Comment on The recent Steam censorship debacle actually sort of opened me up to adult games.
PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks agoSince you seem knowledgeable, maybe I’ll bug you about something I’ve wondered about?
Did you notice a significant (huge by my measure) increase in attempts at polyamory for a period of time, and if so, any comments on how that fits into your timeline overview above? Some of your thoughts sound like they may point to this and other phenomena but I certainly don’t want to put words in your mouth.
Anecdotally, it seems to me like I watched a huge chunk of my (significantly) younger sister’s generation get themselves into plural relationships, then realize after a year or two of various attempts (often including some serious abuse) that actually they didn’t like that idea at all.
And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely encourage people to try what they are curious about, it’s a tragedy to spend a life never exploring what you might like. But that phenomena with polyamory / plural relationships in particular stuck out to me, largely because many of the people I saw try it had never previously indicated even remote interest in similar, some were fairly jealous toward their partners actually. It felt like a strange societal motivation, some kind of soft cultural pressure among peers, to go for it. And I personally never witnessed a positive outcome, either (which is not me saying that no one should live that way if they enjoy it, or that no one can find it genuinely fulfilling, healthy, and preferable).
I guess more than anything else I was just struck by what felt like a wave in popularity, followed by an accompanying wave of “oh, nah fuck that actually”. Any thoughts?
(Disclaimer: this can be a thorny topic, anyone should feel free to correct anything I’ve misrepresented, misunderstood, or just been unkind about, I’m not a jerk on purpose usually).
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Kinda, I’m actually polyamorous myself and most of my social circle still is. But I’ve heard of what you described. In my circles it’s been a lot more women lead and queer though. I think a lot of people jumped in without breaking their mental monogamy as well. Polyamory can be difficult, and for a lot of people especially those who jump in without thinking or who began their relationship monogamous it can be a spectacular shitshow, much like many relationships where incompatible desires are present or where people go in without knowing how to do it well.
I once had a relationship that I think a lot of my ex’s friends probably see as exactly like you described. We began monogamous, it was my first relationship and it was in the mid 10s, and within a year I realized monogamy wasn’t for me. So we opened up, then did full poly, got engaged, and she realized she couldn’t do poly. She pressured me into monogamy (I had been willing to call it quits) and I hated it. It was an ugly breakup that she likely blames on me pressuring her into polyamory. Funny enough a few months after the breakup when I wasn’t looking for anything serious I met someone else who’d recently had a breakup over wanting to stay poly, and we’re happily married with a clear mutual understanding that neither of us is open to closing the relationship.
PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Well thanks for the interesting perspective and I’m very glad to hear it wasn’t so one-sided everywhere, and that you’ve seen a lot more positives! Everything you said about causes of strife makes perfect sense to me and I would imagine those feature heavily for folks who try it out due to simple curiosity or pressure from a partner.
I would imagine, too, that sexual trends exhibit regionality and that they diffuse across regions over time and at uneven rates, much like any other cultural trend. Though of course a lot of cultural diffusion has gotten effectively instant thanks to tech - I remember “back in the day” you could travel from a (US) coast to the Midwest and find everyone basically 10-20 years behind cultural trends, from slang to hairstyles, to dress.
I wonder if relationships and dating and such, being a much slower process in general than changing styles of dress or speech, still have some of that interesting old-school slower diffusion, or more regional pockets anyway.
Anyway, enough baseless speculation from me - cheers and have a good one!
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah I think a lot of people’s perceptions of polyamory come from it being different from what people are used to resulting in things like frequency biases (watch someone do something they don’t have the skills for and have 3 bad breakups at once rather than over 3 years, even though each lasted the same amount of time), differing points of failure (boundaries of monogamy are assumed natural even though there are disagreements and therefore monogamy is assumed unrelated to the failure, meanwhile if rather than cheating being the cause of failure its someone neglecting an existing partner for a new one, then polyamory gets blamed), polyamory giving people enough rope to hang themselves, and the tendency for it to be a mid relationship change in the basic expectations and rules of the relationship which is something always fraught. I also think people go in not realizing that most of the good ones are already polysaturated and it’s largely the train wrecks and partner hoarders that are constantly seriously looking.
And yeah I think it may be geographic but I think its less that and more subcultural. Being involved in queer and kinky irl scenes led to be being in communities with people who’d been nonmonogamous since well before it was cool and who’d already had expectations of high communication skills.
Like, I don’t think central ohio managed to just be way better at polyamory than most places, though I do think some local cultures still remain
PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Great perspectives, thank you! Very informative and much more plausible than what I was saying.