Increased Intimacy, Romance, and Love
The most obvious benefit of polyamory is the opportunity to develop deep, intimate, romantic and sexual relationships with multiple people. To not have our capacity for love to be stifled by a partner, and not to stifle a partner’s capacity for love.
New Relationship Energy
There’s also NRE or New Relationship Energy. Do you remember the feeling the last time you fell in love? There may be no greater feeling in the world. But conventional relationship dynamics would only allow that feeling once in a lifetime. In contrast, polyamorous relationships make room for this feeling again, and again, and again.
Diverse Need Satisfaction
Polyamorous relationships allow our needs satisfied by multiple people. People usually have several friends to satisfy their diverse needs. One friend to go rock climbing with, another friend to go dancing with. But in romantic relationships, people tend to presume that one person will be able to satisfy all of their complex needs. But this expectation is rarely met.
Polyamorous relationships allow our emotional, sexual, and practical needs to be filled by multiple people. Practical needs like grocery shopping, cleaning the house, sharing multiple incomes. And even raising children together. Many couples report that their primary relationship has been strengthened by practicing polyamory.
Communication
For a polyamorous dynamic to be successful, both partners must communicate clearly about their desires, fears, insecurities, boundaries, and needs. Polyamorous couples are often motivated to conduct these conversations in ways that few monogamous partners ever experienced. And by navigating these incredible choppy waters, polyamorous couples discover their ability to approach any other challenging situation with nonjudgmental communication, compassion, patience, respect, and love.
The Virtue of Sharing
Arguing against polyamory, many proponents of monogamy point to the jealousy that arises when seeing our partner engaged in a sexual or romantic relationship with another person.
But this might not be a very good argument. Imagine for a moment one child playing with a toy train, and a second child joins in. And the first child screams, “No! This is my toy train! Mine!” Most of us would look at this situation and attempt to gently teach the child to share. This situation highlights two important issues.
We value sharing as a society. So much so, that when children are unable to share, psychologists consider this to be a development flaw.
We believe, and have demonstrated, that even if a person is naturally possessive, they’re able to learn to share. And will likely eventually learn to enjoy it.
Of course, there’s a simple argument against this though - and that is that humans are not trains. And that our attachment to them can not be compared. Fair enough.
Compersion
In response to feelings of jealousy that often arise in polyamorous relationships, polyamorists invented a new word - compersion, which, as defined by Franklin Veaux, author of More than Two: A practical guide to ethical polyamory, is:
“A feeling of joy when a partner invests in and takes pleasure from another romantic or sexual relationship… the opposite of ‘jealousy’ …a positive emotional reaction to a lover’s other relationship.”
Divorce
But perhaps the most convincing argument for polyamory is that its alternative appears to be failing.
In the USA, more than 1/2 of marriages end in divorce
And it has been reported that 20-40% of these divorces were caused by infidelity.
Imagine how many marriages could have been saved, how many families would not have been disrupted by the turbulence of divorce, and how many children would not be raised by single parents if couples just agreed to open up the relationship.
Nearly half of all married women, and more than half of all married report having cheated on their spouse.
So, although many of us parade our support of monogamy, the reality is far different.
