9 ms·

It's not a myth. The article even points out what's really going on, but they only dedicate at most a paragraph to it: people aren't getting married as much.

• toomuchtodo 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. They're better for resource-sharing and avoid the problem with thinking that your partner has to satisfy you in every way. I agree entirely with this, but just as civil rights and legalizing recreational drugs took forever (and is still ongoing), it's going to be decades of effort to dismantle the societal expectations of marriage while still enabling the benefits that come/came along with traditional marriage (legal, financial rights). Relationships are hard enough with just two people, adding more people doesn't make it easier, so you have to provide resources to help cultivate that stability society wants to express (insert diatribe about lacking mental health funding here). EDIT: Regarding raising kids in a poly family, "it takes a village" [+]. [+] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_takes_a_village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_takes_a_village
  • rarec 8y ago
    Genuinely curious, if you want an open and polyamorous relationship with a group of people, why wouldn't a structure similar to an LLC or similar business group not be roughly sufficient (as far as a framework goes)?
    • berbec 8y ago
      Same argument was made for homosexual "civil unions". If you can't call it marriage, the group denied that right is second class, full stop.
      • Chaebixi 8y ago
        > If you can't call it marriage, the group denied that right is second class, full stop. People can use different terms to distinguish between different things, but that doesn't necessarily make any of those things "second class," full stop.
        • berbec 8y ago
          "share cropper" "separate yet equal" "civic union" All label the upper/dominant class uses to show they are giving those below them everything they are entitled to, except actual equality, while firmly keeping them where they belong.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • toomuchtodo 8y ago
      It is, for handling assets. It starts to break down for child custody as well as medical directives, end-of-life decisions, hospital visitation. You also don’t get marriage related tax benefits or the ability to hold title to real estate or financial accounts as “tenants in the entirety” (which is permitted only in some states, solely for married couples, that protects joint assets when only one person has claims against them), which is important depending on the creditor laws of your state and how they handle claims against a member of a multi member LLC.
• acidburnNSA 8y ago
  > avoid the problem with thinking that your partner has to satisfy you in every way. And if you're not ready for polyamory, maintaining a few good friendships can help with this and lot. Arguing politics may be super fun for you but maybe your partner hates it. So scratch that itch with a Sunday coffee group.
• gameswithgo 8y ago
  > but if your goal is a society where people are in stable marriages why would that be the goal?
  • Santosh83 8y ago
    Welfare of children, which in turn because we are compelled to perpetuate our species.
  • gascan 8y ago
    It lends itself to social stability, and has a bunch of benefits for the people who are in those stable marriages. E.g., the life expectancy for men is significantly higher when they are married. It's also generally found to be better for kids to have a stable home life, and we know that being a single parent is very difficult. That's not to say you have to get married.
  • nkozyra 8y ago
    One common reason religious/cultural/governmental groups have done so is to build ubiquity, spread ideology and compete regionally or globally. I'm not saying there's merit to it, but it has certainly bolstered the "importance" of marriage and children.
    • ihsw2 8y ago
      It certainly makes sense that those societal structures would be oriented towards families -- throughout history (and in modernity), families have always been the atom of democracy. The sanctity of individuality is a relatively new phenomenon and it is weak when compared to the sanctity of families.
      • magduf 8y ago
        There's no evidence that pre-civilization humans had monogamous family units. In fact, in pre-contact Hawaii, it's well documented that they didn't practice monogamy at all, except among the royal families.
  • 8y ago
• nkozyra 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. I don't think these one-size-fits-all approaches work regardless of the approach. Social acceptance of ... whatever people are comfortable with should be the aim.
  • stochastic_monk 8y ago
    I absolutely agree. For some people, polyamory works better, and more power to them. But for others, a single partner, married or otherwise, is what they choose. Marriage is itself a strange, archaic ritual.
  • zorkbonker99 8y ago
    >> Social acceptance of ... whatever people are comfortable with should be the aim If this is what one wishes, and you don't already live in the Bay Area, then you should come here. I feel that this is what most people around me wish for.
    • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      But my true love is a private, quiet office ... :(
  • yoavm 8y ago
    This*100. As someone who was involved with a few polyamorous communities, it's far from being something that everyone can feel comfortable with. Like anything with relationships and human interactions, it's not for everyone, and even if it's for you now, it doesn't mean it's for you always. What we need is to allow people the fluidity and freedom to choose how they want to live and who they want to love. I saw some people really being miserable in polyamorous relationships.
    • magduf 8y ago
      >I saw some people really being miserable in polyamorous relationships. How many people are miserable in monogamous relationships?
• jrs95 8y ago
  Current evidence seems to sugges that this is very harmful for children (which we’re having less of anyways). The long term trend is concerning. Western democracies can’t be sustained by a population which is getting dumber and more criminal, and that’s naturally the outcome of a society which has less and less of a priority on having children and raising them well.
  • bthrm 8y ago
    Gee... it’s almost as if these people have an agenda.
    • mark_edward 8y ago
      What's the agenda? Why don't you people just say what you think instead of making ominous noises?
  • watwut 8y ago
    Good news then, criminality rates are going down. In particular youth violent criminality. Kids also drink less, get hooked on drugs less and get less pregnant as teenagers.
    • cheez 8y ago
      If you take a look here: https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5984ab4715000021008b521c.gif?ops=scalefit_630_noupscale https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5984ab4715000021008b521... You can see that suicide rates peaked a few years after the change in divorce laws, but it is ticking up again. Highest ever for females. So we now have kids who don't do much besides social media and are depressed/suicidal. My theory as to why female suicide has ticked up: their self esteem has cratered due to the tits-and-ass parade on social media.
      • watwut 8y ago
        That is odd take-away from graph that shows suicide problem being rather small among females - and going up at exactly same time as when males suicide went up. Also while males suicides went up more. With both genders coinciding with bad economy. Nevertheless, the youth is not still overall better behaved then previous generations, for all the complaining about social media. Frankly, it just seems that you hate women so much, that you don't see man standing next to her who clearly need more help.
• bthrm 8y ago
  >Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. They're better for resource-sharing and avoid the problem with thinking that your partner has to satisfy you in every way. This is absurd and disgusting.
• btgeekboy 8y ago
  Interestingly, I feel the opposite: people aren’t getting married because they don’t feel compelled to by society. Marriage is more highly valued than before. Personally, I’m mid-30s. I’ve been in a long term relationship that, had I lived decades prior, would have been a marriage and ultimately a divorce. She wasn’t right for me, but it was hard to discern at first. Now, if/when I get married, it’s for life - divorce isn’t on the table, and I need to find someone that I’m comfortable marrying with that constraint.
  • borplk 8y ago
    Society imposes a very heavy fine for the breakup of a marriage and it becomes a huge gamble. Either it will work out and you'll be happy and you'll recommend it to everyone. Or it will destroy your life. If marriage was "cheap" to establish and break up people could do it naturally and peacefully, eventually and successfully move to stable ones if the first attempt doesn't work out. When the risk taking a particular action gets high enough it's completely understandable why many rational people would avoid testing their luck.
• Ygg2 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better Personally, I can't wait, for only 1% to be able to afford partners.
  • xexers 8y ago
    I don't understand. Sharing a house with a stable partner is cheaper than not. Right?
    • Ygg2 8y ago
      Ok, but say you are parent and want what's best for your future kid. It's better for your child that you be #34 partner of Bill Gates, than #1 partner of Joe Jobless. Now apply that realization to everyone. Soon, only the wealthiest will be able to find partners. One way would be to raise kids in commune, but even then a super rich commune will beat any other. They would have access to best medical care, the best trainers, the best pretty much everything.
      • xexers 8y ago
        ok, but now you are talking about kids. Your original comment was simply talking about partners.
        • Ygg2 8y ago
          The logic is pretty much the same. Just replace kids with selfish interest. It's still qualitatively better to be Warren Buffet's partner #42 than Joe Shmoe's #1.
      • magduf 8y ago
        Anyone with any self-worth is not going to want to be partner #34 of anyone. They're not going to get any time with that person. Someone who's just a gold-digger might be fine with that, but that's it. The whole idea of polyamory is that you can have deep, committed relationships with multiple people, but since your time is limited, you can only practically have 2, maybe 3 partners like this.
• hrktb 8y ago
  > open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. There is the concept of PACS in France, which is a legal association between two people, that doesn't have any predicate on sentimental relationships. Of course it is mostly used as a lighter version of marriage, and ersatz for people who can't marry in the first place, but on the legal framework it's open to any pair of two people. I'm bringing it up because the main issue with open relationships is who gets legal standing for anything official (even trivial stuff as legal representation, inheritance, shared resources etc.). A system like PACS lets you have open relationships while setting a pair of strongly binded people for when the proverbial shit hits the fan.
  • teddyh 8y ago
    The general term seems to be “Cohabitation”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohabitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohabitation
• ssaurts 8y ago
  I have no data on this, what is polyamory in practice? Is the equilibrium polygamy for a few alpha males and the rest maintaining their wives and children?
  • elliotec 8y ago
    I think generally it goes as far as a committed relationship between three or more people, sometimes cohabiting, but apart from marriage which would be called bigamy.
• rconti 8y ago
  >It's not a myth >So sure, the divorce rate has fallen(...)
• Erik816 8y ago
  Open and polyamorous relationships work out great if you are a high status male. It's not so clear it works out very well for anyone else. Which is probably why culture spent so much time and effort building the institution of marriage that people don't seem to mind is dying.
  • lisper 8y ago
    That's not necessarily true. Just last night my wife and I watched "Dr. Marsten and the Wonder Women", a movie about Dr. William Moulton Marston, his wife Elizabeth and their mutual lover Olive. The women stayed together even after William died. So it can work out. But it's extremely rare, and not just because of social pressures. It's hard enough to find two people who are mutually compatible. The problem of matching people up gets exponentially harder as N grows.
    • ravar 8y ago
      Case studies make for bad statistics. I wouldn't want to make the rules for all of society just because it allegedly worked out for one group(?) of people.
      • lisper 8y ago
        The Marsten family lived at a time when societal acceptance of alternative lifestyles was much lower than it is today, and it caused them a lot of grief. Polyamorous relationships don't work for most people (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320556) but that's not a good reason to adopt rules that discriminate against the minority for whom it does work.
    • jwess 8y ago
      I'm not familiar with Dr. Marston, but Wikipedia tells me he was "an American psychologist, inventor of an early prototype of the lie detector, self-help author, and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman." He was in a long-term polyamorous relationship with two women, but that only adds support for Erik816's point that polyamorous relationships benefit high-status men... do you disagree that Dr. Marsten was a high-status person during his lifetime?
• virtuexru 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. They're better for resource-sharing and avoid the problem with thinking that your partner has to satisfy you in every way. Personally I think re-establishing the importance of family values and monogamy will make our future a lot better off. Not only for the children but for society as a whole.
  • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    I know the media like to bleat on about the decline of family values but I'm somewhat sceptical about that. It seems far more likely that women just have more options than they did in our parents and grandparents time. Reversing that might improve the figures but it would also come with some undesirable side effects such as extending abusive relationships.
    • ashleyn 8y ago
      I've had the experience of talking this point with someone and their argument essentially boiled down to "women are overgrown children who need men to guide them." This is why I don't entertain "family values" arguments.
  • mr_spothawk 8y ago
    > re-establishing the importance of family values which values?
  • magduf 8y ago
    The society you want to re-establish was based on women being second-class citizens and barely better than slaves.
    • Chaebixi 8y ago
      > women being [...] barely better than slaves. That's unhelpful hyperbole.
      • 8y ago
• lisper 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. Unfortunately, jealously is wired deep into our lizard brains by evolution because it has enormous survival value for both sexes, though for different reasons. Men wan women to be monogamous so that they bear only their children, and women want men to be monogamous so that they support only their children. [Addendum, since this comment seems to be getting a lot of attention]: When I was in college I had a long-distance relationship. Because we were 2000 miles apart it seemed silly to maintain exclusivity. People have needs. But when I found out one day that my girlfriend was out with another man I found myself overcome with jealousy. The intensity of the feeling took me completely by surprise. I was literally paralyzed by it for several hours, as in I sat in the hallway of my dorm room and could not move. This is not something I chose for myself. The intellectual part of me realizes that everyone would be better off if we didn't feel jealousy. But we do. It's not something we can simply choose to put aside.
  • s_kilk 8y ago
    > Unfortunately, jealously is wired deep into our lizard brains Not actually the case, given what we know of the incredible variety of sexual/reproductive practices in pre-modern societies. Its unfortunate that we make the mistake of observing current cultural behaviour and transhistoricising it onto all previous societies, presuming that their social relations must have been just the same as ours. EvoPsych in particular seems to be littered with this kind of fallacy.
    • lisper 8y ago
      > Not actually the case, given what we know of the incredible variety of sexual/reproductive practices in pre-modern societies. Reference?
• someone454 8y ago
  Except for the surge in singles males that would be a direct result of polyamory.
  • mr_spothawk 8y ago
    I don't think this actually follows from poly. It definitely follows from situations where women are expected to have one partner and men have many.
• internetman55 8y ago
  A relative and some nice married women from his town also thought polyarmory was a fantastic idea to try out. Unfortunately the husband of one of his friends disagreed and he got shot in the face.
  • mercutio2 8y ago
    This is pretty clearly a joke, but it’s a bad joke, so I’m going to respond on the meta. Cheating on a partner in a committed relationship is not polyamory. Polyamory is a relationship predicated on communication about boundaries and desires across the relationship chain. We’re not socialized to communicate about relationships very well, and especially about intimate relationships, so this is sometimes hard for people to imagine.
    • internetman55 8y ago
      It's posted as a joke, but this something that actually happened. I feel like the emotions underlying relationships are quite strong (given that my grandfather was shot in the face over it) and we should recognize that experimenting carries risks.
      • mercutio2 8y ago
        Well, that’s a pretty fascinating story, thanks for sharing! It may be hard to know two generations removed, but I’m curious: Are you saying your grandfather’s potential paramour broached the subject with her husband, without first being emotionally or physically unfaithful, and the husband went after your grandfather? Or are you saying the husband was actively supportive of a change in the commitment at one point, then changed his mind? If it’s either of those two, then OK, I take your point, people can be violent, and opening Pandora’s box can bring out that violence. But if there was cheating, even if only emotional, without getting buy-in from an existing partner, than I don’t see that as a ding against polyamory (anecdotal or otherwise). To be clear, I haven’t been involved in a polyamorous relationship myself in decades, so I don’t really have a dog in a fight here. But I have seen polyamory work well for many of my friends.
• a2tech 8y ago
  Have you ever met someone in a true polyamorous relationship? Like, not just on the Internet, but in real life? And known them well enough to be a close confidant? Because I have. And I'll tell you right now that I've never seen one work. Someone is always unhappy deep down (and usually everyone is). They'll tell people its great and that they're just squares for not joining in, but if you know the parties involved you'll see they're unhappy with their partner and looking for something elsewhere (but the source unhappiness persists) or they're doing it because they're afraid of losing someone (in which case they're secretly jealous and afraid). Not things that make for a happy relationship. Now, I don't have a horse in this race. I've always been a 1 person kind of guy, and my interest in this has always been as an outsider that just wants my friends to be happy (and if that was an open/many sided relationship that is 100% not an issue). If these relationships had solved their problems or even made them one iota happier than they had been I'd be as encouraging as anyone.
  • SteveNuts 8y ago
    This has been my experience as well, I knew someone personally that was in an open relationship and her husband became jealous because she was readily able to find sexual partners outside of the marriage, while he wasn't really having the same luck. They ended up divorcing.
    • magduf 8y ago
      Yep, this is one of the frequent complaints about the lifestyle. The problem is that, in my view, men are much more accepting of this* (in that, it's easy to find men who are perfectly fine with having a FWB, not necessarily sharing their primary partner) generally than women, who are much more possessive and jealous. I do find it interesting, because women actually stand to benefit more from relationships like this: resource sharing, being able to take extended time away from work for child-raising, having more adults in the house to cooperate on raising children together, etc. Raising kids in a modern dual-income 2-person family is extremely difficult and stressful (and costly, with day care); I honestly don't know how people do it. *edit
    • LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
• glitcher 8y ago
  > It's not a myth. Sure it is. They argue that the commonly held claim that the divorce rate is 50% is no longer accurate. Sure, one of the factors affecting this decline may be fewer marriages, but that doesn't change whatever the divorce rate actually is. I get your point that there are more nuances to the bigger picture, but when looking at one isolated statistic, citing the wrong number because there are fewer marriages is simply not accurate.
  • coldtea 8y ago
    >Sure it is. They argue that the commonly held claim that the divorce rate is 50% is no longer accurate. The argue by obscuring the larger picture meant by those making the claim.
    • glitcher 8y ago
      The people making the claim are citing 50% because that's what they've heard their entire lives, not because they did some kind of statistical analysis to balance the different factors involved. There is a big difference between a specific statistic (divorce rate) and the larger picture (in this case, each of us is probably interpreting this differently). A specific statistic is purposely isolated, and then can be used as one piece of data among many to analyze whatever one might view the larger picture as. For the divorce rate specifically, if there are fewer divorces because there are fewer people entering into poorly chosen marriages, wouldn't the resulting decline in the divorce rate still hold some significance to you?
• bordercases 8y ago
  No it doesn't, polyamory makes the sex market winner take all which is primed by the premium women put on more attractive mates, or discount they put on less attractive ones. Because their preferences skew you would see fewer men with more women, which is the opposite of what you claim will happen. Try thinking it through!
  • mercutio2 8y ago
    This has not been my personal observation of how it works, at all. Rather, this reads as a dehumanizing portrait of women as fickle pursuers of status. How I actually observe it working is that men who are open, thoughtful, emotionally vulnerable, and communicate without animosity can have lots of intimate partners. Possibly not the specific partners they had their sights set on, though, which is where the “dehumanizing” part comes in.
    • bordercases 8y ago
      Personal observation? Shucks. What do you think is distinct about your local sample (your network) that would not make it representative? What about all the data that dating websites have been sitting on for ages? https://blogs.sas.com/content/sastraining/2014/10/16/how-do-men-rate-women-on-dating-websites-part-2/ https://blogs.sas.com/content/sastraining/2014/10/16/how-do-... Observations like that have been rotating in that market for awhile, including with big players like OKCupid. Women are picky, men are not, but with contraception women can afford to share, resulting in skew. What you're observing is the criterion for attraction looks like they're grounded in compassion, but that doesn't serve as an explanation against the distribution and is instead subservient to it. For example, it could potentially reflect to what extent men are compassionate is somehow on a Pareto distribution, which isn't out of the question. But considering that this trend holds on websites such as Tinder as well as OKCupid, it seems to be general to all female preference regardless if they're going for carnal or intimate pleasures.
      • mercutio2 8y ago
        Dating websites are themselves not representative of human interactions. I’ll happily concede that if you restrict yourself to the intersection of men looking for casual encounters with similar aged women looking for casual encounters, you’ll find winner-takes-all effects. But there are lots of women not looking for casual encounters, and I don’t accept the proposition that polyamorous women are removing themselves from the dating pool for less than perfect men. It appears to be very much the opposite. It’s just that casual encounters are really, really different from polyamory. “Willing to have casual sex with multiple partners” != “Interested in a polyamorous relationship”.
• Buldak 8y ago
  >we're farther from that goal than ever It's still plausible that the recent trend is an improvement (and that we're therefore closer to the broader goal of general welfare, if not high marriage rates). There's less cultural pressure to marry, and so people abstain from marriage whose marriages likely would have ended unhappily, in divorce. A happy marriage is probably better than being single, but being single is probably better than an unhappy marriage.
• throwaway0255 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. How is this different from being single? And what indication do you have that this would be a good idea? Anecdotal I guess, but people who label their relationships this way have been without exception some of the most dysfunctional people I’ve ever met living in extremely unstable living conditions and breaking up and moving constantly.
  • mr_spothawk 8y ago
    > How is this different from being single? single is a lot closer to "relationship anarchy". there are all sorts of variations of "poly" though, some of which people have tried to put some hierarchical factors in place. as a civilization, I don't think we have nearly enough data to suggest that it's a "good" idea... but it's certainly something I'm open to trying (p*unintentional).
• coldtea 8y ago
  >Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. I think there's a reason societies haven't adopted them en masse, and resorted to the more traditional model all over the world and all around history, with few (and insignificant) exceptions.
• mr_spothawk 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. Doing so is going to require a LOT of trial & error. Open/poly relationships introduce all sorts of emotional factors which (I think) most people aren't prepared for, even if they could be. Our political institutions are wholly unprepared for a reality like that. Can you imagine the difficulty a parent might have instructing their child's preschool: "on of the moms or dads will pick Kiddo up at 3 every day" ? Certainly it's possible that different institutions are possible, or even better. But it's not the case that our society has any historical examples of successful, publicly polyamorous (and especially, non-hierarchical) role-models.
• ihsw2 8y ago
  Poverty is overwhelmingly felt by single folks and children of single folks -- especially in communities of color. Whether you're raised in a two-parent household is the #1 indicator of whether a child of color succeeds in life. The traditional family has (and always will) be the strongest institution for children. Not only that but the #1 source of violence and terror in the world are single males, marriage overwhelmingly acts as the cornerstone of the civilizing process for both men and women.
• 3pt14159 8y ago
  I'm non-monogamous. I'm pretty flexible about the exact arrangement (because I'm bi and I'm ok with tailoring my approach to my partner's comfort level) but the only thing I really can't do is fullblown monogamy. That being said: Poly has severe complications that most people in it don't really advertise. High status, attractive men are much more likely to get partners. This can lead to a dynamic where an average looking male partner is theoretically allowed to date other people, but if he's honest with potential partners about being in an existing open relationship then the pool of women willing to date him evaporates. Meanwhile, his female partner ends up dating men that in a normal monogamous context would be difficult for her to attain, potentially destabilizing the relationship. Then you throw sex into the whole equation. Reasonably good chance that you're not going be the best sex your partner has ever had forever. Or even if everything is great, you could be someone else's best sex ever, and it could destabilize their primary relationship and it could cause real hurt to both of them. Meanwhile, less than average looking or low status men date even less than they used to. The whole incel movement will just get worse if the whole world goes poly because men are generally less picky than women and are happier with lots of casual partners. This isn't always the case, of course. Some people can handle jealousy. Some people can compartmentalize different sexual experiences, but most humans struggle with it. Monogamy has a stability that I don't see as frequently with poly relationships. Though many people cheat, of course.
  • magduf 8y ago
    >Meanwhile, less than average looking or low status men date even less than they used to. The whole incel movement will just get worse if the whole world goes poly because men are generally less picky than women and are happier with lots of casual partners. This seems to be saying that women should be required to "settle" for lousy men, instead of going for better men and accepting that they have to share them. If a woman has a choice between being a co-wife for a guy who's reasonably attractive and well-employed and treats his partners really well, or a guy who's a drunk bum but will be monogamous with her, which is the more sensible choice? Also, another factor I think is being ignored is the fact that, over the age of 30, there's more women than men (and this gets progressively worse as the age increases). Monogamy necessarily leads to a lot of unpartnered women.
• rhino369 8y ago
  I'd rather be single than have someone else fuck my wife. I suspect most people feel the same way since infidelity a major cause of divorce.
  • lurquer 8y ago
    I'll get downvoted, but I'll speak for the silent majority of lurkers on this thread reading the posts from the oh-so-enlightened and progressive 'polys. Any person who is ok with their spouse having sex with someone else is an immature and irresponsible fool.
• zamalek 8y ago
  > people aren't getting married as much. ... because people aren't getting married for the wrong reasons. Previously, if you weren't married by 30 there would clearly be something wrong with you. It is generally becoming more acceptable to either have no interest in relationships, or to hold out for the right person. This is a healthier outlook on long-term relationships. At least with most of my friends. If you don't ever want to get married, then don't. If you never meet the right person, then don't get married. It seems like I'm paraphrasing your first paragraph; but I'm not: both the decrease in marriage rates and the decrease in marriage failures are caused by this healthier perspective. The causation isn't the decline in marriage rates (because it has its own causation). Poly is another matter entirely. I strongly believe that mono and poly are sexual identities just like any other (straight, homosexual, trans, etc.). Pairing a poly and mono together in a marriage is a great way to see things end in tears. You should be able to openly and unashamedly share what you are, so that everyone involved can make a mature decision based on this crucial factor in compatibility. Poly marriages should be legal (and should be legally documented as such). Mono marriages should also be legal (and continue to be documented as they are today).
• dahart 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. They're better for resource-sharing and avoid the problem with thinking that your partner has to satisfy you in every way. I read the book "Sperm Wars" a long time ago, but I still remember their argument that humans are mostly monogamous by nature, and that all the social factors we attach to monogamy and marriage are just rationalizing what we tend to do anyway. They also point to other species that do this, since it's a common misconception that animals aren't monogamous. FWIW, I'm not against polyamory per-se, but I personally reject the idea that it's the solution to having unrealistic expectations. In my mind, thinking that you have to be satisfied in every way is the problem, not thinking your partner has to be the one do to it.
• fvdessen 8y ago
  > Personally, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we adopted open and polyamorous relationships in a large way. What you suggest seems to go again the Universal Declaration of Human rights (Article 16.3) which states that: "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."
  • ppseafield 8y ago
    I don't agree that everyone wants a polyamorous and open relationship. Myself, I am in one, and it suits me. However, how do you define a family? Polyamorous families exist, families with parents in open relationships exist, and they are just as much families as monogamous families.
    • fvdessen 8y ago
      The common definition of a family, and the one referred to by the article is "a group consisting of two parents and their children living together as a unit."
      • ppseafield 8y ago
        OK, but what of the other families I mentioned? Are you simply saying they're not families? Neither does the definition mention the monogamy of the parents.
        • fvdessen 8y ago
          They're not families according to the usual definition, and I don't see how two parents could live with their children together as a unit without them being monogamous.
          • ppseafield 8y ago
            More specifically: there exists social monogamy and sexual (closed, not open) monogamy. The definition doesn't specify which.