Is Polyamory a Luxury Belief?
Does it match the "luxury belief" criteria?
In a previous post, I laid out a framework for thinking about luxury beliefs.
Rob Henderson has identified a real pattern, but he doesn’t have one definitive “how-to” guide where he lays out what exactly is, and is not, a luxury belief. His thinking is spread out across several posts over the years, and it’s a bit hard to untangle. My post was my attempt to steelman the concept.
I proposed that a belief becomes a luxury belief when:
The believer wants to be seen as the type of person who believes it;
It is costly to espouse;
It is costly to practice; and
The believer can afford both of these costs because of their membership in the upper class.
The believer does not have to actually practice the belief; the belief just has to have, as a general rule, a high cost to practice.
Some common examples of luxury beliefs include: supporting someone going into the trades/joining the military/not going to college, “abolish/defund the police,” drug legalization, drug use, raising children in single parent households, and non-monogamy.
In fact, Rob Henderson cites non-monogamy as his very first example in this WSJ piece:
For example, a classmate told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her what her background was and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent, stable, two-parent home—just like most of our classmates. She added that, yes, she personally planned to have a monogamous marriage, but quickly insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.
My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways.
I don’t want to speculate on what this unnamed Yale undergrad actually meant during this conversation. Who knows—maybe uttering the phrase “monogamy is overrated” in a rich, New England WASP-y context does in fact give the utterer some social status points. I’ve never been to Yale.
Maybe some people hold poly as a luxury belief, endorsing it at parties but never in practice. But I’m part of a subculture—rationalists—where being polyamorous is considered a normal, boring, uneventful part of life. The way my subculture practices poly doesn’t fit into the luxury belief system. It has nothing to do with status games or “claiming to be poly” in public while secretly practicing monogamy in private.
How Rationalist Poly Works
Ozy’s tweet is referencing the post Romantic Friends by Jacob Falkovich.
Jacob summarizes rationalist-style poly as being able to date your friends.
When I joined the rationalist community in New York a lot of people called themselves polyamorous, but almost no one was slutting it up. Most people were looking for a single partner to focus on, and only a minority of those in a relationship were looking for someone else to date. In contrast, my “monogamous” non-rationalist friends would say things like “I met this girl I might be serious with, but I could probably squeeze in 3 more weeks of Tinder hookups before she asks if we’re going to be exclusive.”
It took me a while to realize that “polyamory” had more to do with how rationalists treated friendships than with how they thought about romance. Specifically: a shared agreement to welcome romantic feelings among friends, and to not let romantic drama ruin the communal spirit as much as possible. What it looked like in practice wasn’t wild orgies, but instead [...] People enjoying things like cuddling, going out dancing, or watching a movie with someone of the opposite sex without raising eyebrows, even if they weren’t actually “dating”. [...] Polyamory mostly affects how I relate to my female friends, not in how I relate to my marriage.
How this usually works in practice is that young people within a friend group date multiple people concurrently while looking for someone to marry. After a while, some relationships don’t work out, and these exes return to being friends. Despite being exes, there’s still the possibility for emotional intimacy, texting multiple times a day, cuddling on the couch, and (occasional) sex.
Eventually everyone is paired off and starts having children. While the kids are young, the parents typically slow down on outside dating (or stop doing it entirely).
“Isn’t that just monogamy with extra steps?”
No. No, it is not. Just because they bear a superficial resemblance does not mean they are in fact “the same.”
Just because avowed poly people still end up with ~1 partner, that does not mean that polyamory is fake, and everyone is secretly practicing monogamy after all. That “~” is carrying a lot of weight, here.
Return to Jacob’s framing of poly as “yes, men and women can be friends.”
The dominant attitude in most Anglosphere countries is “no, men and women can’t be friends, because men want to have sex with their female friends, and that’s bad and causes drama.” Say there’s a mixed friend group where two members are dating and exclusive, while the rest of their friends look on, secretly hoping they’ll break up and one of them can swoop in on the rebound for a chance at dating. In order to maintain monogamy and prevent cheating in this environment, partners have to engage in mate guarding and jealousy. Even the appearance of situations in which cheating might happen is discouraged. Functionally, this means that women do not hang out 1-on-1 with their male friends. The empress must be above reproach.
Consider why the “gay best friend” is so treasured. It’s a chance to be friends with someone of the opposite sex, while there is a guarantee of zero romance.
Even in comparatively laid-back friend groups where hanging out 1-on-1 is considered fine, I would struggle to think of a married monogamous person who wouldn’t be upset by their spouse cuddling with an ex on the couch (let alone having occasional sex).
The “Cost” of Polyamory
Being able to cuddle on the couch with an ex while nobody really cares requires an almost complete absence of jealousy.
Yes, almost complete absence.
Many years ago, in the ancient days of 2013, Scott Alexander wrote a post titled Polyamory is Boring. He describes the experience of not feeling jealousy:
I feel like the correct, responsible thing to say at this point would be “Yes, of course everyone experiences jealousy, and it’s hard for the first few months or years, but eventually you just learn to live with it and the sacrifice is worth it.”
But the responsible answer is wrong, and the incredulous-stare answer is right. At least in my very limited experience, jealousy is a paper tiger, sort of the post-9/11 al-Qaeda of emotional states. You spend all this time worrying about it and preparing for it and thinking it is going to be this dreadfully imposing enemy, and in the end it sends one guy with a bomb in his shoes onto a plane, whom you arrest without incident. [...]
As opposed to this tiny-to-nonexistant role of jealousy, I think pretty much everyone here has experienced compersion. Compersion is the opposite of jealousy, being really happy for your partner when they meet someone new and they are obviously happy. [...] some of this has rubbed off on me. It is a good feeling and it makes you feel good to have it. If there is a Heaven, I assume compersion will be a big part of its emotional repertoire.
I don’t know what the base-rate is for this neurotype, but poly is fun and easy if you have it. When you feel compersion by default, this “luxury belief” doesn’t cost much of anything. There are probably many people who naturally feel compersion instead of jealousy, and aren’t poly simply because they don’t know it’s an option. Those people would benefit from polyamory becoming more widely accepted.
But some people cannot be poly. Some people feel a ton of jealousy. Again, I don’t know what the base rate is for feeling vs. not feeling jealousy, but many poly spaces are filled with people trying (unsuccessfully) to repress their jealousy. They’re not doing well. I would absolutely not recommend poly to anyone with a strong jealousy drive. A lot of marriages have broken up because a previously exclusive couple tries to open up the marriage because it “sounded like a good idea” without any thought to dealing with jealousy.
And that... really sucks. Not everyone can do this. I wish more people could do this. I wish I could snap my fingers and give this temperament to everyone who wants it. But that’s not how the world works.
This lack of jealousy is a privilege in the ordinary luck-based sense, not in the “only rich people have this” sense. Various surveys conducted over the years show that polyamory—and the temperament that’s required—isn’t really confined to one social class or another. Feeling compersion and lacking a jealousy drive isn’t something only reserved for the wealthy.
I like to compare lacking a jealousy drive to having well-functioning kidneys. Someone with end-stage kidney disease on dialysis has to manage the amount of fluids and electrolytes they consume, otherwise they swell up like a balloon and the dialysis doesn’t work as well. They have to balance water, salt, and sweating throughout the day. Do you have any idea how much of our culture is focused on hanging out with people and eating or drinking? Not just alcohol, but coffee and tea. All the water and salt in food. Someone on dialysis can’t just drop in to hang out with a friend over coffee one morning, or go out to a bar with friends after work. Not even to sit there and drink water. It is insanely weird and off-putting to be in a group setting and be the only person conspicuously abstaining from consuming anything. Teetotalers can drink a mocktail and still be part of a group at a bar, but someone with end-stage kidney disease can’t handle any frivolous liquids.
We still don’t know exactly what causes kidney failure. We don’t know why some kidneys fail for no particular reason, why some fail after a few decades of bad habits, and why others can be fine despite decades of bad habits. It’s most likely genetics. Through no fault of their own—simply by losing the genetic lottery—some people can’t participate fully in a core part of how people socialize in our culture. That’s tragic!
So, the question: does polyamory (as practiced by my subculture) fit into the luxury belief framework?
Is it done as part of a status signaling game? No, not really. I don’t think there’s any difference in status between the poly versus monogamous members of my community.
Is it costly to espouse? Somewhat. Given the amount of hate that people get online for being non-monogamous, it’s definitely still frowned upon by average people. But lots of beliefs are costly to espouse.
Is it costly to practice? No, not if you don’t feel (much) jealousy. It’s easy if you have the right temperament.
Can only rich people afford to pay this cost? No, not really. Whether or not a given person can successfully be poly is subject to the whims of fate, irrespective of wealth or social class. A rich person who feels a ton of jealousy can’t buy their way out of it. Something can’t be a luxury belief if there’s no “luxury” involved.
It’s fine to talk about privilege and luck. We can comment on beliefs, opinions, and activities that are just garden-variety privilege, without needing to call them luxury beliefs. We can also acknowledge that some ideas won’t work at scale for reasons unrelated to social class.
I have my fair share of chronic health conditions. Even though they’re very manageable with modern medicine, there are some lifestyles I can’t participate in. There are potential sources of happiness that I will never experience. It makes me a little sad to contemplate, but I’ve worked through those emotions on my own.
The solution is not to malign the ones who are lucky enough to enjoy rewarding relationships as a result of that good fortune. I would never get angry at somebody who is out living their best life without any of my issues. I’d give them a thumbs up and advise them not to squander it.
But then again, that’s easy for me to say. I naturally don’t feel much jealousy.
The steelman of the "polyamory is a luxury belief" argument is that it's about economics. Poor people need monogamy because they need stable dyadic relationship in order to afford rent, groceries, etc. for the household. They don't have extra money to spend on dates and can't risk the threat to the primary relationship of dating additional partners. For rich people, a breakup of the primary relationship is unpleasant but manageable. For poor people, it's absolutely devastating in material terms. You just literally can't afford your rent anymore.
Of course, there's a flipside to the argument. If two people pooling their resources helps alleviate some of the pressures of being low-income, why not three? Why not six? There are serious economies of scale you can get from having a larger configuration of working people.