this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
75 points (77.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43944 readers
487 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Monogamous relationships are hard. I expect romantic groups are far harder.
The upper class has had mistresses and chains of relationships forever. Likely easiest with their resources.
This is very true. Even with parallel polyamorous relationships, relationship difficulty is turned up to high. When you introduce polycules to the mix with triads, quads, or more people it takes that Duffy and ramps it up tenfold.
A triad, for example, isn’t just a relationship with 3 people. It’s 4 different relationships that have to be managed (AB, AC, BC, and ABC, are all distinctive relationships with unique needs). A quad, is 7 relationships. Going up to 5 people is something like 22 relationships to manage. So group relationships like this are pretty rare, even in the polyam world.
It depends on the person and the balance within a polycule. I do a lot better being able to spread out the amount and kinds of emotional support I need. I ask who has capacity to help me with things so nobody at any given time should be getting overloaded. When I was more monogamous if I needed emotional support and my partner was tapped at the time my choices were to strain the relationship or silently suffer.
The benefits like this are more than just emotional support too. I connect with people with physical touch even with friends. Monogamous people can get really jealous over that but being poly that jealousy has never happened. I feel more confident I can maintain friendships in a meaningful way for me because I'm poly.
Me and my nesting partner mostly just nest. I get to fill other needs with other people. If I were monogamous I'd have to decide if it was worth it to throw my living stability out the window so I can search for someone else who can be my everything.
It takes work for sure but I've found being poly a lot easier. The learning curve and finding boundaries can be wild and painful at times. A lot of that is because as a society we only really talk about relationships from a monogamous lens so anyone trying to explore being poly is usually going in blind and they don't have words to describe what they're looking for.