Yeah I think a lot of people’s perceptions of polyamory come from it being different from what people are used to resulting in things like frequency biases (watch someone do something they don’t have the skills for and have 3 bad breakups at once rather than over 3 years, even though each lasted the same amount of time), differing points of failure (boundaries of monogamy are assumed natural even though there are disagreements and therefore monogamy is assumed unrelated to the failure, meanwhile if rather than cheating being the cause of failure its someone neglecting an existing partner for a new one, then polyamory gets blamed), polyamory giving people enough rope to hang themselves, and the tendency for it to be a mid relationship change in the basic expectations and rules of the relationship which is something always fraught. I also think people go in not realizing that most of the good ones are already polysaturated and it’s largely the train wrecks and partner hoarders that are constantly seriously looking.

And yeah I think it may be geographic but I think its less that and more subcultural. Being involved in queer and kinky irl scenes led to be being in communities with people who’d been nonmonogamous since well before it was cool and who’d already had expectations of high communication skills.

Like, I don’t think central ohio managed to just be way better at polyamory than most places, though I do think some local cultures still remain