You’ve hit on my fears too. I was in LA for a year among yes, queer circles, and nearly everyone was playing with poly but that’s all it was: play. All relationships were superficial and all fled for the hills as soon as difficulties were encountered. What is a life when you can depend on no one for comfort.

This goes hand in hand with my thinking that no one knows how to do poly “right”. They appear to be tools for people to stay blissfully ensconced in their regimes of self-care. I remember in my first poly relationship I was ready to go to war for my partners. But I almost never felt this readiness returned. To them, it might have been so much adornment for an aesthetic life holding little in the way of deep and lasting engagement.

For an image of what this could look like, Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” hits the spot.