“What’s your taking on “poly” vs. “dating”, as discussed here: http://fd-midori.livejournal.com/377749.html ?”
– Your definition of each
– Compare & Contrast
– Pros & Cons of each
– Does it ever morph from one to another? Does it ever morph back?
– Are there perceived social status or greater cool-factor to be in one or the other?
– Peer pressure for one or the other?
– Role models for either?
– Source of information about how to have poly relationships or how to date
– Myth around poly, myth around dating
– In my very humble opinion dating is casually spending time together to see where things will go. Poly is about being open to multiple serious relationships. You can date while you are poly.
– Dating can be done by people who are monogamous or by people who are poly. Dating doesn’t have a requirement to be ‘exclusive’ though people can choose to use it that way. Dating essentially means you have no commitment to anything serious in the relationship. Poly in my opinion involves having some level of commitment with the folks you are dating. It doesn’t have to be super formal or defined in great detail, but there does have to be the assumption that you take one another pretty seriously and you aren’t going to disappear without notice.
– Pros of dating: no commitment, freedom to be ‘single’, no relationship boundaries on your behavior.
Cons of dating: you don’t necessarily have a good idea what the other person wants from the interactions, you may or may not be looking for the same kind of eventual result as the person you are seeing.
Pros of poly: more people who are committed to you means more support, possibly more sex, the ability to get needs met by disparate people, the freedom to explore many more aspects of yourself than is generally allowed in monogamy.
Cons of poly: you have to juggle the needs of multiple people, scheduling can be a serious bitch, you need to have an extremely high skill level at communication for it to work, you need to ensure you are only involved with people who are very emotionally mature or it descends into a drama clusterfuck.
– Sure it can move in either direction. Depends on the level of commitment involved in your interactions. That’s up to the individuals.
– There is absolutely a ‘coolness’ factor to poly these days. If you are casually dating multiple people with the understanding that once you figure out with whom you want to be in a Relationship and then the other dating situations end you are viewed as limited, narrow minded, unevolved, and sometimes even mean because you were ‘stringing those other people along’. I think that general society has an unfair expectation that people take any dating situation Seriously. I don’t think it’s good for people.
– I don’t think there is pressure to be poly in the general societal pool. 🙂 There is still a strong push in general society to take any/every dating relationship and require it to be a Relationship. People are not really encouraged to casually date if they are monogamous and that’s kind of sad. In the queer/bdsm circles I’ve traveled in there is enormous peer pressure to be poly. I think is mostly because the folks who choose to be active in the public scene are people who are hunting. People are privately kinky all over the place and don’t feel the need to be around ‘the scene’.
– For me personally or for people in general? For me personally I know a few individuals who are fuck-you good at poly. Daddy Joe comes to mind. His extended web seem to by and large have their shit together and I respect that a lot. For people in general I think the ones that are always trotted out are Janet and Dossie because they wrote the book. 🙂 I don’t think there are role models for dating. Maybe there should be.
– I know there are many books on poly but the only one I am personally familiar with is The Ethical Slut. The closest I can come to a book on casual dating is The Rules and it really makes me shudder. It does point out that people shouldn’t be exclusive until it is serious.
– I think there is a pervasive myth that if you are poly you will fuck anyone anytime and it’s not true for the majority of poly folk. There are also a lot of assumptions about how poly relationships work and it is nearly impossible to determine how people structure their relationships without asking. I think that one of the biggest myths about dating is that it has to be exclusive. It really doesn’t.
You can ask me a question here.