There are a lot of different types of poly relationship structures and different names for them. The base unit of relationship is a standard couple where 2 people are together. Add another person in and they can either be in a relationship with only one of those people and form a “hinge” aka “V” or be in a relationship with both of those people and form a “triad” aka “throuple”. As many people as those involved consent to can be added this way.
Most of the time it’s one person who is in a relationship with multiple people who are each in relationships with multiple people. This forms a “polycule”. Where you have the people you’re in relationships with aka your “paramours” and they have the people they’re in relationships with aka your “metamours”. This group of relationships can take many forms and can be drawn out into a cool diagram like a molecule, hence the name polycule.
The people you’re in a relationship with can break up with you like in any other relationship and vice versa. It’s more complicated when you add in housing situations if you’re all living together, multiple people are all dating each other, or if two people are married.
Using one of my breakups as an example:
I’ve been in a triad where one person broke up with the other. I was then put in the middle of their breakup drama. I set a boundary of not wanting to deal with their drama/shit talking of the other. One of them kept breaking that boundary, so I broke up with that person while still being in a relationship with the other. Luckily I was living with the person I stayed with or that would’ve been way more complicated.Man I can’t even form a diatomic bond and y’all mfs getting polysaccharides and shit
I dated a free radical once. Nothing but broken bonds left in her wake.
if only STI’s weren’t a thing, polycules would be great….
but, i’d rather be single than have to deal with pustules on my genitals for life….
….
i bet they’d all be cured by now if idiots didn’t see it as some divine retribution….You know we can test for those things now, right? As long as everyone remains faithful to their partners its not an issue.
If 300 people all get tested and are clean, they can all get together every night for a massive orgy and there is zero STI risk. As long as none of them sleep with anyone outside of the group that hasn’t been tested.
you can’t just test for these things without symptoms.
most of these diseases have dormant phases and active phases… like a cold sore….I don’t know how healthcare works where you live, but here you can. Its free, no questions asked. Get the results a couple of weeks later.
Er? You absolutely can do an STI screen without symptoms. Some of the most common STIs don’t even usually have symptoms.
not how that works, virgin
LOL. I know that’s how it works because I’ve done it several times.
lol, and how many STI’s does that screen test for? HIV and Hepatitis only?
Yeah, anyone practicing safely can avoid that issue.
Yep, this is exactly it. Practice safe sex, get on PrEP for HIV prevention, talk about testing and status with any potential sexual partners in or out of the polycule, and get tested every 3-6 months.
Yeah. My polycule is small but my friend is in a big multinational one. They have a google doc spreadsheet with STD results and sexual relationship tracking (fluid bonded, barriers, etc).
yes because you can absolutely trust and guarantee safety amongst everyone in your polycule, and because you can totally be safe from STI’s that are transmitted by skin contact….
you can be safer, but not safe
Yeah it’s better to just be alone forever. Isolation smisolation
nothing is completely safe… walking down the street isn’t completely safe….
acknowledging risks isn’t the same as saying don’t take any risks….
chump.Lol. Obviously. You said polycules can’t be great, not me.
i said no such thing
Trust isn’t a numbers thing.
Trust isn’t the issue. Probability is. Even without deception, there’s a chance someone can have an STD without knowing it. And there’s a chance that std won’t show up on testing due to incubation times, dormancy phases, and false negatives.
Imagine there is a 1% chance of your partner having an STD without knowing it. 1% doesn’t sound too bad an odds. But if you have 50 partners in an extended polycule, then the chance that at least one of them unknowingly has one is 1-(.99)^50, or 39%. Probabilities compound.
i’ve been lied to by people i trusted many times… but i hope your ability to determine trustworthiness is perfect. mine is not.
I am unsure if that is completely true as my past experience in the lifestyle was that everyone was very on top of regular STD (think you meant this not SDI) testing and safe sex practices to protect all involved, whereas normal dating there is a lot less of that plus secret polycules you are not even aware you are in (cheating). Not seen a study on this but this was my observation at least.
Yeah my fluid bonded girlfriend had a condom break with her other boyfriend. So she just told me and we switched to condoms until she could get retested. No big deal.
If we hadn’t been poly it would either have been a I cheated on you conversation or worse she exposed my to possible STD without my consent.
STI… but the problems with people cheating are present in polycules or any other relationship…
people lie and cheat….i’m not saying they’re completely bad and nobody should ever do it (sorry downvoters, you have my blessings), it’s just the kind of thing that concerns me in these scenarios….
afaik, people tend to do things like get herpes, not tell anyone, and tell people it’s not even worth tripping over… just a lil herpes…
and as long as your polycule isn’t a closed loop, it’s essentially infinitely large….
Personally I would never be in a relationship with someone who would do that but i am pretty picky with very firm boundaries.
people i wouldn’t think would do such things end up surprising me
Watch out for those sexually dransmitted illnesses
Don’t be a grammar Elon
people really hate typos
STIs are all curable, treatable, or preventable
Herpes can be spread, even with condoms. Often asymptomatic, also so common/with a test that is also so prone to false positives that they don’t test for it in most panels.
PREP, PEP, and doxyPREP are great things. There should also be no stigma around STI’s - a large chunk of adults get one at some point in their lives. Trich or HPV I think the vast majority of people don’t even know.
The big thing is that everyone should be an adult and open/honest about their risks and tolerances. The more partners you have, the more likely a condom is to break or something is to go wrong. There’s a balance in all things.
that’s a much more reasonable way of putting it that i did, yes, thank you
As someone in a polycule, that could very soon not be true.
that is grossly oversimplifying things
would you like to elaborate?
because
- HIV is preventable through PrEP
- gonorrhoea is curable with antibiotics
- syphilis is curable with antibiotics
- chlamydia is curable with antibiotics
- mgen is curable with antibiotics
- many of the above are preventable with DoxyPEP
- herpes is treatable
- HPV is preventable through vaccination
and your “pustules on my genitals” is just complete FUD
none of that is 100%
and walking down the street isn’t 100% safe
i know. i used that exact example previously.
like i said before:
i’m not saying risky things aren’t worth doing. i’m saying this is not without risks.
“getting tested” doesn’t cover most STI’s unless you’re symptomatic… you can’t go to the doctor and say “test me for every STI”… that’s not an option.
HPV, Herpes, and many others are diseases for life. you can take medicine that makes most people asymptomatic for most of their life… but it’s not just fixed.people on here are acting like you can just trust everyone you date, and everyone they date, and everyone those people date, and everyone those people date, out to infinity and it’s totally safe and fine and the only issue is skill in knowing who to trust…
or you can just make sure everybody “gets tested” but that’s not how getting tested works.and many diseases are evolving resistance to current treatments… it’s a lot of risk that is worth considering before making an informed decision
gets voted out
slowly takes out an immunity totem i found in a charity shop.
the immunity totem is the part of the lease where it says your name and not everyone else’s
it must really suck if sudently 2 boyfriend, 3 girlfriends, and 3 non binary partners decide to risk homelessness rather than stay with you.
I’ve seen some bad poly breakups. Once where the three all had a falling out. They jointly ownend the house they lived in together. Three were a few months where they all would just stay in their room as much as possible.
One of them finally managed to get a loan to buy my friend out of her share. Now she refuses to be dependent on a partner for housing.
If all of them cannot pool together and find another place, then shit’s bad enough that you might not notice. As you now will be paying rent on whatever house y’all were sharing.
Look accordion practice space ain’t cheap and the master walk in closet has a 5 gallon water heater I can sit on while I play. Helps burn the stress after nightmares.
in case anybody who doesn’t know, poly doesn’t mean everyone is dating each other. Someone in a poly relationship can date someone who has no interest in dating their other partners. ofc a good rule of thumb is that everyone in this metaphorical web should be able to sit down and have dinner with each other without being mean or violent with each other.
So it’s like de-federating
Explain relationship between people using the Fediverse. Please and thank you.
Fuck, I’ll never be able unlink federated social media and polyamory in my head now.
Fundamentally they both come from anarchist ways of thinking. If there is no higher order or rule, and nobody has any veto power over anyone else, then the only thing left is to manage each relationship on an equal footing.
Poly for me is about the fundamental idea that nobody gets veto power over anybody else’s relationship, which means exclusivity simply doesn’t happen. It’s just like if you had a friend that said you weren’t allowed to have other friends. That would be weird, and there’s no real reason why romantic relationships should be any different.
While this is certainly a valid form of romance, it’s more accurately described as “non-exclusive simultaneous relationships” than a single “polyamorous relationship”.
Some people really do live in multi-partner committed households, but those seem most often to be dominated by a single person, such as fringe Mormon polygamy. And the most common form of "polyamory’ is probably “affair-tolerant monogamy.”
It’s a big complicated world, and variations of how humans with form intimate relationships fills all possibilities when there is no enforced legal prohibition. (And,.sometimes, even then.)
As a poly person: no, it is not a “affiar-tolerant monogamy”. That is an open relationship.
Polyamorous partnerships are far more committed. Also, sex is not always a part of it.
Of course there is the concept of a primary partner, but there are lot of poly folks that thislike this idea.
But what all of those relationships have in common: there is no case where only one partner is poly. All is about communication and consent.
And to the core topic: There is this thing like a polycule. A network of people with somehow connected relationships. Breakups in those structures are often consensual and no big fuzz. But if it gets dirty, at least in my experience, the offending member of the polycoule gets shown the door. And most of the times, those are the new ones. People that think the could convince their partner to get monogamous because they are the only one that is needed.
Sorry for the long post, you hit a nerve there ;)
No apologies necessary*. I certainly wasn’t trying to offend, just be accurate in model setting.
A more accurate umbrella term for “affair tolerant monogamy” would probably be “non-monogamous”, with the dividing line between that and “polyamory” being exactly what you said : all persons in the relationship cluster knowing the stances of all other participants.
Accurate and non-offensive terminology can be hard.
It does circle us back to OP, though. The answer to “what happens when one couple breaks up in a polucule” is a loud and emphatic that depends on what type of polucule you’re in.
(*: no apologies needed from you. To the extent that I caused you any distress I sincerely apologize. Causing pain was not at all my intent.)
I engaged in the “affair-tolerant monogamy” variant when I was younger. I discovered there’s a positive curvilinear relationship between amount of drama and number of romantic partners. I am sometimes barely able to handle my own incidental drama, so it didn’t last more than a few years.
Having been divorced from one monogamous relationship
That graph sounds plainly exponential rather than needing its own coordinate system.
Like a walrus
Yeah people not dating their partners partners is much more common than everybody dating everybody.
I know people living in a “polyamorate” or something, so they are as a group of people in a relationship
La Vie Bohème!
Imagine getting broken up with by 2 people, both with non-binary haircuts. I’d probably jump into a river and become a trout
I dove into the desert and became a sand trout.
The Golden Path!
This vaguely reminds me of the song Fish Sticks by The Heligoats:
You were baptized in a river
I was thrown off a bridge
Then I landed on a crab you slept with seahorses
I started having seizures, you started having kids
You found your inner self, I found my inner fish
B E C O M E T R O U T
It is pretty rare for my partners to date each other, so most breakups are usually “normal“. Even when they do, one breakup only concerns the two people involved, unless something really bad prompted it, which has never happened to me directly.
Yeah honestly it’s pretty normal. Imagine two friends were dating and now they’re not. It’s not like you all aren’t friends anymore
It’s because the (western?) default image of a break-up is a messy one. You don’t just “remain friends”. You fully cut ties and try not to even think of them until 4am.
I wish Caprica wasn’t cancelled. I liked their portrayal of a poly group.
I can’t remember if the show did it, but in The Expanse books poly relationships were part of Belter life, especially on smaller ships
On Earth too! One of the main characters (Jim Holden) was raised by a poly family with 8 parents on a ranch in Montana.
if I’m not mistaken, belters are poly because they looked being really close and personal in a ship, while Holden’s family was more because legal issues and land rights. Holden’s family wasn’t a normal thing on earth, while Belters polycules were like the norm for Belters.
It’s written differently in the books vs on the show. On the show it’s definitely more of a legal thing for land rights
The show briefly showed Drummer in charge of a small poly crew.
It did: they gave Drummer Michio Pa’s story in the last couple seasons.
Is it worth watching? I liked Battle Star Galactica very much but wasn’t convinced enough to watch Caprica
I’d say no. I liked it well enough. But it’s frustrating with all the unresolved plotlines.
But it’s been a really long time since I’ve watched it, so maybe there’s some awesome stuff I forgot.
If there was awesome stuff worth remembering, you would at least remember something. From what I’ve heard, it’s the backstory of – I don’t even remember their names – and I wasn’t particularly interested in them. So I guess I will leave it.
It was good and had potential but was cancelled way too early. The finale was a montage to try and wrap the story up. Very frustrating.
Is there a poly equivalent of something like the Magna Carta?
I have heard of something called the “poly bill of rights” IIRC
Lemmy needs an out of context community
Man, I have enough to deal with enough rags written by dead slave owners to want to add more to my dynamic
<serious> They mostly don’t. Poly people think they do, but you see far, far more relationship volatility in polyerotic relationships than you do in monogamous.
Edit: I see that I’m getting downvoted by the people that are in non-monogamous relationships. Fact is that when you talk to sex-positive sex and relationship counselors, they will almost universally say that functional polyerotic relationships are the equivalent of post-doctoral work, while most people have relationship abilities equivalent to a barely-literate middle school level. It’s not that multiamorous relationships are bad or wrong, or that the people that engage in them are wretched examples of humans (…although there are certainly more than a few of those) or anything like that, but to be functional that type of relationship requires a far greater level of self-awareness and honesty than most people are capable of. Hence the reason that they tend to be so volatile; more moving parts, more chances to fuck up.
In my personal experience I have found that most multiamorous relationships are more casual and less emotionally intimate (e.g., more shallow) than monogamous relationships. The people I have personally observed, including my own partners, have had less time to spend with any single person, and were more likely to jettison relationships rather than putting in the hard work to fix problems.
I feel like there’s too many poly relationship structures to be able to generalise them all like that.
There’s plenty of people who have open relationships, where two people have a very close relationship (sometimes married) but they aren’t sexually exclusive with each other.
I’d also wager that some poly relationship structures would be more stable for lgbt people rather than heterosexual people, solely on the idea that everyone could participate more equally.
None of what I said is restricted to any specific form of multiamorous relationship, or any sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. Most of the people trying to engage in polyerotic relationships–by which I mean the overwhelming majority–are people that have signed up for an ultramarathon before they can successfully complete a 5k fun run.
We’re really just sharing opinions though, not facts.
I haven’t found any solid evidence that poly relationships are inherently more difficult or prone to failure than monogamous relationships. Long-lasting relationships are just hard in general.
