Ah, polyamory...
...it's literally a Frankenstein's Monster-ing of a Greek root and a Latin term, and that's dumb. Literally as dumb as the concept behind the word itself.
(vent ahead)
From OP:
They're also nerds who LOVE board games and conventions.
I have this somewhat rick-shod hypothesis (i.e. I have some confidence in it/despite the fact that my interaction with polyamory is very limited I think polyamory is nonsense as a concept, let alone in practice and have yet to find reason to entertain the idea without also entertaining use of the sadness rope) about polyamory amongst "nerds" at the very least, that-- given how long this thread is, I'm not sure was already made.
Aside from people who already have "particular baggage", I could only ever imagine that those that are "polyamorous" have commitment issues not particularly because they're promiscuous, but because they've never
had to, until recently, make decisions about choosing a mate. Likely, they were either bullied because of their looks or otherwise weren't seen as desirable, so they relegated themselves to admiring from afar without actually taking action because they were all but sure that they'd be crushed. Or maybe they went further but were nonetheless severely inept in handling matters related to the level of intimacy that they sought to achieve-- at any rate, I take it that such situations allow for a pronounced sense of loneliness and desperation (either consequently or independently) to form.
Then they graduate high school, go to college, and they're seen as more desirable by people either in general, or at least within the (sub-)communities in which they traverse (this may be because they actually
did change, or because their statistical chances of success in making these kinds of connections inevitably increased at least fivefold given a college population, to speak less of sticking a bunch of more independent young adults together). It's possible that multiple people may profess interest in each other in a way that makes Christmas lights fresh from storage look like a fresh shipment of steel beams. But while common procedure for
common people would be to draw lines and make calls on who you want to try to date, they figure/are persuaded into this odd relationship where they're all involved with... each other. My impression is that this happens because
- They never learned to choose, and until that point, they had never been in a situation where they had to choose. They would admire from afar, or they would be so thoroughly trounced in their efforts, and some of the best impressions that they had came from heavily unrealistic portrayals of romance, unmoored from the weight of reality-- a weight they neglected to apply in their contemplations, if they were able to at all.
- They're either inherently lonely, or they otherwise unhealthily pedestaled the concept of an intimate relationship... maybe some ratio of both.
And whether they're lonely enough, they're desperate enough, they're naïve enough, or they're arrogant enough (again, probably a ratio of these three, though there'd be a greater proportion of the first two things), they believe they just have all this love they can give, and they won't worry about getting jealous, and they'll even be able to love everyone in this kudzu vinery of a relationship equally and superlatively (while I typed this out without realizing that it's kind of contradictory, I'm keeping this because I think it accurately describes the attitude at hand).
But monogamous relationships are hard enough, and they don't run on mating season energy past maybe the first month or two (for people that
aren't freaks of nature)-- how in the
hell would you be able to maintain multiple relationships with a finite amount of time, energy, money, and forbearance? How would you be able to remotely feel the same way about everyone in this relationship web, without bearing preferences?
How would you deal with the fact that you're in a network of people that have at least supposedly given themselves to everyone else in that network in an intimate way, and therefore the avenues for drama as well as the potential amount of drama have both increased exponentially?
I mean, the answer-- given the standardized jargon for this subculture-- would seem to be that they
don't.
I take it as a given that these arrangements are doomed to fail and dissolve either into a set of monogamous pairings, or self-destruct altogether, and trying to think of breaking up in this setup boggles my mind-- imagine being responsible for the feelings of not only the person you're immediately involved with, but also God knows how many other people in the same network that feel some kind of way about you either leaving wholesale or at least breaking the complete multigraph.
So far, my understanding is that the relationships in reality are either remarkably unbalanced, terribly shallow, or entirely spawned because
In all, I find polyamory to be the pretentious cousin of the open relationship
(in the same way pansexuality is the pretentious cousin of bisexuality). In my observance, the open relationship makes no pretense about what it is: in most cases, the desire to have an intimate rapport without the means to sustain that desire in practice (e.g. in cases where people are communicating long distance and are early-stage dating). Whereas a concession is made in having an open relationship (in scenarios such as the one I gave as example) that neither party really knows what they're doing, being in a polyamorous network all but suggests that you're pretentious, horny, naïve, or all three.
