How do people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners). How do people do it without (emotional) bonding with the other person? I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it?
Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?
You don't have to think of sex as this deep emotional bond between two people. In one sense, you've been tricked into believing that that is the only way.
So one solution is to accept that sex can be just that: just sex. It can be something that you and a friend do, maybe regularly, maybe only once in a while. Like playing Tennis. You may be happy that you have a friend who you can play Tennis with. But you don't have to fall in love with your Tennis partner and share every other part of your life with them. This solution you can call "Compartmentalizing".
The thing is, even if you had a Tennis partner who said "I don't want to play Tennis with you any more", you'd probably still feel hurt. Having emotional bonds is not limited to just sexual partners, but to anyone that you spend time with. That level of hurt is probably proportional to how often you played Tennis together, and your expectations on how long you expected that relationship to last.
The other method is to not separate emotions from sex, but to just get better at accepting loss and death of relationships as a natural course of life that must be reckoned with. This solution you can call "Acceptance of Grief".
Tennis analogy isn't right. Activities like that don't require to expose yourself in a vulnerable way to other person (multiple persons in a sport) in private space. Making love, as it's called, does not fit your example.
This statement says more about your own attitudes to sex than anything else. There's nothing wrong with that, but you seem incapable of imagining that the two activities can be performed in similar, non emotional, ways. Why must you feel vulnerable to have sex?
>Certainly not, but I'm pretty sure that, in order to be successfully polyamorous, one would need to be extremely loving and accepting.
If they were that loving, they would have sufficed with less-amorous... It's because they're not that loving to any single person (but instead all about the quick gratification) that they look to expand their variety...
Just out of interest, how old were the people you spoke with?
Personally, it took me over two decades of learning to make it work, and I agree that it's about O(n!) difficult.
I've had several failures, but kept perservering, and it paid off, so anyone reading this who feels like they're definitely poly but afraid to start the journey, do it!
FWIW, I've known I'm poly since before puberty, and it still was not easy. I think poly acceptance today is where gay acceptance was a couple decades ago, with most people being either dismissive of its validity, saying it's a bad idea in practice, and generally denying its right to exist.
> How do people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners).
Most likely, people who separate emotions from sex can enjoy the pleasure of sex without getting (too) attached to the other person. Some people have a natural inclination toward that separation, others may have developed it out of being hurt in a relationship, or common sense after gaining experience, some people develop intimacy in other ways, etc.
> How do people do it without (emotional) bonding with the other person?
Practice. :)
> I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it?
If you're asking for stats across the population, I'd rankly speculate it is strongly emotional. But that's just a guess-- perhaps someone here who knows the research can report?
> Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?
No, because emotional detachment is simply one approach to sexual freedom, and a rather superficial one at that.
Another approach is to gain emotional maturity, introspection, and self-control through time and experience. Part of that is understanding that sex is not the epitome of an emotional bond. E.g., a free and self-aware human can have a perfectly nice emotional sexual encounter, and then decide to leave it at that because they see the evidence that a fuller long-term relationship likely wouldn't work with this person. Or perhaps they have a short- or mid-term relationship that doesn't much past sex for reasons they've learned through their life experience.
For example-- did you ever know any couple in high school who had a completely toxic and nasty relationship but somehow they just couldn't ever break up with each other? Or, they'd break up, then they'd be making out at a party and instantly get back together?
Some older people can optimize out the toxicity from this:
1. They meet, enjoy each other's company, and decide to have sex, enjoying both the emotional and sexual bond from that experience.
2. They reflect on the situation and assess an extremely high likelihood that continuing the relationship would lead to that kind of dysfunctional relationship.
3. They leave it at that.
They even have a protocol-- called mutual respect-- to deal with the problem where one party wants to leave it at that one party wants it to continue. Through the use of a so-called "two-way handshake" the two parties agree to hang up the connection, and the heart-broken party just does the work of breaking down that connection alone.
Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?