Forgive me, I’ve tried polyamory but I don’t quite know what counts as “cheating” when the relationship is opened like this.
So my sister (14) “Liz” went out with “Asher” (16) for like a week. Asher was always very giggly, flirty, and romantic with Liz and would find couple songs and say “That’s us!”. My sister seemed very happy with her new boyfriend.
Asher turned out to have a boyfriend he had been dating for a year before Liz. Liz knew about the boyfriend, but since he said “I’m poly and in an open relationship”, we all assumed the boyfriend was okay with it.
Turns out, he wasn’t okay with it and Asher got into a relationship with Liz before telling “BF”. Then, afterwards, he said “Well I like “BF” first and I like him better than you so I’m breaking up with you.”
Maybe I’m too upset because she’s my sister, but kind of a jerk move there on his end.
If you tell people you are in an open/poly relationship, but your partner doesn’t know about that, you are not in an open/poly relationship; you are just a lying, cheating asshole.
Real poly relationships have a bad reputation mostly because of people like that.
There are lots of people that have been pressured or coerced into poly relationships too (in regards to the bad rep, I mean). “Polybombing” I think that’s called?
But thats just shitheads being shitheads. Some people will use any avenue available to them. Despite that, and while I am not the type for it, I do love and respect a number of people who are polyamorous and do think the concept is beautiful. That is, in a way that I find unaccessible and ill-suited to my personal needs, but beautiful no less. At least two of those people have even made it work too lol