I tried (long distance) dating a poly dude in a situation where he had a long term live-in boyfriend and got me and a trans girl to start dating him around the same time. He wanted a polycule to work out and it seemed plausible-ish for a few months, but the communication was atrocious. Everyone liked the central poly dude and I tried getting along with the other two, but it was clear they were just interested in the main dude. Turned into a mega jealousy situation between all of us which blew up horribly and spectacularly.
In a good monogamous relationship now, but I wouldn’t even try a poly thing again. It requires a lot of communication, moving parts, and if someone is slightly less than truthful it’s probably doomed to fail lol.
I’ve been with my wife and girlfriend for about 4.5 years. Gf has been married for longer.
Polyamory attracts trainwrecks and hands them a ton of rope which they promptly hang themselves with. We hear about them a lot because they’re loudly collapsing all the time.
We don’t hear about our types because what are we going to do, loudly announce stable long term relationships? Because I am judged as one of those people or a slut or a player or something I’m hesitant to loudly profess my polyamory. My coworkers don’t know that one day a week I don’t go to my regular home when I leave but to my girlfriend’s home where I hang out with her and her kids (whom I’ve been a stable adult fixture in their lives for years) until her husband wakes up for work when I either take her out to dinner, or get some alone time as he watches the kids, or he’s just there hanging out with us, then rather than it being an absolute fuckfest, we either have “I have work in the morning” sex, curl up watching tv, chat alone, or increasingly often chat with her kids because they’ve been needing more attention lately before going to bed. Then the next day I go to work from there. And they also don’t know that that evening my wife is glad that I was there because it’s good for me and she needs some alone time on a regular basis because while she loves me very much I’m a high energy extrovert and she’s a low energy introvert.
Hell my family is uncomfortable with my polyamory except my sister. They can accept that I’m gay and love my wife, but they don’t talk about my girlfriend and are clearly uncomfortable when I talk about her. So I shy away from it. And I don’t go to poly events because they’re full of train wrecks. I don’t filter through partners. I’ve never even had a romantic relationship that was under a year long.
And yeah I’ve had my drama. Casual sex has gone weird. My ex was actually monogamous but she started a triad because I wanted polyamory and that went just terribly. But also I was in my early 20s, similar situations for monogamous relationships aren’t blamed on monogamy but on dumb 20 somethings.
But yeah I’m happy and stable. And I know my wife, gf, and meta would all agree that’s our situation
None of them are particularly happy memories, but it has nothing to do with Poly itself and everything to do with the fact that the only women that are attracted to me, or that are even interested in talking to me, seem to be abusers with a plethora of mental illness issues.
I upvoted you. I asked for experiences. I was hoping for success stories, but I came into this understanding that most people don’t have them. If literally nobody on Lemmy but me had a good polyamory story, that would be valid and wouldn’t discourage me.
Voyager and alexandrite. Both can be installed as webapps and allow multiple accounts. I mostly use voyager because I am familiar with having used it on mobile. Alexandrite looks very pretty (IMO).
I knew two groups of polys. One was a success story and did very well with a big family full of kids. The other one broke up when it was clear two of them cared more about each other than a third. So I’m guessing it’s like every type of relationship- sometimes it works out well, sometimes it’s a disaster.
So maybe not exactly a success story but I wouldn’t call it a disaster either. I don’t view my current experience to be negative even if it is extremely difficult for me.
I’m poly, technically have been most my life but most my relationships have been functionally mono until 3 or 4 years ago. I’m in a hard place right now, 6 months ago my polycule split, two months ago my anchor partner very suddenly broke up with me, my nesting partner of over 10 years has stopped physically interacting with me.
I thought I was insulated from heartbreak because I could fallback on other partners while I get back on my feet, and I did actually do that a couple times with non core partner breakups. Apparently the opposite can happen where all your partners drop away in rapid succession and you have to deal losing all the people who would have supported you.
I’m happy I’m poly. It is difficult but so is being mono in different ways. The love I had when the polycule was functioning I can’t describe that to people who haven’t had it before. I had a great run of about 3 years of memories I’m going to hold very dearly. I’ll rebuild my relationships with new people and everything I’ve learned here will make things better for me in the future.
I’m poly, in a closed triad. Basically I live with my two partners and we are all dating eachother. Honestly, it just kinda works. Not much different than “traditional” relationships apart from the fact that even the biggest standard beds barely fit all 3 of us lol
With those two words polyamory, a practice as old as humanity and in every corner of the world, has been… FINALLY DEBUNKED! I can’t believe I was here for the destruction of a lifestyle!
My understanding is that, If one partner is in a relationship with more than one partner it is polygamy
while if all the partners are in a relationship will all the other partners then it is polyamory
I never considered marriage as a prerequisite for polygamy . because many people are polygamous even in states where polygamous marriages are outlawed.
There is, but they all come under the umbrella of polyamory. There’s lots of sub categories like “parallel” (where someone’s partners don’t have much or any contact with each other), “kitchen table” where they’re not in a relationship but do talk a lot about scheduling etc, might be friends, and then where everyone is in the same relationship or has independent relationships between everyone in a group. But lots of people use lots of different terms for those things.
Polygamy does mean marriages but has been missed because people didn't have better alternative words. "Menage a trois" is another term not needing marriage but has connotations to some of being mostly sexual and also only cover 3 people.
Polyamory as a word wasn't really widely used until the 90s and it's only really become mainstream in the last maybe 10 years?
Polyamory is much more precise and correct than polygamy.for describing relationships outside marriage. Polygamy is also a legal term very specifically related to marriage laws.
If you reply to my comment or post, it’s an automatic upvote because I appreciate you for taking the time to interact with me and I will try to reply in return.
If a post or comment is funny, touching, interesting, heartfelt or anything else that makes me appreciate the time and effort you put into this, it’s an upvote.
If you’re only here to argue in bad faith, insult or belittle someone, it’s a downvote. If it’s with me, I will ignore you and not even downvote.
God, this thread is a breath of fresh air. Every time the topic came up on reddit, you had the same core of bitter whiny losers reciting the same archetype of the rejected and resentful guy stuck at home while his GF was out ‘cheating’ on him, and insisting that this was the reality in every single case.
I’m mono myself, but it’s nice to read various experiences here of poly relationships.
I personally think i’m too selfish to survive in a poly environment though, and also I’m not really that interesting of a person in general - preferring time alone mostly.
Poly requires a ton of trust and communication, so for me it would fall down quickly with the wrong kind of partner(s)… especially as it takes me a while to trust others
I actually consider myself a selfish person. But I experience huge amounts of compersion. It makes me so happy when good things happen to the people I care about. It’s selfish of me to want more than one partner and to revel in my wife’s other relationship. But I’ll be damned if senseless or traditional moralizing is going to stop me from being or making people happy.
Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.
That’s ultimately just the Internet being the Internet.
On the fediverse, any instance shouldn’t blindly trust any other instance for that exact reason. That’s part of the game. Instances share the data over ActivityPub, and it’s up to you to process and make use of that data. That includes spam filtering and whatnot. Some instances have CSAM detection for example.
Every instance that’s subscribed to a user or community gets the full set of data: every vote, from every user, from every instance involved. We have the data, we can analyze it. And that’s what really matters.
It doesn’t matter if there’s rogue instances trying to manipulate votes. Everyone have the data to detect and filter out the noise. Maybe one day it’ll be like E-Mail where the majority of the traffic is spam. But just like E-Mail, we’ll make filters and make it work. If all else fails, there’s always the allowlist method: only see content from sources you trust not be spammy. You can even run AI models on it to filter the data if you want. You have the data, you can do whatever you want with it to make it useful for you.
I have faith in the protocol and its openness, not the software that runs it.
Thank you for your response. May I ask (since you seem very knowledgeable): Could a singular instance manipulate their backend votes on a single post and have it replicate in order to garner more/less interest?
Kind of but not really? You’d have to federate out every vote individually. There’s no upvotes totals anywhere, there’s a vote table that contains who voted up/down on what, and it’s counted as needed. So if you want to send out 1000 votes, you need 1000 valid users and also send 1000 different activities to at least one instance.
You can make it display 100000 votes on your own instance if you want, but it’s not going to alter the rating on other instances because they run their own tally.
If you really want this to work long term, you need a credible looking instance with credible looking users that are ideally actually subscribed to the target community, and credible activity patterns too. Otherwise, the community can detect what you’re doing and defederate you and purge all the activities from your instance, and also revert all those votes as a side effect.
Remember, all votes are individual activities, and all votes are replicated individually to every instance. On Kbin, you can even see all the votes right from the UI, they don’t even hide it! You can count them yourself if you want. So anyone with the dataset can analyze it and sound the alarm. And each instance can potentially have its own algorithm for that, so instead of having just one target to game, like Reddit and a subreddit, you have hundreds of instances to fool. There’s so many signals I could use to fight spam: instance age, instance user growth, the frequency and timing of the votes, are the users seemingly active 24/7, what other communities those users post into, what are they voting for, do they all vote in agreement with each other, and on and on.
So, you technically can manipulate votes but it takes a lot of effort and care to make it as hard as possible to detect in practice. We play the same cat and mouse game as Reddit, but distributed and with many more eyes on it.
I’m poly and am now in a monogamous marriage but was in a few poly relationships prior. I’m 99.5% okay with this.
Poly was fun but had high overhead - there’s a certain amount of work required for any relationship and it seems to increase to some extent as you get closer with someone. Two partners was literally double the work, sometimes more. A lot of people thought I was a swinger which always pissed me off. A couple of non-poly girlfriends thought it gave them carte blanche to fuck around on the side while I was staying monogamous for them. Classy.
My very last poly partner was simply horrid and ultimately turned me off to poly. Successful polyamory requires trust and communication. We had been unintentionally monogamous for awhile and it turned out she was not communicating some unfulfilled needs. To be fair, they were valid needs, but I couldn’t have known to fulfill them without being told first.
When she and I started dating, we were only seeing each other and had agreed that we’d only consider bringing new people to the relationship if our “core” relationship was solid. That was always my condition in every poly relationship. Years later, without any prior warning, she told me about the issues she had with us and mandated that the only way she’d be willing for us to stay together was if I were to support her starting a relationship with an absolute trainwreck of a human being. He was a socially awkward, late twenties, literally virginal fellow that had never been in a relationship of any kind before and he nailed the cocky, oblivious, “kind of an asshole but projects the blame on you” engineer stereotype on the head so hard you could feel it across county lines. I noped the fuck out so hard. Looking back, my ex had glaring warning signs you could see from space, but I was pretty young and nieve, plus I was madly in love with her even before we started dating. This and an earlier relationship with a narcissistic abuser are the only relationships I regret.
I met my now wife a few months after my ex and I split. She didn’t want to do poly and I was pretty burned out on it, so I had no complaints. I do miss it sometimes. I’m a bit of a flirt and I really miss that, the excitement of hitting it off with a new person and all the chemistry and interesting things to learn about them. Still, I wouldn’t trade what I have with my wife for all the dates in the world.
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