Do you have a source for that?
"In her paper, published in the Journal of Sex Research this past June, Balzarini compared the demographic backgrounds of 2,428 polyamorous individuals and 539 monogamous ones by asking participants to take an online survey. Her team found that polyamorous people tend to identify more as bisexual/pansexual, are more likely to report being divorced, and make less money yearly than monogamous couples."
"When it came to monogamous relationships, 74 percent of straight respondents reported being monogamous compared to only 17 percent of bi/pan respondents. (The remaining percentage identified as gay/lesbian or other.)"
Also, this is entirely anecdotal, but in the various circles I'm a part of, every single polyamorous person I know is queer to some degree. Granted, a lot of that is because the people in my circles are disproportionately queer, but not nearly so much that it would be the sole reason for that.
If it's two entirely discrete circles then this paper is irrelevant to TFA.
Although the statistical methods are dubious, it does show that polyamory is on an upswing. Thankfully. Choosing a single partner for life is one of the most ingrained pieces of rhetoric in the modern era, and most people don’t even know you can choose anything else.
Still a bit sad that this topic is too divisive for HN. Last time I tried bringing it up, a half dozen people chimed in saying it can’t work, that it’s a bad idea, and so on. But maybe in a few more years it’ll get a nice discussion.
Notably, it invariably results in more single men, more crime/societal instability, generally makes gender inequality more extreme, and results in less people doing parental duties.
From a "natural selection" point of view though it's probably a superior modality to monogamy, and monogamy is only really enforced through oppression in practice.
For what it's worth, polyamory might correlate to higher status within a society, across societies higher levels of polyamory correlate to lower status of that society.
For example, I’m a parent who does a lot of parental duties.
It doesn’t result in more crime or societal instability for people to have multiple partners.
Sure it does. It tends to result in more single men and it's the single men who end up causing all the disorder.
I’m acquainted with a few people in this world, but am not in it. From what they relate, there’s wide variety of participants with very different approaches and experiences. Everything from pure hedonists to people who can’t or won’t get divorced to various kinksters and fetishists.
I’d imagine with all of the recent media coverage, there’s a mini “eternal September” of dudes dragging their girlfriends into this.