31 points

Hmm, you could have a Mulan situation with one of the pairings 🤔

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12 points

Where the dude is into effiminate guys, or …?

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33 points

The dude went to a drag queen show without understanding what the whole concept was

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8 points

Gotcha. That accounts for one pairing. What about the other two? You’d need at least a double mulan situation in order to have a chance at an actually straight love triangle.

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2 points

Kind of like a reverse Birdcage?

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23 points

There’s some Interesting graph theory problem somewhere in here about finding out if a network of N people in M relationships must include at least one gay person.

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7 points

Even numbers are pretty easy to solve at least. They can be straight or lgbt.

I posit that any love shape that includes an odd number of participants requires some form of deception, or at least one LGBT person in order to be valid.

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35 points
*

A relationship graph which requires no gay relationships is called a bigraph (honest, I’m not making this up) or bipartite.

That follows because if you can two color the graph so that edges only connect different colors, you just assign male to one color and female to the other.

This means there’s a tone of mathematical identities describing this. Wikipedia has a good introduction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartite_graph

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5 points

Very neat. But the fun part of this is that if you’re poly/into more than one person, you are now a part of the LGBT group, not the straight one.

Note the above image, where the triangle shape requires that every person be into another person, with the tension being that if it’s cishet, they have to choose only one person.

We aren’t checking to see if a shape with LGBT people works, we know those do. We are checking to see if a cishet triangle is even possible.

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5 points

isn’t cis het an identity, therefore someone could identify as heterosexual an be in a polycule, only fucking members of the opposite sexual.

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9 points

A relationship isn’t LGBT; a person is. A cishet man who has two bi/pan female partners who date each other isn’t LGBT because his partners are queer.

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0 points

You and I have a different definition of interesting.

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82 points

Accute Love Triangle: Two people who are boning, but they wistfully pine for a third person from afar.

Obtuse Love Triangle: Two people pinning for the same third, when they’d be better off hooking up with each other.

Equilateral Love Triangle: When there is no age-gap discourse in the polycule.

Right Love Triangle: When the odd-couple finds the perfect person to square them off.

Stereographically Projected Love Triangle: A romantic Isekai

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38 points

Non-euclidean love triangle: Both people who are currently together wish they were with the same third person who lives too far away for a relationship to work.

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1 point

The fastest way do get from A to B is not a straight line but to bone C.

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5 points

…which instance is accidentalpolyamory on

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65 points

The classic love triangle was with Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere, where both guys wanted the girl but were also best friends. Does that not qualify?

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69 points

Ah, a triangle with a platonic base.

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7 points

Great joke man! The unrelated Greek term plausibly masquarading as another geometical term, brilliant!

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3 points

Unrelated Greek word? Platonic here refers to the nature of Arthur and Lancelot’s relationship. It’s a platonic relationship, rather than romantic or sexual one.

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1 point
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4 points

I think you’re somewhat understanding what Platonic love is. In modern usage, I’d say that Platonic love is a really strong form of love, stronger than could be called friendship, but which lacks a sexual or romantic dimension (or at least lacks enough of those to characterise as a romantic or sexual relationship).

But it might also be interesting to look at what Platonic love meant to Plato. I’m not an expert. Not even close. But my understanding is that he might have meant it to be the most perfect form of love. We have the phrase “platonic ideal” that we use in other contexts to refer to something that is the most perfect version of that thing, and I think Platonic love likely originally meant that, for love. It was love of the body, the mind, and the soul. Not less than romantic love. Not equal-but-different like the modern usage of the term. But instead encompassing everything that romantic love is and more.

But I’ve only read extremely shallowly into this matter, and would love to hear more from someone who really knows their stuff.

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16 points

Technically the triangle just refers to ‘relationships’ and not ‘romantic relationships’ so two male friends and one female love interest works as a triangle but one woman with two male strangers doesn’t with because that’s just a V.

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8 points

I vote that it should. Sounds like good drama, the kind you’d expect seeing a love-triangle tag on a fancfiction site.

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5 points

That is the standard of the love triangle. The two love rivals have to be friends with, or at least know, each other or else there is no tension between them for their love of the 2nd party. Or else every person talking to multiple people on dating apps is in a love n-gon. And love should never intersext with n-gons.

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1 point
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