why I am polyamorous

A friend recently asked me to share my thoughts on polyamory vs monogamy.

Unrelatedly, I am working on a post about how, at least in my social milieu, I feel stating takes and conclusions seems to be very overrated relative to sharing the personal lived experiences that shaped such conclusions (or, in the absence of such experiences, saying nothing at all...).

In this spirit, I will give you a chronological events-based view of my thoughts and feelings towards polyamory. Assume until otherwise noted in these stories that I am living as an unusually feminine male, sort of like david bowie, or at other times just a particularly eccentric male.

pre-polyamory

You can read more about my relationship history in a relatively comprehensive list of people I have fallen in love with, but I will give broad overviews as relevant.

Relationship 1, 7th to 11th grade: Pining endlessly and bottomlessly for my female best friend with whom I had no sexual chemistry. I didn't have much understanding of sexual chemistry and felt it would obviously work out if we tried, which in some sense may even be true, but is not a very inspiring case for why she should break up with her hot smart kind car-having boyfriend to be with me instead. Foiled by monogamous exclusivity!¹

Relationship 2, 7th grade & 9th grade: Having lots of fun dating this really hot girl who was super horny and nice. In both cases I break up with her after 4-6 months explicitly for the sake of renewing my focus on pining in futility for girl 1. Given that I did not view the pining as optional, this was the correct and noble thing to do according to the institution of monogamy, but it was also pretty stupid and she was not pleased. Foiled again!

Relationship 3, 10th grade: Having lots of fun e-dating this truly incredibly hot girl I met at a summer camp run by the residential magnet school I'd later attend for 11th and 12th grade (along with girl 1), and we started staying up all night having camsex shortly after for like 8 months or something. This person was one of the smartest people I'd ever met and I was deeply in love with her. I know that she was deeply in love with me too because she spent a lot of time playing this telnet MUD called HellMOO with me which takes place in a deranged post-apocalyptic future. We made characters that represented eachother and engaged in a lot of erp by roleplaying as the other person (the game had a horniness system, cum physics, etcetera). Anyone I can inspire to participate in that sort of thing is obviously deeply in love with me. Aside from her wit and bottomless horniness I do need to explain to you that this person literally looked like she was in her mid 20s, was extremely tall, extremely muscular, particularly in her ass and thighs... like she visually parsed more as a goddess than a human and had the confidence to match.. on the one hand I don't want to spend any more time lecherously describing this person but on the other I feel like if I don't you will (rationally) fail to imagine or believe how attractive this person was. Suffice to say it was fucked up. Anyway I dumped her to pine for girl 1 some more. Foiled again!²

Relationship 4, 11th & 12th grade: At my residential boarding school I meet one of the funnest and smartest people I've ever met. I take her out on a date by breaking into condemned dormitory on campus with a picnic blanket and having a picnic on the roof where we stargazed and watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo³. She was impressed and we kissed and stuff. Then it turns out she has a boyfriend back home but she will break up with him to be with me. But then she doesn't do that because she likes having sex with him too much, much to my dismay. He wasn't as smart as her and I don't think they talked that much when she was at school which was almost always because he lived like 4h away. I am not trying to insult her or him when I say this, but when she talked about her emotional bond to him it sounded exactly how one would describe their emotional bond to a beloved dog that they are debating giving up. She keeps cheating on him and hooking up with me a few more months, eventually I think she got annoyed that I kept passionately imploring her to break up with this person for hours a day. We were only kind of meh-tier sexually compatible to begin with and my whining kind of killed the vibe, especially given that most of my arguments were to the effect “are you sure you like having sex with him more than me?” (she was) and “sexual compatibility isn't so important anyway, you harlot”. We kept being quite close friends for another like 8 months; I would say this person was definitely in love with me in some sense, and I kept spending nearly 100% of my thoughts obsessively opining to her and myself why she should definitely break up with her sex-dog boyfriend to be with me. Foiled by monogamy... again!

first introduction to ‘polyamory’

Relationship 5, 11th grade, brief: There was this guy, a 12th grader, who was a very beautiful writer and an overall spontaneous and fun person. Girl 4 had a huge crush on him, likely because he was her only peer in writing ability at the school, possibly the only one she'd ever met period. Well I end up hitting it off with him during a field trip and I would say he pretty explicitly fell in love with me. I think I mostly appreciated this prospect on its own merits though the idea of holding a triumphant position in a love triangle with girl 4 was certainly not lost on me.

Anyway there was just one barrier which was that he was dating this lovely valedictorian+prom-queen girl already. But he felt she would see the logical merits of initiating a thruple. I was aware that a gay classmate i respected had had the time of his life in this beautiful spontaneous thruple at some fancy summer camp last summer. So I got pretty excited about this idea.⁴This culminates with the 3 of us going on a ““date”” (she was not clued in apparently) in my hometown and then we come back to my home (my parents were out) and he initiates hilarious/autistic group hugging which he then tries to escalate into group kissing in a very awkward manner that was consent-forward but otherwise involved no explanation. She thought it was weird and dismissed it. And that was pretty much that.⁵ Foiled by monogamy, I guess, honestly I wasn't bent out of shape about it. I'm not even sure how much this affected my views on anything it just felt appropriate to include.

Relationship 6, 12th grade: I date a sex-dog type girlfriend of my own for most of 12th grade and we have lots of sex. She was pretty helpless and had few friends, but she was nice and got along well with my dearly beloved internet friends I spent hours talking to every day and again we had a great time having sex. By this point I was pretty tired of all the pining stuff (felt rather embarrassed about it, in fact), we simply broke up for a normal and sane reason which was that we graduated high school and would virtually never see eachother again. [insert epilogue here later]

first ‘open relationship’

Relationship 7, sophomore yr college: Another relationship where we hit it off sexually really well, >1h of sex a day, etc. We were hanging out and hooking up a lot and then every so often one of us would say “but like just to be clear... I would like to keep things where they are and not be ‘dating’”. And then as I remember it maybe a month or two in she is like “Okay I am attached enough that if you started seeing somebody else I would be hurt.” and I was like “Well that's fine, I was not planning on that, I have grown very fond of you and I'm enjoying spending 12h a week having sex together”.

And then she is like “Okay... so are we dating then? Aughh... I mean I feel like a bad person because really I know I'd like to see other people I just know I'd get upset if you did... but I know that wouldn't be fair...” and I was like “I honestly don't care.” which was pretty much true. While I certainly had experienced envy, I don't think I'd actually experienced anything up to this point that you could describe as jealousy.

My memory of the specifics is a bit fuzzy, I don't recall if there was ever a time after this where I was nominally permitted to see other people as well or if it was always only her, though I know I didn't see anyone else. I remember setting some sensible polyamory ground rules with her, namely, that I didn't want to feel in competition for her time or affection, so it would be ideal if there was some kind of schedule or advance notice for seeing other people. I remember she was seeing this guy for a while that I thought seemed like a nice sweet guy and so I was pretty supportive. I think she also did some SeekingArrangements stuff which I just thought sounded interesting.

It's amazing what life was like before I was exposed to cultural consensus engines like Twitter. I am now aware that today the cultural consensus is that people view the arrangement described as perverse cuckoldry. Hell, for all I know, maybe she did too. But again I truly didn't care or see a reason to care or see a reason why I ought to, and just implicitly held a frame that this variance in “jealousy” and “desire to see other people” was like a type of neurodiversity, and that in this case we appeared to be quite conveniently compatible, just like it was convenient that she happened to be a “very oral person”⁶ and I happened to... like that.

Anyway this all changed over winter break. She was texting me a bunch about being super excited going on dates with this amazing guy back in NYC, he was super hot, etc. Then she became less and less responsive. One near-peak was when I was having a sleep study and I had a bunch of shit hooked up to me and looked completely insane and felt very uncomfortable in my body, and since I wanted to share my experience I sent her a selfie or two and then messaging her something like “haha wow its amazing that I am experiencing such strong unsexiness while you are having sex with this guy you're head over heels for... it almost even makes me feel insecure lol” and then like the next day she ghosts me for like 36 hours or something and I probably message her something like “I feel like you are so into this guy that you are now having a crisis about our relationship even though it's an open relationship and you have no way of seeing him all that often” and she was like “yeah thats basically what happened...” and then I destroyed a strange nutcracker doll made of beads and elastic string in frustration, went for an angsty run listening to Nine Inch Nails until I threw up a tiny amount, which felt very freeing. The next day or so we call and I tell her I'm not enjoying this open relationship stuff right now and would like a pause. Then like 5 months later she gets super distant for like 1.5 months and then dumps me, which upset me a lot and I was frankly inappropriately mean/disgruntled about it afterwards.

I will note that telling of the polyamory-relevant details of this story kind of elides over the fact that it was actually quite a sweet relationship, remains a special/unique experience, and I had a lot of affection for her. [insert link to future love list entry]

parental history

first exposure to mature polyamory

(to be continued)