[dbspin]

This is a recipe for perhaps the most unhappy society imaginable. Without such outmoded ideas as 'commitment', and 'through thick and thin' relationships become subject to the immediate barometer of personal happiness. In practice this is anything but equitable, freeing and fulfilling. It results in people with perceived high 'value' flitting from relationship to relationship, often several at once. Invariably leaving relationships and abandoning partners when the ordinary vicissitudes of life arise - job loss, ill health, aging, deaths of parents etc.

Real intimacy requires investment. Relationship anarchy, any time I've seen it attested or practiced, faciliates the opposite. It's a fetishisation of alienation. What you're describing as 'pressure of expectations' can be understood very differently, as the expectation of reciprocity. In other words, being able to rely on people - whether as friends or lovers, when things get difficult. Without that, all we have is limerence and capriciousness.

I say all this as someone who's been in non-monogamous relationships of various kinds - from weeks to years. Without the possibility of commitment and the acknowledgement that all relationships are inherently hierarchical, we atomise individual needs and make real enduring connection and community impossible.

[poisonborz]

What you say is true in general but why would it all be true for a nonstandard relationship? Why would you be less committed to multiple persons (or why would you not have 1 committed out of all). If anything, a single household of multiple stable personalities creates more involving and colorful context, more possibility of hierarchy, and more reasons to not abandon it (as a bigger community relies on you).

I had much less direct and indirect experience, but I know what you talk about. Even more, it is also my experience that these constellations are unstable. But I see this as them existing in a sea of monogamist society, surrounded by prejudice and contempt. Try to introduce this to friends and family. It's similar of how gay relationships are much more often open, due to (guess:) societal context like a patriarchal society.

Historically disconnected societies were used to be more creative. I hope they would also be in the future.

[dbspin]

In practice people are never equally committed to multiple partners, if nothing else the longevity of a relationship changes feelings. As it should! It normal and healthy that feelings and commitments deepen over time. There's an idea prevalent in polyamory right now that relationships should be 'non hierarchical'. I believe it's both unrealistic and I unhealthy. Openness does not equate to equivalence. Being happy for your partners additional sexual experiences or even relationships is not the same as those relationships sitting on an equal footing with your own.

To your second point - sure polyamorous relationships are countercultural, and this inevitably puts more pressure on them from family etc. However they're also innately more complex, and require far more processing than conventional relationships. They'll always be a minority for this reason alone. And that's totally fine. Your relationship style is no less valid for being less popular. This need to proslethise to others is itself unhealthy. Tolerance is important, uniformity is not.