Exactly. It's often through poly and other unconventional relationships that you realise the way monogamy can be interpreted so many ways. I've known people to be in monogamous/conventional relationships where both people have very different ideas about what monogamy means in terms of where the boundaries lie, but because it's accepted under this catch-all term of 'monogamy' it never gets discussed, because they assume that their conception of monogamy is the 'normal' one that their partner obviously adheres to.
Don't get me wrong, quite often the two conceptions are similar enough that the relationship works fine, or someone who is unfaithful acknowledges they were unfaithful. But sometimes that kind of assumption can be a recipe for disasters that could have otherwise been avoided.
And obviously poly relationships aren't flawless. The initial stages aren't referred to as a steep learning curve for nothing, and many people just drop the whole thing or flit from failure to failure because they're taking a long time to get through the initial sticky bits. Even then, people change, and what they want from a relationship changes, and if parties fail to talk about it, it all goes pear-shaped.
I think monogamy would probably get a better run with people so inclined if they talked about it enough so that they can acknowledge it meaning different things to different people, and realise the usefulness of finding out what kind of monogamy one is agreeing to before one enters a specific monogamous relationship.
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Date: 2005-08-23 04:30 pm (UTC)Don't get me wrong, quite often the two conceptions are similar enough that the relationship works fine, or someone who is unfaithful acknowledges they were unfaithful. But sometimes that kind of assumption can be a recipe for disasters that could have otherwise been avoided.
And obviously poly relationships aren't flawless. The initial stages aren't referred to as a steep learning curve for nothing, and many people just drop the whole thing or flit from failure to failure because they're taking a long time to get through the initial sticky bits. Even then, people change, and what they want from a relationship changes, and if parties fail to talk about it, it all goes pear-shaped.
I think monogamy would probably get a better run with people so inclined if they talked about it enough so that they can acknowledge it meaning different things to different people, and realise the usefulness of finding out what kind of monogamy one is agreeing to before one enters a specific monogamous relationship.