As a bisexual person, I don’t think polyamory is an orientation but rather a relationship style. I believe everyone is capable of feeling love for more than one person at a time. However whether someone is monogamous or polyamorous has more to do with whether they want that particular kind of lifestyle in that relationship. Polyamory means more novelty, more NRE, greater diversity of experiences. It also means less time to spend with any one person, which may mean a mismatch of needs so that people are always compromising on time they want to spend together, it also can mean imbalance in the relationship especially if one person has more than one partner but their metamour isn’t in love with the other partner. This happened to me when I was first in my relationship with my partner who at the time was polyamorous. I wanted to have more sex and spend more time with him, but he needed to spend time with his other partner and would have most of his sex with her at the time because she was physically with him and I was not. This experience was decidedly not fun for me. Even though I might theoretically believe that “love shared is love multiplied" and I wanted him to have more love in his life. But my needs weren’t fully being met at the time. Likewise I’ve experienced being on the other side when I had a short lived relationship with a female friend that started during COVID lockdowns at the prison where my partner is currently. While I enjoyed it and my partner supported it, I noticed that the energy I felt in my feelings for her did take away from energy I felt for my partner, even though I still loved him just as much the entire time, the INTENSITY of my feelings and passion for him didn’t seem to be able to be sustained the way they can be when I am being monogamous because my energy was being taken up by limerence for my friend. And I WANT my feelings for my soulmate to be that intense all the time, and now that I’m monogamous again they are. Now that doesn’t mean I broke up with my friend, she distanced herself from me due to other issues in her life, but since she did I realised that I prefer the dynamic of my monogamous relationship FOR NOW although I’m open to changing my mind in the future.

These experiences as well as the huge numbers of people that have affairs while “still loving their spouse" convinces me that polyamory isn’t an orientation but a relationship style that has a particular way of dealing with the inevitability of people falling in love with more than one person.