But for me the key thing behind polyamory has always been the idea that the best way to build a relationship and to figure out the rules for a relationship is for you and your partner (or partners) to figure out the rules that work for you together, rather than just accepting an assumed, socially dictated set of rules.

For me, that’s pretty much the key factor of what poly is. (And I am starting to hate the word poly, just because it has so much screwy baggage separate from that.)

Rather than assuming a default, poly is the idea that working out rules that work for you and your partner(s). If what works for the two of you is to be sexually exclusive, you are still poly in my book.

So if you MUST label yourself, I’d go for polyamourous (or multiphiliac) in a monogamous relationship.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. (I have lately gotten the feeling that far too many poly people are invested in having the identity of poly - and defining that as meaning they MUST have more than one person in their lives - than investing in the health of their relationship(s).)

- Bonnie

Not meant to be a flame; merely an expression of frustration. [Not that it matters, I guess, but my partner's grandmother's 92 year old boyfriend died recently and I'd just returned from the funeral and from supporting grandmother for 3 days on my own, no other family there until the day before the funeral - family who does not accept me, partner, or our relationship. I loved the boyfriend - he still had his mind and was a remarkable person. The past 6 days have been very difficult.]

My apologies all around.

- Bonnie

I guess it comes down to whether you view polyamory as an identity/orientation, per AJ, or as a behavior, per me. It seems to me that behaviors that can be so easily thrown off can’t be “orientation”; orientation implies a permanence or a stability. I believe the gay man who tells me that he just can’t bear the thought of sexual contact with a woman; I don’t believe the polyamorous man who tells me that he just can’t bear the thought of only having sex with one woman. I believe both of them when they say they’d be unhappy if social mores forced them to engage in the undesirable pattern; I believe the levels of unhappiness are pretty different.

I guess I end up favoring a gunpoint test using emotional distress/stress as the measured factor: if the person is coerced or incented into the desired behavior, how much trauma does it cause them? I suspect that the gay guy would be pretty upset; we already have the testimony of the poly guy who seems to be managing the stress of not being true to his “orientation” pretty well.

That differentiation in emotional response seems significant to me.

Certainly there have been a life’s worth of “mistakes” and I doubt I’m alone: I think I’d like to be with someone who ____ and I don’t. Or I think I’d hate to be with someone who _____ and I end up falling madly in love with her. It’s probably better to say “bad guesses” than “mistakes” though.

But I think it’s important to distinguish between someone who has NO experience and someone who has SOME experience. So if you’ve been both polyamorous and monogamous, then you presumably know enough about both to be more informed when you say “I define myself as polyamorous.”

That’s way different from my saying the same thing. (Ignore that I’m happiliy monogamous for a moment.) Because while I might think I’d like it, I could be 100% mistaken. OTOH, while you might be mistaken in some respects–you might fall in love with a single person and settle down forever–you’re not going to be nearly AS mistaken, because you’ve been there. And done that.

Gender identity as straight/bi/gay doesn’t seem to require actual sex; most folks have “tested” their identity through masturbation/fantasies/non-sexual encounters with the opposite sex before they have actual sex. The average seventeen year old het male may not have had any sexual encounters beyond a kiss, but if he spends 83% of his free time fantasizing about women then chances are pretty damn good he’s heterosexual.

But polyamory (like all detailed relationships) seems to be a lot more difficult to predict than most folks think. I have no experience with it, but it’s gotta be hard; even monogamy is incredibly difficult. Sort of like saying “I want to be with someone who likes to debate” can be a good guess… or backfire horribly. For polyamory, I think you have to at least have tried it to profess that you like it.

And if you HAVE tried it (like Myca) and you think it’s for you… then heck, you’re polyamorous. If you want to be.

I like you and your posts. But save it for a different thread, please.

And here we are, at your introductory post, already engaged yet again in a Robert-instigated thread derail about his hair-splitting definitions instead of having more commenters roll out the welcome wagon for you. Great. The reason why I rarely comment here.

- Bonnie

“Gynosexual” and “androsexual” wouldn’t always work for the ways I find myself expressing attraction. I sometimes think I’m heterosexual but bi- or multi-gendered — which is to say that I find masculine-feminine gender dynamics most compelling but I’m willing at different times and with different people to occupy a masculine or a feminine slot. This is not to be confused with topping or bottoming, either. Butch/femme is closer, but there are butch/femme dynamics that are like the type of interaction I’m talking about and others that aren’t.

I think one of the things about gender relations is that they’re almost impossible not to oversimplify.

What about someone who is indifferent to sex and gender, but who is strongly attracted to long-haired math geeks of either sex? There should be vocabulary for that.

You’re absolutely right. There’s ‘bisexual’ which would be technically accurate, but wouldn’t speak to the actual preferences in question.

—Myca

I mean, do we say about someone who has not yet had heterosexual sex, who not only desires members of the opposite sex, but also exhibits behaviors conventionally recognized as heterosexual, that they are “heterosexually inclined?”

I see your point. But just as a point of thought, why should we assume that the way we think about heterosexuality is the way we should be thinking about sexuality in general? Maybe the way we think about heterosexuality is wrong.

I think it would make sense to say “right now’ with any descriptions of any sexuality. And to be more specific.

For instance, why not replace “heterosexual” and “homosexual” with “gynosexual” and “androsexual”? So what we now call lesbians and straight men would be gynosexuals, and what we now call straight women and gay men would be androsexuals. (Bisexuals would continue to be called bisexuals). That just seems to make more sense.

So “what is your orientation?” “Well, I’m androsexual for now, but of course we’ll have to see what the future brings.” I’d rather live in that world.

Edited to add: But even that is too limiting, because “androsexual” and “gynosexual” assume that sexual orientations must have to do with sex and gender. What about someone who is indifferent to sex and gender, but who is strongly attracted to long-haired math geeks of either sex? There should be vocabulary for that.

Just because I’m not having sex with two people at this very moment as I type doesn’t make me less polyamorous or less queer. And if I were, you could expect a lot more typoes. There was a period in my life when I was having sex with a number of different people; there was another period in my life when I was having sex with no one but myself; I’ve been conscious that I’m polyamorous since about the age of sixteen.

I don’t believe that sexual orientation is *always* immutable, either; I think that people have a far higher likelihood of trying to override their orientation and failing than of overriding their orientation successfully, but that in the odd instance where someone finds that going the other way works for them, it’s simply invisible, unless the people in question make it visible.

I think many of us have encountered the story of a person who dates entirely heterosexually until they meet the right MOTSS and fall head over heels. Similarly the other way — but there’s likely to be more social visibility in the case of, say, a lesbian who finds exactly *one* man she wants to have a relationship with and stays with him: because “straight” is default, is majority, and once you’re in a minority relationship you simply, silently lose your majority status, but someone with a long queer history is likely to have invested their identity in queerness, and be unwilling to lose that identity even in a het relationship.

As Robert guessed back in comment #13, though, the person I’m interested in does not have room for polyamory in her romantic paradigm . . . and being with her is more important to me than being in a polyamorous relationship right now (or theoretically ever, I guess).

But for me the key thing behind polyamory has always been the idea that the best way to build a relationship and to figure out the rules for a relationship is for you and your partner (or partners) to figure out the rules that work for you together, rather than just accepting an assumed, socially dictated set of rules.

If I were deciding all on my own how my new relationship would work, I’d probably choose for us to be open to multiple relationships, but I’m not deciding all on my own, and I wouldn’t want to be.

—Myca

1. Someone who has acted on her or his orienation/inclination and then chooses, consciously, not to, which is what CassandraSays is talking about.

2. Someone who feels he or she is a certain way–gay, bisexual, polyamorous–but has never acted on it.

In neither case does outward behavior necessarily reveal inwardly defined identity. As well, I am wondering about what I think I hear as the implication by some in this discussion that the defining moment of any of these identities is the sex one has. I mean, do we say about someone who has not yet had heterosexual sex, who not only desires members of the opposite sex, but also exhibits behaviors conventionally recognized as heterosexual, that they are “heterosexually inclined?”

Example - I’m bi. I’m in a monogamous relationship with a man. That does not mean that I have somehow become straight. If Mr. Cassandra and I broke up tomorrow and I was looking for someone to date, I’d be looking at both men and women.

Like I said, orientation is what it is.