2025-01-14# PolyamoryI'd probably be polyamorous if I were living in the US. As
of today though, I am not practising polyamory.Why? - I'm sympathetic to the ide
a of compound benefits. Investing 10 years into the same person has compound ben
efits 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'r
e real and significant. I'm also sympathetic to the idea of planning your life m
any years into the future instead of just doing what feels good for the next day
or month or year. - I'm sympathetic to the idea that different people provide d
ifferent forms of values that are hard to compare, say on a scale of 1 to 10. 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 w
ho 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 ideal person falls short no matter who they are. There will be meaningful
value (trustworthy advice, knowledge, emotional support etc) I can get from peop
le other than this one person. - I like gradients over sharp cut-offs. If you're
monogamous you're forced to either consider someone as having potential to beco
me one of the most important people in your life, or remove them from your life
completely. There is no in-between. In the past I have not done well with stayin
g friends with people I'm romantically interested in, so I end up removing them
from my life completely. If you're polyamorous you can increase or decrease time
commitment more gradually.Poly combines the benefits of both.How?Scarce resourc
es include time and location. - I used to think time is a constraint for practis
ing 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 pers
on. Doing this over 10 years still likely gets some of the compound benefits I m
entioned before. - Place is a significant constraint. Since I plan to eventually
shift to the US, one way or another, any social bonds I form while in India wil
l eventually need to adjust to that. (This is the kind of annoying tradeoff that
makes me wish billion-person cities existed.)The biggest constrait by far thoug
h is that I, and more importantly the women I date, will face significant societ
al judgement from religious people while I'm in India, and I'm not sure dealing
with that is worth the benefits. Therefore I plan to be monogamous as long as I'
m in India.I also hope to remain friends with religious people and be included i
n their social circles, to whatever extent that is possible. Some of the kindest
people I have met in my life are religious, for example, and I expect I can gro
w as a person by spending more time with them. This is easier to do if I weren't
actively practising polyamory. (I'm sure there's people who think I'm committin
g evil simply by thinking about the idea and not practising it, but I can't do a
nything about that. I can censor my actions and words to some extent, but I can'
t censor my thoughts. That is sacred to me.)Navigating this is confusing and I d
on't have all the answers. In my mind there's a clear pareto frontier where both
increased and decreased self-expression come with significant upsides and downs
ides.