This is going to start out tangential and get to point eventually, really.
It’s very interesting sometimes to see how the interactions of social stereotypes wind up when confronted with real, actual people.
I’m polyamorous; one of the more common responses I get to this among people who don’t know anything about it is something along the lines of, “How horrible that your husband forced you into this.” The fact that I was the driving force behind the openness of our relationship is something that a lot of people seem to be unable to comprehend, because they’re caught up in the idea that women have some sort of innate calling to be monogamous and settled and men have an innate calling to be promiscuous and seek variety.
The other response I get at that point is something like, “So when will you have sex with me/my partner?” Because, apparently, the social notion that anyone who is not in a closed monogamous relationship is sexually available to anyone who expresses an interest.
Then there are the men I know who are tired of being thought of as being perpetually sexually available or uninterested in forming serious relationships – which interacts weirdly with the social presumptions that are tangled up in my Aggravation #2 above for those who are in open or multiple relationships.
Of the people I know who are actively uninterested in serious or committed relationships at the moment, but who want to have casual sexual and/or romantic liasons, all but one are female. Of the longest-term successful relationships I know of, one of the ones I can think of right off the top of my head is between a pair of gay men. I know one couple who, should they successfully have children, will have their father staying at home and house-husbanding, as is his preference and natural inclination, while mom is the primary income.
Love doesn’t mean anything to groups of people.
Love means something to specific, individual people.
Why demographics differ is a nature/nurture question that I don’t think anyone’s smart enough to unravel. And even if one could come down and say “Women are really more likely to want to watch chick flicks”, that doesn’t mean that I, as a specific example of a woman, am going to be more interested in seeing that stupid Titanic crap than going to a Jackie Chan flick.
I repeat what I said above, in summation: for any given type of love or style of relationship, there will be people of all different dynamics who want it or at least who experience it. Which forms of love or types of relationship approach will depend upon the people, not some abstracted presumptions about what their adjectives mean.
