I think it's nearly impossible to find a man or woman who *wants* to deal with the kind of sleep disruption that a newborn typically brings, but plenty of people want large families, and so they make the tradeoff, sometimes for many years.
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If you ask "wouldn't you prefer your baby never cry at night?" the answer might be yes, but that doesn't imply a similar answer to "wouldn't you prefer not to have a baby?" Likewise, sometimes wanting sex with others doesn't necessarily mean wanting a nonexclusive relationship.
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I think most people conflate categories here; college debt isn't an inherent part of education, and likewise I think forbidding your partner from having sex with others isn't an inherent part of commitment.
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I do think that some people really do want very specifically to prevent their partner from having sexual intimacy with anyone else, and then to be fair, they agree to the same stipulations for themselves.
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I think a ton of ppl get into monogamy as a proxy for commitment, without thinking it through. But also, as with college, there are some instances in which this arrangement does actually make sense for you even if you go into it fully aware.
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If you're a household with a median income, children (especially without the benefit of extended family/other caregivers), etc., the time/resource cost of multiple partners is high, and very often intolerably high if there is any possibility that other partners can fall pregnant.
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This is a bit funny because one of the most common positives I hear from poly families with kids is how it's much easier for them to take care of their children because there's more total adults. I do agree it could go either way though!
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I think people who want to take care of their beloved's partner's children are EXCEEDINGLY rare, but they certainly do exist and I'll bet they are very helpful
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It doesn't seem that crazy, lots of people help care for unrelated kids who live in their household. Communal childrearing works sometimes!
Also if you haven't seen it already, /r/polyfamilies is a subreddit for poly families, many of which have kids and talk about how it works
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I guess my take is that the vast majority of people feel sexual attraction to people outside their relationship, most of them at some point have stronger feelings for someone else, some of them want to make the tradeoffs for nonexclusivity, and few actually want a poly family
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I think I agree? I think also there's some fuzziness around 'want' here; lots of people functionally end up doing the discount-bin-poly version of family by having secret kids with multiple partners, and those might actually 'want' polyamory in a more permissive culture.
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tbh I think a lot of those people just don't want their partners to freely make their own choice about the tradeoffs of poly, because they might leave.
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