Love many: The way of polyamory

Is it possible to be deeply in love with multiple people at the same time? Arundhati Ghosh describes her experiences in the garden of desire

Credit: Special Arrangement

Being in romantic love with more than one person at the same time is perhaps the last existing taboo. Even the most open person I meet stumbles when the singularity of this love is challenged. In our stories, films, songs and poetry there is a celebration of the longing, arrival, or loss of that one ‘true love’, sealing that singularity with a societal stamp.

I am 50. I have been in consensual relationships with two to four partners at any given point. But I have noticed that conversations around polyamory are at best uncomfortable and at worst sleazy. Is it because it crumbles the idea of family as we know it? Or makes it impossible for the state to control its citizens? While no one questions a mother’s right and ability to love all her children, there is grave suspicion around loving more than one person romantically and sexually.

Burden of definition

I realised early that I had the desire and ability to love more than one person at a time, with the hope of building lasting relationships. But I was filled with ignorance, and fear. It was my friend Kaushik with whom I had my first discussion about this while I was in my twenties.

He was openly polyamorous. He asked me to read ‘The Ethical Slut’ — a guide for singles and couples to have multiple but ethical and emotionally sustainable relationships. He was living in the US and knew non-traditional families, comprising three or four partners who shared romantic, sexual and parenting needs.

But it was after much reading and speaking with kindred souls, that I came out — accepted my being, and felt comfortable talking about this practice.

There are as many ways of defining polyamory as there are polyamorous people. I hear people refer to polyamory as just ‘poly’. That just means ‘many’. Where is the ‘love’, I ask? For me, polyamory is the practice of nurturing various relationships of love, with or without sexual intimacies, with the consent of all involved. They can be short-term or long-term, with or without a primary partner, and sometimes creating alternative circles of family with various partners. The closest Bengali word I can conjure up for polyamory is ‘bahumonorath’. It means ‘many desires’. I really like it.

Many myths

Kaushik once told me that one of the biggest misconceptions about polyamory was that it was a reaction to failure to find one true love. I am reminded of people who whisper ‘Is she lesbian because she hasn’t found a man?’ Also, I don’t love more than one person because ‘not all needs are met by one person’, or ‘one person may become boring after a while’. I do so because my heart sees beauty, courage, honesty, kindness and compassion in more than one person and desires to connect with them — the same reason for which anyone would fall in love with one person. I just refuse to say, ‘Stop, don’t fall again. Your quota of ‘one life, one love’ is done.’

R pointed out another misunderstanding — polyamorous folks sleep with anyone. Men slide into my DMs with nasty requests and photos often. But without any judgement on people who like having sex with more than one person, to assume that a polyamorous person will have sexual relationships with everyone makes ‘consent’ irrelevant. This is where a polyamorous person and a sex worker share society’s discrimination. The same holds true for love. A polyamorous person often has to explain to others why they may not feel ‘love’ towards them. This may be irritating, and trying, but it is important. I sometimes explain that loving one person or many are both behaviours constructed over time. We are made to believe the former is natural and the latter an aberration.

And here are my two cents. Is singular love infallible? Because I see different kinds of monoamorous couples around me — happy, struggling, living with the fragility of being human. Many have relationships outside of their couple-hoods, known or unknown to their partners. Life is complex. Being polyamorous, I understand deeply the needs of the body and soul. What I disagree with is the ritual performance of ‘sacredness’ of couple-hood, the myths built to valorise it. And the vilification of anything that is outside of it. The burden for polyamorous people is that, in such a sacred world, only they remain profane.

Being a co-lover

The logistics of carrying out polyamorous relationships are not straightforward but not impossible either. We are sometimes in long-distance relationships. We can’t set up dates in a jiffy, or spend a weekend hopping from one exhibition to another without a plan. A partner could have commitments with other partners. So we need to be mindful of the openness, limitation and availability of each partner.

But there are also brighter sides. Having multiple partners means I can go on a cultural holiday with one and an adventure trip with another, depending on our shared interests.

Are you never jealous? That’s another question my friends ask. The reason why we feel jealous or angry if our lovers are intimate with others has been explored by many philosophers and psychoanalysts. I found two answers for myself. Firstly, one sees the lover as a possession. ‘You are mine’ has made for the lyrics of many evergreen songs, establishing ideas of ‘no trespassing’. Much like legal rights over property, ‘loyalty’ rights
prevail over the lover.

Secondly, the lover is seen as an extension of oneself. ‘You and me are one’ are also popular lyrics. In this case, the intimacy becomes an assault on the self, without consent. This is how we are conditioned to think and feel. However, it is not impossible to change this way of thinking if we so desire. But it takes time, and brings heartburn.

Idea of compersion

I did feel jealous sometimes. But in my search for the opposite of jealousy, I stumbled upon ‘compersion’ where a lover feels joy knowing that their loved one receives love and pleasure from others. Compersion is a cornerstone of polyamory, I understand. The person with whom your lover has a relationship becomes the ‘co-lover’, again a new word I learnt. I have noticed two problems that co-lovers face.

For women, there is precedence in history, as the co-wives of a polygamous man. While there was some sisterhood and camaraderie in the women’s quarters, often, the access and frequency of presence in the bedroom became contentious and tools of patriarchy were used both by the men and the women to compete. In polyamory, there is no space for competition directly, but one can slip into that zone easily if one is not careful. Patriarchy runs deep in us. I have found myself feeling inferior to other lovers of my partners and felt miserable for days.

However, for men as co-lovers, the situation is almost unprecedented since in most cultures polygamy was prevalent among men. So men have to begin from scratch as to how to live with co-lovers. But here too I have seen men use this as an excuse to exploit affection from their partners, and to sleep around. I think given the patriarchal context of our lives, women have to be more careful than men in polyamory.

I continue to feel jealousy in many situations. But I continue to train myself to respond differently. I speak about it with my partners who listen with care, find the reasons for it. I remind myself why I practise polyamory. And the joys far outshine this niggling discomfort. I think polyamorous people don’t speak of jealousy much. They should. That way, we won’t be seen as freaks, but folks struggling through it all, like any other.

After years of engaging with various co-lovers, I feel that one can love a person like one loves the inflection in a poem, or edge of the ocean, without having to own that poem or ocean. One can rejoice when others enjoy them. In some ways, the practice of co-loving in polyamory is a process of learning to accept, embrace, and celebrate the
conventional ‘other’.

Difficult or easy?

My friends struggling with the demands of monoamory think polyamory is easy. From my experience of both, it is not. It comes with its struggles. Unlearning conventional love and relationships was difficult, given our conditioning. These are complicated multi-nodal relationships where the decisions about one affect others. Also, unlike what people think of us, commitments are real and because they are with different people, one has to be conscious that they are not in conflict.

Mimi, a dear friend who is monoamorous, often discusses with me that the different prices we pay for our choice of different lives — hers seen as more stable and mine as more free — are equally difficult and enriching. But I will say that it is not a journey for the faint-hearted, or one that you do hidden surreptitiously behind marital vows without the consent of your partner. Honesty is key, as is consent. Dishonesty is a dealbreaker. If I find people ‘interesting’, I don’t wait for the right time to break it to them that I am polyamorous. I say it directly, and expect them to come clean about their status too. That said, I have had ‘not so happy accidents’.

D says that as a polyamorous person she often lands up doing many things alone. Quite contrary to what people imagine about us. In monoamory, the couple is expected to do things together — often out of choice, and sometimes for optics. However in polyamory our partners may not be there for us when we want. It is easy to question their love.

But I ask a different question — does this change the nature of our relationship, or simply make me feel hurt? Is it possible to separate ‘hurt’ from the changes in the quality of the relationship? I like to draw up broad maps of expectations from time to time and share them with partners, figuring out what works best for us. They don’t have to be equal commitments, as long as they are consensual ones. And if they change, I have to readjust. Practising this patience and understanding each day is draining.

One of the toughest times in polyamory for me has been when a partner a few years ago fell in love with someone and decided to turn monoamorous. It was harder because it was not just a question of me grieving the loss. He left with a value judgement about polyamory as a practice, abandoning a promise to create an alternative life and world together.

I prefer not to discuss my heartbreaks with other partners. Why should they suffer unnecessarily? People ask me if I have taken a break from ‘love’. Well, I think I have been lucky to find wonderful partners from among friends and friends of friends, continuously. I am too old and old-school for dating apps, but am amazed at the courage needed for it that some of my friends have.

As a practitioner of many desires, I have fallen, been broken and failed more than I have rejoiced. I have run towards the safety of the known, the conventional, the doable. However, these feelings have passed. What keeps it possible and aspirational for me is the sheer passion of wanting a world where love is free of possession. I have seen some people go back to monoamory. Like P, who said it was too hard.

But don’t I want to ‘settle down’? My mother, although accepting of my choice and approving of my partners, or ‘friends’, as she likes to call them, still worries about the lack of a singular and permanent companion in my life. It’s the ultimate destination, most will tell you. But I rejoice in my polyamorous journey so much that the destination is immaterial. And ‘only dust settles’.

And therefore

There was a time when I defined ‘love’ within guarded boundaries, attempting to create a spill-free environment making sure that the line of control had strict embargos on strays.

Today, with all my greys, I look at love in a gentler blur, overflowing, swirling in its porousness, erasing borders between romance, friendship, family. The definitions don’t seem to matter anymore. I touch my heart and I know that life is richer when love and land is kinder to refugees.

(Note: My experiences have been mostly within heterosexual relationships, so my insights are from that perspective. Polyamory can have other stories from other genders and sexualities.)

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