▲ 60 points
back
56 comments
It is interesting how much these discussions are focused on the earlier, procreative stages of marriage. ‘Free love’ / freely connecting with people has a certain attraction but what about the commitments later in life? (see: declining health, aging parents…) Such responsibilities feel overwhelming with two sets of parents, it would be hard to imagine more. The flip side of commitment would have less takers i’d imagine
When I was in a poly relationship, we were all very low income, so we'd help each other out with rent and emergencies. I helped someone's brother navigate the process of getting a GED and figuring out community college, the group as a whole helped another member kick his alcoholism, and we were there for each other during challenging times. I was only dating one other person in the core group, not everyone else, but it was like having a large extended family that truly had your back, and still is -- even though I'm in a monogamous relationship now, I'm still close to my ex and everyone else in that group. They're my chosen family
I think when practiced mindfully, this kind of relationship structure is really powerful. You don't have to go through things alone or with only one other person who'll always truly have your back.
I don't want to idealize it: polyamory is hard work, without which it becomes a toxic dumpsterfire shitshow. Being able to have a tight knit community like this and maintain it for years is tough, and requires lots of patience, honesty, vulnerability and mindfulness. But it's gone a long way towards showing me how flimsy the traditional family structure in the West can be -- particularly for those of us who have complicated relationships with the families we were born into.
Could you expand a bit on the link between free love, and later-in-life commitments? It seems a little like you're saying that people have a responsibility to make the next generation of caretakers?
To me as a late-30s person with no intention to reproduce, that seems a little like: damned if you do, damned if you don't. And, it leaves me wondering if I've missed out by not pursuing this free love thing.
They're not implying such a responsibility to reproduce, seems to me.
What I'm hearing from the parent comment is that they're weighing positives and negatives of focusing on commitment vs focusing on freedom, respectively, in different situations.
Hmm, I'm still not seeing the connection. How does a steady monogamous relationship, especially in that "procreative stage", make it easier (or harder?) to grow old, or deal with aging parents?
> YouGov survey in 2020 of adults in the United States found that, of those who are in a relationship, more than a quarter are non-monogamous.
This seems remarkably high. Is this including "cheating", the very name of which implies it's not considered ok?
Found the source.
> A YouGov poll of more than 23,000 Americans finds that about a quarter (25%) of Americans say they would be interested in having an open relationship.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/society/articles-reports/202...
I don't think that's the right source question, I think it's this one from this study, https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/a4tvy27qfw/Updated%20Results%20f...
"On a scale where 0 is completely monogamous and 6 is completely non-monogamous, how would you describe your current relationship?"
The results were:
0 (completely monogamous) 71%
1 4%
2 3%
3 4%
4 5%
5 2%
6 5%
Not sure 6%
Seems like a really odd question. What would ratings 2 through 5 even mean?
So maybe people who are scoring themselves 1 or 2 are thinking about other people, 3 flirt with others or something?
They could also use a quarter to do a coin flip if a marriage will end in divorce. 45% by 2021 estimates.
No ring, no alimony and no child support has free love written all over it in the 21st century.
Its obvious that it takes a lot of synergy nowadays to not be a statistic :)
I'm a college student. Relationships among a lot of young people work differently than they did for previous generations.
For most of us, I think it's generally accepted that unless both parties explicitly say they want to be in a relationship, they aren't in one. Sex by itself means nothing with regard to the actual status of the relationship.
I and a lot of my friends have been in/are in open or semi-open relationships.
My understanding is that the answer is no. The 25% generally refers to what is called ethical non-monogamy, or open relationships. I also think 25% sounds high.
One interesting thing about comparing the relative merits of an entire adult life of monogamous commitment vs an entire adult life of non-monogamous free love is that no one person can try both.
That is a vacuous observation. It applies to any choice that one maintains for one's entire life.
The non-vacuous point is that different people live fully on opposite sides of the spectrum, so do whatever you want to do and find the balance that makes you happy.
Doesn't the fact that it applies to any such choice make it not vacuous but all the more profound?
Not by my standards. Not only does the aphorism apply to any choice, it also applies to any time period. It is simply the observation that you cannot do something and not do it at the same time. That doesn't seem particularly profound to me. But at the end of the day profundity is in the eye of the beholder so YMMV.
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
- G.K. Chesterton
Neat article, but very eurocentric. "Inventing" free love here very much feels like "discovering" America.
Currently reading Sex, Sin and Zen by Brad Warner, which offers a (westerner's) take on the relationships between sexuality and Buddhism, which I'm finding fascinating.
IIRC there were also indigenous American cultures that had nonmonogamous marriage/relationship structures but I don't have a source for that off hand.
> but very eurocentric
And Christian European to boot. Take: "But for centuries in Europe, nobody openly defended, and few dared to imagine the possibility of, greater sexual freedom for both men and women; and no one discussed alternative sorts of relationships. There was one exception: a few authors defended male polygamy, as sanctioned in the Bible."
I know very little about the Iberian peninsula under Islamic rule, but reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-Rahman_III with "His natural hair was described as being reddish-blond, and he apparently wished to avoid looking like a Visigoth (from many European concubines in his ancestry), desiring to look more like an Umayyad Arab." makes me pretty certain that that non-monogamous {wife + concubine(s)} was established in that part of Europe.
"Polygyny , Concubinage, and the Social Lives of Women in Viking-Age Scandinavia" byt Ben Raffield, Neil Price, and Mark Collard at https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/pdf/10.1484/J.VMS.5.114355 also points out evidence for multiple wives and concubines in Scandinavia. And it adds "it is estimated that 85 per cent of societies in the anthropological record have practised some degree of polygyny, and many societies around the world continue to do so today".
Kidnapping and raping slaves is not really the same as free love or a polyamory.
The difference in average size of the sexes in humans (sexual dimorphism) is associated with some degree of polygyny (males tend to be larger).
> What we now know as the Free Love movement began in the US in the 1850s, and was shaped by the ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier and the anarchist Josiah Warren.
Some interesting intentional communities and wild social experiments came out of this. See:
Oneida stirpiculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_stirpiculture
Oneida Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community
> Oneida was formerly known as Oneida Depot. In the nineteenth century its residents were among the closest neighbors to a utopian socialist commune, set up by John Humphrey Noyes, lasting from 1848 until 1881. This commune, called the Oneida Community, produced silk and canned goods until the manufacturing of flatware picked up in the later years of the Community's existence. This would lead to the foundation of Oneida Limited, a company which survived the Community and became one of America's most important flatware producers in the twentieth century.
Another intentional community, Temple of the People, was established late in 1898, also in New York like Oneida. They were not based on free love, but on Theosophy. They did have similar notions about unconditional love in a Christian brotherhood sort of way. They moved to Halcyon, California, in 1903. John Varian raised his family here, including the famous set of engineers, Russell and Sigurd Varian, whose inventions are often credited with establishing Silicon Valley.
Adding more fire to the discussion: "No, Polyamory Is Not A ‘Solution’ To Cheating" [1]
[1] https://www.polyphilia.blog/home/polyamory-is-not-cheating
I think most people do not consider social evolution at a whole. We know we are too much for Earth resources, witch means the need to reduce the human population. China have tried it in a simple way: no more than one child per couple. Than they found a big issue: population aging. Witch means young people have to help their parents and grandparents alone, and the second generation might have also 4 elders to help etc. Automation help a bit, but does not suffice. The Swedish model of social services does help a bit, but again do not suffice so far.
Inventing "multi-partners families" is a way to re-create the old family model with enough young and enough not too old to help the elders and the children while still ensuring a reasonably free and productive life to anyone "in the family".
It's hard to agree ourselves also in two, in more it's even harder, convincing people to a new social model it's equally harder, but probably certain trends are a potential partial answer to such demographic problems that summed to others might "solve enough" for the not-so-far future...
That wasn't the only issue with the one child policy.
Countries that depend on children caps also generally see sex-selective abortion, because generally in most marriage customs the man is favored over the woman and no one wants to be unfavored. (Interestingly, as regulations have eased and also with both increased gender mobility in general and the current lopsided situation favoring women, the sex ratio is starting to swing back in China.)
If anything, lopsided sex ratios are even more dangerous, because revolutions do often get started by young, restless men.
One child per couple means every generation will be half as big as the generation before it. That is such a ridiculously fast decrease that it is no surprise that population aging will be an enormous problem. Having 2 (or 2.1 or something like that) children per couple will also result in a shrinking population, but at a much more sustainable pace.
Not that I particularly support such a policy. It appears that a country becoming richer and more educated automatically reduces population growth, to the point where the classic Western countries tend to have mostly stable populations. I don't see multi-partner families being a significant part of the solution for large population numbers.
> I don't see multi-partner families being a significant part of the solution for large population numbers.
They might be a solution to allow fast population shrinking, since they offer enough free and productive life to those in a productive age inside the family.
Each generation has to discover for itself that "Free Love" is always disadvantageous to women. The Free Love movement in the 1960's petered out because women found out that having sex with multiple partners leaves them holding the bag when they get pregnant.
Women have their own interests and their highest interest is that the man stays with her, to help her care for their offspring.
For men, it's obviously advantageous to go around knocking up as many women as possible without having the burden to raise and support those children.
> Women have their own interests and their highest interest is that the man stays with her, to help her care for their offspring
Citation needed. My wife would like to disagree.
“ For her, it was this fusion of love and sex that alone could provide ‘the distinctive characteristic of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have no idea.’”
Interesting to see the term child-begeter, reminds me of the _breeder_ trope. If you always expect people to find new ways to convince others to have sex with them, you will never be surprised again.
Interesting story for all of the big names in literature and philosophy it touches.
Free love is only enabled by technology and medicine.
I think COVID and monkeypox epidemics show free love is a backwards way of thinking.
In a globalized world, disease can spread faster than our ability to make cures.
"[A] good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” ― Augustine, "City of God"
“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.” ― G.K. Chesterton
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.” ― Aldous Huxley, "Ends and Means"
Whenever you meet someone promoting free love, look at whether they struggle with sex addiction or guilt over having done something sexually illicit. Margaret Mead serves as another example, now known for her fraudulent studies of Samoan sex life in which she claimed that free love is the state of nature. It turns out that Mead, too, had been having an adulterous affair.
I have yet to meet a single person anywhere in my circle of acquaintances from conservative religious practitioners (who nevertheless endorse some sort of non-monogamy, as believers in the bible who have actually read it would tend to given the apparently blessed non-monogamy within it as a text) to modern non-monogamists through actual literal cheaters ... who does not believe sex carries with it some form of personal restraint or ethical responsibilities to observe.
What those ethical responsibilities might be varies, of course, and it shouldn't be a surprise when people's specific related advocacies might be consistent with their behavior.
I'm all for discussing the merits of monogamous vs non-monogamous conduct or other sexual ethics, but I have little respect for people who seem to be primarily orient their discussion around supposed moral corruption of people who have openly endorsed non-monogamy, especially given how many who have ostensibly endorsed monogamy can similarly provide us with examples of "struggle with sex addiction or guilt over having done something sexually illicit."
There is not much in the way of evidence or argument that the line between good and evil runs neatly down the middle of this debate.
> I have yet to meet a single person… who does not believe that sex carries with it some form of personal restraint or ethical responsibilities
As I understand it, the GP was suggesting that people tend to define the nature of that restraint and those ethical responsibilities around their behavior rather than conforming their behavior to them. That’s not a controversial statement as people tend to rationalize their own behavior to justify themselves in all manners of behavior. Therefore the GP is suggesting that anyone investigating sexual ethics to analyze the lives of who they’re listening to lest they become embroiled in the self justifications of others instead of sober reasoning.
I’d also recommend to be suspicious of oneself around one’s own self-justifications and underlying motivations because we’re all prone to this.
> as believers in the bible who have actually read it would tend to given the apparently blessed non-monogamy within it as a text
Just wanted to point out that while the Bible depicts a lot of polygamy, that depiction is not ever given explicit approbation. While polygamy is never banned or explicitly labeled wrong (a fact that many evangelicals are unaware of and get very squirmy about when they encounter it), it is also never praised or labeled as a good thing. Most of the stories featuring it end in agony and tears (Jacob, Leah, Rachel, and the handmaidens produce a lot of offspring, but boy does it sound like an awful environment as depicted).
Finally, in the New Testament, you get Jesus explicitly calling out "one man, one woman" as the intended design for marriage (Matthew 19:4-6):
"'Haven’t you read,' he replied, 'that at the beginning the Creator "made them male and female," and said, "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh"? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.'"
So, while not as clear-cut as the average evangelical would like, still fairly consistent.
> Whenever you meet someone promoting free love, look at whether they struggle with sex addiction or guilt over having done something sexually illicit.
What a heap of tosh.
Thankfully it’s the twenty first century, adults are free to enjoy their sex lives how they want without having to endure these puritanical cliches.
Whenever you meet somebody promoting prudeness, look at whether they struggle with sexual traumas or feelings of guilt caused by self-denying religious upbringing.
Sure, I know lots of them and literally none struggle with sex addiction or guilt as you suggest.
What is up with the fact that like 95% of people in "polyamorous" relationships have a very identifiable set of phenotypes? A lot of them are pudgy, low muscle mass, pasty, etc.
Not trying to throw shade - legitimately curious why they all seem to fit into this category. It's not clear to me if polyamory allows them easier access to sex than monogamy or something - it certainly does't seem to get them access to partners that would be out-of-reach otherwise, as most polyamorous groups seem to be within a relatively similar attractiveness band.
This hasn’t been my observation at all. Ratios of “pudginess” seemed similar to the general population to me.
I’m wondering where you got your representative sample.
I live in the bay area