I’m getting increasingly pissed of by the way people in poly relationships view and talk about people in mono relationships. i get that poly people are often defensive and are pissed of by the assumptions people make about their relationships but that is even more reason not to make assumptions or be disparaging about other types of relationship assumptions I’ve seen just in the last month about monogamous relationships are that people in monogamous relationships:
- don’t talk about, work through or negotiate their relationship boundaries
- are just in monogamous relationships because they haven’t thought about their other options
- do not allow each other to have friends who are of the gender(s) they are attracted to
- do not have lives outside of their relationships
- expect their partner to fulfill all their sexual,social and emotional needs
- feel like they “own” each other
- Are more insecure than people in poly relationships
- who are seriously sexually attracted to , or fall in love with other people will cheat or end the relationship
- if they are female are being bad feminists and upholding the patriarchal power structure
- Are less open minded than poly people
and I’m sure this is true for some people and some relationships, but I think its much more a case of what the media tells us is true (though obviosly the media tries to put a positive spin on it by wraping it up in the romantic ideal and the institution of heterosexuality and telling us all that thats what we should be aiming for) but the places i see these assumptions from poly people are places where whatever relationship status the people reading or listening are is that they are likely to be the sort of people who have thought about why they do what they do relationship wise and those that are monogamous are monogamous because they have chosen to be.
I am in a monogamous relationship and none of those things in the list of assumptions I’ve heard from poly people are true for me and i think if all of these things were true for anybody that would make for a really unhealthy and pretty much impossible relationship.
I’m going to unpack each of these assumptions in separate posts because I think they need more inspection than one blog post can provide
