Why I'm No Longer Polyamorous

And why you (probably) shouldn't be either

There’s been a spate of discourse on Substack about polyamory in response to Lindy West’s new memoir that has rocked the web. For those of you who don’t know, West is a feminist writer who was prominent in the 2010s for her snarky blogging and anti-fat shaming crusading. After going quiet for a number of years, she’s back with a memoir detailing how she agreed to be polyamorous with her husband after he pushed her to let him sleep with other women. While she initially rejected the idea (to the point of tears), she claims to have eventually accepted it and come to enjoy sharing her husband with another woman, who now lives with them.

Many are characterizing her story as a sad story of a woman being pressured by a horny man into polyamory. Others say it’s more complicated. I have not read the memoir, and so won’t say anything more about it.

What I’m more interested in is the discourse about polyamory in general that has emerged in the wake of West’s memoir. This is the first time in a while that I’ve seen polyamory discussed outside of niche poly circles themselves. Naturally, most people have mildly negative reactions to polyamory, and I share that sentiment. While I think we should tolerate people who are poly, I don’t think the vast majority of people should even consider being polyamorous. The risks and downsides are simply too great for all but a very small number of extremely eccentric people.

But a lot of the negative commentary I’ve seen is from people who have never been poly and don’t know many or any poly people. As a result, I haven’t seen an accurate deep dive into why polyamory generally isn’t a great idea.

I used to be polyamorous myself. I spent years in a polyamorous relationship that was poly from the start, and I also spent a decent amount of time at poly meetups, reading poly books, and lurking on poly forums. I came away from the experience feeling pretty jaded about polyamory. Again, I think for a small number of eccentrics it works out ok, but polyamory doesn't work out well for most people who try it. Polling backs this up, showing that there are far more formerly poly people than there are actively poly people. In other words, most people who become poly chose to go back to monogamy in the end.

Why? Read on to find out.

But first, a few definitions (sorry)

Before we begin, I need to briefly define some terms (I know I know, but it’s necessary if you want to talk about polyamory with any amount of clarity).¹

For the purposes of this post, when I talk about polyamorous people, I’m talking about anyone who has or wants a primary relationship where both partners agree it’s ok to date and have sex with other people.²

A primary relationship is one that involves many of the commitments and lifestyle choices we typically associate with normal monogamous relationships: cohabitation, being +1s to events, meeting friends and family, spending multiple evenings per week together, and a general expectation that you’re life partners and will plan your lives together. Of course this also often includes (or will include in the future) marriage and kids, too, but not always. In some sense, all non-casual monogamous relationships are primary relationships.

The most common setup in polyamory is to have one primary relationship and then other “secondary” relationships. Secondary relationships include dating, sex, and perhaps even some lesser forms of commitment. They can vary from occasional hook-ups all the way to steady relationships with romantic feelings. But definitionally they do not include cohabitation, marriage, having kids together, or an expectation that you’ll plan your lives around one another. In many (though not all) cases, the primary couple agrees that they won’t seek out or commit to a primary relationship with anyone else, and will only have secondary relationships with others.

Sometimes a person will have multiple primary partners. Usually this involves one person having two primary partners who both live with them, or sometimes it’s a true throuple where three people all are committed to one another as primary partners. This is the case in Lindy West’s relationships.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the reasons I’m no longer polyamorous, and why you shouldn’t be either.

Your relationship will be destabilized

Most people want a stable, committed relationship. They want someone to live with, who they can call their person, who will support them through hardship, and will be committed to building a life together with them. Most people also want to eventually marry and have kids with someone. This is true for most polyamorous people as well, whether they opened up a monogamous relationship or were polyamorous from the start—the only difference is they don’t expect monogamy from that person.

But polyamory opens the door to numerous risks that threaten to destabilize those kinds of stable, committed relationships. It makes it far more likely for those relationships to fail than they would have otherwise.

When you’re dating and having sex with someone for months or years, you’ll inevitably start to have strong feelings for the person and form an emotional bond, even if you only had casual intentions. These kinds of strong feelings can be confusing when you’re already in a primary relationship, and they sometimes cause people to reevaluate their commitments to their primary partner. For example, you may have agreed with your spouse that neither of you would seek out other primary relationships, but after dating and fucking a secondary partner for a year, you might start to desire a primary relationship with that person in addition to, or sometimes even instead of, your spouse.

Worse, the comparison between a secondary and primary partner is stacked against the primary partner. Think about it, the secondary partnership is usually newer and thus more novel and fun. We all know about the honeymoon phase—that initial period when dating someone new where you’re obsessed with another and can’t keep your hands off one another—and it happens in poly dating as well. Except in poly dating you’re comparing that rush you feel with your secondary partner to the calmer kinds of feelings you have for a long-term primary partner, who you’ve known for much longer and whose flaws you are more familiar with.

Poly people are usually aware of this dynamic. They call it new relationship energy, and it is frequently discussed in poly circles. What I saw time and again, however, was that having a theoretical understanding of new relationship energy and taking measures to protect your primary relationship rarely worked in practice. Infatuation, sexual attraction, and new love are some of the strongest emotions humans feel. They’re a natural drug. People cannot help but be changed by them.

It’s true that some primary relationships were doomed no matter what, even if the couple had been monogamous. Many such cases! But it’s also common for the strong and complex feelings induced by polyamory to destabilize relationships that had been going well. Anecdotally, I saw more breakups of long-term primary couples in the poly world than I saw breakups of monogamous, long-term couples.

These risks never really go away either, as long as you remain polyamorous. Maybe you now have two primary partners, or you replaced your previous primary with a new one, or you successfully managed to resist temptation and made sure your secondary relationships stayed secondary. But no matter what, at some point you or your primary partner will meet another new person, start fucking them, and once again have to deal with all those sweet and confusing feelings of infatuation.

Jealousy will come for you, too

One of the most obvious drawbacks to polyamory is that it makes people jealous. Jealousy is one of the most corrosive emotions for relationships, and polyamory will give you many, many opportunities to feel jealous.

Given that this is a clear risk of polyamory, poly people talk about managing jealousy a lot. There’s constant talk about introspecting and trying to determine what the jealousy is really about. It can’t be that you simply don’t like the idea of your wife having sex with another man, no, it has to be that you don't get enough quality time or want more compliments or something.

Poly people put a lot of emphasis on having tough conversations, processing feelings with your partner, and setting boundaries, and for good reason. You really do need to be having conversations about difficult feelings much more often in a poly relationship than a monogamous one, all else equal.

When you’re immersed in poly circles, it’s easy to be smug about this. You feel so enlightened for spending so much more time Communicating and Processing than the normies do. But the reality is that, while honest communication and emotional processing are important to a point, a healthy relationship shouldn’t demand so much from you. In a healthy relationship, the vast majority of your interactions will be fun or mundane, and only a fairly small portion will involve serious emotional processing or hard conversations. It’s draining to have relationship troubleshooting be a regular occurrence in your life.

I’d dare say most people who become polyamorous believe that they’re going to be the exception—they’re simply not jealous people, and they’re self aware enough to manage what minor jealousy does come up. I will concede that this is true for a small number of poly people, but far more people attempting poly end up dealing with more jealousy than they expected. It’s comparatively easy to manage or simply not feel jealousy in a monogamous relationship. There’s a world of difference between not feeling jealous about your husband being close friends with Sarah, and not feeling jealous about your husband going over to Sarah’s every Thursday for date night and sex.

If most poly people simply weren’t that jealous, why is there so much writing and podcasting and presenting about how to manage jealousy in poly relationships?

It’s a bad deal for men

The poly relationships most often profiled in the media are those in which one man has two girlfriends. Lindy West’s story is just one example in a long line that have captivated the press. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Perhaps there’s something people find uniquely titillating and/or outrageous about that dynamic, or perhaps it’s more legible to mainstream audiences who are familiar with Old Testament kings and modern day religious cultists who take multiple wives. Regardless, because of this bias in media treatments of polyamory, many in the mainstream think that polyamory is an exploitative practice that primarily benefits men at the expense of their female partners.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, polyamory is usually much more brutal to men than women.

It is much easier for a poly woman to find men to have sex with and date than it is a for a poly man to find women interested in him. This phenomenon is acknowledged by most poly people, though a vocal minority denies it. If you spend any time in polyamorous circles, you’ll see this for yourself. On poly subreddits and Facebook groups, one of the most common posts you’ll see is from a man whose wife is having sexy fun with new men while he’s struggling to get any dates at all. In person, you’ll encounter many a couple where the woman almost always has one or two secondary boyfriends while her primary partner is stuck in a long dry spell, even though they’re roughly equal in terms of attractiveness. Many men who didn’t have too much trouble dating when they were monogamous find that the poly dating world is much harsher and more competitive.

Why is poly dating so much worse for men than women? It all comes back to gender ratios. More men than women are interested in non-monogamy in the first place. Poly meetups and online forums almost always skew male. For more evidence of the gender differences here, look at gay relationships, where a much larger share of gay men are non-monogamous than lesbian women. Of course gay poly men have the benefit of being able to hookup with other men that straight poly men lack.

Additionally, there are many more single, nominally monogamous men who are open to casually fucking or even dating a poly woman than there are single, nominally monogamous women interested in such arrangements with a poly man. A large subset of monogamous men will take an opportunity to get laid even if it means having sex with a partnered woman. Meanwhile, polyamory gives the vast majority of non-poly women the ick, and frequently they will suspect their poly suitor is lying about being poly and actually just cheating.

A small number of men do have a lot of success with poly dating. Generally speaking, they seem to do so by either getting very involved in the poly and kink communities (kink communities are usually heavily polyamorous) and making those social scenes their entire lives, or by being unusually attractive. Aham, Lindy West’s husband, is a touring musician, so of course he was able to find other women to date. Touring musicians are some of the few men who can get laid at will. Most men don't want to make polyamory their whole social life, and most men are not going to be as magnetically attractive as a touring musician. That’s just reality.

This gendered inequality in dating opportunities leads to many problems. The obvious one is that, if you are the male half of a heterosexual primary relationship, you’re going to have to deal with many of the downsides of polyamory like managing jealousy and seeing your primary partner less without getting many benefits in exchange. It’s one thing to be ok with your wife going out on dates and hopping into bed with other men when it’s all theoretical. It’s quite another to be ok with it when it’s the third guy in as many months, and meanwhile you haven’t even had one first date in the same timeframe. Even otherwise secure men stop feeling so secure in these circumstances.

This inequality also causes problems for women as well. While they’re more likely to enjoy sexy fun and the highs of new relationships, it’s much more difficult to manage jealousy and time commitments when their husbands don’t have the same kinds of fun flings to occupy their time and emotional energy. It’s a lot of pressure to have to satisfy the emotional and sexual needs of multiple men who are only dating you, regardless of their status as primary or secondary.

There’s simply not enough time

Polyamory is a very time consuming lifestyle. People in poly circles frequently joke about how essential shared calendars are. Many monogamous people find it difficult to juggle just one relationship with work, exercise, sleep, hobbies, friends, and raising children. Now imagine trying to find the time for all that while having one or two secondary partners on the side.

Most poly people end up spending less time with their primary partner than they would otherwise. Some essentially give up having a social life outside of romantic relationships. Others reorient their whole lives to revolve around poly and kink circles. Regardless, something has to give, and none of the options are that appealing.

How much this impacts you depends on your lifestyle and life stage. Young free spirits who work part-time jobs and don’t have or want kids can maybe swing it, but for most adults who do have responsibilities, something will have to give if you want to be polyamorous.

Hell is other people

There’s another, final risk of polyamory, which applies even if you somehow avoid or work through all the previous issues I’ve mentioned. It’s that even if you and your primary are perfectly ethical and “enlightened”, that doesn’t mean the people you date will be as well. I’ve seen people get into secondary relationships with people who were toxic or even abusive. I’ve seen people have secondary partners who said they were cool with polyamory, but then after months or years of dating tried to convert the person they were dating back into monogamy—with them, of course. There are less severe versions of this too, like secondary partners who simply can’t handle their feelings of jealousy.

Of course, you can expel these toxic people from your life, but there’s a few problems. First, it’s much harder to cut someone off when romantic feelings are involved than it is when it’s just a friend. Second, you have to count on your primary partner to have the judgement and willpower to do so as well, and they may not.

Make no mistake, when your primary partner dates a toxic person, that impacts you and your relationship as well, no matter how many boundaries you set. Dating a toxic person is emotionally draining and can destroy someone’s self esteem. Having to emotionally support your partner through the experience of dating a toxic person is brutal, and then they won’t have the capacity to be a good partner to you.

There are always exceptions

None of this is to say that every polyamorous couple has a rough time with it. I did meet some couples who seemed perfectly content with their setup, who had been polyamorous for years or even decades and had stable, happy lives. If that describes you, I’m not saying you’re evil or wrong, or that you should be socially shunned.

But tolerating and even accepting individuals who make unusual life choices doesn’t mean we have to promote their lifestyles or treat them like they’re without any risks or downsides, like they were flavors of ice cream or something. In the early-to-mid 2010s there was a lot of credulous coverage of non-monogamy in millennial-focused media that I think presented an overly rosy picture of polyamory in the name of acceptance and validating alternative lifestyles.

Polyamory is risky and a net negative for most. If you’re thinking about trying polyamory, think twice.

1. Polyamorous people are often nerdy and very particular about language, so I’m sure some people will quibble with my definitions of these terms. However, what I’m writing out here is how I most frequently saw the terms used in practice, and how I used them myself.

2. I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of this in the main body of the post, but there are other forms of polyamory and non-monogamy that you may have heard of. There are so-called “relationship anarchists” who date multiple people but do not have or want a primary relationship.

There are also swingers who have group sex with other people as a couple but don’t date other people or even have casual sex with others separately.

Finally, there are also polygamists, where one man marries multiple women, but the women aren't allowed to date others. Polygamy is typically seen in religious cults, and shouldn’t be conflated with polyamory.