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For as long as I can remember, the Polyamory community has had a strangely sex negative segment that was largely born of the desire to distance themselves as much as possible from the widespread assumptions by people outside of the community that polyamory was all about fucking around indiscriminately. It’s why, despite the huge amount of common ground they share, a lot of the polyamory community holds animosity towards the swinging community…something that largely goes one way since people in the swinging community don’t have any anxiety over being mistaken for polyamorists and being scorned for being all about love. These purists afraid to admit that a lot of loving relationships start from a place of sexual desire were the first to start talking about “true polymory”.

However, as Polyamory has really been taking off in the last ten years or so as far as the attention it’s been getting in the media, the demographics of the polyamory community have undergone a huge shift and consequentially an influx of new ideas. This has largely been a good thing, but one of the less pleasant side effects is that there’s are now a multitude of new ways for people, according to other people, to be “doing polyamory wrong.” Instead of just one group of assholes slut shaming people who are more sexually open than them, we have a whole new group of assholes who are basically commitment shaming people whose style of polyamory involves any elements they don’t like.

I think it’s important to remember that Polyamory as a movement has no deities. There is no one true model everyone is meant to mold themselves and their relationships to. There aren’t even any basic rules. Even the basic definition of polyamory meaning “many loves” is as open to personal interpretation as the independent words “love” and “many”. I mean, isn’t someone with two romantic partners really just practicing duoamory? Two doesn’t seem like “many” to me. That’s exactly how pedantic anyone who starts talking about “true polyamory” seems to me.

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