We're All Polyamorous Now

How dating culture poisoned the well for normal people seeking marriage and family.

Most of the world is currently in a demographic crisis. Several generations ago, the global order designed a system that depended on continual economic and population growth. Meanwhile, the same system created the conditions and culture to greatly reduce fertility. To close the gap, Anglo-sphere countries are importing third world populations (for these and more nefarious reasons). If you are a rational person, you recognize that this is a disaster.

Historically, normal people wanted to live the traditional life story (TLS):

• Growing up in a home with their two parents,

• Coming to maturity and leaving home

• Marrying for life and having sex only within marriage

• Having more than two of their own kids

Today, people wanting to live the TLS are finding it to be an uphill battle. Nearly every aspect is more difficult and fraught with deception and sabotage. Older generations cannot grasp how much worse the younger generation’s experiences are from their own. Characteristically, this leads to them giving advice that is out of touch, confusing, and insulting.

This is uncharted territory, and the only people who have experience to draw from are those who have been through the crucible and come out the other side. The pioneers of this new frontier have a duty to start publishing the maps and try to leave the trail better than they found it.

The Decline of the TLS

Living out the TLS is no longer a path you’ll stumble into but now requires a deliberate vision and effort. Pink-haired liberals and alphabet people may hog the attention, but most of the more normal younger generations have lost the plot entirely and approach relationships and sexuality aimlessly, not even consciously aware they are following a progressive life story. The younger generation does not understand that they are the subjects of a giant social experiment. They experience both the traditional expectations of relationships and the progressive revisions at the same time and in contradiction.

The Boomer generation normalized rebellion from the TLS, but they still understood it was normal. They would sow their wild oats, but eventually settle down and pursue a compromised version that mixed family life with pursuit of affluence. Not exactly a traditional family, but something in the same ballpark. The compromises though, were obvious enough to their children to undermine the moral and practical arguments for the TLS.

With the hypocrisy and compromise of the Boomers, plus the general decline of religion, marriage was downgraded to something like an optional personal preference. If preference creates the marriage, its strength is only as strong as the intensity of that preference at a given time. It is rarely noted that marriage is actually a familial glue that holds civilization together that applies to the non-religious and religious alike. Marriage, in principle, creates an environment where it is safe to divide labor in the ways necessary for families to thrive. If the promise of monogamy holds true, a husband can safely invest materially at the levels needed for a wife to endure pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, over multiple years. The wife can safely attend to the family and invest in the home without fear for her safety or provision. The children can enjoy the security of having both parents at home and learning both masculine and feminine virtues that will reward them in adulthood, and prepare them to repeat the TLS in their own lives.

Progressivism laid the moral and legal groundwork to reject traditional marriage in the name of equality, and modern technology provided the tools to make it happen. Each “feature” of traditional marriage could be abstracted and atomized into a product which could be selected a la carte. Daycare and public school replace home care and education. Baby formula removes the mother as an absolute requirement for nursing. Birth control removes child-bearing from sex. Porn removes the need of anyone else from sexual gratification. White collar work allows husband and wife to serve interchangeable roles in the workforce and be interchangeable providers. Ironically, this describes the marriages of conservatives and liberals alike. Why have traditional marriage if you can instead pick and choose the aspects you want?

In nutrition science, the food matrix effect shows that the benefits or harms of foods go beyond the sum of their nutrients such that supplementing the vitamins of fruits and vegetables is not the same benefit as eating the food itself, and in the same way, marriages cannot be broken down into their elemental forms and artificially replaced without destructive consequences. “Marriage my way” is inherently self-oriented with one or both spouses changing the marriage in substance to a compromise of how selfish each spouse gets to be. The products designed to supplement or replace the natural elements of traditional marriage impose significant costs and are inferior to the real thing, but their existence and popularity make it difficult for anyone to insist upon traditional marriage and to find a spouse aligned with the same goals.

The Relationship Landscape

There is no single progressive life story the same way there is a traditional life story. Progressivism is about constant emancipation from any constraint on personal choice or self-determination, so it would be a contradiction in terms to speak of a single progressive life story. It is not only that progressives have different desires than traditionalists, but that progressives are inherently revolutionary in overthrowing anything that has become a tradition, even when it is the tradition from their previous revolution. When progressive gender theorists speak of queerness, this is what they are talking about.

This becomes especially important when considering the dating pool. When a whole culture expects the TLS, dating and marriage is a straightforward process of achieving relative compatibility and negotiating desirable traits, not trying to author a unique way of life. For example, the characteristics of wives and husbands in Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s Fairy Tales apply in roughly the same way in any time or place that operates within the TLS.

The Fisherman and his Wife from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. A cautionary tale to women about discontentedness and to men about being overly passive.

Queerness has not infected the whole dating pool such that every individual has their own unique life story vision and sexual proclivity, but the modern dating pool is better understood as a collection of niches. These are not exclusionary cliques, but pockets of people who have common desires and outlooks which they assume and may even be invisible to them, but they are not universal to the whole pool.

What is especially unique to modern times is that the right wing of the niches have fully internalized the first sexual revolution. The current Conservative Life Story is for a man and woman to meet and begin dating, to introduce sex after a few dates, after a few more dates enter into a committed relationship status, after several months to move in together, then remain in that state indefinitely but usually for several years until they decide they want kids or have some other prompt to officiate a marriage. In practice, most of these relationships have a shelf life, and the process is repeated. The conservatives are simultaneously looking for housewives and emancipated women, for a fairy tale wedding among people with more than ten partners under the sheets. I must reiterate, this is the dominant conservative position, whereas the less conservative will have more overtly sexually-oriented hookups or queer relationships.

Bringing Marriage into the Future

In short, we’re all polyamorous now. Don’t get me wrong, the overt polyamory gaining popularity in queer circles is uniquely perverse and disgusting, but it is only superficially distinct from the multiple sexual partners of conservatives. Overt polyamorists make explicit and open their non-monogamy, this at least strikes me as more honest than the conservative model which deludes itself about being the traditional and ethical way to enter relationships.

The verdict is still out as to whether a civilization can sustain itself at all without a significantly sized TLS niche. In our nutrition analogy, we’ve never seen a world where the majority of the population is surviving on highly processed food with vitamin supplements, but we have reason to believe it will be disastrous. Likewise, we’ve never seen what happens when whole generations of people reject the arrangements that make for strong families and healthy children. The declining fertility rate itself is not promising but predictable in this paradigm. Even those kids who are born will face the problems characteristic of those born out of wedlock, who the traditionalists aptly named, “Bastards.”

To have a traditional marriage and family requires you to be more right wing than the conservatives. It is a challenge, because the conservatives do not even know that they are progressives. The reduced dating pool for those serious about the TLS niche will still have the natural negotiations of desirable traits and chemistry required in all dating, but it will have the added difficulty of finding the pool and assessing how serious the person really is about this way of life.

Many of my readers have experienced these factors first hand and will be happy to have mental categories to explain them. Finding solutions will be much harder, but we risk wasting our efforts if we devote all our energy to solving a problem we do not understand. The first step is to understand.

Originally, I was planning on writing a different post that was more specific to the practical methods people are using to solve these problems, but I realized that I needed to lay some ground work first.

The situation is far from hopeless, but I am tired of seeing the good people burned. I hope that this has provided some clarity, and I wish my readers the best.

Update: The followup piece to this newsletter has now been published: