[bcarlyle]

I've recently spent some time within the burner community where polyamory seems to be common.

Some people seem to be having wonderful polyamorous relationships while other seems to suffer in terrible relationships where they insists on being polyamorous.

For me this seems unrelated to polyamory. It seems more to be the case that the people who are emotionally stable have good relationships and the people who are unstable struggle to form good relationships.

At the same time it seems that polyamory might be appealing to many who can't make "normal" relationships work. So my guess would be there are two distinct groups who are drawn to polyamory.

Highly emotionally intelligent people who communicate their needs and function well within relationships who wants more relationships and people who struggle with relationships who sees polyamory as the solution and monogamy as the reason for their previous problems in relationships.

[elfchief]

In the vast majority of cases, a relationship that is broken with two participants is going to be broken with more than two participants. People don't suddenly become less obnoxious, more mature, less possessive, just because there's someone else around. If anything, existing problems tend to get rather amplified with the addition of more people.

The main case where this isn't true as much is when a relationship is otherwise good, but there are specific things that are missing -- there's not conflict, just things missing. For example, if one person in a couple enjoys BDSM and the other doesn't, adding someone that can fulfill that desire can be quite helpful.

There's always exceptions, of course, but that seems to be the way things generally work out.

[archevel]

> People don't suddenly become less obnoxious, more mature, less possessive, just because there's someone else around.

In my experience the opposite is true people DO become more mature in the presence of others. In general people tend to take a breath and try not to lose face by becoming upset in most social contexts. Also a third party can mediate conflicts, couples therapy comes to mind. Sure that's not the same thing as romantic involvment, but I can imagine conflicts deescalating just by having a third person around who can see both sides or take side or point out that the arguing parties are both behaving as idiots.