The circumstances under which I’d be okay with it are so narrow that I would fully expect it to be impossible to find in the real world. That being the case, I’d rather “default” to monogamy (though not necessarily strict monogamy, if possible), than to polyamory.
Hell no. I am one of those people who is wired to be monogamous. For me, romantic love is something I can only share with one person. I’m also rather jealous - not in the sense where I won’t let my partner talk to anyone else they could even have the slightest possibility of being attracted to but in the sense that I couldn’t share my partner’s heart with someone else. If I knew that my partner had romantic love for someone other than me that would be the end of the relationship.
Really just that I’ve already gone through the taking care of my husband and then having no one to care for me experience. It doesn’t make me want to sign up for having to care not only for a husband but for his other wives, too.
The idea of someone other than my husband being bound to care for me is not a pleasant one for me and, honestly, I can’t see how sharing a husband would in any way make me more likely to care for another woman than I am now. She wouldn’t be my wife. If we’re friends, why does it require marriage to make it happen, and if we’re not friends why would marriage make it happen?
Interestingly, the book I dug up on polygamous marriage talks about African cultures where the women actively try to get their husbands additional wives so they can stop having sex with him.
One wonders if these are the same communities were FGM is practiced, leaving the women sexually damaged to begin with, or if these African men are just lousy lays…
I can see the appeal of having sex with multiple women, but truly being in a relationship with more than one? No. And I have problems even making male friends, let alone some other relationship.
Ok. We certainly do think differently. I can imagine caring about other wives. Generally I like people whom my husband likes. But I wouldn’t expect to take care of them unless it were reciprocal, just like friends do.
Maybe some here are thinking about sexual relationships with the other wives? That wasn’t something I had included in my thoughts. I don’t think my husband would want anyone messing with his wives. Heh.
People who know me as an exmormon will sometimes ask I shouldn’t have stayed in and had several wives. I always joke that you never want more than one wife. The ideal is to have one wive, and several girlfriends.
Seriously, though. No. I do much better in one-on-one relationships. I like having a wife who loves just me, and me just her.
Polygamy? I enjoy my privacy, so communal living would not be appealing.
Polyamory? Very appealing to me. I prefer if I am not my partner’s only lover.
I don’t know. It would depend on who’s asking me and on the living space arrangement.
I’d prefer having a whole closet and room to myself. I need some space, but i’ll sleep with my partner as much as they want to.
I’m currently one part of a combination of relationships that’s so complicated it requires a hub and spoke diagram to explain it, and it would be nice if there could be some legal formalization of it, or at least legal protection so that two of the partners could stop living with the fear that the simple fact of their relationships might be used to remove their children from the home.
I was in a FFF relationship years ago. Maybe 4 or 5 years ago? We all lived together, slept together… etc…
Would I do it again? No. HELL NO. NEVER EVER EVER AGAIN. It was horrible. The whole thing lasted about a year. I was emotionally done with it a few months in. But because I didn’t want to lose one of the partners, and she was still into the other one, I had to wait it out.
It didn’t help that the other girl was BATSHIT INSANE. Yeah, that didn’t help at all. And I had jealousy problems with the relationship too. I will never make that mistake again. I’m just not wired to be with more than one person at a time.
It Sucked. It Really Sucked.
I have considered it as early as my teens. Either reading all that SF as a kid warped my mind, or I was warped that way before I read those stories. I’ve joked with my wife that she’s going to be my first wife, and that later on when I’m successful and rich I’ll get a second wife for her to boss around. She’s said okay, but she’ll remind me that she’s got first wife status, and she’s mother of my first-born son and heir. There are reasons I married her 
Compatibly twisted sense of humor is really high on that list.
The problem is that it’s not really practical in many circumstances. Even societies that practice polygyny (and it’s mostly that form; there are only 4 cultures cited in ethnographic journals as practicing polyandry) it’s not the norm. Having more than one wife is usually a status symbol, a show of wealth, and only occasionally from mutual need and support. If we were still primarily agriculturalists, large groups such as poly or extended families would be great. But with an industrial pattern of living, poly marriages don’t offer huge benefits.
I’ve argued that what we’ve got in the US and most of the Western industrialized world is a dysfunctional version of polygamy. Divorced men end up paying for a separate household for their former wives, who may or may not remarry, and in either case that usually makes little difference in how much the man pays. He still has to pay to support his children, even if he isn’t allowed to see them due to a court decision or the wife’s interference. He gets none of the benefits of a poly marriage (group child rearing and shared household chores, sexual access to all of his wives, built-in peer group for his children) while still having all of the financial burdens of a multi-wife household. Plus extra costs since he can’t consolidate his household and has to maintain separate residences for them, and by extension his children if he doesn’t have custody.
It’s a shitty deal for men, not much better for some women. While she’s single and caring for a child or children, alimony and child support may help, but most likely she’s going to be in a low income bracket for a long time, she won’t have anyone else to help her out, much less someone to watch the kids while she works a full-time job, and it’s still harder for her to find a new husband. If she doesn’t get custody (though it’s rare that she won’t, even when the husband contests it) she’s probably better off in some ways. Women almost never pay child support or palimony. Still, she’ll end up being alone and not getting to see her kids very often, living with a statistically lower income and lower chance of remarrying.
I’m not saying that legal polygamous marriage would solve a lot of problems—on the contrary, it would probably create a few new ones—but it might provide a better living situation for some people some of the time. It might change the marriage dynamics favorably. Don’t know for sure, since it really, really depends on the original couple. There’s no practical reason it couldn’t work. As I pointed out, in a lot of ways our current divorce and child-custody system sucks ass. I really doubt having legal poly marriage would make it worse than it is already, and it might actually help.
I thought you were saying that an advantage would be having someone to care for you when your husband was dead. That’s how I took your comments about nursing homes and how women care for other people and then get left with no one to care for them.
I’m not limiting anything to polygyny in the OP, so it’s any arrangement of marriage or sex.
Wasn’t it Ed O’Neill who said while in character,
“Good Lord, I’ve got One wife; Why the Hell would I ever want Two???”
Of course not. I do not have such a small ego and penis that I need a bunch of slave wives to make me feel like a man.
So you’re not ruling out polyandry, I take it. 
My number one sexual fantasy has always been two women at the same time. Since that strongly appealed to me, I considered that two or more wives might be appealing too, but I’ve since realized I don’t have the personality for long term multiple partner relationships. Also, I have a hard enough time finding one girl I have chemistry with, let alone two.
That’s very close to how polygyny was described to me in social anthropology class. The only clarification I’d add is that typically it’s the first wife who chooses the secondary wives. It’s not so much a man with several wives as it is a woman with one husband and several “helper wives”.
If you approach marriage as an economic arrangement, polygamy makes sense, particularly when it’s very labor intensive to maintain a household. If you don’t have the option of buying things like pre-made clothing or bread (and have to sew most/all of your family’s clothes, cook everything from scratch, etc.), having several people pool their labor into one large household can be very efficient.
That said, I’m not convinced that polygamy is compatible with my modern Western concept of romantic love. The only way I’d consider polygamy is if I were to have my heart broken one to many times and give up on romance entirely, but still want to raise a whole passel of kids.
I could maybe imagine a hypothetical situation where I have a boyfriend and we decide to be in an open relationship with another couple. But realistically I doubt we’d ever meet a couple that would be such a perfect match. Relationships take a lot of work. Trying to sustain a relationship with three people sounds exhausting to me.
In theory, sure. In practice, extremely unlikely.
In my observation, women don’t want to join my harem. They want to join Brad Pitt’s harem.
I’m sort of inclined to agree with Sleel’s analysis.
With all you read in the tabloids about messy divorces, I can’t help thinking that polygamy might be slightly preferable to serial monogamy. If some rich man wants another woman, might as well formalize it, and make him take responsibility for her children and her medical insurance.