I don't understand the reasoning behind limiting yourself to one sexual partner. I mean, it's just another physical act, like going on a rollercoaster, or kissing, or dancing. It just seems rather arbitrary to me.

I can understand why it would have been a good idea as little as 50 years ago for safety reasons, but with proper use condoms plus spermicide -- which are amazingly cheap -- you literally have a higher chance of dying in a car accident than getting pregnant¹, yet we think nothing of driving cars or crossing the street.

STD's are now an issue, of course, but if you're concerned about that you can both get tested first and exchange test results, obviating the issue on a case-by-case basis. (If you know they have an STD and you sleep with them anyway, well, that's kinda like jumping out of a plane. No one pushed you, and it's your own damn fault if you didn't check your safety gear carefully enough.)

I kind of understand the "in order to fit in" argument. I don't particularly feel a desire to fit in, though. Never really have. I've found that standing out has generally done me better.

Still, an amazingly large number of people think that limiting yourself to one sexual partner² is a great idea. More than that, an amazingly large number of people think it's the only viable option.

Why is that? Is it just a religious preference?

EDIT: I'd really like to get the opinions from people who have been polyamorous in the past, and are now monogamous. I know some of you are out there. Please?


¹: I ran the numbers. Feel free to do it yourself. I used the USDOT fatality numbers for 2004 (which are lower than 2003 and 2002, and the latest I could find) and the effectiveness ratings published by Planned Parenthood for proper use of condoms and spermicide. Depo alone is even more effective.
²: At a time, at least. The whole "single boyfriend/girlfriend" thing, and only sleeping with them. Nothing says you can't find another significant other, but that typically ends the current partnership, and all that.

I had an IM conversation with ariata today where she asked me to explain ... well, here's the relevant part of that conversation:

( fascinating drivel )

These "definitions" aren't all that nifty, or even overly special. It came up in a discussion of polyamorous relationships. They're not even definitions, really, but names that emphasize some aspect of a relationship. They're certainly not exclusive: think overlapping circles, or Venn Diagrams, or even signal networks, if your'e into that kind of thing. The big R is something you can't really pin down with a single definition.

A relationship, in essence, to me, is a continued interaction between two people. (I understand that, for some people, it's "two or more people". For me, it's "two people". I'll explain that in a bit.) That's the basic framework, and from there it goes in all sorts of directions. The bit about "continued interaction" is generic enough that it's hard to distort much, but "people" can be molded to include pets, computers, cars, whatever -- anything that interacts. So really, I suppose a relationship is a continued interaction between two entities, but that doesn't sound nearly as good, and it doesn't emphasize the people aspect as much as I'd like.

There are so many variations of relationships, on so many axes, that it's really hard even to group them. I mean, society at large has done a pretty good job of coming up with names of the most common varieties such as friends, lovers, and spouses. Thing is, as I wrote to ariata above, these words don't "label" so much as "emphasize" certain aspects of a relationship. It's a difference very similar to the difference between sorting your pictures into various folders versus tagging them with a number of keywords. This journal entry, for instance, doesn't exactly fit into "psychology", "rants", "philosophy", or "introspection", but any of those words would emphasize certain aspects of this entry, so I tag it with all of them -- but not "poetry", or "tech", or "politics" (okay, maybe that one, but I don't want to go there). I would be hard pressed to decide which one tag I wanted to group it by.

To make matters even more difficult, a lot of the words we do have tag things as not there: "fuckbuddy" means there are elements of friendship and lustful activities, but emphasize an exclusion of lifetime partnership; "bedwarmer" and "sex toy" mean there are elements of lustful activities, but emphasize an exclusion of commitment or even friendship. What makes matters extremely difficult is that these terms don't actually, literally mean that those elements aren't present: The negative emphasis comes from the fact that there are other words you would use that do emphasize the commitment, or the friendship, if it were there ... and using the term that doesn't emphasize them gives an implicit emphasis on its opposite. Someone calls their girlfriend (emphasis on the commitment, lustful/romantic acitvities, and friendship) a bedwarmer (emphasis on the lustful activities), the fact that there are words that do emphasize commitment and friendship implicitly gives emphasis to a lack of commitment and friendship -- unless you override it with other terms nearby that do, in fact, emphasize those qualities, in which case the implicit emphasis isn't there anymore. If you say your girlfriend is also an excellent bedwarmer, you're emphasizing everything girlfriend-like with an added, extra emphasis on how she is in bed.

Given all this, it is any wonder that people are eternally confused about what to call their relationships? What do you do when you don't have any convenient words that will emphasize what you'd like to emphasize? Perhaps you have a relationship that's extremely committed, with no lustful activities, but you're sharing your lives with each other economically? What do you call that? You'd have to say something weird like "platonic life mate", because there are no terms I can think of that emphasize shared life with a friend without sex.

The part I don't really understand is the drive to actually categorize relationships, to group them, like putting photos into folders. Is that photo of your beach trip with your ex where you ran into an old friend under "photos of my ex" or under "trips" or under "photos of my old friend"? It seems the same with categorizing relationships. Seems to me it would be simplest to just look at the relationship and emphasize the aspects that are relevent to the conversation at hand, hopefully avoiding any implicit emphases that happen to be false.

This is why, when people ask me what my relationship with someone is, I usually just describe what we do with our time together, instead of trying to find a label. I can use the labels to emphasize certain qualities of a relationship, so if someone asks me "is so-and-so your girlfriend" I can usually answer "yes", "no", or "kind of", depending on if those qualities happen to be present in my relationship with so-and-so, but even then I usually just enumerate which girlfriend-ish things we do and which ones we don't. It's also why I explicitly mention the open nature of my relationships, as there's no common word I know of that means "friends, lovers, partners, and open" (although "primary" comes close, it's not exactly in common usage). Closest I can get, using common words with their common emphases, is phrases like "girlfriend number one". I would often introduce ariata to others as my "partner", because although I have other relationships where I'm friends, lustful, and committed, she was the only one I had partnered with in life (and it was usually immediately apparent that she was also my girlfriend).

So, describing relationships, due to the large number of simple attributes and the much larger number of combinations of those attributes, seems like it often has to be done in a soft, fuzzy fashion. This is all fine and good, because we have ways of doing that, and we even have ways that are easily understood. Still, many people act like they think the label defines what you're supposed to do in the relationship: the label defining the relationship, instead of the relationship specifying the label. What the hell? Someone explain this to me. It's like they took the words -- which were, of course, invented for the purpose of describing actual relationships -- and turned them into cookie-cutters, completely obviating their original purpose. Perhaps the relationships were so standard for so long that people started thinking that the causality went the other way? That the words defined the relationships, instead of describing what the relationships themselves defined? I hear all the time that if someone is your "girlfriend" you should act a certain way toward them. Similar with "friend".

Someone please tell me how this makes sense. Enough people act this way that I'm sure it makes sense somehow; I just don't see it.

So, I've been programming for a very long time, 19 years or so. As you might expect, people ask me for advice on learning to program.

Problem is, I learned to program in 1987. My first language was Basic, my second language was FORTRAN, and my third language (in 1993) was C. I didn't really bother learning any sort of object-oriented languages until college, which for me started in 1996. I taught myself Perl and Java on a lark in 1999. I learned Smalltalk, LISP, ML, and a variety of other languages for classes in college. Somewhere along the line I decided to teach myself Ruby and Python, and I'm looking at O'Caml and Haskell now because they look really interesting, and significantly different than what I've seen before.

At this point, I figure I have a good grasp of how to design and architect a wide variety of programming tasks, and I can certainly explain my design decisions to people who are curious. What I can't explain, though, is how I reached those decisions. Why did I start thinking in that direction? Honestly, it's usually because I've seen something like that before, written by someone else, and it looked like a good fit.

Really, there's nothing special about programming. The programming language is really just a small part of programming. I don't use the first two languages I learned: They're obsolete, now. The crux of programming is really the logic aspect of it. If you want to be a good programmer, practice logic puzzles. That's really what programming is: Figure out the solution to the logic puzzle, and then describe it to the computer in a language the computer "understands".

When asked a programming question, in an interview for example, I figure out the solution before I select a language. Sometimes the solution is easiest for me in Perl, sometimes it's easiest for me in C, and sometimes it's easiest to me in LISP. I assume things will start to be easy for me in Ruby sometime soon.

Still, people ask me, "What language should I learn first?" Really, I have no idea. I could say to learn C, but that's probably not such good advice for a first language anymore. I've actually been saying "Ruby" these days, because it's simple to learn, I can point to some nice tutorials for it, and it's really close to the "solving the logic problem" aspect of programming. I wonder, though, if I would be nearly as good a programmer if I had learned Ruby before C -- learning C has forced me to learn how a computer actually works, and has taught me how to write very efficient code.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I'm a decently experienced programmer who has no idea where he'd start learning to program today. Does anyone have any advice for me to pass on?