OKCupid, Let's Talk About The Definition Of "Open Relationships"

[joreth]

Social Media Site: List your relationship status! Even though we've had "open relationship" as an option for years, now you can link to one partner only!

Poly Person: Oh good, now people can tell that I'm poly because they couldn't tell before when I had "in an open relationship" selected, I named everyone I'm dating in the "about me" section,

Comments

[toshische]

Yesss!
I'm very glad to see reasonable opinion in tons of journalist's articles about "Okc now recognizes polyamory" and excited people linked this articles into online poly communities. Okc recognizes what? Nothing but a bit of couple privilege...
I see exactly the same excited reaction in russian poly community adjusted for it's tiny scale.

[joreth]

Yeah, it's very frustrating. I see very little recognition of this as being a step backwards. It's about as bad (IMO) as kinksters embracing 50 Shades on the rationalization that it will draw more people into the kink community, without holding it accountable for its romanticizing of abuse. Everyone's jumping on this OKC thing with "but baby steps!"

No, it's a step *back*. It is *not* helpful, it only reinforces bad things that some of us have been working for years to break down in our communities. It's actually making our jobs harder.

[anais_pf]

I think OkCupid is trying to be more poly friendly, but unfortunately they just don't quite get polyamory yet. I have observed that many, many people start being actively poly by opening an existing relationship, and I suppose it's hard for people to wrap their heads around any other model. But nope, adding the ability to link to one and only one partner in the sidebar is just the opposite of poly friendly. I like how FetLife allows you to add as many partners and relationship structures as you want. Perhaps OkCupid will follow suit eventually.

[joreth]

Yep, and the fact that Fetlife, with all its privacy violations and bad coding, got this feature to work properly years ago only reinforces, in my opinion, the fact that this is a step backwards, not some hopeful baby step forward.