Revision of 'Partner' function to include polyamorous relationships

As you may or may not be aware, there is a partner function ( http://secondlife.com/partner/ ) available in SL where one can (for a small fee) forge a 'marriage' of sorts between two avatars. However, this does not take into account the concept of polyamory ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyamory ), which, simply put, is a romantic relationship between more than two people.

Talking to various residents of Second Life, I have discovered that many of us are involved (online or offline) in polyamorous relationships. Since Second Life is supposed to be a place we can live our lives how we'd like them to be, instead of how they are, I feel, and I am confident that many of you wil agree, that we have nothing to lose, and much to gain, by allowing polyamorous partnerships in Second Life.

On the surface, it would appear that this could be accomplished with only minor changes to the code - partnerships could be treated as a 'group' of sorts, with poly partnerships referenced in the 'Partner' field of a given profile as 'Multiple' with a list of names available as a tooltip (text that appears when you hover your mouse pointer over a word, in this case, 'Multiple'). Not having an intimate knowledge of the SL codebase, I can't say for certain what the best way to implement it would be, but I am confident it can be done without too great a difficulty.

Discuss?

Edit to add proposal link:
http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=465

Crossposted to General:
/120/f0/52877/1.html

I agree with this. But you are going to get backlash from religious fanatics, except maybe mormons who are polygamous.

However, I do agree you should be able to live your Second Life how you see fit.

/agree

I wasn't aware the particular flavor of religious 'fanatic' who tended to oppose polyamorous relationships were very populous here, but I could be mistaken.

Thank you for your support! Do you have any ideas for making the idea better?

I support no such thing! ;0 I do nothing to hinder it!

May I ask why not? I mean no disrespect, I wish only to know what's wrong with the idea to hopefully adapt the proposal to make it amenable to more people.

Baba, shut up! You suck! Everyone knows it! I hate your mom!

I loooooove you!

I love you more!

OMG. I want to marry you and Oz and Baba! AT THE SAME TIME.

What do you think about THAT??

Sorry for the double-post here.

Teddy, don't listen to Baba. He sucks. I think this is a really good idea. It's actually already got a vote proposal and everything. You can find it here.

Interesting. I'm going to leave my proposal up, though, as that one seems to have fallen by the wayside.

S'your choice, of course. I just wanted to mention that the other one already exists. Sorry for hijacking your thread.

"Will it put more money into LL than it costs?"

IMO, unless you want to promote poly-marriage as a major feature of SL (and get people who have that as a primary concern), it's just not cost-effective for them.

If you want to be formal and specific about partnerships, they should include Dom/sub tags on them.

Either way, the limitations imposed by the way databases work, LL will necessarily have to place a limit on the number of partners you can have. If they put in poly-partners, in two months, there will be people whining "I want to have more than 15 husbands!" (just look at the groups limits).

Furthermore, if you want a harem, you can make a group to keep track of them - so you're not limited in numbers - and people who care to research your profile can find that information, too.

IRL, I have a number of polyamorous friends, and I think it's fantastic that they can pursue those desires. However, they cannot be legally married to more than one of them. The limits of SL make the formalization of these bonds similar to RL marriage. Personally, I don't want to see SL go down the road that would change that.

To answer your money question, yes it will. By allowing poly pertnerships, that'll mean $10 per partner for each relationship. Want to form a foursome? That's $40 right there. Want to break it up? There's $100. The money argument doesn't apply because it's just a rescale of the existing partnership paradigm.

And sure, there will be technical limits. But in the rare case that someone wants to make a partnership that pushes those limits (something I don't see happening often) , then at least the limiting factor will be technical in nature instead of sociopolitical.

As for 'well making a group is just as good' - yeah, the whole 'seperate-but-equal' thing worked awesomely for black folks and white folks in the first half of the 20th century. Oh wait...

You have just tried to equate not having official polyamorous relationship status recognition in Second Life to the struggles and brutal injustices that set off the civil rights movement.

I don't know you, so I'm going to restrain myself.

I think you misunderstand ;0 I neither support nor oppose it. I am "BLAH" about it It matters not to me because I would never have need ;0 My heart is broken! My Plastic Duck has left me ;0 *weeps*

I too am going to shut up... and vote against it. And ensure that my friends will see that statement, and vote against it as well.

I vote against YOU CS

Sorry, the 'seperate-but-equal' argument is a common one used in offline debates about alternative marriages that is often associated with homophobes and other unsavory individuals, it's a bit of a hot button for me. No offense was meant.

The thing is, though, that really all the "partner" option was originaly supposed to be was a two-person group for purposes of land-ownership rights and stuff. If anything, a two-person group (the partnership system) is the case of "seperate but equal" mentality, though I think that's using about fifty times more inflamatory hyperboly than is needed. Problem is, that part of the equation never actually developed fully. As it stands, "partner" is not doing the job it was supposed to do in the first place. LL doesn't even seem to advertise the other stuff anymore.

I reckon it's used as a money sink to replace ratings now the rating system is dead. All those L$ for divorces and then re-partnering! I reckon it's all thats propping up the SL economy!

Teddy, you seem to only be considering poly situations in which every partner is a partner of every other one, i.e. triads, quads, etc. What about when I've got two girlfriends, but they aren't together? It gets incredibly complicated.

There shouldn't be a technical issue and the database design solution is obvious, it's called a "one to many relationship" (seriously!) even brain dead databases like Access can implement this trivially. You just need a separate partnerships table.

And yes it gives more L$ for all the new relationships and divorces


Oh and BTW the Mormons banned Polyamoury ages ago.

Saying that "seperate-but-equal" isn't cool and directly, explicitly relating this issue to that of real-life racial segregation and discrimination are two wholly different things. Guess which one is tasteless, insulting and way out-of-line.

The main idea of letting us have more than one partner is nice, like I said. But as Lex mentioned, it does get a little complicated depending on the situation.

Also, yeah, partnerships are often used by people for no actual reason other than to say "LAWL I'M MARRIED TO ________!!1 CHECK IT OUT YO OMG ROFFLECOPTER" I know because I do this when I get bored. If the number of possible partnerships a person can have is increased, you know this will only get worse. People trying to get the longest "string" or what have you, etc.

It's a good idea if it's going to be used for the purpose of letting real poly people partner up with one another, but I really doubt that that's going to be the large majority. Personally, if I were in a polyamorous relationship, I would almost rather just have the people listed in my profile by me as people I am in a relationship with than be "on the same level" as all the people who just use the multiple-partner thing as a laff gag. Even though I do it. I would want it to be noticably seperate so people would know that I'm not just being a moron like everyone else and partnering to all my friends.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's really a way to prevent people from abusing the system unless they change partnerships to do something huge like.. for example, if they made it so that partnered people share inventories and/or money. That'd be a neat idea. Especially when clubber girls start marrying guys with money and drain everything in their accounts. I can just see it now.

Anyway, that's my view on that. Sorry again for hijacking earlier. I had been up for something like 26 or so hours and wasn't really all there.

I'm against it, and not because I'm against Polyamory. I'm against because there's already a system in place for partners of more than two, and it'd be a waste of time to fix something that isn't broken. The system? Groups. In fact, you have MORE abilities to share with partners as a group member than you do as a Partner. Such as the ability to set objects to group, share land, etc... All partner says is "Hey, look... This is who I'm with." Now, that's cool and all, and as for me, I'm proud of who I'm partnered with... However, if I didn't have the option of having a partner, it wouldn't bother me, because what matters most is how *I* feel about him, not if everyone else knows I'm with him.

Delairen