I totally understand where you are coming from. Poly isn’t for everyone, casual love isn’t for everyone, and casual sex is most definitely not for everyone. Not engaging in those things is a valid choice, and if that is right for you, it is right for you.

I will say that casual love != casual sex. You can experience casual love without any sex at all. You can form romantic relationships that do not involve sex. While I personally am not wired that way I have plenty of poly friends who are. The longest running podcast on the subject, Polyamory Weekly, to this day uses the slogan “it’s not all about the sex.”

Casual sex for a lot of people is a much less satisfying experience than sex in a long term relationship. But to be fair, let’s acknowledge that loads of committed relationships also suffer in the bedroom, so it’s not all great there either. Ultimately it depends on you and your preferences/needs. And of course on the partners you select.

Empirically I can say that I experience love towards a partner about 1/10 times or so. Though my sample size is not actually all that great because while poly, I am very very selective. This may be surprising but the reality is that poly doesn’t mean “screw everything with two legs.” It just means that if someone does interest you, you are free to explore that however you want, and your partners have the same freedom. Whether you choose to have one anchor partner who you share your home life with, or you do “solo poly” where you live alone and have multiple partners with whom you have no plans to ever progress on the escalator is 100% up to you. A couple of people I know actually identify as monogamous, while practicing Polyamory through their partner being poly. Not my cup of tea, but that seems right for them.

> surface-level, material ugliness of other humans

What does this mean? If it's just physical attraction, why not date more attractive people?

Not the person you are asking but if you think about it, sex is weird, gross, and makes you very vulnerable. For some that is offset by it being wonderful and hot and sexy, while for others it takes more to go past the reality of it. That’s why the asexual spectrum is a thing: not everyone is down with getting down. And because as a society we expect sex and sexual attraction to be the norm, people on that spectrum may not always be out about it.

Not saying the other poster is on that spectrum, just pointing out that many different brain configuration exist, with some going “all the sex” all the way to “sex? No thanks.”

That makes sense. It seems about 1% of the population is asexual from some quick googling.

My guess is that it is slightly higher than that because often times the label “asexual” is applied to people who have 0 interest in sex, while others experience a reduced emphasis on sex, hence the “spectrum” part. Also it isn’t something people openly admit to it, so it suffers from the same problem as trying to quantify the numbers of people who identify as bisexual.

And then there's people who the label could be applied to, but spent much of their lives trying to conform to more socially acceptable ideas about sexuality.