‘It’s risky business emotionally’: the social shift towards open relationships
(www.theguardian.com)
No conspiracy, let me shed some light. First, open and poly relationships don't work if anyone involved is especially possessive. I don't mean like a little jealous, or slightly insecure (that can be worked through) I mean one person expects a fair bit of say over one or multiple others lives.
Assuming you now only have a pool of a few reasonably well adjusted emotionally people (well adjusted socially is nice but not requisite) you can now just have N people agree they like each other and want to be together, but like occasionally hook up outside the group either under some arbitrary rule such as being in different zip codes from everyone else or just in general so long as proper precautions are taken. You have a core group of N people who are emotionally and financially intertwined and N+X people who happen to have all hooked up.
It's a fine system, have almost never been monogamous, and it's just like the times I was monogamous except no one is going to be upset about random hookups unless there was a generally accepted rule broken. I also personally find a core group of N=3 to be the roughly ideal number, but everyone's mileage will vary.
Though I suspect that societal normalization will be informed by the economic situation. The reality is if you can't afford to live without 3 incomes everyone will eventually organize around 3 person core households and society will defend the new tradition or whatever.
Of course somewhere in there a lot of people have to give up on religious and social hangups but that's already in progress if the number of articles like this coming out is steadily increasing (it is)