WORST DATE IN AMERICA FINALIST: Cruising Craigslist

Hmm. Did you ask him why he didn’t simply write the ads & then tally the responses, rather than date & have sex with his test-market?

““I’m trying to write personal ads that are guaranteed to get responses from women in order to sell them to other men.””

LOL. oy. Sell the ads or the women?

kissmymango: I think perhaps he wants to sell the responses he gets.

Still disturbing.

eeeeeewww! what a smarmdoggie!

Funny story, but there was stuff that I didn’t understand. I’ve never heard of ‘polyamorous’ before. It sounds like a euphemism for ‘will sleep with virtually anyone’ to me. Primary and secondary girlfriends? What does that mean?

@Sophie: http://www.polyamorysociety.org/

He was an ass, but you’re a sexist.
Men are more promiscuous? What? Sounds like you just couldn’t get any from women :/

This doesn’t sound like a bad date … you weren’t looking for a serious relationship, and apparently neither was he. Funny story though!

polyamorous:
poly = many
amor =love

as opposed to

monogamous:
mono =one
gamous =marriage

Sophie I don’t mean to harp on you, but I just can believe you posted this comment. 1. polyamorous is a commonly used term to describe societies where men take on more that one wife or women take on more that one husband. It’s a less loaded term than ‘polygamy’. You surely came across it in social sciences. 2. Assuming that you didn’t ever come across it, I’m amazed that you couldn’t figure it out from it’s root words as I’ve just illustrated. 3. Assuming you’ve actually never heard it, and you couldn’t figure it out on your own, I can’t for the life of me imagine who you wouldn’t just look it up before making yourself look silly and getting bitched at by me.

Sika :

Well obviously I don’t care if random strangers online think I’m not all that smart, whereas you go to the length of writing patronising, spiteful comments to advertise how clever you think you are.

) I’m fully aware of what ‘poly’ and ‘amorous’ mean. I just didn’t know, though, in what way people use the term ‘polyamorous’. Root words, when combined, often have unexpected meanings, change in meaning when applied to different situations, and also meanings change over time. It should have been crashingly obvious from my comment ‘it sounds like a euphemism for “will sleep with anyone”‘ that I KNEW what ‘poly’ and ‘amorous’ meant. What I was meaning was ‘what does the term polyamory mean in practice?’. I didn’t know because it sounded to me like this guy was using polyamory as a respectable way of saying he wanted to sleep around and was too shallow and sleazy for commitment, yet he also referred to ‘primary and secondary girlfriends’ as if he had deeply held convictions and principals regarding his way of life. I wanted to know if there was a community of self-described ‘polyamorists’ or not, and how they lived. Layla was kind enough to provide a link to a website which did elucidate things for me; you just saw an opportunity to put some basic word knowledge on display because to do so heightens your sense of superiority.

2) I asked here partly because I didn’t have time to look it up, and partly because I thought it might generate interesting discussion (if I’d known it would generate your mean-spirited reaction I wouldn’t have bothered).

3) I didn’t study social sciences. As a matter of fact, I didn’t study anything. I’m an autodidact. I grew up as an orphan in a remote area outside Magadan where for the first ten years of my life I had access to two-and-a-half books, one of which had had all of the ‘evil’ words removed by its previous owner, a schizophrenic itinerant wheelwright.*

4) The word ‘bitched’ is made up of two parts – ‘bitch’ and ‘ed’; ‘-ed’. ‘Bitch’ is an noun used to describe an unpleasant woman with an baselessly high opinion of her intelligence and a need to belittle others in order to make this known. ‘-ed’ is a suffix added to describe said woman’s actions.

*Most of that wasn’t true, but how would you know? Seems presumptious on your part to assume that I not only studies social sciences but also was taught about polyamory.

Yes I can see by the length of your post that you definitely didn’t have enough time to look it up.

You don’t have to get so defensive. Your post just fell into the “Someone should really tell that person that asking an easily researched question in a comments section makes them seem thick.” category.

Like for example…I tell strangers if they have toilet paper stuck to their shoe. It’s awkward, but I do it.

Sophie WTF.

But to answer the earlier question, some of what Sika said isn’t entirely accurate. It isn’t used as a synonym for polygamy though obviously there are similarities. Polygamy is exclusively used to describe setups in which there are formal marriage like institutions and people enter into marriages with more than one other person (one men, many women; one woman, many men; groups… whatever). ‘Polyamorous’ on the other hand is a more recent term coined because some people feel either they, or people in general, are so made that they’d never be happy with just one partner. It tends to be a PC-term though ironically if you consider the distinction with someone in an ‘open relationship’, being in the latter implies that both (or all) parties to the relationship are aware of it’s status as being ‘open’ whereas that’s not necessarily true with someone describing themselves as ‘polyamorous’. I’ve a Polish friend who feels that it’s a more healthy form of relationship than the conventional, though personally I’m too mad-jealous to find it a particularly attractive option. It does however open whole new possibilities of social faux pas, such as when on meeting him with a Polish girl he seemed to be into I ask if she was the long talked of girlfriend. I was told she wasn’t. Of course, in this instance what was a simple case of misunderstood identity may have inadvertently turned into cock blocking if for whatever reason he’d not intended for her to find out then and in that way that he had a long term girlfriend, whatever the nature of their relationship. How confusing. Easier to by monogamous, I feel. Kudos on the autodidacticism, your English is bitchin’ (a compound of ‘bitch’ a derogatory term used here ironically to indicate that something is good (bathos?) and ‘in” a suffix marking the word as the present participle of whatever-the-verb-might-be with the g dropped to denote colloquial conviviality).

For anyone interested my friend recommends the book ‘Opening Up’ if, like me, you find the concept deeply baffling and inherently unattractive.

Don’t feel bad about cock blocking…his seems to busy enough as it is

Wow, what a jerk!!

Haha you’re asking for it. I mean honestly that sucks, and that guy is a huge dick, but it’s Craigslist, seriously.

Sika you suck and got owned!!! Haha Sophie- great post, I really enjoyed it..and knew that you were looking for a cultural reference for the word versus the meaning in your original post. Sika- before you think you are doing someone a favor, you may want to fully understand the situation. IE- “Hey, you’ve got toilet paper on your shoe, you look silly and I’m going to bitch at you.” “Actually, that is the ribbon from my grandmother that I stitched to my shoe in her honor.” Its one thing to tell people something awkward, its another to judge… It was obvious Sophie knew what the word meant literally, but was trying to understand what the person in the story meant by it.

I have been involved with a polyamorous couple before. It was…interesting.
They had ‘rules’ for each other, like I had to meet his partner before we slept together and condoms had to be used. There were a few more rules, but I can’t remember them.
It didn’t last long, for other reasons, but hey. To each their own.