Polyamory: ‘At the moment I have three other partners, which is more than I’ve ever had before’
From our first fairy tale, we're inundated with picture-perfect partnerships, but is there a better alternative? A new book by philosophy professor Carrie Jenkins does a deep dive on the rules of romantic engagement
When philosophy professor Carrie Jenkins wrote a book about love in 2017 — What Love Is: And What It Could Be — she revealed in ensuing interviews that she was polyamorous. That she and her husband of eleven years were consensually non-monogamous, and had been from the start of their relationship. The result? “Relentless slut-shaming.”
In her latest book, Sad Love: Romance And The Search For Meaning, she further explores our fixed ideas of happy-every-after, the Disneyfication of romantic love, and how true and lasting love can and should include supposedly negative emotions like sadness and anger, rather than being relentlessly happy-clappy.
The book touches on polyamory, but mostly it is about the nature of love, and how eudaemonic love — the Aristotelian idea of ‘good spirited’ love — trumps traditional romantic love as more collaborative, more creative, and less prescriptive. She shines a light on our conceptions of love, and asks us to think outside the box.
But obviously all anyone wants to talk about is polyamory — at best regarding it as something rebellious and experimental, at worst a threat to Western civilisation. Jenkins, who describes herself as “a people pleaser who gets hate mail”, is bewildered by all the outrage.
“The inability to engage or have a conversation, or even consider that there may be an alternative, makes me very sad when peoples’ minds are that closed,” she says. “Puritanical sex-negative fundamentalism scares the crap out of me.”
Resident in liberal Vancouver, Jenkins — originally from the UK, and now Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia — is open and generous in sharing her thoughts and experiences. She has been in love with more than one person at the same time, which to the serially monogamous way of thinking (that is, most of us) may sound novel and fascinating, if not a scheduling headache. So — how does polyamory work?
“It works in a wide variety of different ways, in as many different ways as there are different people doing these relationships,” she says. “At the moment I have three other partners, which is more than I’ve ever had before. In the past, I had one other long-term partner as well as my husband, which lasted about six years, but we broke up before the pandemic.”
Jenkins and her husband do not have children, but she says that for parents who are polyamorous, it just means another person around to help out, to be involved in family life. You could see how that idea might rattle conservatives; the nuclear family model remains a sacred cow.
It is not the intention of Carrie Jenkins to rattle anyone, other than to encourage fresh ways of thinking about love and human relationships. What she terms the Romantic Paradox — chasing the romantic happy-every-after — tends to make us unhappy. She describes it as “the romantic, feelings-first conception of love as an intense emotional state, either excruciating agony (sad love) or blissful pleasure (happy ever after).”
Happy-ever-after is presented by our culture as static — fairy tales end at the marriage. Philosopher Elizabeth Brake calls these social assumptions amatonormativity, where only the happy-every-after model gets our approval. Society tells us that love is something that happens naturally, is eternal, and goes on behind closed doors. “We don’t talk about amatonormative pressure much,” writes Jenkins, adding how by not talking about it, “this kind of almost invisible social pressure can be incredibly effective.” You meet someone, get married, the end.
“Polyamorous relationships can challenge our ideas that the nuclear family is the ideal structure for society, and in a sense this is a real challenge to Western civilisation – and people rightly see it as such. What I’m realising more over time is that the ways in which it is challenged are ways in which that structure needs to be challenged.”
Eudaemonic love, says Jenkins, is more of a collective and continuous work in progress: “You are a co-author, helping to make the story up as you go along.” Instead of thinking of partners as property — “as valuable objects to possess” — Jenkins wonders if instead we should regard our partners as “collaborators and co-creators” where partnerships are “a unit of shared activity rather than shared passivity.”
In terms of partner co-creation, it could be “art, children, communities, schools, science labs, inspiring lives of adventure, quiet lives of meditation.” There are no limits, she says.
After her work and ideas — and crucially, her polyamory — were featured on a late night ABC news segment in the US, she was bombarded online: “A lot of the attention was pure hate”. As a philosopher, she is keen to start conversations; as an individual, an introvert, someone who “obeys traffic laws even if nobody is watching” — she is hardly the stock Jezebel image we hold in our cultural imagination of a woman with multiple partners. But, she says, “if I stop talking and engaging, the game is up.”
Sad Love is “an attempt to create a conceptual mirror”, to look at how we unquestioningly accept a version of romantic love that she says is basically a combination of biological imperative and social conditioning, tied up in pretty ribbons. She recounts how at a philosophy seminar, instead of discussing ideas around consensual non-monogamy, she was instead asked highly personal questions about STIs and jealousy.
She also points out how in mainstream culture, there are few positive depictions of polyamory; that people assume it is unworkable, doomed to fail, a relational car crash, or just a sex thing: a kind of Millennial version of swinging, rather than a viable alternative to the norm. We frown on it.
“Lack of social support disproportionately impacts stigmatised or marginalised relationships,” she explains, citing a 2006 study where psychologists found that people who perceived greater disapproval of their relationships were less committed to them. Other people do influence us – a 2015 study showed the opposite: How extensive approval from your social network results in stronger feelings of love, commitment and positivity for a partner. So polyamory remains disapproved of, misunderstood, perhaps even reviled – and therefore marginalised.
Why all the negativity? Surely, being ethical and open about non-monogamy is better than sneaking around having affairs? As divorce rates attest, happy-ever-after doesn’t work for lots of people. Yet we cling to the script that (a) romantic love equals happiness, (b) one partner can always meet all your needs and you theirs and (c) there is only one relationship model, involving two people staying together forever. Anything else is either a ‘failure’ or a deviation. Yet we are loathe to embrace even the idea that alternatives do exist. What lies beneath our hostility to the consensually non-monogamous relationship model?
“When I get negative reactions, I think there are a few things at play,” says Jenkins. “People may feel that it was something they could have wanted or could have enjoyed, but never felt like it was okay for them to explore. So they just had to tamp it down and repress it as an idea, and work really hard to stay on the monogamous straight and narrow. Then to see someone openly living non-monogamously — people may find that really annoying.
“Almost like the most homophobic people can be secretly queer, and feel terrible when they see others being openly queer. So there are those dynamics.”
What Love Is: And What It Could Be by Carrie Jenkins
“What could also be happening, and I think this is more rational, is that people perceive polyamory as a threat to their entire worldview or their conception of what a good human life could be, and I think in some ways they’re actually right. What we are living with as a [Western] worldview has been informed by centuries of patriarchy, misogyny, sexism, racism, classism, all the ways we have been trained to value or devalue certain kinds of people or relationships.
“Polyamorous relationships can challenge our ideas that the nuclear family is the ideal structure for society, and in a sense this is a real challenge to Western civilisation – and people rightly see it as such. What I’m realising more over time is that the ways in which it is challenged are ways in which that structure needs to be challenged.”
And within this challenge, Jenkins urges acceptance of all emotion – not just the hearts-and-flowers of romance, but the real, gritty feelings which come with love, either monogamous or non-monogamous.
“It’s intriguing that we are so much more ready to accept sad parental love than sad romantic love,” she says. Sad parental love, she reminds us, is not seen as a failure – it’s perfectly normal for your kids to make you sad sometimes, but it doesn’t mean you stop loving them. We need to accept, she says, that real love involves all the feelings, even the uncomfortable ones; and it comes in many guises too.
