I hope that my title makes sense. I am half Middle Eastern. My family was never religious with Islam (where a man can have 4 wives), and the country my family is from is not really into polygyny and is more modern than other countries are. I don't want to say where I am from for privacy.
For many years, I wondered how women in polygyny can tolerate it. I know they are usually forced to, culturally or otherwise. But I always thought that the wives were married to a man they all love and that they were all jealous of each other and fighting.
And men, men online make it sound like these dudes with multiple wives are all alphas and the women are all adoring them and longing jealously for them.
As I get older, I realized something. The women who are in polygamous marriages tolerate it because the men they are with tend to be scrotey at best. The women can't leave like in the west. Leaving an abusive marriage in the west is often not easy either. So the next best thing is if he leaves you alone most of the time to be with his other wives and you can just manage the house in peace.
An extreme example: Let's say you're 16 years old and wealthy in the Middle East and forced to be the fourth wife of a 50 year old prince. In the first several montns of marriage, he makes life a traumatic nightmare because you're his new toy and he's old and you're not. I'll spare the details. Then, at some point you get pregnant. Once you start to show, he loses his attraction to you. He goes off to be with his other wives while you're alone in a palace with a jillion servants. At that time, you're not saying "wow, what an alpha Chad!" Nope. You're saying "thank God he's with his other wives, hopefully he gets so distracted by them that he never comes back". It a shitty cycle of getting pregnant and being left alone, but since he's a wealthy prince you have nannies and caregivers. The only thing is that I would spend the entire time freaking out about my daughters.
And the other three wives are also thinking the same thing. "Thank God he's gone, hopefully he gets so distracted by his other wives that he never comes back and I can just manage this house in peace". I would just spend my time hoping and wishing he never comes back and just hangs Out with the other wives indefinitely. Menopause and old age is a blessing because it means he's less likely to want to do "you know what".
And the old dude in this story is saying to himself "women love to share me, because I am a prince and I am rich and I am alpha and high value". No. They all hate him. They love to share him because it means less time with him. I am convinced that this is how a lot of women live and many women in history have lived.
The reward of marriage is to keep the treatment a male provides and if that treatment is lv it will never work for the woman