Quote:
Originally Posted by rdy46227  A belated reply to the original question... Two groups of people fall into poly much easier than the general population.
People who enter the Swinger Lifestyle can easily (maybe immediately) adopt poly when they see it as a way to enhance growth and experience.
People in the Single Lifestyle can easily adopt poly to get more quality in their often fluid relationships.
I started expanding on this, and decided to put up a separate post for each. |
Swingers are over the wall.
Most of the population avoids multiple relationships, or avoids having multiple relationships collide with each other by cheating, sleeping around, or other frowned on methods.
A few people can grow into poly relationships. They encounter another who finds their way into an already existing relationship (triad, quad), or they create a new relationship that overlaps the existing relationship ("V"). When the relationships (or effects of) meet, the people involved choose to adopt a poly solution, abandon the newly encountered, or revert to old model of love triangles, cheating, and divorcing.
Adopting a poly solution can be so hard that potential polys give up. Those who persevere can spend lots of effort getting through the societal and personal barriers against poly.
Society believes that people should only have sex or emotional intimacy with one partner at a time. It forbids married (read: committed relationship) people emotional intimacy with a potential sex partner because it makes sex outside of marriage too easy.
Upbringing establishes ideas and guilt-emotions for possessiveness and against sex outside marriage. The hardest internal battle is exclusivity, figuring out if a person can personally support more than one, and if they can allow their partner to do the same.
A couple has to make "forbidden" sex no longer forbidden to each other. Then they're ready to adopt swinging, poly, or both into their life as they desire.
With a swinger attitude, avoiding sex with all others just isn't in the cards. A swinger doesn't have to avoiding deep emotional intimacy just because it can lead to "forbidden" sex -- swingers don't avoid "forbidden" sex, so they don't have to avoid emotional intimacy with might lead to "forbidden" sex.
So what makes poly easy for swingers is that the sex/exclusivity angle is already taken care of. When a budding multiple relation situation runs up against the exclusivity wall, the vanilla will have to scale it, but a swinger will have already torn it down.
And polly is just beyond the wall for the swingers who choose emotional involvement.