My post Relationship Tragedies Created by Social Expectations resulted in many comments that were not easily answered in a few sentences so created this blog post.

Rolf asks:

Clarifying questions:
To the best of your knowledge, what sort of women in terms of socio-economic status and attractiveness are into poly, and the same for men? (either citable stats or anecdotal is fine, noted accordingly)

How often do poly-interested women want to bang low and mid socioeconomic men or average to ugly men?

On average, to the best of your knowledge, how many kids do the average poly person have?

I have not had much contact with people identifying as poly. My post was about Ethical Non-Monogamy (ENM in the literature and frequently in Internet Discussions). Polyamorous culture is a subset of ENM. I do not know any polyamorous couples well enough to know if they have children or the types of men the women are interested in.

With the broader term of ENM, I have a few data points.

• Couple A in British Columbia. She married her first and only sex partner until sometime after their two children were born. It would be hard to find someone of higher socio-economic status than her husband. While not billionaires, they are multimillionaires. They work and socialize with very wealthy people and high-ranking people in government. They are invited to and attend sex parties and clubs that are dominated by middle class people. Their physical attractiveness and condition are nothing out of the ordinary.
• Couple B in British Columbia. She is significantly younger, perhaps 15 years, than her husband. She is quite attractive and in good physical shape. He is more ordinary but still above average. The have no children. They travel in the same sexual social circles as Couple A.
• Couple in Northwest Washington. They were both virgins when they got married and were very active in their church. They have two children. After the children were in their early teens they decided to find out what it was like to have sex with someone else. He is above average in appearance. She is average. Socio-economic status of their sexual social circles is middle class.
• Couple C in the Seattle area. He is above average in appearance. She is average with a bit of extra weight. Middle class. No children. Socio-economic status of their sexual social circles is middle class.
• Couple D in the Seattle area. Both are a bit above average in appearance but have a little bit of extra weight. It was the first marriage for him and the third for her. He has one (or two) children from a previous relationship. She has five children all from previous partners. They are middle class with sexual social circle also middle class.
• Couple E in the Seattle area. They are both a bit above average in appearance. Middle class. Second marriage for both of them. She has more than one child from a previous marriage and (I think) five grandchildren. He has at least one (and probably two) children from a previous marriage. They attend and host house parties, swinger cruises, and sex clubs with a middle-class background.
• A single woman in the Portland area. I don’t know her marriage history, but she has two or more children. She was a stripper for many years and migrated to being a flight attendant. She is quite attractive but has a few extra pounds. She has a single male friend that frequently attends sex clubs and house parties with her.
• Couple in central Oregon. He is quite attractive. She is significantly above average. They have at least one child. Upper middle class on the socio-economic scale. They travel in at least some of the circles that Couple A & B do.
• Couple F in southern California. Both are a bit below average in appearance but probably top 3% in wealth. They have two (or three) children. They attend and host house parties and visit clubs (where she enjoys gang bangs), hotel takeovers, and swinger cruises. She told me that she and her husband estimate she has had sex with over 600 men.
• Couple G in southern California. He is quite good looking and in good physical condition. She is slender but average in appearance. They are quite wealthy with two homes in the 15-to-20-million-dollar range and travel in private jets, and the most expensive suites on swinger cruises. They host house parties where most of the guests are of the middle class. They have one child.
• Couple H in Minnesota. Two children and two or three grandchildren. Middle class socioeconomic status and similar socio-sexual circle.
• Couple I in Colorado. Probably in the top 1% socio-economic class. He is quite good looking. She is probably 40th percentile because of some excess weight. No children. Middle class socio-sexual circle.

Rolf also comments:

Since in “ENM” “ethical” is stipulated but not defined when for many “ENM” is an oxymoron, for the purposes of this reply I’ll call it “consensual promiscuousness dressed up in polite linguistic attire.”

I probably should have used the phrase Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM).

Rolf then goes on with what, at best, can be called a reasonable hypothesis that he presents as factual without any good evidence. His assertions are not supported by what little contact I have with this world, what I read, or what AI’s I query on the topic (see below) have to say. These people trend up on the socio-economic scale and but trend egalitarian and trend only a little low in fertility.

Some books I have read on the topic and highly recommend:

The Gilmartin Report includes interviews with the children of swinger couples. One would think that if they were traumatized or otherwise felt their family environment was harmful it would have reported it.

Sex at Dawn looks at evolutionarily close relatives of humans, some primitive human tribes, and even some fairly modern cultures which regard sexual monogamy as abnormal.

Insatiable Wives is mind warping. There is a subculture of swingers where the men encourage their wives to have sex with other men. They don’t necessarily want to have sex with other women and get highly aroused watching, and/or hearing about, their wives having sex with other men. This book is a scholarly look at that subculture.

In real life, one woman I know posed nude for her husband so he could post the pictures of her on reddit. She also reported she and her husband did not have sex more than once a month and then the attempt frequently failed. She also reported he would get excited about posting another nude of her or getting lots of comments from men about the posted pictures. but that excitement did not transfer to interest in sex with her. I suspected he was building up to having his wife have sex with other men. I gave her this book. Not too long after that he lost interest in posting the pictures. Their sex life remains poor. I don’t really get this. Neither does his wife.

This magazine article from 2019 reports exactly what I heard from a woman in the late 1990s who found sex clubs to be her answer:

The problem is not that they are functionally unable to have sex, or to have orgasms. Or frequency. It’s that the sex they’re having isn’t what she wants,” Gotzis told me in a recent phone conversation. And like other straight women he sees, “she’s confused and demoralized by it. She thinks there’s something wrong with her.” 

A court actually ruled on this very topic:

Group sex between consenting adults is neither prostitution nor a threat to society, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Wednesday, dismissing arguments that the sometimes raucous activities of so-called “swingers” clubs were dangerous.

Speaking of courts… Justice Scalia had something to say about sex parties:

I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.

First hand reports:

I was driving around late one night and turned around in a motel parking lot. These two truck drivers asked me to have coffee with them … it was the first time I ever had sex with two men at the same time.  It was like being plugged into an electric circuit — I knew then I could never be in a sexually monogamous relationship again.

Susie
Member of a swingers club.
December 9, 1997

started dating new person for first time in like 4 years and i forgot how friggin good sex is in the beginning right after the initial ‘getting to learn bodies’ hump

Aella @Aella_Girl
Posted on X August 23, 2026

Grok has some information on the topic (follow this link for the same text as below with sources):

The short version: visible poly communities look more educated and White than the country as a whole; representative surveys of who has actually done poly or broader ethical non-monogamy look much more ordinary on income and race. There is almost no published data on attractiveness. There is no study that answers “how often poly women want low-SES or unattractive men.” Fertility numbers for “the average poly person” do not exist; the pieces we have point toward fewer children than average, not more.

Polyamory is a subset of ethically non-monogamous (ENM / CNM) practice. The two answers therefore overlap a lot. Where they differ, I note it.

---

1. Socioeconomic status and attractiveness

What the data actually say about SES

There are two kinds of samples, and they disagree.

Community / convenience samples (Loving More 2012, older ethnography, people who show up at poly events or take poly-branded surveys):

• High education is common. In the 2012 Loving More survey (~3,500 self-identified poly people), 35% had a bachelor’s and 27% a graduate degree, versus much lower shares in the general U.S. adult population at the time.
• Older writeups described poly and swinging scenes as middle / upper-middle class on education and income, and heavily White.

That is who is visible and easy to survey, not necessarily who does it.

More representative or larger comparison samples tell a different story:

• Haupert et al. (2017), two large U.S. samples of singles: lifetime CNM was not associated with education, income, race, religion, region, or politics. Men and sexual minorities were more likely to report it.
• Moors, Gesselman & Garcia (2021), U.S. Census-quota sample of ~3,400 singles: ~11% had ever been in a polyamorous relationship; ~17% wanted to. No differences by income, race, politics, religion, or region. Men and people with lower education were more likely to have done it. Sexual minorities, men, and younger adults wanted it more.
• Balzarini et al. (2019), large online comparison (not a probability sample): people in poly relationships were more likely to earn under $40k than monogamous respondents, more often divorced, and far more often bisexual / pansexual / non-binary. Education and race differences were small.
• Slate’s 2024 summary of later work (~15,000 participants across studies): CNM is not consistently tied to income, education, or being White. Current poly samples sometimes even lean lower income.

So: the stereotype “poly = rich, White, highly educated coastal professionals” is mostly a description of the organized scene and early research samples. Population-style surveys of behavior find CNM and even poly experience spread across income and education, with men overrepresented and (in one poly-specific study) a small tilt toward less education among people who have actually tried it.

Women vs men on SES of participants:

• Men report more desire and more past engagement than women in representative work.
• Community poly surveys sometimes have more women than men among respondents; that is recruitment, not a census of practitioners.

Attractiveness

There is no serious published dataset that scores physical attractiveness of poly vs monogamous people. Anything you hear about “hot people in poly” or “poly is for people who can’t get a monogamous partner” is anecdote or selection into photos and events.

What does exist:

• A 2026 mate-preference study of monogamous vs polyamorous people found both groups most often wanted two “well-rounded” partners (kindness, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.). Monogamous men were more likely than monogamous women to prioritize “good in bed + attractive” for at least one partner. Among poly participants that gender gap shrank; both sexes still valued attractiveness, and women still weighted kindness highly. Status was not the top trait.
• Ordinary mating-market findings still apply unless proven otherwise: women, on average, are pickier than men about status and resources; men are pickier about looks; both sexes prefer attractive partners; people usually pair with others near their own attractiveness band.

Anecdotal (clearly labeled): In urban poly scenes, women—especially bisexual women—often report more inbound interest than comparable monogamous dating. That is about volume of options, not proof that the women in those scenes are unusually attractive or that they date down.

---

2. How often do poly-interested women want low/mid-SES or average-to-ugly men?

No study measures this. There is no paper that asks poly-identified women how often they pursue low-SES or below-average-looking men.

What we can say without inventing data:

• Female mate preferences do not appear to flip just because the relationship style is non-monogamous. Women still, on average, care more than men about a partner’s resources, status, and “well-roundedness.” Attractiveness still matters to both sexes.
• More options usually raise, not lower, selectivity. If poly-interested women have more suitors (a common field report), they have less reason to accept men they would reject in monogamy.
• “Unicorn hunting” and similar complaints in the scene are about couples seeking a specific extra woman, not about women flooding toward low-status men.
• Mid-SES men are a large share of the population; some of them will be partners in any large dating pool. That is not the same as a preference for low status or low attractiveness.

Best honest answer: Rarely as a preference. Some sexual/romantic pairings with mid-SES or average-looking men obviously happen, as they do everywhere. There is no evidence that poly-interested women systematically want low-SES or unattractive men, and general sex-difference research plus the one poly preference study point the other way.

Anecdote from the commentariat (not science): heterosexual men in open/poly arrangements often discover that their female partner gets more attention than they do. That is consistent with women remaining selective, not with women “banging down.”

---

3. How many kids does the average poly person have?

Unknown. There is no representative fertility figure.

What exists:

• Eli Sheff’s longitudinal work (since 1996) follows poly families that already have children—by design, not a random poly sample. Those kids, in her interviews, often look emotionally healthy and benefit from extra adults; the sample is small, selected, and not a fertility census.
• A Canadian poly survey cited in later work: about 23% of respondents lived full-time with at least one child 18 or under. That is household composition among people who answered a poly survey, not completed fertility.
• Poly-identified samples skew urban, delayed family formation, high rates of bisexuality/queerness, and (in community samples) high education—all traits linked to lower completed fertility in rich countries.
• Broader research on unrestricted sociosexuality in WEIRD populations often finds a negative within-country association with number of children, especially for women.

Best estimate, labeled as such: the average self-identified poly person almost certainly has fewer children than the average same-age monogamous person, with a large childfree share and many one-child households among those who parent. Poly families that choose kids look more like 1–3 children with extra adults around, not high fertility. Nobody has published “mean number of children = X.”

---

Same questions with “ethically non-monogamous” instead of “poly”

ENM / CNM is the bigger bucket: open relationships, swinging, polyamory, “monogamish,” etc.

SES and attractiveness (ENM)

This is where the representative data are strongest.

• Lifetime CNM in U.S. singles: about 1 in 5. Current CNM among adults is often estimated around 4–5%, depending on definition and year.
• Haupert et al. and related reviews: no reliable link to income, education, race, religion, politics, or region. Consistent correlates: male sex and LGB+ identity.
• National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior-style work on open relationships: men and gay/lesbian/bisexual people overrepresented; income and education not significant predictors.
• Swinging, as a distinct ENM style, in older studies looked more middle-aged, White, and middle/upper-middle class than poly community samples—but those too were convenience samples.

Attractiveness: still unmeasured. Swinging scenes are often described anecdotally as more “couples who already matched on conventional attractiveness,” but that is scene ethnography, not a rating study.

Women vs men: men report more CNM experience across studies. That does not mean ENM women are a different SES/attractiveness class; it means more men say yes to the behavior.

How often do ENM-interested women want low/mid-SES or average-to-ugly men?

Same as poly, with even less reason to expect a special preference: not as a pattern that research has found. Swinging is often couple-driven and looks-matched. Open relationships among heterosexuals still run on ordinary female selectivity. Bisexual women are overrepresented in ENM and expand the partner pool, which again tends to increase choice, not force dating down.

Kids among ENM people

Still no average. Lifetime CNM includes many people who were non-monogamous in a college or early-adult window and later had ordinary monogamous families. Current ENM parents exist in meaningful numbers (Alarie 2024 and related family research), but ENM as a whole is not a high-fertility subculture. Expect at or below general-population fertility for people who stay ENM through prime childbearing years; higher than “poly-identified and childfree by ideology,” lower than religious monogamous groups.

---

Caveats worth putting on the blog

• “Poly” in a probability survey (“have you had a committed romantic/sexual relationship with more than one person at once?”) is not the same as “I live in a polycule and go to munches.”
• Almost all of this is U.S./Western. Other countries will differ.
• Attractiveness and “who women will sleep with” are the weakest parts of the evidence. Anyone claiming a precise percentage is guessing.
• SES of visible poly and SES of people who have ever tried CNM are different facts. Both can be true at once.