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this. Something clicked when someone explained to me that open relationships and poly relationships work differently.

yes, obviously, people like that exist, this isn’t about them. i never said the post was about all cheaters, and i certainly don’t claim to know everything about all the reasons people cheat and where it comes from (hell, one of my friends mentioned something in a rebug about people who think they’re obligated to be in/entitled to a relationship, and that sort of thing causing lack of respect between partners, and that got me thinking about sexism and allonormativity and i still need to write the rebug reply to that).

my point is just that i think the vast majority of cases among cishets (who are very very commonly mono) come from the reasons i said, because i don’t think enough people are inherently evil weirdos who get off on violating real boundaries to explain the cishet/mono cheating crisis. it kind of feels like a thought-terminating cliche honestly. i honestly genuinely believe that if non-monogamy was normalized more we would have way fewer stories of “cheating” and, in inverse proportion, we would have way more instances of non-monogamy. of course cheating would still happen for various other reasons as i’ve alluded to in the previous paragraph, but i’m not entirely sure how they would translate to polyamory or if the resulting relationship problems would even manifest the same way (i.e. “cheating”). what i do know is someone who would cheat obviously is someone who has a desire for multiple partners on some level and i find it really difficult to believe that most of them would just knowingly deliberately lie about that want if it was brought up entirely so they can violate it. it honestly just sounds like too much effort to be worth it for the vast majority of potential cheaters. and like, have you ever considered why cheating is such a rare issue in the poly community? it obviously happens, but you don’t hear every other polycule talking about a partner that cheated on them like you do with every other mono cishet

(i hope this makes sense i am fighting off falling asleep while writing it lmao)