"And so how can we blame anybody for avoiding “fixing themselves,” even if it goes wrong?"
Choosing polyamory is not "fixing oneself." There is no benefit to it, unless the only thing you get out of sex is physical pleasure.
Choosing polyamory is not "fixing oneself." There is no benefit to it, unless the only thing you get out of sex is physical pleasure.
There are a thousand reasons that someone may be drawn to either lifestyle, a thousand more reasons why someone might find themselves shifting between them, and still a thousand more reasons why someone might be situationalist and not identify with any prevailing lifestyle for themselves at all.
Depthful discussions about different ways of living can be interesting and enlightening, but making reductionist claims about the “other” doesn’t deliver on that.
I wonder if people are just wired differently, and it's like trying to convince a straight man that he should actually be attracted to other men. Would explain why this topic has generated basically zero interesting discussion, which is unusual for this website.
I think you might be on to something. Maybe I'm an odd duck, but I can't possibly divide my romantic attention between multiple individuals without negatively affecting the quality of the relationship/s. I suspect anyone who claims to be able to doesn't experience love the same way.
You're right though, different people probably do have a very different experience of love. Some people say they do not experience romantic love at all, some people can't imagine romantically loving more than one person, others are sure that they're fully in love with multiple people at once.
It's impossible for me to say conclusively that someone is wrong when they're talking about their own experience of feelings.