[incommunicado]

I think Polyamory is a very complex, very difficult concept for most of us to take in and, if it doesn't just "make sense" to all those who choose it, it will be a very dangerous path. Far more dangerous that swinging could ever be. There's a difference between putting yourself on the line and having friends you have sex with, and taking people into your heart on a romantic level.

We have some close friends whom we suspected of swinging with another couple they hung out with weekly for a long time. What we didn't suspect was that they were attempting to have a poly amorous relationship with them.

It ended badly, and, without opening up every detail to forum scrutiny, I will say that one of the big issues was that feelings were not balanced all around. In order to help our friends and be supportive, I started doing a little research on polyamory and realized that it is, by it's own admission, very amorphous in definition. Most normal folks need rules (sorry, the majority needs rules) to feel more comfortable. Even as swingers, most of us do not have a completely open, "do what you want, when you want, with whomever you want, as long as you come home and tell me all about it", relationship with our spouses. We re-define our sense of monogamy to include sex with others when we are with our spouses, like we are sharing giant sex toys. We make rules about how emotionally close we will allow ourselves get to our extra partners or them to us. We save certain acts like kissing or anal sex, for our primary, or we "only play together" so we don't feel like we are just abandoning the ancient representation of marital commitment (however artificial you may feel it is). Remember, fidelity isn't a sacrifice we make for one another, it's a gift we give. Accepting each other's sexuality and opening the door to sharing it with other partners is a gift as well, just a more progressive one.

And, most of us (myself included), feel that we have a finite amount of romantic love to give. When you have true romantic feelings for two people, you haven't doubled your ability to love, your feelings are halved between them, generally as they migrate from one to another (and possibly back again, as with crushes). It's not like having kids where you are supposed to grow new, equal amounts of love, to accommodate each new child you bear.

If polyamory is to work, it requires two things... 1) Special people who are open to, and/or have need of such a thing and 2) a solid definition. It can't stay amorphous. you can't have varying amounts of love within a tryad or quad. If everyone doesn't love each other equally, emotionally AND physically, it simply won't work for all. For instance, tryads made up of a primary couple where the secondary partner really belongs emotionally to only one of the primaries, regardless of whether or not the other primary gets to have sex with them, isn't really polyamory (yes, I'm being opinionated here). It's two people getting their cake and eating it too, and the other "primary" partner making a sacrifice in order to retain their spouse in their life, because they know that if they pulled "primary" rank, they would learn how tenuous that is.

I have no problem with people who don't wish to be defined or confined by societal rules, or any rules for that matter. And, that's fine, as long as they are fully content that, in their quest for freedom they may end up alone.

O.K. open fire. I'm ready.