(July 11, 2012 at 8:52 am)pgrimes15 Wrote: No objections myself if it is consenting adults. The examples we sometimes see on, for instance, a TV documentary, always leave me wondering what happens to the young males in the community who cannot find a mate because all the alpha males have got several. Surely they would have to leave and the result would be a community of older men, each with lots of wives, and children. Can that work ?
Notwithstanding the example from Shrike1978 of a MFM arrangment, all the examples we see, and what most people imagine when they consider polygamy is men with lots of wives. A wife who had lots of husbands may not work so well (although I'm prepared to be corrected on that).
Anecdotally, as a community leader, I see a mixture of all types. In actuality, I personally know more long-term-stable MFM and MFMF groups than I do FMF, but I have no real reason to suspect that translates to the larger community. I suspect there's just as much FMF working out there, but the part of the community I'm most directly involved in isn't weighted in that direction. The other long-term model I see work well for some groups is the "line marriage" concept where you have a large, sometimes geographically spread out group of people with various connections to each other. Many may only be connected through other people in the group, and some may have never actually met at all, but they are all somehow connected through a line of committed relationships. These often break down into smaller subgroups of two or more people who are together on a daily or near-daily basis who have longer connections to people in one or more of the other subgroups. This has advantages of allowing various individual relationships to begin and end naturally without having to completely restructure the whole group when things change. While I'm not sure this model would work well for me, it is the model followed by a prominent skeptic-athiest-poly advocate whom I have an incredible amount of respect for, and it seems to work amazingly well for her.
I do see much more short-term FMF than anything else over the entire community, local and global, and I see a lot of it fail, but that comes more from the alpha-male mentality with an OPP (one penis policy) and wanting all the women who gets into it for totally the wrong reasons. Get into to have hot sex with all the women and you're destined to fail miserably. That something that completely amuses me, because my male partner and I are mostly hetero and definitely alpha personalities, but that whole idea is foreign to us, and completely against the ideas of personal choice and individual freedom that we teach.
A lot of the overall disconnect comes from the popular conception of religious polygamy vs. the realities of secular polyamory. When you break away from the fundamentalist Mormons and Muslim types, there's not really a religious element at work. Granted we have a large population of pagan and new age individuals and groups in the poly community who will tell you that it is within their religion, but they're still ultimately doing it for secular reasons, not by religious mandate. And when you get past the fantasies people have of this lifestyle, it ultimately comes down to the same realities as everyone else...an average night is sitting down to figure out the monthly budget and make a grocery list (taco night again??? But we just had tacos!) while complaining about what someone is watching on TV.
