at all?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aehr.12250
I seem to remember that he practiced what he preached (not only as the first ever professor of economics, but also as a pastor), and has founded at least one school for women, but annoyingly I can't seem to find the source any more ??
Of note also : by the end of the 19th century the (neo-)Malthusian feminists had already embraced ideas that he disagreed with like contraception and for some even abortion.
Individuals in the western capitalist society spend most of their time making capitalists of all sorts exceedingly wealthy, rather than spending most of their time on themselves.
Give us 4 - 6 months off a year like our ancestors had, and we'll have plenty of children
I was having lunch with some of my dad’s USAID friends, and someone joked whether my wife and I were thinking of having a fourth. Then someone reflexively said “well nobody needs four kids.”
Well, most of that is highly variable and contingent, local. Ask an anthropologist, they'll tell you.
Personally, I don't think one should prescribe the "one true" form of family for other people.
The question you raise in my mind is "What are you going to do to the non-conformists?"
This norm was not evenly distributed. Generally, if you were a peasant (and especially a woman), you were expected to adhere to the norms rigidly. While those with means or power frequently got to flaunt them or even started their own religions to get around them[1]. To me it just looks like another lever of control for the powerful over the "plebs".
At many points in time this quote could easily apply to monogamous marriage, men having multiple wives and/or concubines, and consanguineous marriage.
Referring to the other comment about human morals evolving - religion is evolving as well, although it learned to cover it up. Catholicism is my favorite here, because it's perfected the art of bullshitting itself. For example, divorce is not allowed - but if you look for "evidence" that the partner has misled you into a marriage, then we call it "Marriage never happened" and boom - your not-a-divorce has been granted. Abortion suddenly in the spotlight? It's because our understanding has evolved and it's only now that we see that it's never been acceptable. And so on.
Separate from this topic, I find that understanding of what's "mainstream" is completely irrelevant to informing my own decision making.
It is mainstream to have a gambling addiction, be overweight, be heavily in debt, etc. The fact that something is "normal" doesn't tell you it's good.
However, if you feel alone, ashamed, afraid to reach out to others, etc, having a sense for how common certain kinks are can be extremely useful information. The objective of these statistics isn't to tell you what sexual behaviors are good or bad based on popularity... the very definition of a kink is that it is uncommon.
> Most people don’t want to talk about their true feelings, and when they do, they usually dress it up to make it socially acceptable.
That’s a good thing.
They exist as part of our culture and civilization. Is this some form of "the natural order of humankind is monogamous nuclear families"?
In other words, you can’t really test a lot of social constructs in isolation.
Lmao. This has been tried and failed with every sex cult. The Children of God are the best (worst) example, having started during the free love era.
It actually does hold itself together well enough, until the old guard gets bored and looks to the kids as their new source of sexual gratification.
Selfishness only works when other people can also be selfish.
Extremely bleak. The /redscarepod people, for all their minuses, are more than correct on this. I don't see any way out of this for the West, at least not in the short term.
The coming advent of genetic engineering will make poly more interesting as it be possible for more than 2 people to be biological parents. In fact, we see this already in popular sci fi like The Expanse.
I used to think this and remember my friends and I starting to have this idea that marriage is a social construct in high school and college as we tried on our philosopher hats. A little later I read an interesting book called Sperm Wars [1] that largely tried to line up the results of scientific papers and behavioral surveys with attitudes and narratives about sex. They had what was a compelling argument for me that the cultural ideas behind monogamy are a social rationalization for what we’d be largely doing anyway. In other words, they argued that from as far as they could tell, we tend to have serially monogamous pairings, and the culture and religion views on marriage are just after-the-fact explanations for it, not the primary cause of it. There are, of course, lots of other species on our planet that also tend toward serial monogamy, and don’t have the same social constructs that humans do.
And in a world where the relationship is procreative, the multi-decade long shared task demands stability.
I've seen women and men with a 'hierarchy' of partners, and they all know it (these were typically D/s relationships as well, so it was at least consentual [0])
I've also seen cases where people just like to have a routine to go through. My partner and I are no longer practicing poly, but even when it started they were, aside from special occasions, just a one night a week thing. It worked out well because it was a night I worked late, so we couldn't do anything anyway.
But there were times it was a little unbalanced one way or another, really though as long as you can communicate, it can get worked out.
As far as procreation/etc, Aside from Mormon and other polygamous cultures/religions, it doesn't NOT work out.
Or, I've seen scenarios where a polyamorous relationship allowed couples to have children where they could not otherwise.
I think harem builders create lots of animosity tho.
[0] well, parts were. Others were abusive.
You can be childfree, polyamorous, body positive, whatever, and enjoy your youth.
In older age, your 50s and 60s onwards say, your health, your partner, your family become the basis of your life. It's the ultimate "fuck around and find out".
For my part, I’m happy to see polyamory becoming more mainstream. The idea that we have to choose one partner for life is so indoctrinated into the fabric of society. It was wonderful discovering that there are a whole community of people who live happy lives without this.
Aella’s surveys help people make grounded and informed decisions about baseline behaviors. Most people don’t want to talk about their true feelings, and when they do, they usually dress it up to make it socially acceptable. Polling large numbers of people is at least one antidote.