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Your opinions?
Kinsey data on the number of people who declare themselves "poly" shows the number expands until about the age of 30, and then contracts sharply from then on. Why do you suppose this is so? What might it say about the motivations of the polyamorous?
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I think it mirrors politics: how many bleeding heart liberals get old- or turn 30 and buy a house and an SUV and have a fat pile of children- and begin violently swinging to the right? I've seen it happen many times.
I also know that, for myself, being poly is (or was) stressful. It's having two- or however many- boyfriends. The good and the bad both multiply. It's like okay, twice the love, twice the sex, twice the snuggles and attention. It's also twice the hangups, the baggage, the working-out-of-things-between-me-and-him-and-him-and, and well you get the picture. When it works, it's like being awake for the first time ever. Living and breathing love. And when it breaks- as does everything in our entropic universe- it breaks double (or triple, etc) and leaves one with that many more pieces to sweep up. Imagine your last three breakups - now imagine having them all happen today. It doesn't help one's motivation to get back on the ride.
If you can do it, and stick to it, bully for you. I remember being so happy it was like Pizzicato Five had exploded all over me.
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Yeah, my take on it was that by age 30, most people have both "figured out" what they want, at least in a broad sense, and have had a good helping of stuff they don't want, damping down their sexual curiosity.
Actually, I can be more specific than that:
I have tried to see poly arrangements as a sort of "love and intimacy" thing. Like, "it enhances my love and intimacy level, to new and glorious heights". That's what most of the pro-poly rhetoric is about, and I think it's the most altruistic portrayal of everyone's motivations. But when I place poly in its social context, I notice that it's possible to get an awful lot of love and intimacy through means other than placing actual dicks into actual holes and moving them about.
I am now very tempted to conclude that despite what people actually say, being "poly" is not about love and intimacy, which you can get all kinds of ways, and instead is very specifically about the desire to avoid feeling sexually deprived in a long-term relationship.
I think there are two solutions to that problem: Live with someone you are not passionate about, then fuck a bunch of people you are passionate about, ... or, live with someone you are passionate about - who is just as passionate about you - and find new ways to explore and renew that passion.
BOTH approaches require a lot of emotional intelligence to tackle, and I'm not surprised that people veer between them, or seek some compromise, as they go.
. . .
Then again, there's my other interpretation, which is even less flattering: Sometimes being ardently "poly" is a sign that a person is critically low on self-esteem, and wants to compensate for that with an avalanche of attention and drama.
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If it's cross-sectional data, the data could be due to aging (all 30 year olds go through this), or it could be generational (THESE 30-year-olds go through this, as a function of the cultural milieu in which they grew up/find themselves). You could expect this pattern if, say, sexual norms became more liberal over time, peaked in the late 70s / early 80s, then something (*coughAIDScough*) caused them to start swinging back toward the conservative end of the spectrum.
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( http://www.iub.edu/~kinsey/resources/Polyamory.pdf )
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