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Conveniently, someone wrote an article in Psychology Today about how open marriages are healthier than closed marriages. It cites the contributing factor as a relationship that encourages and supports personal growth and change - and that growth and change is facilitated through interactions with others.
Sounds kinda familiar.
It also makes the point that sexual relationships are not mandatory for achieving this growth and change, which is a point I made too. But I maintain that personal growth and change is correlated with the level of intimacy of the relationship that fosters it - so a person who has no or few intimate relationships with people other than the spouse is a person who has little opportunity to have the kinds of experiences that foster exactly that kind of personal growth and change, whereas a person who has several intimate relationships (platonic or not) has just that many more opportunities for experiences that foster that kind of personal growth and change. And that romantic relationships, by their very nature, tend to be extremely intimate, and therefore likely to be more influential on the people in them. And, therefore, people with multiple, simultaneous, intimate relationships are more likely to have the opportunity to have those kinds of experiences that foster personal growth and change, and therefore become an incredibly rich and nuanced type of person.
Polyamory, by its very nature, requires that we either embrace, or learn to adjust to, change. And here we've just seen that change can lead to personal growth, which usually leads to the highest degree of satisfaction in marriages.
Of course, not all polyamorists are enthusiastic about the idea of change, not all use their relationships as a vehicle for personal growth (some don't see it as being about "growth" but about "getting my needs met" and some think they're very well enlightened enough, thank you very much), and not all relationships are satisfactory just because they're labeled "polyamorous". We're still human, after all, and still prone to make many of the same mistakes (and invent a few new ones, just to spice things up) as monogamists do. But, if you're wondering why we go through the trouble of maintaining multiple relationships, how we can possibly love someone when we're already "in love" with someone, what are the benefits to being polyamorous, that's one of them.
Sounds kinda familiar.
It also makes the point that sexual relationships are not mandatory for achieving this growth and change, which is a point I made too. But I maintain that personal growth and change is correlated with the level of intimacy of the relationship that fosters it - so a person who has no or few intimate relationships with people other than the spouse is a person who has little opportunity to have the kinds of experiences that foster exactly that kind of personal growth and change, whereas a person who has several intimate relationships (platonic or not) has just that many more opportunities for experiences that foster that kind of personal growth and change. And that romantic relationships, by their very nature, tend to be extremely intimate, and therefore likely to be more influential on the people in them. And, therefore, people with multiple, simultaneous, intimate relationships are more likely to have the opportunity to have those kinds of experiences that foster personal growth and change, and therefore become an incredibly rich and nuanced type of person.
Polyamory, by its very nature, requires that we either embrace, or learn to adjust to, change. And here we've just seen that change can lead to personal growth, which usually leads to the highest degree of satisfaction in marriages.
Of course, not all polyamorists are enthusiastic about the idea of change, not all use their relationships as a vehicle for personal growth (some don't see it as being about "growth" but about "getting my needs met" and some think they're very well enlightened enough, thank you very much), and not all relationships are satisfactory just because they're labeled "polyamorous". We're still human, after all, and still prone to make many of the same mistakes (and invent a few new ones, just to spice things up) as monogamists do. But, if you're wondering why we go through the trouble of maintaining multiple relationships, how we can possibly love someone when we're already "in love" with someone, what are the benefits to being polyamorous, that's one of them.
