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Abraham himself wasn’t monogamous.

It's almost like everything in nature is random

I chose to be with you.

And that's totally fine to have your preference. It's not just a "your choice" situation. Communication at the onset and throughout a relationship should help weed out others who are not monogamous.

K

As someone who used to be poly, I agree 100%. Poly people can be emotional wrecking balls if they don't put in the work to build and maintain healthy relationships. Poly drama story time!

The worst of my poly primaries believed she had infinite love to give, so she saw no reason to limit herself to one partner. While her love might have been truly infinite, her time, emotional capacity, and sense of commitment were not. She frequently overextended herself with multiple new interests and had her desire for attention and validation fulfilled far beyond reason without the capacity or apparent intent to fully reciprocate.

Her interests were typically less socially adept men who didn't have much luck in dating, so they threw themselves at a charming, intelligent woman showing intense emotional and sexual interest, unaware or uncaring that she hid her flaws with equal intensity. (She had this thing about fucking virgins: hey, I don't kink shame!) I saw her break a few hearts when they realized they weren't going to "win" her for themselves, but only toward the end discovered that this wasn't due to self-delusion as she claimed, but instead her failure to clearly communicate firm expectations and boundaries. Sometimes that they weren't communicated at all. I also learned after the split that there were far more men than I knew about. Uggggh.

Eventually she began breaking the rules we established for our relationship and chose to leave me when I insisted we close the relationship to work on ourselves, as we promised to do when we first became committed. She opted instead to begin fucking two mutual friends, one of which immediately ghosted me while the other, a newly former virgin, soon called off our friendship so he could, in his own words, "have a clear conscience while pursuing a lasting relationship with her". I'm sure I don't have to explain how successful he was.

No conspiracy, let me shed some light. First, open and poly relationships don't work if anyone involved is especially possessive. I don't mean like a little jealous, or slightly insecure (that can be worked through) I mean one person expects a fair bit of say over one or multiple others lives.

Assuming you now only have a pool of a few reasonably well adjusted emotionally people (well adjusted socially is nice but not requisite) you can now just have N people agree they like each other and want to be together, but like occasionally hook up outside the group either under some arbitrary rule such as being in different zip codes from everyone else or just in general so long as proper precautions are taken. You have a core group of N people who are emotionally and financially intertwined and N+X people who happen to have all hooked up.

It's a fine system, have almost never been monogamous, and it's just like the times I was monogamous except no one is going to be upset about random hookups unless there was a generally accepted rule broken. I also personally find a core group of N=3 to be the roughly ideal number, but everyone's mileage will vary.

Though I suspect that societal normalization will be informed by the economic situation. The reality is if you can't afford to live without 3 incomes everyone will eventually organize around 3 person core households and society will defend the new tradition or whatever.

Of course somewhere in there a lot of people have to give up on religious and social hangups but that's already in progress if the number of articles like this coming out is steadily increasing (it is)

Primarily administrative privileges, at least from a practical standpoint.

It can be done without declaring it a marriage legally, with wills, medical proxies, etc. if you prefer granular control.

I just want my partner to not go through the nightmare of probate court and legal headaches should something happen to me, or be able to see me in the hospital without pushback. If one piece of paper covers 90% of that then I’m reasonably willing to sign it. On the flip side of that, I hate weddings and would prefer to spend that money on a more material investment lol

Everyone is different though, and there should be alternative options that aren’t such a huge hassle, so I do agree with you.

There are absolutely legal and tax benefits for a legally recognized marriage.

You don’t need it.

Actually, you kind of do for all kinds of things.

Stability of partners and income makes it more predictable to pay for rent and taxes. That's pretty much it.

Over the years, monogamy meant predictability and trustworthiness. Generally speaking that's true. When there's fewer emotions in the pile, there's more predictable results. More emotions and people? More unpredictability. Landlords and banks don't like that when it comes to loans or rental situations.

I mean, I've seen a lot of monogamous relationships fail too.

It seems you're correlating "polyamory" (non-monogamous relationships) with "polycules" (relationships with more than two people). Not all polyamory is a polycule and not all polycules are necessarily permanent; nor have their members exclusive with each other.

Sometimes polyamory looks like a marriage where both members have okayed having sex with other people. Sometimes it's groups of "swinger" marriages where they "swap" members. Sometimes it's just a person who regularly casually hooks up with others. I'd argue that what people consider monogamous relationships have a bit of wiggle room. Life is complicated; people are complicated.