Opinions on polygamy and polyamory?

[Oktavarium]

I'm a Muslim, so I'll bite because I think people get our position wrong very often.
You can marry up to 4 in theory, but there's a lot of things you have to keep in mind:
1. You have to treat them all equally and not pick favorites. Even the Quran says it's near impossible for most people (4:129)
2. You have to provide equally well for each them. This requires having cash coming out the wazoo and so polygamy was a thing of the aristocracy.
So, in theory, it is possible for it to be ethical, but in practicality monogamy is highly, highly preferable. Islam has a rather formal system of law that takes into account things like social acceptance and physical/mental danger among other things.
It isn't an excuse to have an "open relationship", it was and is a custom that's isolated to few for basically the entirety of history and a heavy ethical weight on you if you do choose to marry more than one.

 

[Roman_Bruh]

It's bad methinks

 

[CTRL]

Monogamy or death.

True and based.

It's practiced by only the most mentally-ill of degenerates, and you can tell just by looking at them and their soulless fuckin' Kubrick-stares just how far they've fallen.

It's so pervasive that it has infected mah fiction! Last year there were so many stories with polyamory that I quickly became sick of it. Someone really wanted their stealthy NTR idea pushed massively. I've seen it done tastefully perhaps once or twice, and that's in a fictional setting, with a lot of SOD. I doubt there is any chance of it working out in the real world.

 

[Momoc]

Many people view polygamy through the lens of seeking a more fulfilling sex life. But rationnally, it was a solution to a situation of shortage of men after deadly wars. The best way to prevent women and widowed mothers from being left without a husband (and therefore without a provider, a breadwinner) was to share a man.

Speaking of imbalanced sex-ratio, I may sound crazy, but polyamory could be a solution to address the shortage of women in China and India. But socially, it is obviously difficult.

 

[Vitnira]

My husband and I are open to a three-way relationship with a woman (where we BOTH like/love the third) and have flirted with some dating, but fully accept we are never going to find a third person. Finding a partner is already hard, finding what is typically called a "unicorn"? Yeah, no. I think the reality of polycules has already been discussed - they're generally all fat autistic alphabet soup hipster weirdos in a studio apartment in san francisco.

Since the predominant strain here is anti-poly (unsurprising), I'll give my (not-strong) arguments for why we'd like to be in a thruple:
It mostly comes down to having greater intimate availability.
Sometimes I need to work late. Sometimes he needs to work late. We're fine being alone, but it'd be nice to have another intimate partner to fill those gaps, and also give the currently-overworking partner less guilt about being unavailable.
This also means chorin' overlap. A third person really doesn't contribute that much to overall mess load (batching meals is so easy), but does give an extra set of hands for house cleaning so it can be better distributed. More time for doing other stuff, like snuggling.
My husband and I are a very stable, loving relationship and find people of both sexes, while single, find us comforting to be around. We're so much a combined unit others don't tend to feel like a third wheel. A third person really wouldn't detract anything from our setup.
I'd be fine with raising not-my-kids if they were my husband's. Another parent to help would be nice, actually.


Writing it out like this a lot of the "that sounds nice" parts could easily be filled by a close-knit community like family (siblings/cousins) or church, but I don't have either, and society has basically done controlled demolition on family/community...so neither does anyone else.

I think poly can work if all members are stable, but as discussed, the statistical likelihood of that is near zero. I don't even know how most regular couples I see stay together, let alone introduce a third or more.