Relationship Needs: Polyamory & Casual Sex
Polyamory is choosing to have many sexual partners rather than one, as in monogamy. Over the course of the years, I have supported a number of clients with a desire to examine the cost/benefit of polyamory in their lives. This included those who were having many casual partners without commitment and those pursuing serious open relationships. These clients had a common desire for physical gratification and emotional connection; even those who at first seemed to only want pleasure, eventually found themselves lamenting the lack of deeper intimate connection or repressing feelings of lonliness.
Six Needs
For understanding how personal needs drive desires, I’ll reference Maslow’s hierarchy as adapted by Tony Robbins’ into six categories for context — Variety, Consistency, Significance, Growth, Contribution, and Connection. Typically one or two of these needs dominates the others. While “Connection” is one of the needs listed, our more powerful driving desires often differ from the core need of connection. Polyamory can therefore be used to:
Achieve experiential variety;
Ensure consistent gratification;
Feel greater significance;
Improve sexual responsiveness or relational skills;
Contribute to others’ needs;
Maintain constant connection with someone as partners phase in and out.
Remember that a partner can fill these six needs but only in their domain. For example, we may feel significant with a partner, but our need to feel significant in our work can only be satisfied by our work. Alson, no one person can cause such great feelings of significance that our purpose becomes irrelevant. While we may feel fulfilled by contributing to our partner’s needs, this rarely fills an entire day for those without a family or a job. We do need to contribute to a significant other, family, kids, community, and work, or some combination thereof, as our contribution becomes pathological, stultified, and/or regressive if our character has no room to grow and expand. Even a dominant need for romantic connection must be satisfied by friends and family as well. A lover alone cannot fully satisfy social needs beyond their role as partner/lover/spouse. We can allow our relationships to provide the good things they can but not demand they meet our other needs.
Needs in Polyamorous Action
Sexual Variety
Interest in polyamory often comes from a dominant need for Variety. It serves this need well in the short term, but with a number of long term caveats and risks.
The first caveat of polyamory for variety is the expense. Maintaining and prospecting relationships costs time, energy, and money. Financial resources and time are lost in the pre-sex dating process, money for activities, and bills for sexually transmitted diseases, restraining orders, pregnancies, etc. Variety can place individuals in cycles of emotional highs and lows that cause apathy, obscure good partners, and contribute to psychological degeneration characterized by noncommittal behavior, exploitation of others, emotional volatility, narcissism, and deception.
The second caveat is frequency. New experiences sacrifice the reliable consistency of a committed relationship. Logically, and according to data, committed couples have sex more frequently than individuals outside of committed relationships, simply because prospecting and maintaining new relationships takes a lot of additional effort and mental resource.
The third caveat is damage to group norms. Angelenos are acutely aware of how a desire for variety harms dating culture by overpromising, ghosting, boasting, fawning, undercomitting, and exploiting. This causes others to be distrustful and punitive, even towards good and well-meaning individuals, misreading cues. We misinterpret busy-ness as avoidance games, consideration as sarcasm, interest as neediness, and genuine connected as love-bombing manipulations.
Variety is not inconsistent with monogamy. I recommend practicing the Kama Sutra with a single partner or exploring greater diversity in sexual interaction as a way to experience variety without risk, expense, infrequency, or cultural damage.
Consistent Sex
Individuals who attempt to practice polyamory for Consistent sex should research the the data – statistically, committed monogamous relationships are more sexually active. Choosing a single relationship and advising others to do the same also increases the social group’s probability of consistent intimacy for all stakeholders.
An ethical problem with polyamory and widespread casual sex (in societies where prostitution is illegal) – it reduces the group’s overall frequency of intercourse and produces instability. Here’s how. It firstly increases intercourse for hierarchically dominant men, reducing their emotional and relational quality with an excess of available partners. It secondarily decreases subdominant male success rates which increases sadistic, violent responses towards women as female high standards for male partners famously outweighs male partners higher responsiveness towards women. Technology is partly to blame, as some studies indicate women swipe right on less than 10% of male profiles while most men swipe right on 90% of female profiles. This scenario encourages female sociopathy, with women becoming accustomed to deceptive behaviors which are unnecessary in a committed relationship.
Significance and Hierarchy
Clients often want polyamorous relationships because they lose lovers to richer, better looking, more confident, or physically fit partners and they want to feel Significant by having multiple partners. This inevitably fails. They feel overwhelmingly diminished when partners reveal other sexual experiences or move on, which happens more frequently in proportion to the number of partners. If the relationship lasts more than a month, a break damages the sense of personal significance and provides negative return on the experience, unless the partner is perceived as low value, but this undermines self worth in a different way. Thus polyamory as a means to gain significance is a short term game with long term failure. The lesson learned from individuals driven to be significant is that a stable, monogamous relationship with someone they admire is the best option to meet the need for significance. The more partners they have, the higher the probability of damaging their significance even if they are at the tope of their respective wealth or looks hierarchy.
Sexual Growth
Some clients approach polyamory as a means of Growth. They want to improve their social skills, confidence in bed, assertiveness, or orgasmic potential. None of these skills require polyamory to improve. More growth occurs in stable committed relationships because they have more time to practice and more freedom in a psychologically safe environment in which to engage their body and their hidden desires. They can even practice seducing their partner if they want to be more sexy. There is no skill which cannot be gained. Meanwhile, dating provides the necessary means to improve social skills and assertiveness with stranger, without requiring copulation. A caveat is also behavioral degeneration – at some point in practice, individuals pursuing polyamory damage their growth as negative experiences or failures increase. They become aggressive, judgmental, or neurotic, much like individuals pursuing variety.
Contribution to Other’s Needs
Individuals who practice polyamory by placing a high value on Contributing to the needs of others often do so at their own expense, behaving in a psychologically impaired manner which may even become a dependency disorder. They fail to set boundaries, are exploited, and cause fights between partners. They have higher stress levels and may become ill from cortisol overproduction. Self denial often causes substance abuse in these individuals, or love addiction which lands them seeking recovery in SLAA (Sex and Love Addiction Anonymous). The need to contribute often puts them in compromising situations while to obsession results in failure to achieve their own goals.
Connection & Love
In my experience, individuals with a strong drive for Connection (or love) rarely pursue polyamory. The exception occurs when they believe they are incapable of meeting their connection needs otherwise, whether due to internal psychological factors, and/or external monetary situations, living situations, or abuse. For these individuals, goal-oriented coaching or therapy for trauma can help healing and allow change. They benefit from identifying their needs and desires then designing realistic solutions for connected intimacy in a psychologically unified, healthy manner.
Impact & Success
My clients often have different values and morals. As I watch them develop, I become more and more convinced that polyamory (or intentional pursuit of many casual partners) is a shortcut which becomes a long detour, having poor long term outcomes. It reduces meaningful experience, encourages objectification, impedes deeper psychological development, defies cultural norms, and causes harm to the group. The lack of cultural acceptance (and biological psychological traits) also prevents most individuals in our society from intentionally accepting or pursuing a partner who immediately asserts polyamorous goals. Most people defer to hoping for a potential serious partner. Few people are willing to suffer rejection by making polyamorous intentions dominant.
In my coaching and counseling experience, the few polyamorous couples which survive are comprised of individuals from a cultural background which views sex as a need separate from commitment. They also have strong personality compatibility as well as mutual interests and goals which solidify their commitment. Even then the practice is often a response intended to mitigate overwhelming isolation or trauma in some form. While mature practitioners of polyamory behave better, few individuals know themselves well enough to act forthrightly. Cue Arrested Development:
Tobias: You know, Lindsay, as a therapist I have advised a number of couples to explore an open relationship where the couple remains emotionally committed but free to explore extramarital encounters.
Lindsay: Well, did it work for those people?
Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might…but it might work for us!
Even for mature, relationally-stable practitioners, extra relational experiences often cause individuals to grow apart. This is not to assert polyamory cannot work but that it is the exception to a rule that most polyamorous relationships suffer instability which jeopardizes long term or permanent success.
For those interested in polyamory, examine personal needs and limiting beliefs. Then remember that outcomes are better when seeking a long term partner, even if we fail along the way. We will learn what we’re looking for and how to have a relationship. We will learn to respond to attraction, common goals, personality compatibility, and compatible needs. For individuals currently dating, polyamory is a good way to stall individual development or harm future goals. Instead,
“Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.” ~ J. Peterson
