Your continued participation in the shitty situation you're in doesn't serve you, and only gives polyamory a bad name!
Wow -- so it's not just my weird perception?
I described it elsewhere as:
Can you all please tell me how to start enjoying the taste of the sh!t sandwiches? I know you need to eat a lot of them to be poly, & there must be something wrong with me, because I'm having a hard time.
Often people hereabouts step up with handy ways to make sh!t sandwiches a little less disgusting, and I want to jump around screaming
WTF??? because I'm kinda ill-mannered that way.
Thank you,
JustCurious83, for reminding me of that post.
We have seen these rules, which generally seem to come out of the swinging community, or just plain brain-washing from our monogamous societies and families, and really do not work well at all for polyamory, stated by members here so many times they have become a stereotype.
WHY, WHY, WHY? Fear of competition? Sexism? Insecurity? A need to feel in control? A belief that this is how polyamory "should be" done?
The monogamist (and sometimes heterocentrist) mindset is indeed pernicious.
A while back, I mentioned the concept of the
fnord, a trigger-word that sets off some sort of negative emotional reaction, making the victim easy to manipulate, and usually derailing the ability to rationally discuss or think about the topic at hand. A central feature of a fnord is that, having seen it, the victim immediately forgets about it, and is left with a bunch of free-floating anxiety from no obvious cause, so that anxiety gets attached to the nearest topic, person, place, whatever.
While real-world fnords don't magically disappear, we all experience this every day, with "common sense" assumptions that really don't bear up well under ANY scrutiny. Look at
nycindie's list: it's all garbage left over from monogamist couple-front propaganda, and doesn't work particularly well even in a monogamous heterosexual world -- hence
Open Marriage, a book often cited and rarely read: it's
not about sexual nonmonogamy, rather an attack on the joined-at-the-hip
couple front.
In my observation and experience, I have always been uncomfortable with the idea that closed (poly-fidelitous) threesomes are polyamorous. They
can be (and I've been in a happy one), but more often than not, it seems that these are little more than societally-typical dyadic marriages with one more person pasted in willy-nilly, as these stories appear to demonstrate, again and again.
Not that there's anything
wrong with that, except that monogamous marriage already often has a
lot of problems with unwarranted assumptions, deep failures of communication, insecurity, control issues, manipulation... and stuffing
just one more person into that not only makes it worse, but is supposed to somehow magically
fix all those problems
without actually examining them, or even admitting that they might exist.
Talking to unicorns (past, present, and future), it's dismaying to find how many of 'em seem to be one or more of:
They remind me of the women who are attracted to one "bad boy" after another because
I can fix him with the power of my True Love! and soon ask for assistance dealing with abuse.
I find myself recommending counseling/therapy to a lot of people in triads circling the drain. Really, though, I don't see any good reason that people couldn't learn some of these skills
before "finding our third." Is none of that covered in the Bibles (
More Than Two,
Ethical Slut, etc.)... or is everyone just skimming over the stuff that's
icky ("that'll never apply to US 'cause of our LOVE!!")... or is it the Romantic notion that "it's too much like WORK, and everyone knows that True Love is EASY!!"?
