Sigh… Another thing I really doubt I’ll ever get- a throuple of myself, a femboy and a tattooed anarchist punk with green hair, who’s just rlly cooooool.
🙄
There are a lot of different types of poly relationship structures and different names for them. The base unit of relationship is a standard couple where 2 people are together. Add another person in and they can either be in a relationship with only one of those people and form a “hinge” aka “V” or be in a relationship with both of those people and form a “triad” aka “throuple”. As many people as those involved consent to can be added this way.
Most of the time it’s one person who is in a relationship with multiple people who are each in relationships with multiple people. This forms a “polycule”. Where you have the people you’re in relationships with aka your “paramours” and they have the people they’re in relationships with aka your “metamours”. This group of relationships can take many forms and can be drawn out into a cool diagram like a molecule, hence the name polycule.
The people you’re in a relationship with can break up with you like in any other relationship and vice versa. It’s more complicated when you add in housing situations if you’re all living together, multiple people are all dating each other, or if two people are married.
Using one of my breakups as an example:
I’ve been in a triad where one person broke up with the other. I was then put in the middle of their breakup drama. I set a boundary of not wanting to deal with their drama/shit talking of the other. One of them kept breaking that boundary, so I broke up with that person while still being in a relationship with the other. Luckily I was living with the person I stayed with or that would’ve been way more complicated.Man I can’t even form a diatomic bond and y’all mfs getting polysaccharides and shit
I dated a free radical once. Nothing but broken bonds left in her wake.
gets voted out
slowly takes out an immunity totem i found in a charity shop.
the immunity totem is the part of the lease where it says your name and not everyone else’s
it must really suck if sudently 2 boyfriend, 3 girlfriends, and 3 non binary partners decide to risk homelessness rather than stay with you.
I’ve seen some bad poly breakups. Once where the three all had a falling out. They jointly ownend the house they lived in together. Three were a few months where they all would just stay in their room as much as possible.
One of them finally managed to get a loan to buy my friend out of her share. Now she refuses to be dependent on a partner for housing.
Look accordion practice space ain’t cheap and the master walk in closet has a 5 gallon water heater I can sit on while I play. Helps burn the stress after nightmares.
If all of them cannot pool together and find another place, then shit’s bad enough that you might not notice. As you now will be paying rent on whatever house y’all were sharing.
in case anybody who doesn’t know, poly doesn’t mean everyone is dating each other. Someone in a poly relationship can date someone who has no interest in dating their other partners. ofc a good rule of thumb is that everyone in this metaphorical web should be able to sit down and have dinner with each other without being mean or violent with each other.
So it’s like de-federating
Explain relationship between people using the Fediverse. Please and thank you.
Fuck, I’ll never be able unlink federated social media and polyamory in my head now.
Fundamentally they both come from anarchist ways of thinking. If there is no higher order or rule, and nobody has any veto power over anyone else, then the only thing left is to manage each relationship on an equal footing.
Poly for me is about the fundamental idea that nobody gets veto power over anybody else’s relationship, which means exclusivity simply doesn’t happen. It’s just like if you had a friend that said you weren’t allowed to have other friends. That would be weird, and there’s no real reason why romantic relationships should be any different.
While this is certainly a valid form of romance, it’s more accurately described as “non-exclusive simultaneous relationships” than a single “polyamorous relationship”.
Some people really do live in multi-partner committed households, but those seem most often to be dominated by a single person, such as fringe Mormon polygamy. And the most common form of "polyamory’ is probably “affair-tolerant monogamy.”
It’s a big complicated world, and variations of how humans with form intimate relationships fills all possibilities when there is no enforced legal prohibition. (And,.sometimes, even then.)
As a poly person: no, it is not a “affiar-tolerant monogamy”. That is an open relationship.
Polyamorous partnerships are far more committed. Also, sex is not always a part of it.
Of course there is the concept of a primary partner, but there are lot of poly folks that thislike this idea.
But what all of those relationships have in common: there is no case where only one partner is poly. All is about communication and consent.
And to the core topic: There is this thing like a polycule. A network of people with somehow connected relationships. Breakups in those structures are often consensual and no big fuzz. But if it gets dirty, at least in my experience, the offending member of the polycoule gets shown the door. And most of the times, those are the new ones. People that think the could convince their partner to get monogamous because they are the only one that is needed.
Sorry for the long post, you hit a nerve there ;)
No apologies necessary*. I certainly wasn’t trying to offend, just be accurate in model setting.
A more accurate umbrella term for “affair tolerant monogamy” would probably be “non-monogamous”, with the dividing line between that and “polyamory” being exactly what you said : all persons in the relationship cluster knowing the stances of all other participants.
Accurate and non-offensive terminology can be hard.
It does circle us back to OP, though. The answer to “what happens when one couple breaks up in a polucule” is a loud and emphatic that depends on what type of polucule you’re in.
(*: no apologies needed from you. To the extent that I caused you any distress I sincerely apologize. Causing pain was not at all my intent.)
I engaged in the “affair-tolerant monogamy” variant when I was younger. I discovered there’s a positive curvilinear relationship between amount of drama and number of romantic partners. I am sometimes barely able to handle my own incidental drama, so it didn’t last more than a few years.
Having been divorced from one monogamous relationship
That graph sounds plainly exponential rather than needing its own coordinate system.
Like a walrus
Yeah people not dating their partners partners is much more common than everybody dating everybody.
I know people living in a “polyamorate” or something, so they are as a group of people in a relationship
La Vie Bohème!
Imagine getting broken up with by 2 people, both with non-binary haircuts. I’d probably jump into a river and become a trout
This vaguely reminds me of the song Fish Sticks by The Heligoats:
You were baptized in a river
I was thrown off a bridge
Then I landed on a crab you slept with seahorses
I started having seizures, you started having kids
You found your inner self, I found my inner fish
I dove into the desert and became a sand trout.
The Golden Path!
B E C O M E T R O U T
It is pretty rare for my partners to date each other, so most breakups are usually “normal“. Even when they do, one breakup only concerns the two people involved, unless something really bad prompted it, which has never happened to me directly.
Yeah honestly it’s pretty normal. Imagine two friends were dating and now they’re not. It’s not like you all aren’t friends anymore
It’s because the (western?) default image of a break-up is a messy one. You don’t just “remain friends”. You fully cut ties and try not to even think of them until 4am.
I wish Caprica wasn’t cancelled. I liked their portrayal of a poly group.
I can’t remember if the show did it, but in The Expanse books poly relationships were part of Belter life, especially on smaller ships
The show briefly showed Drummer in charge of a small poly crew.
It did: they gave Drummer Michio Pa’s story in the last couple seasons.
On Earth too! One of the main characters (Jim Holden) was raised by a poly family with 8 parents on a ranch in Montana.
if I’m not mistaken, belters are poly because they looked being really close and personal in a ship, while Holden’s family was more because legal issues and land rights. Holden’s family wasn’t a normal thing on earth, while Belters polycules were like the norm for Belters.
It’s written differently in the books vs on the show. On the show it’s definitely more of a legal thing for land rights
Is there a poly equivalent of something like the Magna Carta?
I have heard of something called the “poly bill of rights” IIRC
Lemmy needs an out of context community
Man, I have enough to deal with enough rags written by dead slave owners to want to add more to my dynamic
<serious> They mostly don’t. Poly people think they do, but you see far, far more relationship volatility in polyerotic relationships than you do in monogamous.
Edit: I see that I’m getting downvoted by the people that are in non-monogamous relationships. Fact is that when you talk to sex-positive sex and relationship counselors, they will almost universally say that functional polyerotic relationships are the equivalent of post-doctoral work, while most people have relationship abilities equivalent to a barely-literate middle school level. It’s not that multiamorous relationships are bad or wrong, or that the people that engage in them are wretched examples of humans (…although there are certainly more than a few of those) or anything like that, but to be functional that type of relationship requires a far greater level of self-awareness and honesty than most people are capable of. Hence the reason that they tend to be so volatile; more moving parts, more chances to fuck up.
In my personal experience I have found that most multiamorous relationships are more casual and less emotionally intimate (e.g., more shallow) than monogamous relationships. The people I have personally observed, including my own partners, have had less time to spend with any single person, and were more likely to jettison relationships rather than putting in the hard work to fix problems.
I feel like there’s too many poly relationship structures to be able to generalise them all like that.
There’s plenty of people who have open relationships, where two people have a very close relationship (sometimes married) but they aren’t sexually exclusive with each other.
I’d also wager that some poly relationship structures would be more stable for lgbt people rather than heterosexual people, solely on the idea that everyone could participate more equally.
None of what I said is restricted to any specific form of multiamorous relationship, or any sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. Most of the people trying to engage in polyerotic relationships–by which I mean the overwhelming majority–are people that have signed up for an ultramarathon before they can successfully complete a 5k fun run.
We’re really just sharing opinions though, not facts.
I haven’t found any solid evidence that poly relationships are inherently more difficult or prone to failure than monogamous relationships. Long-lasting relationships are just hard in general.
