Talk:Polygamy

Polygamy vs. polyamory
Interestingly, polyamory is increasingly popular these days, especially in the lesbian community. I've been involved in some pretty creative romantic arrangements in the past few years as a result. But more egalitarian than what's described here, by far. --Kels 21:13, 5 August 2007 (CDT)
 * *jaw drops* Not to be crude, but you might have just made every guy here drool on his keyboard.  Thank you.  Thank you so much. ThunderkatzHo! 21:17, 5 August 2007 (CDT)
 * My work here is done. =P  --Kels 21:24, 5 August 2007 (CDT)
 * As someone else who has been involved in a polyamorous relationship, I concur with its importance. Researcher 10:27, 15 January 2008 (EST)

"Polyandry in human societies occurs so rarely outside the Himilayas, that the articles focus on Polygyny makes sense. [any decent Anthropology course] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandry covers that issue well. But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygyny gives the subjects spectacular support as of 2008.01.14 Overall the article covers its chosen perspective. " (moved from article to here by PFoster) Jan 2008

Maybe we should 1. cover worldwide polygamy better, and 2. have an article on (modern) polyamory? human  08:15, 15 January 2008 (EST)
 * Yeah, polygamy and polyamory are different (and endorsed by totally different groups, and for different reasons) and should be covered in separate articles. L&#39;s Ideology (talk) 17:21, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

term needed
I know it's nit-pickky, but, in the 2nd para of the intro, we say something like: "bigomy is the crime of entering into two **legal** marriages". I get what we are trying to say, but it's kinda wrong - they aren't legal if they are illegal. I'm looking for a term for 'civil marriage" but can't come up with anything. Ideas?--Godot When I graduated, Cognative Science of Religion didn't even exist! now it's everywhere  15:34, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
 * "two legally binding marriages in a jurisdiction that recognizes only monogamous marriages"?--ZooGuard (talk) 16:05, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

couple typos, not sure how to correct: Under the "Islam" heading, it says " any unmarried woman is unable to obtain a divorce," which doesn't make sense. Obviously this is true, since if you aren't married, you cannot divorce. I'm not sure what was originally intended here.

Also under that heading, in the second paragraph, it says, "the law prohibits legal recognition of more than one law." I'm guessing it was intended to read "more than one marriage" or "more than one wife" or something to that effect. Again, I'm not sure how best to correct this. Mcnamara12 (talk) 14:35, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

A debate on polygamy?
Should this really be something supported on this site? Consensual relationships between many parties is one thing, but polygamy's a different animal. It's been tried for thousands of years by every culture under the sun, and never caused anything but social destruction. The top 1% of men always end up hoarding the lower classes women for themselves. Women get married at younger ages due to short supply. The sister wives never have good relationships with each other. The children never have good relationships with their father. Resources are never fairly distributed within families. Fathers waste resources they should be spending on the family they already have chasing more wives. An underclass of lonely, unmarried, angry, young male castoffs is created. And even if society were to allow both polygyny and polyandry, women wouldn't partake because women in most societies don't get anything out of polygamy they can't get out of having an affair since women can't impregnate multiple people like men. Surely if there was a way to make polygamy work alongside a civilization worth living in someone would've come up with a way to do it after thousands of years?

There should at least be a debate on this: Should the site take a positive, negative, or neutral view of polygamy? &#42;Asterisk* (talk) 07:03, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 *  The top 1% of men always end up hoarding the lower classes women for themselves. - there's an interesting statement. There are two very disturbing implications, one about the grading of men and, more importantly, another about the ownership of women. Cloud Yeller (talk) 09:06, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, that's the "one rich man/many wives" model. What about the "three men/four women" version? I wrote about this somewhere on humanthoughts, I think.  Something about the inner workings of the "family corporation" being no one else's worry.  ħ uman [[Image:human sig talk.gif|link=User talk:Human|User talk:Human]] 01:20, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
 * From a purely theoretical point of view, I don't see a problem with polygamy (as long as it means both polygyny and polyandry, of course). If I had to create a new civilization from scratch, I'd probably explicitly allow polygamy (while probably making a marriage contract mandatory in marriage clusters involving more than two persons) while pointing out that it's somewhat experimental, so they are on their own in figuring out how to manage their marriage cluster. That being said, I'm slightly autistic and haven't been in a relationship so far, so it's possible that I'm overlooking something important. 217.81.202.96 (talk) 21:35, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You're very honest to lay down the facts about your own perspective and (lack of) experience. However — regarding your views — I humbly suggest you take this from someone with some experience. And don't get me wrong — that isn't "the be-all, end-all" of the issue; It's just a very important aspect to it. All the best, Reverend Black Percy (talk) 22:11, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Polyandry
Polygamy is more correctly having more than one wife; polyandry is having more than one husband. Is this still the case in modern usage? If so, we need to address this more clearly somehow.  ħ uman  23:45, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Polygyny, polyandry, polygamy. Two circles for the Venn diagram the way I would draw it, not being any kind of taxonomic pundit. CamelCasePragmatist (talk) 23:56, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Doh, got it, thanks!  ħ uman [[Image:human sig talk.gif|link=User talk:Human|User talk:Human]] 01:18, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Questions about polygyny
Several lengthy threads moved to forum:questions about polygyny. 17:58, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

At what point
... does the number of 'wives, concubines and other females available to the male in question' become impractical for the husband to 'deal with'? Anna Livia (talk) 14:09, 11 October 2019 (UTC)