there were many things that made me leave polyamory, a combo of personal experiences and what i witnssed in online polyamory spaces, but a couple of interactions were the tipping point for me.
one was that in a group i was in, someone was mentioning how they have a long-term partner who does not want to escalate their relationship to engagement or marriage, and they were fine with that until the partner proposed to a new partner. and now they’ve been struggling with jealousy. which… of fucking course!!!! they’d taken it as a given that the partner just wasn’t interested in marriage and then it had turned out they were, but not to them! that’s heartbreaking! it is!! frankly it’s a slap in the face (unless you’re also on board with the non-escalation). and they were coming for help working through that and that’s when it clicked for me… there’s no real stability. in at least the standard modern of relationship that poly communities embrace, autonomy means that at any point you can be shifted or downgraded or deprioritized and you’re expected to just “do the work” to make yourself ok with it. and what it looked like to me is that a huge percentage of poly advice is “do the work to make yourself okay with it.”
another thing was talking to someone who’d been poly for 10 years and was still struggling with things like sadness over having less time with a partner who didn’t live full-time with them bc of the time the partner was spending at another person’s house, and realizing that oh, time spent doing the work doesn’t make this better. discomfort with a setup like that is not “monogamous conditioning.” it’s someone not getting their relationship needs met. and that’s what it is for me, the idea that you cannot hold expectations of another person to meet those needs.
i do want to say that there are i’m sure many poly folks and polycules who do prize relational care and who do meet one another’s relationship needs. i’m sure there are many stable poly relationships and folks who are genuinely fulfilled and happy in them. this is not me saying “polyamory is bad and no one should do it,” it’s me naming some strains of toxicity i’ve identified in the community and its norms. i also acknowledge that i’m getting a lot of this from online polyamory groups (mostly support groups) where almost all of the posts are by people who are struggling while the people who aren’t, aren’t posting.
but with that being said, i’m not basing these opinions on the volume of individuals struggling but rather the way they’re encouraged to think and the way things are framed. for example, so many shitty and disrespectful things that people would post about would receive “you can’t tell them not to do that, it violates their autonomy.”
case in point, what inspired this rant, years after i left the community? a discussion i’ve been seeing. i didn’t see the original post but here’s what i’ve gathered: a pregnant woman found out her partner had also impregnated his other girlfriend, whose due date is a few months later, and she’s upset about it. she’s building a family with him and this throws a wrench into everything. and, someone respected in the community is saying that she doesn’t have a right to have asked him not to impregnate someone else, because that would violate his and the gf’s reproductive autonomy.
and i understand where that perspective is coming from. but essentially that is a framework that denies someone the right to stability, and right to have expectations of a partner about their future, the right to a certain family setup. if you want to impregnate multiple women then don’t date a woman who doesn’t want that! it’s fuckboy behavior. i guess at its most stripped down level you don’t have a “right” to tell someone else they can’t conceive a child but you can absolutely feel hurt and betrayed. and frankly yes you should be able to be in relationships where you can expect your partner not to intentionally do this to you.
polyamory will have you excusing all kinds of fuckboy behaviors under the guise of autonomy. it will have you thinking that expectations to the contrary are derived from control. but they’re not, they’re derived from the desire for safety and stability. the difference between a postpartum woman caring for a child who has her partner’s full support and time vs. a postpartum woman caring for a child whose partner is splitting his time with another household and baby is huge! him having a baby with someone else is a life-altering choice. it’s a choice that affects her and their child. and that’s the thing about the standard narratives of polyamory — a refusal to accept that one’s actions affect others. and that those effects can’t be washed away just by “doing the work.” no amount of inner work will make up for the fact that he will have another baby he has to split his time with.
this is just the most dramatic example but it highlights for me just how often micro versions of this dynamic are presented and folks are expected to just be fine with it. it’s a question of whether you take responsibility for how your choices affect your partners, or not. again i am sure there are plenty of polyamorous people who absolutely do take that responsibility, but i think also it’s given a free pass quite a lot.
i also think relationship anarchy is a practice which really can only be done with detachment. for example, and this is a bit different because i understand RA and solo poly are not synonyms (but philosophically they’re very similar), there were some solo poly folks responding to the above situation with “I simply set a boundary that I will not co-parent, but I don’t control my partner’s reproductive choices with others,” which sure, great, but that’s not the situation. the person who’s now left pregnant with a partner who won’t be able to fully support her can’t just boundary-set her way out of it. it only works if you choose not to entangle yourself with others physically, logistically, emotionally. which yeah, that’s solo poly, and that’s great if that’s what you want. but there have to be better frameworks for the people who don’t want to be that disengaged.
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