Not all women are so possessive.
In fact, some women would probably find it comforting that there are other women in the household to chat with.
Done right, I am sure they would come to love each other as sisters.
And a husband taking an additional wife is less threatening to an existing wife than a husband being forced to chose between marrying his new girlfriend and divorcing his wife, or keeping his wife and losing his girlfriend.
All because he cannot marry both.
"Not all women are so possessive."
That's not the only issue.
Admittedly I am judging by the only standard I have, which is my own experience.
My wife and I, over almost 19 years of marriage, have developed a level of emotional intimacy that I will arbitrarily designate as "maximal" for us.
I think it would be impossible for me to develop and maintain that same level of intimacy with two or more women at the same time. Since I think I am fairly ordinary, that leads me to doubt that any man could develop and maintain his personal level of maximum intimacy with two or more women.
That would mean that a man with more than one wife would be shortchanging all but one of them. In that situation, he might be unable to develop maximum intimacy with any of them, and so would be shortchanging all of them *and* himself.
In a monogamous society, a married couple reach a point at which they say, "Okay, we're middle-aged, we're not 'hot' any more, but we have this relationship of love and trust, shared adversities and joys, and that is a much deeper and more mature kind of happiness than sexual adventurism." In a polygamous society, maybe instead the man goes out and gets himself a new eighteen-year-old wife.
It's "one flesh," not "two fleshes" or "six fleshes."
Sure, we all know what kind of urges men have. As Jeff Foxworthy says, you see an old guy going down the hall at the old-folks home with a walker, and what he's thinking is, "I'd like a beer, and I'd like to see something naked."
But the greater happiness, and the greater good for society, is to be found in putting that aside and cleaving to your wife. Singular.
Motherbear despises people who believe in polygamy.
I personally think that, even in our monogamous society, guys who chuck their wife and kids for a younger woman are even worse.