My wife and I are new to poly (a year in) and we have been ENM for many years.

We have used a lot of resources to open up our marriage successfully and be poly.

Our top resources have been: * poly informed therapist * poly friends who are married and have been in long term relationships with secondaries * many podcasts * trial and errors

Our understanding and experience of polyamory has grown tremendously over the last year.

As much as I enjoyed this sub when we started, after a few weeks I found the advice to be very narrow minded to “one brand” of polyamory. If your situation doesn’t match the expected way of doing polyamory as this sub preaches, then you get downvoted, personal attacks, told to “break up / divorce / poly is not for you”

It is quite disheartening frankly to see that type of behavior here.

A few examples I picked up over the months by just reading here:

• If you are married and want to try poly, this sub will scoff at you for being interested. There is even a post “dear mono, you don’t have to try Poly” that is frankly so condescending.
• If you are in a situation where one partner wants to try Poly and the other one is confused, then there the advices are usually “divorce/breakup”
• if you are a secondary in hierarchical structure, any issues you face will be met with “break up, your hinge doesn’t have a relationship to offer”

That is not even mentioning the personal attacks I have seen here in the comments.

I get that this sub is free, the mods are not paid and everyone is at a different life stage, but if I compare the real life Poly community we have built for support with this sub, it is glaringly obvious this sub doesn’t represent the polyamory community as a whole.

Maybe it is a Reddit problem.

Thoughts, comments? Do you disagree? Have you had the same experience?

** update **

Thank you for the discussion. I appreciate the nuance, the polite disagreements, and being validated by some as well in what I noticed.

A few additional points from the comments on this post * there is a definitive rudeness being hidden behind “just being honest” that is really off putting. It is lacking empathy and understanding, especially for a sub that believes that love is infinite. * there is a lot of assumption about who I am and what is my relationship, my race, my sexual orientation, etc. It is frankly disappointing to see, as it is used to invalidate my opinion. Again, for a sub that pretends to be about infinite love, seeing comments like i must be a cishet man who is used to get my way (not the case btw) and then used to try to invalidate what I said without any substance, that is exactly the type of comments that make this sub unwelcoming and condescending. * I am surprised about the comments of “old timers” who say they are tired of saying the same thing over and over and lose patience on being nice.

Hopefully this post and the comments here help this sub become more inclusive and welcoming.