Links that didn't copy into Cat [Jan.11]

Interesting debate. This thread also raised some good perspectives: [check on new ic.org site?] Poly/open relationship advice

and also this one: [check on new ic.org.site?] poly relationships when you aren't poly

I was also amused to read this article on Kinsey Confidential http://kinseyconfidential.org/dan-savage-3-non-m...(thanks to a friend's twitter feed) 

Everyone, even if you're going to be monogamous, needs to acknowledge that monogamy is not .. easy. Love doesn't mean that you don't want to sleep with other people. Love means, if you make a monogamous commitment, means you will refrain from sleeping with other people. You will still wannna – and you will wanna bad – and you will both wanna...We have put a lie at the heart of all of our long-term romantic relationships and then we wonder why they fall apart. Two people are looking at each other and lying to each other every day about something very important, and they both know that the other is lying every day. Then they don't trust each other, oddly enough, after all that lying back and forth. It's so much healthier just to acknowledge, even if you are going to make a monogamous commitment, that that is going to be an effort and there will be consequences to that. [snip] Monogamy is stupid and people are bad at it.

and I really liked this insight:

For most of recorded human history, men weren't supposed to be monogamous. It was required. They had concubines. They had whores. They had mistresses. They had more than one wife. Monogamy was really for women and all about paternal anxiety and assuaging that – enslaving women, really. It was about control. To the credit of our species, it took us however many tens of thousands of years before we realized that wasn't egalitarian, and about 60 years ago we decided to make it fairzies. But we made a big mistake. Rather than giving women the same latitude and freedom that men had enjoyed, we said men had to now hew to the monogamous ideal that had been imposed on women. It has been a disaster...

For most of my adult life I've been entirely monogamous, in long, faithful relationships. Dull, mostly sexless, but loving faithful relationships. And now, I'm becoming much more familiar with the concept of poly, and I don't know yet if it suits me but life is certainly more interesting and fulfilling than ever before. I expect I'll settle into being mostly monogamous in an open relationship where my partner is poly, but in the meantime I'm enjoying the journey. It's not always an easy journey, but nothing worthwhile really comes easy.

I don't think poly is a fad. It's been around a while. I also think that when we discover this site (and others like it) and we explore our kinks, we become more sexually adventurous and open to new ideas and concepts which aren't 'mainstream'. And we talk about it, so it seems more common than it is.