When Poly Works...

PolyinPractice

New member
The relevant thread convoluted... :)

I am Poly because:

I found a relationship that makes me feel better than anything else ever has.
I realized I don't care if he's with someone else, so long as my needs are met.
I realized the sort of person who is good at one relationship is good at many; and his or her being poly is inevitable. I WANT someone who is so awesome that more than one person wants to be with him and commit to him.
I don't want to restrict myself to loving one person.
I don't always have the capability of taking care of my partner, or being with him, and am grateful he has others who can.
In the same way, he can't always be there for me, and I'm glad I have others there for me.
It just makes sense.
I enjoy being able to build on to something that already exists, and not have to start from just me and one person.
I love the honesty and transparency.

Could I be in a healthy, mono relationship? Sure. But it'd be harder, not easier, to be involved with one person. At least for me.

...and yes, I am technically single, and yes, there is plenty that sucks about being single and dating an attached partner with a live-in. I won't bother to list them here, suffice it to say, none of them outweigh the benefits listed above :)

Love to hear other perspectives!
 
Could I be in a healthy, mono relationship?
My answer is nope, I couldn't... and that's enough for me to firmly reject monogamy then and there. So on the grounds of wanting to live socially healthy, the choice becomes simply "a lifetime alone vs. polyamory".

And seeing that I do trust myself to have a halfways decent chance at being loving and respectful to folks, "a lifetime alone" doesn't seem necessary as of now. ;)
 
I'm poly because... I am. I think I am in a healthy relationship in large part because needs and desires are openly stated. I'm not sure that left to himself that monogamy is my husband's natural state, given his history. Setting the parameters of our marriage to allow other loves generally insures no cheating as I define it. Because to me, cheating is not getting one's emotional or physical needs met elsewhere -- it's the hiding and the lying when doing so. It's deliberately abusing the trust of the relationship, and feeding ignorance to those who need knowledge. Oh, it could still happen. People do the damnedest things for the strangest reasons at times. But I think the odds are improved.

And well, I don't see myself as monogamous. Early on I realized my ideal is a triad, preferably one where everyone loved each other. As I've grown, well, I've realized that A) ideals founder on the human factor and B) relationships can also expand beyond three. (But it's a place to start). But I wouldn't have legally bound myself to my husband if his expectations included strict monogamy, and I think I made that clear prior to doing so.

We look very normal, very standard. But we're not.
 
For me, it is all about what works - I am not fussy about configuration.

Right now I am in a developing relationship with a guy who has been in both mono and polyfi relationships. My long term relationships, until now, have been polyfi. At the moment our configuration is mono - but we barely have time for each other, so adding anyone else would be highly impractical. However, we are both open to the possibility to others - as you never know what life will bring - despite that neither of us is seeking.

So again, not hung up on any one relationship configuration, but very hung up on relationships that work.
 
I worry about the quality of my relationships not the number.

I am very capable of loving more than one man at a time but I do not need more than whatever life brings my way.

Honestly if Butch died tomorrow... I could easily find myself in a mono relationship with Murf.
 
I'm polyamorous in nature, in that I definitely have the capacity to love more than one person. I can happily live monogamously, because I do not have to be sexually intimate with everyone I love, but I will always love many people. For me, the line between friendship and romance is blurry and thin, and anyone who builds a relationship with me will have to be accepting of that fact.

I'm poly because I don't know how not to be. :)
 
Dagferi and Rainy-- Absolutely, part of being poly is not worrying about the number. It's odd, and not so odd, but my mono friends assume, since I'm poly, that I worry about the number. It's projection; they assume since they do (keeping it to one! ) that I do, too. But being poly isn't about having multiple relationships; it's about being open to multiple. After all, I don't have to prove my poly nature by dating two people, anymore than I have to prove being bisexual by dating both a man and woman.
 
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