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I have an IQ of two standard deviations above the mean. I hold two Ph.D.s (Princeton and MIT), am physically robust (biathlon and crew), very attractive…and emotionally and financially secure. I have been diagnosed as very high functioning autistic on the basis of brain scans; I have good empathic skills, but don’t seem to need the constant reassurance others do. I’m not sure what drives me to want a relationship, other than enjoying the complexities of intimate interaction and how they evolve over time, and the physical contact is important to me. I also have learned a lot in intimate relationships, and seem to be wired for learning.

Do men want to pair up with me exclusively? Hell no. After the “new relationship energy” wears off in six months or a year or two, everything that comes out of my mouth threatens them, and that includes things I’ve always said (like, “did you read the latest article in Journal X? How did you feel about the methodology?” or “No, being in a sports stadium with 100,000 screaming people and seizure-inducing lights and explosions unsettles and confuses me; I’d rather not.”). I do not mate with females; they don’t float my boat, though I tried it in my 20s and 30s. I suppose “the right women” could come along in the future, but they haven’t so far.

So although by one set of standards I am an attractive mate, I am not the kind of mate that most/certain men are wired to want a monogamous relationship with (regardless of all the propaganda). They want to mate with, i.e., hunt, conquer, and go through the behaviors that lead to impregnating, younger, more docile, girlish women. This seems to be a fairly fixed evolutionary tendency of higher primates.

It also seems to be a fundamental element of human behavior that outliers of any sort are excluded from social arrangements. “Ugly”? It can be just as alienating to be physically “beautiful.”

However with polyamory I have found my value to be much higher, emotional-economically speaking. There is something about removing the pressure to be “all and everything” to another person that makes it possible for all parties in a polyamorous relationship. No one person can complement all my parts, but I can have complex, rich, sustaining, creative give-and-take interactions with multiple people. The expectation is removed that in a relationship of just two, somehow their non-ideal (to each other) qualities will overlap just as their ideal ones will. (More likely their non-ideal and ideal parts will be perpendicular to each others’, and the differences will accumulate stress.)

I find that the males I engage with in polyamorous relationships tend not to be of the Selfish Gene/conquer-impregnate-and-dump pattern. They seem to be a new sort of human, more evolved, more caring about learning, growing, improving the world around them. They seem to be more realistic and…yes…boring. They don’t think that their choice of partner or their engendering of offspring or the size of their paycheck or penis or house or car mean anything. They may do important things in the world (one of my old partners shared many patents for vaccines). But they are…I don’t know…more loving in the larger sense of the word.

That points to something important; love is, in fact, boring. War is exciting, including sexual war. Love just goes along quietly. I am not theist or religious at all, but I think the very first Christians (who were Jewish heretics) were really onto something when they perceived the superiority of love over empire.

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Better to be someone’s shot of whiskey than everyone’s cup of tea, I think the saying goes.

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Monogamous people who are similar to most poly people (educated, middle-class+, etc.) have a very low divorce rate.

I suspect that Mr. Friedman’s data possibly reflects traits of his own social group, because I know lots of poly people in decade-long relationships. (I’m also not sure how one defines ‘poly LTR attempt’– like, I’ve had LTRs break up that weren’t intended to be lifelong relationships, and I feel like it would be unfair to count those against polyamory’s ability to maintain lifelong relationships as a whole.)

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Note that I say “doesn’t”, not “didn’t”. In today’s surviving hunter gatherer societies, it can be observed that pretty much everything is shared—including partners. Also including the role of raising children. Also, everything. Since everything is shared, it doesn’t really matter which children are yours, because there’s no way to pass on your wealth to them, since you don’t have any wealth independent from the tribe’s wealth.

This sharing was incredibly adaptive: necessary for survival in a world without surplus. It would thus be maladaptive to be extremely jealous, as it would make it harder for the tribe to get along.

If you’re going to make arguments using evolutionary psychology, it’s important to not project modern culture onto the ancestral environment.

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