Pornosophy: The Joys and Sorrows of Polyamory

There’s nothing wrong with refusing to have an affair under the theory that it may lessen the intimacy with the person on whom you’re cheating. An affair can be an attractive and exciting prospect, since you get to be naked with a person who was previously a friend or stranger. On the other hand while you’re having an affair with somebody else you can’t be close to the person with whom you normally sleep. Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments which deals with empathy and of course there’s Flaubert’s Sentimental Education that's one of reasons Woody’s Allen cites for living in Manhattan. Ultimately it’s sensibility that’s at stake. You can’t please all of the people all of the time and anyone who tries to do so is spreading  themselves thin. Some people who are so filled with love and desire that they feel they can’t contain themselves have come up with ingenious solutions. One of them is, of course, the threesome. Instead of sneaking away to get the thrill of undressing in front of someone new, you simply invite them into your marital bed. The beauty of arrangements like this is you get to have your cake and eat it too. You don’t feel deprived of either a new experience or the pleasure of the tried and true. On the other hand while no one is going to complain about having the wool pooled over their eyes, there's always somebody who's going to feel left out, when favoritism rears its ugly head. Imagine a situation starting off with a certain degree of equanimity and then degenerating as one person begins to feel excluded or jealous of a passion in which they're not able to partake.