The Sunday Times - UK (2022-02-13

ship

It’s February 1, 2015, and I am standing by a cluster of trees on

the ramparts surrounding the great henge at Avebury. It’s 7am,

minus five degrees, and the sun isn’t due to rise over the stones

for another 46 minutes. There’s a gaggle of people waiting for

the celebrant to begin the handfasting ceremony, an ancient

Celtic ritual in which hands are tied together to symbolise the

binding of two separate lives. I’ve known the “groom” for nearly

17 years and his partner for almost as long, but only became

aware that he was polyamorous three months previously when

I met the woman to whom he’s being handfasted.

In the UK, polyamory remains a curiosity, the stuff of

three-in-a-bed tabloid fantasies and TV talk show

exploitation. And yet it’s a fascinating topic that deserves to be

examined sensibly and sympathetically. My first encounter

with polyamory was in 2012 when I read a blog post entitled

The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy by

Andie Nordgren. Phrases burst out of the page: “every

relationship is unique”; “customise your commitments”; “love

and respect instead of entitlement”.

It was an invitation not to dismiss monogamy, but rather to

rethink what we mean when we talk about love, commitment

and intimacy, something I’d barely stopped to question. So

I decided to talk to people who had been pushing back the

boundaries of what relationships might look like, those in open

and polyamorous relationships of one sort or another, and see

what we might all learn. I spent two years speaking to more

than 50 non-monogamous people, a pretty diverse bunch —

and just as diverse is the way they run their relationships.

In monogamous relationships people often operate on a set

of assumptions, often unarticulated. Meet, date, have sex,

move in, marry, mortgage, children: the path that most of us

tread without questioning it. In consensual non-monogamy,

making assumptions is a recipe for trouble. There is no one

blueprint. These couples constantly communicate and

negotiate; it requires them to be flexible, engaged and to have a

readiness to rewrite the rules and design the relationship they

want. Many of these people, I’ve found, have discovered a level

of intimacy through being nakedly — and hopefully also

compassionately — honest with one another in a way that

plenty of monogamous people could only dream of.

Seb*, an international lawyer based in southeast Asia, says

that’s what sustained his and his wife’s relationship when they

opened up their marriage eight years ago after being together

for three years. They each have one long-term partner — Seb

has been with his for seven years and his wife with hers for six

years — and also date casually when the mood takes them.

“There are people whose bandwidth for extra partners is

limited,” Seb says. But if it isn’t then, “It’s a case of lots and lots

of communication and being very clear about what you want

and don’t want out of the relationship. Honest communication

and trying to not slice up something finite so that everybody

gets a little bit less than what they want. Instead, the aim is to

effectively grow these relationships so they’re able to meet the

needs of multiple people.”

A 2018 study from the University of Michigan found

that polyamorous people reported higher levels of both

relationship and sexual satisfaction than monogamous people,

and were more likely to have had sex recently (48 per cent versus

37 per cent). But before you go “yay, more sex” and charge off, it’s

still no small step deciding to adopt consensual non-monogamy

as one’s default. It means interrogating values that most of us

absorb by osmosis from almost every aspect of our culture. First,

many people find themselves questioning monogamy because

they’ve been attracted to more than one person at once, or to

someone other than their partner. Is this something you’re

happy to leave to fantasy or is it something that you feel needs to

be explored? If it’s the latter, the monogamous script offers

limited choices; essentially choose or cheat. Consensual

non-monogamy offers a wider range of options.

Another question often asked is: what does a relationship

mean to me? Is being part of a “traditional” self-contained couple

a defining part of your identity, or is the essential “you”

independent of whatever relationship you find yourself in?

Couples are very much in evidence within consensual

non-monogamy but the boundaries are often far more porous.

Then there is the thorny issue of how to divide your time

between your partners. Do you find it easy being “fair” to

everyone and balancing people’s wants and needs? If you

want to maintain multiple relationships, then it’s a useful

skill to have.

The topic that comes up time and time again, though, is

jealousy. Jealousy is something of a catch-all term under

which we group things like insecurity, anxiety, envy and

anger. The people I interviewed weren’t immune to these

feelings but they tended to be quite self-aware and ready

to ask themselves where their feelings stemmed from and to

address them.

The flipside, however, is the unexpected joy these couples

describe in feeling something known as “compersion” —

this is a joy in their partner’s joy, happiness that they’re

sharing love and intimacy with others; basically, a feeling that

is the absolute opposite of jealousy. I asked one academic, Dr

Dylan Selterman, now an associate teaching professor at Johns

Hopkins University, what single thing he had encountered

while researching consensual non-monogamy had really made

him sit up and think. His answer: compersion. “There’s an

association between the closeness and intimacy that people

have with their partners’ ‘others’ and feeling less jealousy. In

other words, if my partner has other partners and I feel very

close and intimate with them, then I feel less jealousy. And that

seems to be one of the big strategies.”

There are two things that couples often do when opening up

their relationships, one very useful (but not always done) and the

other potentially fraught (and done rather too often). The first is

that they talk about what their changed relationship will look

like. The second is that they address the worry that their

relationship may not withstand outside involvements by putting

rules in place. Shelly*, an Israeli academic, and her husband

went down the first route. They’ve been together for more than

Antonio Terron/Trunk Archive 20 years, open for well over a decade and each has a long-term

The Sunday Times Style • 17