Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Halsin Romance, Expectations and Obligatory Poly

Yes you are right that poly was used in contradiction to lifestyle and open marriage arrangements that had prohibitions on forming emotional attachments to secondary partners. The injunction "you can enjoy their body but not their affections" led to situations where the new partner never got their emotional needs met.

Years go by. And poly is becoming more an more accepted and more and more popular. Where I live there is a very high concentration of poly people and if you get on the apps you will often see people complain "is everyone here poly?!"

Now presciptively poly means many-loves and was designed to describe loving relationships with many people. But this meant many different things for many people. For some people it meant kitchen table polyamory where everyone get along - for others it's something closer to the og open marriage where the 'dating separately' partner had little or no contact with the new partner. And so we get a thousand and one new categories and you have people who call themselves poly but also free agents who form no permanent attachments. You have relationship anarchists who reject the loving hierarchy idea of primary and secondary partners and you even have relationship anarchists who reject the very idea of relationships. Because there's not equivalent of the French academy that is going to come along and force people to start using the term to only refer to loving relationships a thousand flowers were free to bloom; I'm no longer sure there is a model poly relationship

Because each group of humans works out it's own relationships so you have as many understandings of poly as you have poly people. Words change as they get used differently by different people. My inner decriptivist believes that poly has become a catch all - a category like queer. If someone calls themselves queer you just don't know if they are gay, bi, pan, sapio . . .

Now I have seen people trying to preserve the meaning of polyamory by using ENM to describe relationships that don't necessarily stress love and relationships. But in my experience unless the person using ENM as substitute for lifestyle they could be classified into one of the thousand and one different flavors of poly. In my experience people who eschew poly in favor of ENM have negative impressions of poly people. I heard someone say "yes, but I'm not in your club" once.

Splitting vs lumping. In biology there is a distinction between splitters and lumpers. Splitter see many different species and sub species - lumpers tend like to see only handful of species and believe that many of the creatures listed as separate species shouldn't be. I tend to be a lumper with the word poly - it's a broad tent.

Now I have dated someone who refused to commit on relationship anarchist grounds so listing someone who avoids commitment as poly doesn't seem strange to me. "we have what we have, let's enjoy it while we have it. it will end some day . . . labels won't change that . . ." I do *indeed* understand why some find those attitudes frustrating!