Confirmation Bias

A friend of mine posted this link on her facebook site. It's an article about opening up monogamous relationships. I'm responding, not the article itself, but to one of the comments, which claims: Having been in and known dozens and dozens of people involved with open relationships, I can think of less than a handful for whom it has worked.

Of course defining which relationships "work" and which don't can be pretty hard, but it struck me that a case could be made that most relationships don't "work" at least if your test is having them last for life.

When I was at university I knew of perhaps three openly non-monogmous relationsips, although there were probably a few others who were keeping it quiet. Naturally this was out of hundreds (possibly thousands) of relationships within my friendship circle over the years.

The other day I opened the newspaper to an interview with someone who was part of one of those non-monogmous relationships, who has now become a moderately famous author. His partner is drifting around during the interview, occasionally intervening. And yes, its the same partner. They've been together more than 20 years, since well before I met them.

The thing is, I can only think of four other relationships from my peer group that have made the distance. So the "failure" rate is actually a lot higher for the conventional relationships than the very small sample of open relationships.

But when monogamous relationships break up outside observers seldom blame monogamy. When open or polyamourous relationships don't last, it's the first thing everyone else grabs for.

It's not a very original observation of course. It's called Confirmation Bias. When we see something that supports our prejudices we file it away as evidence, when it counteracts what we expect we often, although not always, disregard it.

But it would be nice if, on a lefty website, people of explicitly progressive politics were not so clearly applying it to bash others.