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Assume that every factor drops a person's chances by one in ten, because that way the math is easy.
This means that finding a partner under most circumstances (monogamous or poly) is a one-in-a-thousand chance (or, if you consider 'being poly' a factor, one in ten thousand):
- someone you find attractive
- who finds you attractive
- who is poly/poly-friendly
- with whom a relationship could be worked out
(Note that I'm rolling all of the actual human compatibility shit into 'with whom a relationship can be worked out'. So all the possibilities of incompatible politics, odious personal habits, simply unable to work the logistics over the circumstances, wanting children or not, discovering after five years that there is a painfully unresolvable incompatibility, and so on, is being lumped into a single factor.)
I don't know about anyone else, but 'one in a thousand' or 'one in ten thousand' strikes me as about right for what fraction of people I encounter might be potential partners, and even with those numbers if I plug in the population of the city in my profile I get 70 or at least 7 potential partners without considering travel.
Package-deal relationships, on the other hand, require:
- someone who finds you attractive
- who you find attractive
- who finds your partner attractive
- who your partner finds attractive
- who is poly
- who is willing to touch a package-deal relationship setup with a ten foot pole
- with whom a relationship could be worked out
Which is one in 10,000,000, and unlikely to live in my town or yours, though according to Wikipedia's current population notes, there are probably 31 in the US.
If one adds the standard UH criteria of "for an exclusive relationship", you've got added to that:
- who does not have any other partners
- who will agree to a closed relationship off the bat
And that, at one in a billion, means that of the seven or so on the planet, odds are decent that none may speak your language.
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Some of this expectation is based on the fact that triads and quads exist and do not seem horribly uncommon in my experience. Although I would guess that at least some of those are based on possibility of a relationship being quite positively correlated with already being partners-of-partners -- the ones I'm aware of have almost always formed a bond at a time rather than all at once.
On the other hand, I would guess that "is willing to touch a package-deal relationship" and "is willing to agree to a closed relationship" are likely to be anti-correlated.
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And the "a bond at a time" thing is the really critical - I have seen more than one person who was in a triad at the time say that they would never have gotten involved with either partner had the package-deal treatment been on the table. Package-deal is a big negative.
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Also, that "is poly" will tend to overlap with those traits, if "attractive" is presumed to include mental/emotional attractiveness.
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That hasn't been my experience. They seem to be pretty much independent variables to me.
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i'd say that "with whom a relationship could be worked out" covers many factors that aren't immediately apparent, though, so there are probably more unicorns available for six-month periods of time than these statistics suggest.
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