The Prisoner's Dilemma and poly relationships

[much_ado]

pyrategrrl pointed me at an excellent post that introduced me to the concept of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and how it works in the context of poly relationships.
[edit: i have lived through PD situations, likely mangled more than a few of them; i just didn't know it had a name in or out of the poly context prior to reading the post. i'm not quite *that* waifish

Comments

[persephoneplace]

i guess i disagree that the consequences are dire if i am greeted with defensiveness or hostility. I am always better off reaching out in trust and vulnerability - to do anything else moves forward in a spirit of mistrust which only builds upon itself circularly.

If my feelings get hurt along the way, so be it. I learn something and adjust my behaviour with that person.

I also find that people respond to openness with openness.

I would always rather err on the side of reaching out and expecting that person to be likewise warm toward me.

[much_ado]

something i said in a reply to a comment in tacit's post is applicable here as well:

the vulnerability often comes along with a degree of emotional investment in the initial offering: "i am opening myself up to you, and giving you a chance to rebuff me, which i may choose to perceive as a hurtful interaction".

if you don't emotionally invest in the offering, then there is no vulnerability - as you say, you shrug it off and move on, no damage done. a lot of people, in my experience, invest *heavily* in any act of reaching out, and take it as a mind-bogglingly-large range of hurt or insult when rebuffed.

so the question of whether or not you're invulnerable actually becomes more a question of "how much emotional investment do you include in any outreach you make?"
in your case (because i actually know you), i think your initial outreach is genuine and *does* contain some degree of emotional investment; you're just better at not responding to rebuff or rejection than many, up to a point

[persephoneplace]

interesting differences, my friend. That is also a good analysis of my outreach.

I think part of this, funny as it is, even to me, is the remnants of being a farm girl that I carry. When i grew up, you waved to anyone driving past the house b.c there were so few - you just assumed that you knew them or would or should know them. It has had a huge impact on how I act toward people i don't know.

I do always feel slightly confused when i get a cool reaction tho - like i just don;t know what to do with it or why they might be like that.

I do also wonder sometimes how my experiences of being adopted affect my approach to poly. I always had a story that included the mom raising me and the mom who birthed me and was encouraged to have room in my heart for both, even when i didn't know the latter.

[mzrowan]

(to make the following sentences clearer: A is lovers with B is lovers with C)

I think there's another level of emotional charge here, too, in poly situations, that comes from knowing that C could dislike or be uncomfortable enough with you that they try and interfere with your relationship with B, either explicitly ("I'm not happy about you seeing A") or implicitly (suddenly having an emotional breakdown the night A and B are supposed to have a date). And if C is more established with B than A is, A is even more afraid of what C could do.

(Of course, whether that interference will work has a lot to do with B, but many people are vulnerable to that type of thing, or have explicit "veto" agreements.)

I guess my pointis that that adds to the emotional investment that you might have in C liking you, making it more than the normal "I'd like you to be my friend, but it's no big deal if that doesn't happen".

[the_nita]

Wait - Introduced you to?? Tell me that I'm misreading this, and you meant "in relation to poly" as opposed to the exercise of the prisoner's dilemma as a whole.

[much_ado]

no, i meant exactly what i wrote; i'd never heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma before this morning. lived it, yes, but not heard the name before, or known there *was* a name for the experience, in ANY context, not just the poly one.

[the_nita]

Oh. Okay.

kind of stunned look

I somehow have a memory of having a discussion with you about a situation having been a 'PD" - must be the bad memory striking again.

[much_ado]

we may very well have had that discussion, but for whatever reason, the analogy of the Prisoner's Dilemma didn't take at that time. now, especially in context of my own life events of this week, for some reason i'm in a better place to have it stick (no offence to you, honest :)

[the_nita]

I'm not exactly in a position to comment much on its relation to poly, but in general, I've found that walking into any new interaction with someone who's important to someone I care about without a reasonably level of vulnerability (in the "Hey, you are important to someone who's important to me - can we find out if we can be friends and see where we go from there" kind of way) has been, for me, a good recipe for having the person who's important to me walk away, for any number of reasons.

If anything, I'd argue that *not* having that vulnerability and willingness to try pretty much guarantees the catastrophic, as opposed to the other way around.

YMMV.

[melebeth]

I tend to see a lot of people in poly relationships who are very uncomfortable with the idea of meeting a lover's other lovers. This is among the single most common source of angst I've noticed for people who are polyamorous, especially if they're fairly new to polyamory.
This is fascinating and alien to me, because in my experience getting to know my partners' other partners has been the best part of being in poly relationships. In most circumstances, I would probably actually feel uncomfortable not meeting my partners' partners, since they are important to hir life and, by extension mine. Now there may be a semantic disconnect here, because you say lovers and I read partners, and you may mean something different than what I'm understanding. This may also be a YMMV thing, because my experience of poly seems rather different than the experiences of most of the people I know. But I will say that in two of my three long term poly relationships, getting to know my partner's primaries not only improved the health of the relationship but

[fairy_bloom]

I looked at your other links on this, and was amused to read "all rational players will play defect