Women are more willing to share a man than vice-versa.
This may be a dumb question on my part, but is this from personal observation, studies you know of, other?
ie, I know there're places where one man is allowed to marry multiple women, but not other way around, for example... But do we have reason to think that if suddenly we went "poof, now it's allowed both ways" in a western society that, until then, was mostly monogamous, it'd default to "few/single men, many women" type marriages?
(Just to clarify, I'm not arguing against you so much as simply wondering/asking. I honestly don't know the answers here.)
As far as stability, hrm... I would have thought that a strong poly marriage would be more weblike then chainlike, where each additional link strengthens in, but empirical data trumps all. Lack of poly tenth anniversary parties would be a fairly relevant data point.
(Hrm... wait, what's the prior for tenth anniversary parties in general vs the actual number of poly weddings that happen.)
Oh, sorry if this reply is a bit disorganized. It's as much me "thinking out loud" as an actual reply.
This may be a dumb question on my part, but is this from personal observation, studies you know of, other?
You know, I just looked it up and the evidence is less clear cut than I thought. In American poly culture, couples who want to date a woman are much more common than couples that want to date a man. Woman who want to date couples are called "unicorns", while men who want to date a couple don't have a word. But this kind of evidence cuts both ways; there are lots of couples that want women, but few women are jumping to date a couple.
Also: t...
A thought occurred to me today as I skimmed an article in a rationality forum where the subject of gay marriage cropped up; seeing as the issue has been hotly contested in various public fora and especially the courts, what about poly? After all, many if not all the arguments for gay marriage apply to poly marriage as well.
Questions for LWers who are currently in a such a relationship, or have an opinion to share:
Do polies want to marry each other or do such relationships not lend themselves to permanence above a threshold of partners? Should polies campaign for the right for a civil union anyway? what are the up and down sides of this? etc