Sometimes the Discourse touches upon whether polyamory increases the number of single men. (I haven’t yet heard the symmetric concern voiced, so I’ll focus on single men here.)

So, naturally, I modeled a polyamorous dating market by adapting the Gale-Shapley stable mate-allocation algorithm. My tentative tldr is: polyamory decreases number of forlorn men if guys and gals are equally polyamorous (as is true in my little bubble), and increases that number if men are moderately more polyamorous.

Since we all already know that I’m woke, I’m gonna live dangerously and not put any disclaimers here about gender or about how math is dangerous. So, here we go:

Adapting Gale-Shapley to polyamory was surprisingly straightforward: guys keep going down their lists until they’re polysaturated; gals accept offers (made by acceptable guys) until they’re polysaturated, then accept any offer made by a guy they like more than one of their existing boyfriends.

(Also, nobody will be partnerless if both sexes are equally numerous and equally polyamorous and having more partners is always better until you’re polysaturated. The first two assumptions are true in my experience, but the third isn’t, so I also gave each person a “pickiness” where if they’re insufficiently attracted to somebody then they won’t even consider dating them.)

Independent of the algorithm itself, there are free parameters in describing the people executing it, i.e. in the correlation between people’s preferences: some people are super hot and will be in high demand. I decided each person’s attractiveness was ~Normal(0,1), and any person’s attractedness to anybody else was ~Normal(other’s attractiveness, 1).

Running the model in a few conditions (monogamy; polyamory where everybody tops out at [2/3] partners; and polyamory where guys are more polyamorous than gals) produced the following results:

Comparing the left-hand sides of the (red, green, blue) lines, we see that polyamory on its own decreases the number of single men; that number only starts increasing when the guys start becoming more polyamorous than the gals (black and magenta lines).

Obviously this is a high-accuracy model of reality, and polyamory being objectively a good thing is now mathematically proven.