Mono or Poly?

Should you be monogamous or polyamorous? Tell me about you and what you want from a relationship, and see where people like you are most likely to get it.

I am:

Age:

Are you in a relationship?

In your ideal relationship, how do you feel about:

People like you, with your values

Each point: on average, how often people like you at that level have what you said you want, weighted by how strongly you feel about each thing. Grey band: 95% range from refitting on resampled data. Under each level: how many people of your gender answered from there. * Fewer than 50, so that point leans more on people with other answers and is rougher than the band suggests.

Notes

Data: 52,410 people who took my Your Relationship survey (December 2022 to September 2026), answering about their primary or longest current relationship. Most things in the list above match an agree/disagree statement they answered (for example, "My partner takes priority over everything else in my life"); agreeing means answering 1 to 3 on a −3 to +3 scale.

Four are facts they reported instead, since that's where monogamous relationships do best: staying together, getting married (married to this partner), kids (with this partner), and cheating (nobody in the relationship has cheated, by their own definition). Staying together counts half as being together 5+ years (your own time together isn't used for this) and half as thinking the relationship will last a very long time. Marriage, kids and 5+ years are about where people end up, so if you're under 40 they use people at each level around age 40 (the numbers stop changing after that; at 25, mono and poly people don't differ yet).

"Like you" means your gender, age, and, if you said so, time together and your partner's interest in other partners. I tested 13 traits; these are ones that change how the mono-to-poly pattern looks, on people the model hadn't seen. Religion, politics, number of sex partners, porn, income, kids and a same-sex partner didn't. How much you'd want other partners yourself changes it too, but it isn't asked, because that's close to asking whether you want to be poly; each level stands for the people actually there.

If you're single, or skip time together or your partner's interest, each level uses what's typical for people like you at that level. Poly relationships tend to be newer, for example.

The other things to rate are from my Relationship Desires test on Glosso, with its wording (the answer options are simplified here). The score only counts the ones you rated; "Not important" leaves a thing out. "Dislike/dealbreaker" counts a little less than "Must have" (2.5 vs 3).

For each statement there's one model: the six levels, each trait, and how each trait changes the pattern across levels (shrunk toward no change, so thin groups don't make noise). Checked against real groups of 100+ people (level × women/men × age band), it lands within twice the sampling error 97% of the time, usually within about a point.

This shows where people like you report having what you want, not what would happen if you switched. People who are very poly chose it, and may differ from you in ways the survey doesn't capture. Everything is self-reported, and my survey takers skew young, liberal and online.