polyandrous

If monogamous and polygynous societies are more common than polyandrous and polycular societies, it's probably for a reason.

In the stories, the polyandrous arrangement also serves as a small military force, highly motivated to protect its leader.

Almost all of the few polyandrous societies practice what anthropologists call fraternal polyandry, where a group of brothers shares a wife.

To be clear, wife-sharing isn't polyandrous (one wife many husbands).

I am not sure how well Heinlein's polyandrous Loonies[1] would match real-life scenarios.

Fathers may be fathers of children not biologically related to them in societies which practice wife-loaning and wife-swapping, or in polyandrous cultures even without anything like an adoption involved.

[edit] to get the math right a polygamous/polyandrous relationship maxes out at n-1 contracts.

For example, I support the legal right to polygamous/polyandrous marriages since social norms, expectations, and the like I think are wholly separate from the job of the government.

In societies where resources are scarce, for instance, polyandrous societies are more common, because it's more important that individual children are given the appropriate nutrition and protection than it is to ensure that the birth rate is maximized.

There's this woman, Allia Potestas [1], who is notable just because we happen to have her epitaph, and the epitaph happens to mention details of some sort of polyandrous relationship configuration that she had.

In one formerly polyandrous culture (the Todas of India), a woman would ceremonially choose the socially recognized father of her children, and if she changed that choice for future children, she would have to go back and ritually designate a different husband.

Matt Ridley's The Red Queen also discusses this particular culture, being one of the extremely small number of polyandrous (one wife, multiple husbands) cultures ever known to have existed, in contrast to the extremely large number of polygamous (one husband, multiple wives) cultures.

My current girlfriend and various women I knew in college have reported to me encounter frequencies of 3X per day during their 20's, along with their male partners at the time basically complaining of that rate being "unsustainable." It may well be possible for certain women to be able to sustain polyandrous relationships, and for them to benefit from such relationships while acting as a moderating force in society.