City Pages (Minneapolis) article

Ravenscroft

Banned
February 28, 2018: "Meetthe Minnesotans finding love through polyamory"

Not a terrible article, & quite poly-friendly, but often talking out its journalistic ass with unsubstantiated claims --
MNPoly, a St. Paul-based meetup group, boasts more than 1,200 members.
Umm... well, that's more likely all the people that have EVER signed up, possibly dating back to its inception in the late 1990s. Heck, I was there; the biggest meeting I attended was maybe 25 people.

And we might be impressed by another dubious factoid --
Nationally, it's estimated that 5 percentof the population has some sort of non-monogamous structure in their relationship.
Well, duh: think of all the cheaters, & now the virtual affairs, plus those who re thinking about doing it... :rolleyes:

As for "Minnesotans," it's mostly about two vees, an open marriage, & one woman's intimate network, all apparently from the Twin Cities.

One commenter says
City pages discovers old people and Tinder. 2004 is soooo cool.
(referring in part to other articles in that issue) which made me laugh. Actually, the writer DOES appear clueless that CP has been there before: October 10, 2012, "Polyamory in the Twin Cities, which talks about one vee & one woman's hope of getting around to forming an intimate network, & mentions that MN Poly has "a couple hundred active members."
 
And we might be impressed by another dubious factoid --
Quote:
Nationally, it's estimated that 5 percent of the population has some sort of non-monogamous structure in their relationship.
Well, duh: think of all the cheaters, & now the virtual affairs, plus those who re thinking about doing it...

It seems that I did read somewhere as I first began researching poly that there were estimates that as many 10 million married couples in the United States actively participated in some form of consensual non-monogamy (including open relationships, swinging, poly, etc). I don't recall the source at the moment, however, but undoubtedly could be Googled.
 
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Yeah I think the number of people having affairs would be much higher ...
 
Yeah I think the number of people having affairs would be much higher ...

I'm inclined to agree with you, Kevin - in fact, I would very surprised if that were not true. Al
 
Kinsey et al. said something about a high likelihood of men having extramarital sex by their seventh anniversaries; certainly not so low as 5%.

Eh -- could be muddling of terminology, too. There's plenty of people who claim monogamy, yet have multiple/serial sex partners (excused as "just looking for The Right One"); the more recent variant seems to get the wink-&-nod as the trendy "hook-up culture."

Being one of those rare Google-literate people :)rolleyes:), I easily found "How Common is Consensual Nonmonogamy?" (2015)

From 2,395 subjects, a study published 2014 had found that "5.3% of participants identified that their relationship was CNM."

But there's a caveat: "[c]ompared to participants who said they were monogamous, those who reported engaging in consensual non-monogamy were significantly more likely to be male and to be non-heterosexual."

(It just now occurs to me that an old code word for an open (DADT) marriage was "separate vacations.")

This CNM seems to include a lot of Monogamists who might be uncomfortable in the same box with polyfolk.

Certainly, some people ARE going to be confused by the notion "CNM = polyamory." Like, there's an article, "New Sexual Revolution: Polyamory May Be Good For You" that, despite that headline, glibly says stuff like
These consensually nonmonogamous relationships, as they're called...

The study of consensual nonmonogamy is a relatively new field.

...little is yet known about who participates in consensual nonmonogamy and why.

Consensual nonmonogamy does not include cheating...
then suddenly veers back toward poly like an angry drunk with a stolen truck:
One thing that seems to unite the polyamorous community...

If you ask most people how they'd feel if their partner had sex with or fell in love with someone else, the responses would be pretty negative ... . Ask a polyamorous person the same question, and they're more likely to tell you they'd be thrilled.

None of this suggests that polyamorous people are somehow immune to jealousy...
This terminological muddying seems (IMNSHO) either airhead clueless or intentionally dishonest, which is why I'm irritated that it's a 2013 article in Scientific American.
 
Being one of those rare Google-literate people

Ok, I confess, it was almost 2AM and I was sitting at the computer because I couldn't sleep - and really just didn't feel like doing the Google search for the random factoid that crossed my mind. :rolleyes:

But, since it's only midnight tonight - here it is:

From Psychology Today online (May 9, 2014) - How Many Polyamorists Are There in the U.S.? by Elizabeth Shef

(And I know that she is well regarded - I've read the accolades, but I did not especially think that her pamphlet on "When someone you know is poly" was particularly well done - although I haven't read her books yet - so can't really be a fair judge.)


The most reasoned estimate of the number of poly people in the U.S. comes from Kelly Cookson, an independent academic who looked at a lot of research and then compared the percent of bisexuals in poly research to the percent of bisexuals in a national survey to inform his estimate. In an email interaction, Kelly Cookson summarized his results for me: “It appears that sexually non-monogamous couples in the United States number in the millions. Estimates based on actually trying sexual non-monogamy are around 1.2 to 2.4 million. An estimate based solely on the agreement to allow satellite lovers is around 9.8 million. These millions include poly couples, swinging couples, gay male couples, and other sexually non-monogamous couples.”

So this particular estimate is for approximately 10 million couples who have agreed to "allow other lovers"- as I quoted last night. But - as Ravenscroft has noted in his post, there are so many factors involved in these studies - including terminology, personal interpretations of that terminology, straight and gay variances, etc - that it makes it difficult to really have any idea of what the actual number might be of those couples who CNM, much less poly.
And, I really don't understand how the statement goes from 9.8 million couples who "allow" it - to only a couple of million who actually try it - doesn't really compute for me.
 
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