Open or poly relationships from the superior position or inferior position
If you read guys talking about pickup, seduction artistry, and adjacent areas, you've seen guys slagging open and poly relationships because those guys are thinking of themselves in a relationship with a chick who is continually getting laid by new guys, while he doesn't have the game to go sleep with new chicks (he might be subsidizing her financially, too). The comments slag open relationships as a way for chicks to do hypergamy while guys are loser "beta bucks" providers... the guy is sitting at home paying the bills while she's out f**king. For guys without game, who are struggling to hang onto one woman, open relationships are terrible, or would be terrible; sexual scarcity is their biggest problem. It's their biggest problem and they can't imagine a world without sexual scarcity, cause they experience nothing but sexual scarcity. Their friends experience sexual scarcity. They don't lift. They don't work to improve themselves and their lives. They probably don't understand women.
Those guys aren't going to find a lot of my writing useful, except for the relatively rare beginning posts. I, on the other hand, look at open or, conceivably, “poly” relationships as a possible game tool that solves a set of problems players have. See the linked post for my reasoning and experience, but, the short version is, open relationships leverage one chick in order to sleep with other chicks and also transform the "Where is this going?" conversation chicks begin after hooking up with a guy for a while. Guys who have good game and a lot of women in the air often want to retain women who are eager to get into that monogamous, exclusive relationship.
These guys have a different set of problems that the guys with no woman or (barely) one woman. Non-monogamy can solve some problems for guys already experiencing abundance. Non-monogamy looks like a hellscape to guys who aren't experiencing abundance.
I also advocate that men don't marry and be careful when it comes to cohabitating. Marriage is a system for transferring resources from a man to a woman for the sake of raising children, but that system broke down a long time ago for reasons too long to detail right now: Real World Divorce explains why men should not marry today, under almost any circumstance. A legally married guy should be careful with open or poly.
(Before someone says so, yes, in some ways "open relationships" and "poly relationships" are different, but for players the distinction is irrelevant, and the right pitch depends on the girl's personality.)
For a game-aware guy in the superior position, "open" relationships are a handy contrivance to increase sexual availability and keep FWBs / lovers going over the longer term. As every player who has ever lost chicks to the "Where is this going?" conversation knows, most chicks who are into a guy want to "advance" the relationship from hooking up / casual dating to serious dating to cohabitation to marriage. At least chicks think they want marriage, but their view of marriage is based on fairy tales, Disney stories, and TV / movies. Some chicks genuinely do want marriage but many don't; they've just been told by society since they were little girls that marriage is the right thing to do and that they will be a beautiful bride/princess on their wedding day. Legally, too, marriage gives a woman an option on at least 50% of a man's assets and future earnings in the event she feels like divorcing him, so she's going to be eager to marry.
Getting off topic here in the anti-marriage rant... importantly, the "Where is this going?" conversation kills most uncommitted relationships. The woman in a lover or friends-with-benefits relationship with a guy she likes or loves will most often demand that he become exclusive, or she will break up, or she will find another guy she judges to be high status enough. The "branch swing" guys fear often happens when the woman isn't getting what she wants from a casual relationship, so moves on to a guy who will give her the official, socially acknowledged girlfriend status she wants.
Most players just let chicks go after a couple weeks/months, when the chick asks "Where is this going?" Or, some players will become the chick's "boyfriend" while still f**king, or attempting to f**k, other chicks... inevitably the guy gets caught and the girl is angry. Maybe she scorches him to her friends and cuts off all contact, etc., while saying online that all men are dogs, players, etc. She ignores her own complicity in choosing hot fun players over stolid provider guys, but we'll ignore that for the time being, cause point is that players have probably seen angry chick behavior. The "boyfriend while pulling chicks on the side" technique works, but at a potential cost.
Open relationships and sex clubs, however, can offer a solution to the "Where is this going?" conversation: a guy can sleep with a chick for a couple months, until she's into him, then propose taking her to sex clubs or similar venues, while building up the idea of consensual non-monogamy in her mind. This solution can retain her, increase novelty, and make it somewhat easier to sleep with new chicks. If you have not brought a hot chick to a couples-only sex club, you probably don't know what real raw sexual power looks like.
But this only works for guys with good game (good value) to start with. Should you lack good, strong game, you will be unhappy if you rub this lamp and find the genie that pops out.
A guy also has to be ready to lose the chick he wants to take to a sex club. A chick who is serious about marriage and family will dump a guy who wants to do non-monogamy, as she should. Most young chicks, however, are not serious about monogamy, and even many older chicks will take a cool player for a ride while still seeking the guy who will give her children.
Players are not much afraid of losing a chick. If one chick goes, another will come. A basic guy is worried that he'll never again get a chick as hot as his one and only girlfriend. A player knows the next one might be hotter, better in bed, etc. A player is not phased by one chick's exit. For a basic guy, his girlfriend leaving might be perceived as a catastrophe. The basic guy needs to level up his game, his body, his being, but he probably doesn't have the fortitude to do those things.
Overall, open or poly is a way to keep her on the rotation while forestalling her dropping out. In my view it is still better to catch and release older women who want families, but the open or poly frame can help make a woman's forebrain align enough with her hindbrain to make her stick around. A guy should make sure a typical woman's primeval hindbrain and recent, reasoning forebrain agree with each other, if she's going to be more than a one-night stand or short fling. The poly system / frame can make her intellectual framework agree with what she is doing sexually. Without that framework, most chicks will eventually dump a guy who won't marry or commit. Almost no one thinks for themselves or questions the society they live in. That applies doubly to chicks, who are creatures of the herd.
At the same time, chicks have lots of naughty fantasies they generally won't share with other people, including, frequently, group sex fantasies. Nancy Friday's books, the success of 50 Shades of Grey, and the entire romance novel industry show this. Many chicks will act on those fantasies in a given space (spring break, Vegas, bachelorette parties, while drinking) but then deny them to themselves and to others later.
Poly/open is an alternate system that can allow a chick to tell herself that what she's doing is okay and even desirable. A guy who is discreet and non-judgmental can often draw these feelings out of her. Most chicks are used to being judged harshly by their parents, their religious figures, their boyfriends, their bitch girlfriends, etc. If you can guide her into admitting her naughty fantasies, then making some of them happen, you will be unlike any other guy. Many chicks actively fantasize about having sex with men and women simultaneously, but most chicks don't think they'll ever get to act on those fantasies.
Bi women also make great wingmen. A truly bi woman can lead to a huge number of threesomes, etc. The first woman is the hardest.... the next ones can turn out to be very easy, if you learn how it's done. Standard male-female online dating seems to have gone to shit in recent years, but unconventional online dating has proven to be resilient in my experience.
This superior/inferior situation reminds me of the Krauser post, Reveal vs Restructure,
So why the divergence in opinion? I think it comes down to which side of this divide you fall on. Is your Journey a process of:
* Uncovering a pre-existing SMV and personality that is attractive to women, or; * Ridding yourself of a Pussy Repellent virus and then building an attractive man from scratch.
The [trainee Chads] are normal men with normal social skills and outlook and inhabit bodies that are reasonably attractive to a wide range of women. Some will require more work than others but all are building on a strong base. It’s like cooking a meal starting with fresh organic high quality ingredients. These men already have decent value, they just lack a Value Delivery Mechanism. Teaching them game is like having an out-of-shape teenage Usain Bolt show up on his first day of Learn To Sprint school. They have to put in the work but the rewards are almost immediate. There’s never any real struggle.
In contrast, [frustrated chumps] are a broken mess and the older they are upon discovering game the more traumatic the transformation. Whereas tChad just needs a daygame model and a shove in the back to start opening, fChump needs a complete overhaul of his entire personality and lifestyle.
If you read about game online, this distinction and the endless debates it engenders will be apparent. Guys starting from a very low point have a way different experience than guys starting from a normal point, or a high point with high underlying value.
For a high-value guy, the problem is often retention. High-value guys can get attractive girls for sex pretty easily, but most girls will pursue monogamy (or "monogamy" for the guy, while the girl "slips up" or "makes a mistake" every so often) from a guy they like, and dump him if he won't offer it. I don't want to go chase new skirt every month, when the previous girl wants to know where this is going. I want to make her into my implicit wingman.
I see a similar distinction among the few who look at open relationships from a game-aware perspective, like myself, as a tool for retention and novelty, versus the more common outlook who see open relationships from the perspective of a guy whose wife, girlfriend, or partner wants to sleep around on him. He knows he likely doesn't have the skill to seduce and sleep with new women, while women interested in casual or semi-casual sex have no problem finding it. They can ask virtually any straight man they know for sex and get it. He, however, knows he is going to be thinking about his wife or girlfriend in the throes of passion with another man while he is watching Game of Thrones. The low-status guy doesn't get the high-status guy's problems at all. He can barely even conceive of them. So when he hears about the non-monogamy strategy, he's like, "Ugh, gross."
She's bored, he's a loser. That's the usual media frame. I'm describing something very different, where he's high value and she knows he'll find another girl if she bails. That world is very different.
Want to do non-monogamy from the superior position? The free ebook Sex Clubs, Non-Monogamy, and Game explains in detail how to.
I am updating this with another example of a woman being against poly... this story about a 42-year-old New York woman trying to get married and have a family, late... she's been on the shelf way too long. She finds, "If I wanted to be in a polyamorous relationship, or something purely sexual, I’d never be lonely. But I’m looking for the traditional thing and that’s just hard to find in my age range." How many men are realizing that "poly" is a way to juggle multiple women in sexual relationships that lack true commitment? I define "true commitment" as involving kids, or, barring that, some kind of financial cross-subsidization. Poly rarely does either. Normal, intellectually honest women understand this... how many of those are out there, though?