Okay, speaking as a poly person, responding to a dickish satire article….
Yes, there are obnoxious poly people, but it’s like any other
non-race-based minority group, in that a) you don’t always know that the
person you’re talking to is poly, b) nobody talks about the poly people
who don’t do this, and therefore c) we’re being painted as a group by the actions of a minority of us.
But there’s more to it than just that. Monogamous people give unsolicited relationship advice all the fucking time. Not just to poly people, but to each other. Complaining about poly people doing this is hypocrisy on the HIGHEST scale.
One of the reasons you might not know the person you’re talking to is poly is because about 50% of the time, if a poly person tells a monogamous person that they’re poly, what follows is a detailed discussion of why poly doesn’t work for the monogamous person, generally with the implication that it’s really weird and shouldn’t work for anyone, and quite often with passive agressive shitty phrases like “not really natural” or other ways of saying “YOUR LIFESTYLE IS WRONG.” And if the poly person attempts to defend themselves by saying why poly works for them? Then they’re “shoving their lifestyle in people’s faces”.
In terms of hypocrisy and general shittiness, this is somewhere between The War on Christmas (”How dare you acknowledge the existence of something I don’t approve of, I’m being attacked”) and men interrupting women constantly and then complaining when they try to get a fucking word in edgewise.
And the thing is… most of the time (not all of the time, some poly people are pricks, too) when we’re giving advice, it’s not even the same kind of shit we get from monogamous people. We’re not saying your lifestyle, as a whole, is wrong. But we will call out the weird and toxic things that seem to be standard in monogamy, like “now that I am in a relationship I have to interact differently with people based on their genital configuration, because my girlfriend gets insecure if I carry on a conversation with a woman for more than thirty seconds” or “now that you are in a relationship with me, you are obligated to change this about yourself/give up this thing that you love that I don’t/place my feelings above all else”. We’re not telling you to get some strange, we’re telling you how to spot toxic behaviour and unrealistic expectations. (To be clear: I am not saying that there is no toxic behaviour or unrealistic expectations in poly relationships, I’m just saying we don’t NORMALISE it.)
