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2025-05-14

Polyamory (Personal)

Summmary

• If I was living in US, I'd attempt being polyamorous. I want to combine freedom (to think and act independent of others' wants/needs) with >10 year commitments and time investments in a person of opposite sex.
• I'm not very keen on woman friends or casual sex or short-term relationships. (Exceptions may exist.)

Main

I'd probably be polyamorous if I were living in the US. As of today though, I am not practising polyamory.

Why?

• Long-term benefits
  • I'm sympathetic to the idea of compound benefits. Investing 10 years into the same person has compound benefits you don't get if you choose a new person to date every year. I don't have a deep understanding of what the compound benefits are, but I'm convinced they're real and significant.
  • I'm also sympathetic to the idea of planning your life many years into the future instead of just doing what feels good for the next day or month or year.
  • My ideal is not a casual relationship as I tend to get attached to people.
  • I'm not very keen on staying friends with women I'm attracted to, due to this not working out in past experiences.
• Independence of thought
  • My current guess is that it is possible to maintain higher level of independence of core values and beliefs from your partner while in a polyamorous relationship. Maintaining this independence of thought is very important to me.
• People are hard-to-compare
  • I'm sympathetic to the idea that different people provide different forms of values that are hard to compare, say on a scale of 1 to 10.
  • Imagine being forced to have only one friend, for example. It would significantly alter your attitude towards friendships if you're forced to pick only one.
  • If I'm forced to pick only one partner for my whole life, I will naturally have a high bar for who I wish to pick. I will have to eventually breakup with anyone who fails to meet this bar, no matter how good they are for me or I am for tham. I do think nobody can be perfect at everything, and there will ways in which this person falls short no matter who they are. There will be meaningful value (trustworthy advice, knowledge, emotional support etc) I can get from people other than this one person.
• Time investments
  • I like gradients over sharp cut-offs. If you're monogamous you're forced to either consider someone as having potential to become one of the most important people in your life, or remove them from your life completely. There is no in-between. This is unlike friendships where you can gradually increase or decrease time investment as circumstances change, without losing the relationship completely.
  • Being poly can allow you to maintain a relationship with much lower time investments. For instance one meeting in 3 months may also be sufficient depending on circumstances as they are not solely dependent on me for any of their needs. This is also similar to some friendships requiring little time investment to maintain and yet lasting long-term.

Why not?

• Unknown unknown
  • I don't yet have a lot of real world data on problems faced by polyamorous couples. Everything I wrote above is only theory. I'd like more data on the same.
• Societal acceptance
  • As long as I live in India, I and people I date are likely to face societal judgement from religious people. I'm personally okay dealing with that but it could be a non-trivial task to find a partner who is also okay with it.

How?

Scarce resources include time and place.

• I used to think time is a constraint for practising polyamory but I'm less convinved by this now. Even if you have only 4 days a month to spend with other people, you can split that as 2 days a month per person. Doing this over 10 years still likely gets some of the compound benefits I mentioned before.
• Place is a significant constraint. I haven't finalised a place to live many years in, it's possible I don't stay in India. So any relationships I'm part of will have to adapt to that. (This is the kind of annoying tradeoff that makes me wish billion-person cities existed.)

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