I guess I don't understand why a relationship has to focus on the individual relationships between people instead of the communal relationship with everyone.
In 1979 Margaret Clark and Judson Mills in their paper claimed that many relationships can be defined by how they treat the giving and taking of benefits. They proposed two types of relationships: exchange relationships and communal relationships.
The paper :
Interpersonal attraction in exchange and communal relationships.
In an exchange relationship, there is the expectation of balance in giving and taking. Each person assumes that when one person gives a benefit, he or she should then expect to receive a comparable benefit from the other person. It’s a clear case of “If I scratch your back, you’ll scratch mine.” If I pay for coffee today, you should pay for coffee tomorrow. This kind of relationship involves keeping track of each person’s contributions and making sure everything is even. These are types of relationships that business partners, acquaintances, and strangers have with each other.
Communal relationships, on the other hand, are less concerned with perfect balance between partners. Instead, people in these relationships give benefits non-contingently. That is, they don’t necessarily expect to be paid back. They give simply because they’re looking out for the other person’s needs. Sure, you might hope that your partner in a communal relationship will also look out for your needs, but you’re not keeping a spreadsheet of each person’s contributions. These are the types of relationships that families, friends, spouses, and romantic partners tend to have.
Interestingly, though, in communal relationships, when one person quickly repays a favor, the other person is less happy about it. In communal relationships, it’s actually unpleasant when the other person tries to make things perfectly equal because it misses the point of a communal relationship. In fact, Bram Buunk and Nico Yperen claimed in their paper the more people tend to treat their relationships as exchange relationships, the less satisfied they are in marriages.
The paper :
Referential Comparisons, Relational Comparisons, and Exchange Orientation: Their Relation to Marital Satisfaction
Because they end up treating what’s supposed to be a communal relationship like an exchange relationship, which undermines the behaviors that make a marriage successful (being responsive to each other’s needs).
Although it’s true that some types of relationships (coworkers) are more likely to be exchange relationships and others (married couples) are more likely to be communal ones, some people are also just more likely to be communal, regardless of the specific relationship. These are people who usually take people’s feelings into account and go out of their way to help other people. People with such a “communal orientation” are more likely to help people, to express emotion in a relationship, to treat others fairly, and to give other people credit for success.
Strong communal oriented people will be required to form a poly-fi relationship as being a single relationship consisting of 3 or 4 people instead of as a network of interrelated couples.
It is very difficult to find a group of people who are that much strong communal oriented to form one single relationship.
But I can also see a happy situation in which all three (or 4 people) are pretty much an interconnected unit and spend their romantic time all together instead of as individual partnerships.
I grew up in a family similar to that. The family consists of seven married couples and two divorced women. Three women were bisexual. They were also nudists. To outsiders they were relatives. Outsiders knew some cousins sharing a residence and sources of incomes. But they weren’t relative. Since it was a conservative land no one knew the truth. The family had twenty two children. We children knew the truth but we never cared about our parents’ relationship. To us they were all parents. But we knew it very well not to talk about it with anyone.
The adults were mostly farmers. They also had few cattle, chicken and fish farm. They also transported their goods to market. Too much work but everyone helped each other. We weren’t rich but we were happy. One of my uncles once needed a surgery. The hospital was one day drive from our home. He also needed two attendants for twenty four attendances. Entire cost was very high. It was one of the medical treatments where a family usually went bankrupt. But we were able to manage it by helping each other and cutting corners here and there together. We lived like one single family.
We didn’t have electricity then. We had to finish our chores, field works and studies before sunset. Kerosene was expensive. We only lit a light when it was absolutely needed. In most evenings, we would entertain ourselves by us. We would recite poems, sing, dance, act etc. Once in a while we would rent an electric generator, TV and VCR (remember that device?) to watch a movie together. Sometime we would go together to the nearest town which was an hour drive. We looked like an army convoy! We also talked to each other… a lot. We knew what was going on in each other’s lives.
Our parents were romantically involved with each other. They kissed each other in the presence of the children. But they never had sex or argument in the presence of children. But we knew sex was part of their relationship.
Although we call other women aunt they were all mother to us. Most children were breast fed by more than one woman. The family had some strict rules. For example, we had to leave our beds before sunrise. Family rules were enforced by all the parents. They treated all children as if their own biological children.
It is difficult to explain but it worked and still working for them. Their mindsets, circumstances and necessity helped them. To my parents our poly relationships are weird. To them we are merely dating. We only share good times but not the tough time. Our parents are still together. They still watch TV together.
