I don't find the word "failed" to be helpful at all. I was married for 15 years. We divorced. I do not look back on that relationship and consider it "failed."

I don't find the word "failed" to be helpful at all. I was married for 15 years. We divorced. I do not look back on that relationship and consider it "failed." It lasted for 15 years, most of them were great and we accomplished a lot of incredible things through our partnership. Both of us have moved on to new relationships and we are still friends. I consider that relationship to be highly successful. Of course, my experience took a great deal of emotional maturity, which was developed through a series of monogamous relationships. Serial monogamy gets a bad rap IMO. Luckily I have enough emotional maturity to know that I don't have enough emotional maturity to pull of poly. In my reasonably broad experience with poly folks, the vast majority don't either.