There are 10 good reasons Why Polyamory would Never Work Long-Term…
If you’ve been skeptical about polyamory or have had bad experiences in a polyamorous setup, you might be wondering why polyamory doesn’t work – or whether it does actually work, and if there’s something wrong with you?
I can assure you that there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just that polyamory does not work, and there are a number of dangers of polyamory (for women especially), many of which you won’t hear MEN state are a true danger to you.
Polyamory benefits men in the short-term more than it does women.
Yes, I will probably get some flack from the poly communities, but put your thinking cap on and hear me out as to why polyamory isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
Key Takeaways
- Polyamory is an open loop (where resources are flowing to multiple people who are emotionally and sexually involved).
- Women lose that vulnerable feminine essence that makes men fall in love when they choose to engage in the polyamorous lifestyle (something men won’t admit to you). This is one of the major cons of polyamory.
- Emotional resources are not infinite and neither is love.
- You can’t truly ‘own’ your relationship if it isn’t exclusive.
- Polyamory is about me, me me.
- Men use polyamorous as a meantime solution – but when they fall in love with a woman, they’ll abandon all the other women they were “polyamorous” with.
Do the quiz: how commitment friendly is my man?
Why Won’t Polyamory Work?
Polyamorous relationships are getting more and more popular each day. Social media and dating apps has changed the way we date and find a partner.
It’s caused our culture to value distractions, selfishness and instant gratification rather than real emotional connection.
It’s caused us to treat the opposite sex like candy, and as an avenue through which we seek to fulfil our feelings of lust and need for attention.
As such, some people have given up on commitment altogether and turned to polyamory.
So why would these types of relationships never work long term? Let’s figure it out together.
Firstly, I am not saying that monogamy is the only way. It is definitely not.
There are many marriage forms or mating types that have evolved for thousands of years along with the human race.
There’s polygamy, where a man has more than one wife.
There’s polyandry, where a woman has more than one husband (and by the way, in polyandry, a woman mostly marries a man and his brother or brothers, so this means she marries blood relatives, ok?
This was a common practice in places where land was scarce so that a family didn’t have to split the land between the brothers.
Although polyandry can also occur with different, unrelated men, it is still a closed marriage unit, unlike polyamory).
All these mating styles have value in the appropriate context.
The key is that these ancient mating styles like polyandry and polygamy were mainly formed to either preserve resources or keep land in the family name in a situation where resources were not plentiful.
So in essence, these arrangements all benefit the next generation (ie the children).
For example, when many women marry or mate with one man, it is usually because he is resourceful and powerful, not because he is a deadbeat.
Historically speaking, there is a correlation between powerful men being able to have many wives.
With this power, he gets more access to more women’s reproductive resources (at least in some cultures).
This is especially prevalent in a time when there was no middle class, so you’re either at the top or at the bottom, in other words there was a completely disproportionate skew in the distribution of resources.
But nonetheless, this type of mating style or arrangement can benefit women and men, and the next generation in many ways.
Polyamory Is An Open Loop
This leads me to polyamory. Polyamory is in theory, based on the idea of egalitarianism, and the belief that polyamorous people can love and give to all their partners equally.
Now this may sound good because don’t we all love the idea of equality?
I mean isn’t that what communist countries promise to their people? And how is that going for them?
But of course, if you have had any experience with polyamory, you’d know that equality doesn’t work in practice.
In fact, sometimes in polyamorous setups you have what you’d call your primary, secondary and tertiary partners.
The idea then would be that some of these partners can give you something that others can’t, so it’s like an open buffet where you pick and choose.
What’s different about polyamory is that it’s kind of an open loop.
You have your multiple partners and those partners have their own multiple partners so to speak.
It’s not a closed loop like some of the traditional poly marriages where you know everyone in that specific arrangement.
Closed loops keep the resources in, but open loops don’t, so what tends to happen is that you only give what you’re getting back.
It’s always a trade. That is an important distinction to understand.
So in any situation or any relationship where you only add value when you can get equal or more value back, it leads to it becoming more of a self serving setup than anything else.
Nothing wrong with being self serving but it is not designed to benefit the next generation.
And if it doesn’t benefit the next generation, then it would never work long term. Because life supports what supports more of life.
So let me share with you the top 10 burning reasons why polyamory will never work long-term.
Reason #1: Resources are not infinite and neither is investment.
Love is, or can be infinite, in theory. But resources and investment cannot.
You cannot invest yourself in the same amount in all partners at all times.
That potentially leaves one or more partners feeling angry, jibbed, and resentful.
But let’s be real for a minute:
Polyamory is really about me, me me. It’s about the self.
People say they can treat their partners equally, but that’s really just a justification for their behaviour.
There is no way you can treat 2 different people equally in practice.
It doesn’t matter how much your love is ‘infinite’. Because your emotional, sexual and financial resources are not infinite.
Remember that as a women, we usually only release one, at most 2 fertile eggs per fertility cycle, we don’t release an infinite number of eggs.
Also, your ability to invest in people is not infinite.
So you cannot invest yourself in to all mating partners in the same amount.
You cannot treat all partners equally despite your best intent.
Just like communism promises equality in theory but it never works in practice, polyamory is the same way.
Here’s an example:
A man has a wife and two girlfriends.
On Valentine’s day, he goes out to dinner with his wife as well as one of his girlfriends, because he likes to spread his resources evenly.
However, after dinner that night he went home with his wife.
This means he spent the night with his wife, and his girlfriend was alone for the rest of the night, and pissed because he chose to spend the night with his wife.
This is a true story from one of the women I helped years ago.
Reason 2: When it’s a trade, you stop adding value.
If you have many partners and let your other partners have many partners, then it’s an open loop as I mentioned.
Everything then becomes a trade. You are willing to give as much as you are able to take.
When your relationships become a trade, then you stop wanting to add value for the sake of adding value.
And anytime a relationship is based on trading it destroys the trust, the loyalty and the exclusive value of that relationship.
You lose that specialness and significance that comes with exclusivity.
Reason #3: It’s harder for a man to fall in love with a woman if she is polyamorous.
The reason that it is harder (much harder, really) for a man to fall in love with a woman if she is polyamorous, is because the nature of polyamory is that all partners have to detach and remove their emotions from their partners as much as possible, if your ultimate goal is to preserve the setup.
If a man detaches himself, then he cannot fall in love.
And if he does, the polyamorous relationship will collapse because he will drive everyone mad with his jealousy.
It’s also harder for a man to fall in love with a woman who is polyamorous because she has invested herself in other men, sexually and emotionally.
If a woman is sleeping with other men, then a man intuitively won’t emotionally commit or fall in love with her (although it is not impossible!) because their bond will not be as exclusive.
The men who start a polyamorous relationship are usually reasonably good at detaching.
Women on the other hand, sometimes think they can detach but it’s hard for a woman to maintain this detachment long-term.
Because, she’s a woman. She carries babies in her body, her body is made for carrying, birthing and nurturing life.
So, her body is biologically driven towards emotional attachment to a man!
This is so that she can secure more emotional commitment and resources for herself and for the future.
Remember that the more detached you are from your own feelings, the less you can connect deeper, and the less men can fall in love with you.
This tendency to detach also relates closely to your attachment style.
If you have an insecure attachment style, then as a woman you are much more likely to:
- Get stuck in a polyamorous relationship where your soul is not lit on fire; and
- You are not fully investing all of your emotional resources in one man (at the cost of no man actually being in love with you and “pair bonded” to you)
Curious to know your own core attachment style? You can find out with our quiz below.
Do the quiz: What is my attachment style?
Reason #4: Polyamory is about me, me me.
Now I’m not saying that every single person who enters a polyamorous relationship is trying to be selfish.
Just most of them.
Here’s why:
The people who say that they want equality, are often the people who are only happy when it is 50/50 or when they get 60 per cent and the other gets 40.
The only people who would be happy with getting much less than the other partners are the ones who do not perceive much value in the situation, or who are already invested in someone else.
Equality is often used as a way to appear as though you’re a generous person.
Yet, equality is anything but generous.
You can’t make your partners feel like you are generous and giving when your focus is on equality.
This is due to the fact that you have to remove yourself in the attempt to try to be equal.
Who really in their right mind, would perceive you as generous long-term if you’re trying to give equally to everybody in a polyamorous relationship situation?
Because they know you are not risking much emotionally by trying to dish out your resources equally.
To be equal is to be detached. To be detached is to risk nothing.
Also in relation to this point are 6 behaviours you should never tolerate in a man.
Reason #5: You can’t own your relationship when it isn’t exclusive.
When you share your partner with others, then you’ll naturally be less invested in them. With less investment, there’s less fulfilment long term too.
It breeds the habit of not taking responsibility for your partner’s feelings, needs, desires and fears.
I mean why would you want to take responsibility for their emotions when your partner will just go elsewhere and not invest in you?
There’s nothing sacred there, right?
The point here is that you can’t own your relationship when it isn’t exclusive.
Most people enter polyamory in an attempt to ‘get’ more but they aren’t always aware of the enormous long term costs to that decision.
If you truly took responsibility for your partner, then you’d go deeper and find ways to fill them up and connect with their dark side and well as their light side.
Just so that together you could experience more of not just sexual variety but love, connectedness and fullness in your relationship.
In fact, very often people in polyamory will start to follow the belief that your problem is your problem and yours alone to solve.
That inevitably causes more disconnects over time.
MORE: How to Build Emotional Connection With A Man: Game Changer.
Reason #6: You as a woman have to detach and separate from your emotions
To be polyamorous, you have to detach. and when you detach from your emotions, you have to ignore your own feelings like jealousy and hurt and yearning for more.
And you’ll essentially lose the core of your femininity and the core of who you are as a woman.
A lot of women enter the situation ignoring their heart’s yearning for deeper love and ownership from a man.
And they know it’s there, but they push it down to please the man or to advance their agenda in wanting more resources from more men.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting that at all!
It’s just that you can’t do it long-term. When you ignore your heart, there’s a word for that: suffering.
I’ve also written an article on the 10 signs of a commitment phobic man. You can read that here.
Reason #7: Primary partner in polyamory never really means primary.
The “primary partner” in a polyamorous relationship means that that partner is the number one partner in a hierarchical setup.
The primary partner is supposed to, in theory, get priority.
But like one of my very intelligent readers said in my previous post about the downsides of polyamory: the primary is never the primary until all others are out of the picture.
I’ve read about situations where the primary woman was the wife, but in practice, she was far from being the primary.
That’s because her husband’s other girlfriend was so upset about him spending most of his time with his children and wife, that he had to often be on the phone with her during family dinners, comforting her and relieving her of her sadness about the situation.
So his emotional energy went to the secondary girlfriend, not the “primary”.
Not to mention that this interrupted family time.
(I’m sure the children were very happy about that.)
Investment is never equal.
And women know this intuitively, because we are sensitive to where a man is putting his resources – and his resources mean his time, energy, emotions, money and sex.
On that note, you may want to read this article on ‘Is He Serious About You? Or is He Just Interested?’
Reason #8: Because people use polyamory as a meantime solution until they fall in love.
It’s happened plenty of times:
A man says he is polyamorous, and he remains polyamorous until he meets another non polyamorous woman, falls in love with her, and immediately drops all of his polyamorous female partners.
If a man was in a polyamorous relationship with his idea of a perfect 10, then he wouldn’t be in a polyamorous relationship.
He would want his perfect 10 to himself.
Here’s an article based on a question from one of my readers about how a man used polyamory to basically try to keep his options open.
My client was quite hurt in the situation and I recommend you read it if you want to truly understand the way some men use polyamory to meet their own needs these days, to your detriment as a woman.
Read the article here: Polyamorous Relationships: He Wants One. What Do I do.
Reason #9: Because eventually, jealousy will set in.
There was a longitudinal study done by Dr. Elizabeth Sheff, where she discovered that some of the polyamorous people in the study at first said they didn’t understand jealousy at all.
Literally, they couldn’t relate to feeling jealous. Talk about dissociating from your feelings, right?
Eventually though, after 15 years, most of the people in the study came back and said that they finally did know and understand what jealousy feels like.
Just because you are capable of putting your jealousy aside, you cannot forever ignore the fact that your jealousy was designed to protect you.
Your needs are important, because we are designed to pair-bond and reproduce for ourselves.
You may not want children, but you have jealousy to protect your resources: and your resources is your partner, so your feelings of jealousy will not go away permanently.
Do the quiz: Which of these 8 feminine archetypes am i?
Reason #10: Women Who Lack Confidence & Self Esteem Likely To Choose Polyamory
….In other words, A lot of women who enter a polyamorous relationship do so because they don’t have the confidence to get all of a man’s resources to herself.
This speaks for itself. Sometimes women compromise their deepest heart.
They cover up their true desires because they don’t feel confident. They also sometimes choose men who are already taken because they don’t want to take the risk of asking for too much from one man.
Sometimes women cover up their real yearning in their heart for a full commitment from a man, because she thinks that’s her only option.
And when you come from that place, you can’t have real connection.
You can’t be honest – your repressed anger and sadness will eventually surface, and the polyamorous relationship will break down.
Sometimes women feel it is wrong to even want it all.
Or sometimes their male partners make them feel guilty for wanting it all.
Sometimes women feel scared to get it all from a man, because she fears that if she does, then he has more power over her.
Women just don’t always want to surrender.
And I understand, but what if deep in your heart, all you ever wanted, was the freedom to surrender to a dominant, devoted man?
How long can you realistically ignore that for?
If you want even more detail on why polyamory won’t work long term, check out the other articles I’ve written on the subject (yes, the content in those articles is different to this article):
Polyamorous Relationship: He Wants One. What Do I Do?
Polyamory: Why It Would Never Work Long Term.
I hope you enjoyed this article.
I wanted to say that I am in no way saying that polyamory is ‘wrong’.
I don’t want to make it wrong. I just don’t believe it can work out long term for the majority of people, especially for us women.
Just quickly before you go, I wanted to share with something with you.
Remember that in order for you to have and experience that deeply committed relationship that us as feminine women all crave, you need to understand what it takes to become your man’s one and only.
That is where all of your answers lie.
Because here’s the inconvenient truth:
A man will give you all of his time, attention, emotional energy and resources when you become his one and only type of woman, and he will give you virtually nothing when he sees you as his one of many.
When I say virtually nothing, I mean he’ll do the absolute bare minimum just to keep you around.
Read: Why Does He Keep Me Around When He Doesn’t Want A Relationship?
That means that he’ll do the bare minimum to keep you around as a resource in his life, but never anything more.
But that’s nothing like the love, adoration and the commitment that women receive when they’ve become their man’s one and only.
So as you can imagine, there’s nothing quite as important for you as a feminine woman to understand the process behind being your chosen man’s one and only.
This is why I’ve put together a very special program titled “Becoming His one and only”. Inside this program, I want to teach you in detail the 5 secrets to having your chosen man fall in love with you and beg you to be his one and only.
So do take this opportunity to get yourself a copy. You can do that right here.
Over To You!
Anyway that’s enough from me, I hope this article has helped you and I can’t wait to speak to you again very soon.
By the way, I want to know, what do you think about polyamory? I would love to hear from you and perhaps even your experiences with polyamory.
By the way, if you want more information on how to show up as the one and only type of woman and have your chosen man beg you to be his one and only, you should get a copy of my “Becoming His One & Only” program right here.
And if you want to learn about high value vulnerability, read my article “4 Top Secret Ways to Access Your High Value Vulnerability”.
Renee is the founder of The Feminine Woman & co-founder of Shen Wade Media where we teach women how to show up as a high value high status woman whom easily inspires a deep sense of emotional commitment from her chosen man. She graduated with a bachelor of Law and bachelor of Arts majoring in sociology and psychology. She has been a dating and relationship coach for women in the past 15 years and together with her husband D. Shen at Commitment Triggers blog, they have positively influenced the lives of over 20 million women through their articles and videos as well as 10’s of thousands through paid programs through the Shen Wade Media platform.
Connect deeper with her work through the social media links below.