#made this unrebloggable because I don't need this fucking off into the aether

[morkaischosen]

Based on your tags on the "Why do some swingers hate polyamory" post: why DO you think that is?

so noting that this is wild, groundless speculation, and in particular that I don't know anything like enough about swinging to actually be confident in anything I'm saying:

I'd assume it has to do with the structure of the thing. Swinging as I understand it sets up quite a narrow context where the two partners in a couple set aside the usual boundaries of that relationship to do something they normally wouldn't; humans being humans, I imagine it's probably common for regular swingers to end up in a dynamic where they do their thing and then reaffirm the relationship afterwards in, you know, whatever manner works for them.

It seems natural to me that this would be one of those things where having clear exceptions strengthens the idea that they're an exception to something - and in that context, if you've built up momentum in the idea that you have a monogamous relationship except in this specific way, polyamory could easily look like it's doing exactly the thing you've been going 'but we won't do that' at for all that time.

I speculate (based, again, on no knowledge) that swinging circles - or at least the ones that are virulently opposed to polyamory - draw a very strong distinction between the defined sexual nonmonogamy they engage in, and it's easy for me to imagine that getting romantically involved with someone you met while swinging and starting an affair would be scandalous, breaching the structured boundary and calling all of the ritual of it into question. It's one of my favourite topics: it's easier to really loathe things you're closer to, sometimes, and I can see this being an example where the obvious common point of sexual non-monogamy really brings to attention the ways a swinging lifestyle centres the monogamous principles that underly some of it.

A lot of this is coming back to my conception of swinging as a couple activity - the norm as I understand it isn't a free-for-all, it's couples swapping partners, and that still structures itself around the monogamous couple in a way that polyamory's whole deal chips away at.

(I'll note that all of this is shot through with my assumptions about what polyamory means, which god knows don't seem to quite match up with the way a lot of people think about it; to me the default is individuals having their own relationships, which don't necessarily have much to do with their partners' relationships - I tend to become quite fond of my partners' partners, because I hear about them and I'm inclined to trust my partners' taste in people as much as in music or fiction, but I don't have the level of We Are All One Unit that what I've seen of wider discussions on tumblr seems to assume. As far as I know my angle lines up with how most people in my social vicinity look at it; I don't know if we're a weird niche and most people are doing the more closed-loop-looking The Polycule type shape that seems to be implied by a lot of Posting, or if we're fairly typical and much of what doesn't line up is an assumption from outside. Regardless, I'm coming at this from quite a long way from the sort of closed quad I could easily imagine coming about if two swinging couples who regularly see each other became a stable unit.)

This concludes my unfounded reckon based on a general interest in human psychology and a frankly very vague understanding of what swinging is all about.