...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.
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.