Posting from throwaway - I probably shouldn't but I'm going to go ahead and share my experience. I try to be open minded but I think the article paints a pict

Posting from throwaway - I probably shouldn't but I'm going to go ahead and share my experience. I try to be open minded but I think the article paints a picture that doesn't reflect reality and it almost reads like someone is trying to write a sales brochure for that lifestyle. It certainly minimizes the amount of interpersonal drama that I saw first hand back in my younger days between various polyamorous couples and individuals. Unfortunately, my experience overall with polyamorous people was that they tended to act more like a cult than anything else and often did not to respect personal boundaries at all. A non-negligible percentage of them were bisexual and they appeared to lack the capacity to accept that some people are heterosexual and are only interested in monogamous relationships. Ultimately, this made maintaining any sort of non-sexual social relationship difficult as many convinced themselves that my mere presence indicated consent to unspoken things or that I am closet-poly and that I must be hanging out and drinking a few drinks and watching a movie or playing pool with them for some other reason than wanting to hang out and watch a movie or play pool with them. This would often lead to me getting uncomfortable propositions that I had absolutely no interest in and despite always declining politely I can recall very few times I was actually treated politely in return after declining. Usually, me declining would result in some childish name calling - "closed minded", "prude", "nice" (this always made me go wtf - I knew exactly what they meant by that but it was just a ridiculous word to use - like being nice is some sort of horrible thing) and sometimes even real, unvarnished anger and being told to leave and that I wasn't welcome anymore. Over time, I found myself losing friendships with people I had once considered to be good friends mainly because of the gossip that spread among this relatively large group about my unwillingness to do things they wanted me to do. So, I wasn't even actually connected to the lifestyle and had an absolutely terrible experience with polyamory (if I had to review it I'd give it -infinity stars - do not recommend). If someone that is polyamourous is reading this, please don't take me talking about my personal experience of things that happened well over a decade ago as a personal attack or feel that you need to leap to the defense of your chosen lifestyle. I'm sure that there are plenty of polyamorous groups of people in the world that respect others that are not and I probably just had a terrible experience with a particularly militant group. However, if you are poly and are reading this and you ever acted like the way I describe above towards those that are not poly then you are a fucking intolerant, closed-minded asshole.