Everyone is Replaceable. No One is Interchangeable.

One of the most pernicious misunderstandings I keep running into from my monogamous friends is the idea that polyamorous people treat their lovers as interchangeable. Once someone admitted that they emotionally-believe in their heart that we treat relationships as fungible and partners as commodities. This is a particularly insidious belief because while it is literally true that any person can be replaced, it is the exact opposite of true that people are interchangeable. It is perhaps impossible to grasp the latter without grokking the former.

Everyone is Replaceable

This is observably true. There are almost no places in the world where if a person dies or leaves they cannot eventually be replaced with someone else. Even the widower in abject pain and despair over his wife’s death is likely to eventually remarry. Everyone needs companionship. Likely his children will fare better with a mother, even one not genetically related to them. If your best friend has to move across the world, you will eventually find a new friend to do things with. If your boss quits, someone else will be found to take over her duties.

Not only is this demonstrably true, but also we want it to be true. It is true by design in most cases. An organization that has a truly irreplaceable person will die when that irreplaceable person quits or retires or eventually dies. A military cannot function with an irreplaceable general. A choir cannot function with an irreplaceable tenor or director. A company cannot function with an irreplaceable accountant. Eventually every single one of those will die. People must be replaceable.

Yes, this extends to the personal. Any person you know may leave you, or die suddenly. If they are truly irreplaceable in your life, your life is over. You may as well throw yourself on their pyre. Nowadays our institutions are designed to prevent such situations, and allow people to recover and heal and, yes, maybe replace the person they loved. This is good. We cannot be so fragile in a world without immortality. Especially if we ourselves are irreplaceable to someone else.

Personally, every deep relationship I’ve ever had (so far) has ended, starting from my childhood best friend in first grade. Every single one has moved away, or moved on, or grown apart over time, or been radically altered beyond saving. Accepting change and loss was a matter of emotional survival.

But acknowledging that anyone can be replaced and this is proper is drastically opposed to saying people are interchangeable.

No One is Interchangeable

Every person is complex beyond any single human’s ability to fully comprehend. Never have I had a relationship which wasn’t unique and inalienably beautiful in that uniqueness. Even something as simple as a conversation with my friend Matt is drastically different from a conversation with my friend Steven. To even suggest they’re interchangeable is ludicrous, you could never swap one for the other in any interaction. The relationship I have with one person could potentially be replaced with a relationship with another person, if the first person were to leave. But it would be a new and vitally different relationship.

This may be something that can only be understood when one has, in fact, experienced several intense relationships. One can live through the experience of realizing that the need to care for someone, and be understood and accepted by them, is a desire that can encompass very different people, and be fulfilled in very different ways. And yet that doesn’t mean that those desires and emotional needs are just being fed another shovelful of undifferentiated emotion-coal. They thrum in symbiosis with a different entity that scaffolds and dances in an entirely different way. It’s beautiful and different the same way that your favorite song and your favorite sunset are beautiful and different.

When one has only ever had this experience with one person, perhaps its natural to think that if anyone else could ever cause this feeling, it must mean that my partner isn’t special. That they could be swapped out like the wiring in your stereo. Only when you’ve had that experience with several people do you really get that the other people aren’t wiring. They are songs and sunsets and walks in the desert and winning the race. And it will be sad when your favorite song moves away, or that fantastic walk in the desert succumbs to cancer, or when you decide that winning the race isn’t a central part of your life anymore. It doesn’t mean they weren’t special when you find an exhilarating dance hell to move into the place that they held.

In summary - being replaceable is a necessity, and one must accept this if one doesn’t wish to live in self-deception their whole lives. Experiencing this a few times—experiencing how deeply different and irreproducible each intertwining is, while discovering that this doesn’t make any individual intertwining less special and beautiful—will deeply cement into one’s psyche just how extremely non-interchangeable all humans are.