On ABC's Nightline, Carrie Jenkins and partners: "People need to see that this is a real way people live."

 
ABC's Nightline ran a 7-minute report last night featuring poly professor Carrie Jenkins, author of What Love Is: And What It Could Be, together with her husband and her boyfriend. Then they switched to footage from two other households who've been on ABC before. The segment does not assume that the audience already knows what polyamory is all about; it takes them from the ground up:



The transcript (machine-generated by ABC):

Introducing your boyfriend to your family can be stressful. Will mom embarrass you? Will dad approve? And will he get along with your husband? Yes, you heard that right, your husband. ABC's Abbie Boudreau introduces us to poly-amory.

"There's a squash." Reporter: Carrie Jenkins is very married. "Potatoes. More potatoes." Reporter: But she's getting ready to spend Saturday night with her boyfriend. Does her husband suspect?

"Hi I'm Carrie, and this is my husband Jonathan, and this is my boyfriend Ray." Reporter: We'd say he's got a pretty, good, idea. "I'm in a relationship with Jonathan, and I'm in a relationship with Ray."

They call it polyamory. Defined as a consensual romantic relationship with multiple partners. You might have thought it was just fringey people on the coast who do this, but these buttoned down Canadians beg to differ.

"We were amazed at the number of people who came to us and said, 'Thank you for saying this. We're also in an open relationship, but we haven't felt secure saying so.'" Reporter: Carrie is a tenured professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She met Jonathan, also a professor there. They fell in love and got married in 2011 in a Scottish castle. "I wore a white dress."

Reporter: But along with the I dos, came the I don'ts. "I don't assume that romantic love and sex are the same." Reporter: And a new set of rules that you won't find in most marriage manuals. "If I were to go and have a secret romantic relationship and not tell Carrie about it, that would be cheating in this relationship too."

Reporter: So tonight, Jonathan gets to stay home while Carrie flirts with Ray in a bar. And holds hands with him at a restaurant. And yes, that's her wedding ring, still on her finger.

"For me, the idea of being able to be with two people at once always seemed like an impossible dream. Now that I get to be with two amazing people at the same time, it feels like a dream come true. I feel like the luckiest person in the world."

Reporter: So what's in it for the men? They get to see other people too, although they admit neither is doing so at the moment.

"I consider myself open to dating people. I'm active on dating websites. I go through the world considering myself romantically or sexually available."

Reporter: Ray says there are plenty of advantages. "It's a loving relationship. I don't know if I were in a non- non-monogamous relationship, how I would answer it any differently."

Reporter: But Carrie says they're not a true triad. "Ray and Jonathan are not in a relationship with each other." Though they're not opposed to the occasional hangout. Any relationship in which all partners agree that each may have romantic and/or sexual relationships with other partners, which could range from friends with benefits, to open marriage.

"Nightline" has delved into polyamory before. There was Danny and John. Oh, yes, and Melinda, who unlike Carrie and Jonathan and Ray, actually all live together with their two kids.

So if you're not a couple, what do you call yourself? "We're a triad. Yeah, some people say triple." Reporter: They say the sex is really good. "In the very beginning, there was a lot more three people having sex together often." Reporter: But so is the extra set of hands for childcare. "It's not only about sex, it's about family, it's about working together as a team. It's about accomplishing your dreams."

Reporter: One of their dreams, having children, and they managed to do that all together too. Ella and Oliver are just five weeks apart. It's one thing to have your relationship and have it exactly how you want it. But then to bring kids into your relationship, do you feel like it's a healthy way to raise a family? "A resounding yes for me. More breast feeding, more opportunities, more team work. I can double breast feed while Melinda's making food, and Jon is, whatever it is. There's just more parental support for the children."

Reporter: And then there's John and Ian who also live together with their one child. What do you say to people who believe that your relationship and the way that you're living your life is wrong? " 'Thank you for sharing your opinion.' I mean, what else -- we're not here to convert people and tell people that monogamy and wrong. Totally V totally valid choice."

Reporter: And with the divorce rate hovering around 50%, who's to say these people might not have a point? Carrie Jenkins has written a book, challenging the notion that love requires monogamy. But what about jealousy? "I think every relationship can come with insecurity. We're humans and we're never sure about our standing."

Reporter: We saw this play out again and again in our triads. Jaya has her two lovers, but how do the men feel about each other? Would you two be friends if it wasn't for her? "I don't think we'd be hanguot buddies." "They're very different. What do you think, John?" "Way too chatty."

Reporter: But in this three-headed household, who takes charge? Do you consider yourself more the alpha dog in this family? "Uh, yes. Well, Jaya is kind of the alpha dog too." So what does that make John? "John is somebody who gets fulfillment out of being in service, doing things for people." Reporter: Is it hard to share someone that you love that much? "Ah, it can be. It can be tough."

Reporter: Five years later, Jaya, John and Ian are still together.

And then there's what they say is the social stigma. Carrie's received loads of negative feedback. "There is some sometimes vitriolic and mostly anonymous comments that I get."

Reporter: Despite criticism, Carrie and her partners say they're committed to sharing their story, for other polyamorous people who aren't able to. "People do need to understand and to see that this is a real way that people live."

Reporter: Challenging stereotypes about love. "I would like to be in my relationships forever. That would be my ideal situation." Reporter: One date night at a time. For Nightline, I'm Abbie Boudreau.

The segment's webpage (aired March 16, 2017, online March 17).

The video is also showing on Yahoo News.

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"Maybe Monogamy Isn’t the Only Way to Love"

New York magazine just picked up on Carrie Jenkins' book What Love Is and What It Could Be, and uses it as the hook to summarize a lot of interesting recent research into consensual non-monogamy (CNM). The writer understands that polyamory is a subset of CNM and treats it correctly as such.

Maybe Monogamy Isn’t the Only Way to Love

By Drake Baer

Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins

...Her book examines the long, sometimes awkward legacy of philosophers’ thinking on romantic love, and compares that with a new subfield in close-relationships research — consensual nonmonogamy, or CNM. While singers and thinkers alike have been riffing on a “one and only” for decades, she argues that space is being made in the cultural conversation to “question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love.” ...

Still, CNM faces lots of stigma; even the study of it is stigmatized. Yet in the limited yet rich vein of research out there, the evidence suggests that it’s a style that, in some populations, leads to greater relationship satisfaction than monogamy. In any case, the researchers tell me, the insights into what makes more-than-two relationships work can be applied to any given dyad, given the communicative finesse required when three or more hearts are involved.

In a forthcoming Perspectives in Psychological Science paper, Terri Conley, a University of Michigan psychologist who’s driven the field, defines CNM as “a relational arrangement in which partners agree that it is acceptable to have more than one sexual and/or romantic relationship at the same time.”...

I was surprised to discover how common it is: A 2016 study of two nationally representative samples of single Americans — of 3,905 and 4,813 respondents, respectively — found in each case that about one in five people had practiced it during their lifetime. A 2016 YouGov poll found that 31 percent of women and 38 percent of men thought their ideal relationship would be CNM in some way. Other research indicates that around 4 to 5 percent of Americans in relationships are in some sort of CNM, be it swinging, where partners have sex with people outside their relationship at parties and the like; an open relationship, where it’s cool to have sex with other people but not grow emotionally attached to them; or polyamory, where both partners approve of having close emotional, romantic, and sexual relationships outside of the couple itself. People are curious, too: From 2006 to 2015, Google searches for polyamory and open relationships went up. ...

Jenkins says that as a tenured philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, she’s in a unique, privileged position to openly talk about being in a nonmonogamous marriage. ...

Jenkins met her husband, Jonathan, who’s also a philosopher, back in 2009, at a philosophy workshop that he organized at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland; they later got married in the same hall the conference took place. They took one another’s last names as middle names.

Some New York editor later inserted this standard,
stupid cheating-trope photo into the article.

Now married for almost eight years, they talked about polyamory early on, though defining the relationship that way came later. As philosophers are wont to do, they soon wrote a bit of a manifesto about their arrangement. They observed that even if their wedding guests were woke in any number of ways — not batting an eyelid if a colleague was gay or bi, eschewing heteronormative assumptions, and the like — there’s still the shared assumption that a nonmonogamous relationship is less sexually safe and less committed than a regular ol’ monogamous one. “[E]ven our very liberal pocket of our relatively liberal society is massively — and, to us, surprisingly— mononormative,” they write. “Acquaintances, friends, and colleagues are constantly assuming that our relationship, and indeed every relationship that they think of as ‘serious’, is a sexually monogamous one.”

When I asked her what the biggest struggle to overcome with polyamory has been, she didn’t say that it was anything to do with managing multiple relationships — though Google Calendar is a crucial tool — but rather the strong, sometimes violently negative reactions that she gets, especially online. When I spoke with her by phone, she was struck by a comment to a YouTube interview of hers, where a pseudonymous user invited “everyone” to read her column in the Chronicle of Higher Education about having multiple loves.

“THIS WOMAN IS A DISGUSTING ANIMAL,” the troll wrote. “Every bit as twisted and queer as the Mormons with their multiple lives [sic]. This femme-pig is the spectral opposite of Trump; a far far left-wing freak that desires to completely overthrow Western Christian Civilization.” Jenkins walked me through a deep reading of the bile: Bundling in politics — the “left-wing freak” bit — with the monogamy norms signals to her that there’s a judgment of what it means to be a good person in here, since politics is about living correctly, collectively. Plus “if you’re an animal, you’re out of the range of humanity,” she says. She’s also gets a lot of “get herpes and die, slut” suggestions, she says, which speaks to the hypersexualization of CNM. Nonmonogamy leads to lots of sex, the presumption goes, and with that STIs, and it proceeds from there. The way news articles covering CNM tend to be illustrated with images of three or four people in a bath or bed doesn’t help, either. [Or, one might add, a cheating-guy stock photo that an editor inserts into an article that's explicitly about not-cheating. –Ed.].

“The way we normally think about romantic love, we don’t imagine that it’s entirely about sex,” she says. “For a lot of people sex is a part of it; if we’re just having a hookup or a friend with benefits, we don’t call that romantic love. When it comes to polyamorous relationships, if you’re in love with more than one person, the same applies — to fall in love with someone is not the same as to sleep with them. We’re clear with that distinction in monogamous relationships, but in CNM that distinction between love and sex gets collapsed.”

Researchers who have studied stigma around CNM have found lots. ...

------------------------------

That same paper finds that there were no differences in relationship functioning between monogamous and nonmonogamous couples. ... Polyamorists were more satisfied than people in open relationships, perhaps because it’s hard to block feelings for people you sleep with frequently. Polyamorous people were a special case, with higher satisfaction, commitment, trust, and passionate love than monogamous individuals, though they had lower sexual satisfaction. CNM people also had higher sexual satisfaction with their secondary partners than their primary partners, though that difference fell away when controlling for relationship time, with primary relationships averaging three times the length of secondary relationships.

“Overall, the standard for human responses for relationships is habituation,” Conley says. “That involves a loss of sexual attraction, and we can tell that from stats from therapy. And to the extent that a couple is frustrated sexually, it spills over to other parts of life.” ...

There are other explanations for high satisfaction scores for polyamorous people, she adds. It could be that they’re just acting out a social desirability bias, given that they’re participating in a study about CNM and want the lifestyle to look good; it could also be that people who enter into polyamory have self-selected themselves into a hypercommunicative population — all the poly self-help books emphasize the importance the need to explicitly talk things out. “People interested in polyamory are more relationship-y than the average person,” she says. “They like thinking about relationships, talking about relationships. That’s great in monogamy, but needed in polyamory.”

All this suggests the kind of people that are the right fit for CNM. Beyond being relationship-y, a Portuguese study out this year found that people with a high sociosexuality, or disposal to casual sex, had less relationship satisfaction when in a monogamous relationship, but those effects disappeared if they were in CNM. Still, they were just as committed to their relationships — signaling that exclusivity and commitment may not be one and the same. Harvard sexologist Justin Lehmiller has found that people who are more erotophilic — i.e., that love sex — will be a better fit for CNM; same with if they’re sensation-seeking.

Amy Moors, the Purdue psychologist, has found that people with higher avoidant attachment — where you’re just not that into intimacy — have positive feelings about and a willingness to engage in polyamory, but they were less likely to actually partake of it. While a correlational study, Moors explained that from a subjective perspective, it makes sense: “When you have avoidant attachment, you like a lot of emotional distance, physical distance, time by yourself,” Moors says, which is not a fit for the relationship-y remands of a poly lifestyle. ...

When I asked Jenkins to describe how it feels to have both a husband and a boyfriend — she rejects the “primary relationship” moniker altogether — she said that it’s like having more loving relationships in your life, like a close family member or friend. ...

Two themes stand out in What Love Is: that love is dual-layered, with social scripts overlaying evolutionary, physiological impulses. And that the “romantic mystique,” like the feminine one before it, assumes that love is mysterious and elusive and corrupted [by] examination — a sentiment that protects the status quo. But with investigation, and conversation, the mechanics of love reveal themselves, and norms can change socially, and be tailored locally. Like Jenkins, you can custom-fit your relationships to your life — if you dare to talk about them.

Read the whole article (March 5, 2017).

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About Carrie Jenkins, poly philosopher making waves

Best for last? Here's my final post of three in recent days about poly philosophy professor and new-book author Carrie Jenkins, who's getting in the news.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, read by college faculty and administrators everywhere, has published a 4,000-word article about her life and career, the weak record of formal philosophy on the subject of romantic love, and the literally shitty (as in, human feces) place for women in academic philosophy's very male world. High points:

‘I Have Multiple Loves’

Carrie Jenkins makes the philosophical case for polyamory

Photos: Jimmy Jeong / Chronicle Review

By Moira Weigel

Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and I have plans to meet her boyfriend for lunch. But first we have to go home to walk the dog. Her husband, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, is out of town at a conference for the weekend, and earlier that morning Mezzo, their labradoodle mix, got skunked; Jenkins says Mezzo is still feeling shaky. Before I traveled to meet her in Vancouver last June, she told me on the phone that most "mono" people misunderstand the challenges of polyamory — the practice of being openly involved romantically with more than one person at a time.

"People ask, ‘Tell me about the downsides,’ " Jenkins says. "They expect the answer to be that it’s so hard jealousy-wise. But the most common answer is timing and scheduling. I’m a fairly organized person, so I don’t find it super challenging."

The claim is easy to believe. In her professional life, too, Jenkins is managing to do several things at once. Since 2011 she has held a prestigious Canada Research Chair in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia; she has taught 200-person lecture courses in metaphysics to undergraduates and advanced graduate seminars in epistemology. This semester she is co-teaching an interdisciplinary survey on the theme of "Knowledge and Power," introducing students to Freud, Russell, and Foucault in short order.

Jenkins is also in a band, called 21st Century Monads, in which she and several other academics write songs about the philosophy of numbers....

Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to. She and her husband were tired of living in the closet.

...As we walk Mezzo around Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood about 20 minutes away from campus by the green electric scooter that Jenkins drives to work every morning, she starts explaining why she prefers the term "polyamory" to "nonmonogamy."

...It took about a year, Jenkins recalls, before "I started to realize that I was in love with Ray as well as in love with Jon. And it probably took even more time to acknowledge it." After that, "the poly label started to feel like more of a useful fit."

Despite the personal clarity that she has gained on these points, socially the relationship has not been easy. Even in liberal settings, where people might not blink at the idea of a friend sleeping around or dating someone of the same gender, Jenkins says that "mononormativity" persists: The ruling assumption is that a person can be in love with only one other person at a time. (She recalls a colleague becoming extremely discomfited recently at her husband’s birthday party, when Hsu introduced himself as "Carrie’s boyfriend.") Still, Jenkins believes that we are in urgent need of a more expansive concept of love. And she believes that philosophy, the discipline named for the "love of knowledge," needs to become more expansive — treating a wider range of questions and addressing a broader audience — in order to help create it.

Jenkins did not set out to become a love expert. After growing up in Wales, she entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and pursued a degree in analytic philosophy; she stayed on to write a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of mathematics. "There’s a tradition of philosophy that I grew up in which is quite narrow in terms of the topics that it would address, in academic journal publications," she recalls. "We were addressing fundamental problems about space and time."

She published her first book, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge (Oxford University Press), in 2008. ...

Following that book, Jenkins published a series of articles on theories of explanation. However, she began thinking more and more about love. It seems logical that a thinker who spent so much time re-evaluating the ways in which experience shaped metaphysical knowledge might attempt to analyze her own life using the tools of philosophy. As Jenkins tells it, however, her inspiration came from Bertrand Russell — one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and a titanic presence at Cambridge.

Jenkins with her husband (right) and boyfriend.

"What I didn’t realize when I was studying his philosophy of mathematics was that he wrote about all these other things," Jenkins recalls. She particularly means his 1929 book, Marriage and Morals, in which Russell advocated for what he called "free love." Jenkins calls the book "a precursor of the contemporary sex-positive movement." She thinks that a lot of Russell’s work on love and marriage was ahead of its time, but that he himself remained blind to its philosophical importance.

...While philosophers trained in the Continental tradition — thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida — have written about love, analytic philosophy continues to dominate North American departments. Increasingly, Jenkins has become frustrated with the way it separates philosophy from "real life" concerns.

Personal considerations finally drove her to start making this argument in public. ...

"Despite various kinds of nervousness (justified or otherwise) about disclosure," they wrote, "being closetedly non-monogamous (effectively, mono-acting) has its disadvantages too. We’re ready to be done with it. Academic philosophy is a small world; certain areas of it are very small indeed. What if someone happens to see one of us with somebody else, and assumes (not thinking about the alternatives) that we’re cheating? We each hate the idea of being taken for a cheater, or of being pitied as the spouse of a cheater...."

Jenkins and Ichikawa called their letter "On Being the Only Ones." Soon after they published it, they learned that they weren’t. Strangers, and couples they had known casually for years, started approaching them at conferences, they say, and thanking them for writing the piece. Many said they had quietly lived the same way and felt relieved to be able to speak about it. Emboldened by a new sense that she had an activist mission — that her coming out might help others like her, and that she, as a tenured professor, had the privilege to do so — Jenkins began writing more about nonmonogamy. She wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and Slate. She went on CBC to give radio interviews. ...
...The Cosmopolitan UK spread not only conveyed the opposite of the message that Jenkins had wanted to send. It turned her into a target of abuse online. Like many women who write for the public, particularly about gender or sexuality, Jenkins gets a steady stream of hate mail. Strangers threaten her on Twitter: Why are you acting like this is an ok thing? Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day. ...

Meanwhile, Jenkins has had to contend with harassment within her discipline, too. She declines to offer specifics but says, "Anonymous commentaries in the philosophy blogosphere can be pretty grim." The field has been widely criticized from within by scholars who say that not only is the curriculum male-centric, but gender discrimination is routine. In recent years, several high-profile cases of sexual harassment have further sullied its reputation. ...

Jenkins emphasizes that this image not only affects who is doing philosophical work. It also shapes what kind of work gets done.

The debate over what kind of philosophy gets rewarded blew up recently in a more specific storm, in which Jenkins found herself at the center. It started as a set of disputes surrounding Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor who founded the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and ran it until recently. The Gourmet Report ranks philosophy departments, based on surveys filled out by hundreds of academic philosophers every year, and enjoys enormous influence within the field. It has also caused consternation among critics who have questioned its methodology and say it is biased against philosophy departments with a Continental orientation or an Asian one.

...It was one of several critiques of the Gourmet Report that prompted a flurry of online and email exchanges between Leiter and his critics, and preceded a statement that Jenkins published in the summer of 2014 pledging to behave with civility in her professional life.

Many in the field, including Leiter, read the statement as an attack on him. He responded by sending Jenkins a derisive email and tweeting that she was a "sanctimonious arse." When Jenkins made the email public, other philosophers rallied to her defense. They circulated a "statement of concern," eventually signed by 600 faculty and students, saying that Leiter’s actions had harmed Jenkins’s health and ability to work, and refusing to participate in the Gourmet Report’s surveys until he stepped down as the editor. Leiter published a series of posts complaining of a "smear campaign" and that October stepped down, though he remains on the Gourmet Report’s advisory board. Later that year, he threatened to sue Jenkins for falsely portraying him.

Jenkins refuses to speak about the Leiter controversy. Last summer she — along with Jennings and two other vocal critics of Leiter’s — each received an envelope full of human feces. Leiter denied sending the packages and has attributed them to someone who must be trying to embarrass him.

I n contrast with these dramas, Jenkins’s book What Love Is reads calmly....

"We are creating space in our ongoing cultural conversations to question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love," Jenkins writes. "I’m personally invested, as are you...."

The central goal of What Love Is is to abolish what Jenkins calls "the romantic mystique," a deliberate allusion to Betty Friedan’s classic second-wave text, The Feminine Mystique. "On the one hand, we’ve accepted the idea of love as a tremendously significant social force: something that shapes and reshapes the entire trajectories of lives and serves as a focal point for all kinds of values," Jenkins writes. On the other hand, "we have simultaneously normalized the idea that love is a mystery: something hard or impossible to comprehend."

...While Jenkins criticizes those who are too quick to call "insufficiently examined ideology … ‘natural’ or ‘biological,’ " she also emphasizes that recognizing the biological elements of romantic love can have socially emancipatory effects....

"Let’s not forget that it took many years of serious scientific research to convince (most) people that there is no biologically superior race or gender," writes Jenkins. "Getting a proper grip on the biology of love may help us unravel the idea that there is one biologically superior way to love."

Read the whole article (Feb. 3, 2017).

-----------------------------

Update Feb. 23: A new interview in Vox: Is our view of romantic love too narrow? A philosopher makes the case for polyamory.

...I want to start a conversation. I don't care whether everyone agrees with what I say. I just want people to be talking about this. I think that's the way progress gets done. ... I think we can make progress if we get more people thinking about monogamy, about romantic love, and why it looks the way it does and how much control we have over that.

I keep coming back to this idea that we have so much control over what love is, what love looks like, what stories we tell, what is depicted in romantic comedies, what stories are told in romance novels. All of these ways we determine what love is are a social construct. We have so much control over that. That means we are responsible for getting it right.

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Carrie Jenkins' book: "What Love Is, and What It Could Be"

Canadian philosopher Carrie Jenkins is a rising star for polyamory awareness (see previous post, and remember her piece about poly feet and the white duvet?). Now she's getting wider attention for her book out last month, What Love Is and What It Could Be, deconstructing romantic love for the 21st century. It's been getting a lot of reviews.

● In Quartz, A polyamorous philosopher explains what we all get wrong about romantic love. (February 11, 2017):

...But as Carrie Jenkins, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, points out in her recently published book, [our] concept of [romantic] love is actually the product of a very narrow social script.

...“It’s harming people,” she says — not just those who, like herself, do not fit the conventional script of monogamy and marriage.

Though the social script of romantic love today has recently expanded to allow for same-sex romance, it still expects everlasting couples who stay together till death do you part. Such expectations are damaging for those who don’t wish to follow such a narrative, argues Jenkins. This applies to those in polyamorous relationships but also single people, and those who don’t want children....

Love is a hugely messy concept, and Jenkins argues that it incorporates both a biological side and a socially constructed side. The biological element refers to the physical behavior (the fluctuating hormones and shifts in brain activity) of those who are in love, and is a reflection of our evolutionary need for such ties. But it’s the social script that shapes our norms and expectations of romance, such as the contemporary belief that true love will be permanent and monogamous.

Though this social construct can shift over time, Jenkins says, that doesn’t happen easily. “Some people think it’s made up like fiction is made up, but I’m trying to say it’s made up like the law is made up. We made it, but now it’s real.”

...For example, the “Cinderella story,” in which a woman is rescued by a more wealthy, powerful, high-status man, is still a prevalent tale of what’s considered romantic... “feeding into these gendered stereotypes,” she says. “This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life.”

...Jenkins believes that opening up the social construct of romantic love will ultimately be positive for everyone, even those who end up following the traditional script. “If you give people more choices and they choose to be monogamous, then that’s great. I think it’s better to do things with awareness rather than because it’s the only option available.”

● In Canada's National Post and other papers in its chain: From polyamory to marriage values, if you understand what love is to you, you’re more likely to find it (Feb. 13):

By Blair Mlotek

When new ideas threaten what we hold as truth, it is sometimes easier to stay away from them altogether. ...Vancouver-based writer and philosopher Carrie Jenkins sets out to tell us that love may not be what we think it is – a frightening notion at first, but Jenkins means no harm. In fact, this book is a testament to love.

Although Jenkins is a highly educated philosopher, What Love Is should be accessible to all. She believes that there is more philosophy in our everyday lives than we realize; it is there each time we wonder at the way things are.

But if you picked up this book to find out the definitive answer to what love is, you will not find it here.

...She writes, if we understand it, we can control it, and then change it. She asks us to be active readers, “not to passively absorb my ideas” but to question and challenge them.

Jenkins’s explanation of prevailing monogamy is that in the past people married for the purpose of relationships between families and countries; for financial reasons. Today, people are told to marry for love. Having a nuclear family was normalized and so the steps to get there had to be as well. To have kids, people needed to marry, to marry they have to fall in love.

It is our prerogative to change this....

● In her hometown Vancouver Sun: Unlucky in love? Try thinking critically about it, UBC prof suggests (Jan. 25). With a video.

By Stephanie Ip

...“Love hasn’t been viewed as central to modern philosophy, at least not in the traditions that I work in. That’s a problem,” said Jenkins.

“Without thinking critically about love, you’re kind of defenceless. If you just go with the flow, you can end up in some bad situations such as abusive relationships, or feeling like a failure just for being who you are.”

...“If we don’t have our critical-thinking skills switched on when we are surrounded by the Hallmark and Disney stuff, we just absorb it, and then it becomes our theory of what love is,” said Jenkins. “I think that’s dangerous, and it’s what I’m trying to arm people against.”

● On Valentine's Day, Jenkins was on Canada's popular radio talk show The Current: It's possible to be in love with two people, says philosopher (Feb. 14):

..."You know, it was partly prompted by people telling me if you're in love with two people then that's not real. That's not real love. ... And that didn't feel true to my experience, so I started thinking Well, what is it that they're talking about? What are they describing? That got me down the path of thinking about the way that socially, we police and prescribe certain normative models for romantic love."

..."If you don't understand that both biology and society are playing a role, you might mistake some of the things that are really coming out of the social construct side of things for biological or natural reality and I think gender is a huge part of this."

Listen here (23:34). Here's a transcript.


● A fellow philosopher, writing in the Times Higher Education section of The Times in London, is disappointed by the book's lack of rigor: "Polyamory could shed light on whether love is mainly biological or social" (Feb. 9).

By Jane O'Grady

...This book opens with her morning musings, as she walks from her boyfriend’s flat to the home she shares with her husband, about whether or not she can be said to be in love with both of them. Impatient with the way romantic love is presented as mysterious, and therefore unchangeable, she reminds us that loving is something we do, and can perhaps do differently and better. Whether we can depends on how far love is biologically hard-wired, and therefore subject to the slowness of evolution, and how far socially constructed. Jenkins seems to promise a key debate, which, although hardly new, will be conducted from the original angle of polyamory.

Unfortunately, this book is slipshod, repetitive, and full of rambling assertions rather than fine-grained philosophical analysis....

“I propose a new theory of romantic love,” Jenkins declares.... love’s dual nature is instantiated in “ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role”. But how does that work? Jenkins never fleshes out her airy claim, and annoyingly conflates the origins of love in human history and in the history of a particular human. The crucial allied question of how romantic love fuses genitals and sonnets is never touched on.

Polyamory provides a promising tuning fork for sounding the nature of romantic love, and whether focusing exclusively on one person is essential to it. Jenkins arouses expectations that she will philosophise on this and similar questions via her own feelings, but ultimately offers little in the way either of emotion or philosophy.

● Another philosopher, in the L.A. Review of Books: Illuminating Love (Jan. 28):

By Skye C. Cleary

...Helen Fisher also argues that monogamous romantic love was an evolutionary solution to “female neediness”: once women became bipeds and, arms full, could no longer carry babies on their backs, we needed males for protection. Because men couldn’t protect whole harems of women, heterosexual monogamous nuclear families emerged as the norm. With swift and graceful logic, Jenkins points out that this is highly unlikely, primarily because,

if over 1 million years passed between the arrival of bipedalism and the evolution of love, then there must have been other solutions to the problem of having one’s hands full of babies that worked well enough to keep hominid evolution going for over 1 million years […] And if bipedalism posed such a problem for female ancestors specifically, how come we didn’t end up with male-only bipedalism?

● Quill & Quire: What Love Is: And What It Could Be (Jan. 20).

The philosopher describes What Love Is as “an exercise in critical thinking out loud,” and blends thorough research with personal experiences to present a readable and highly informative book. Jenkins in no way “spoils” love, but rather stimulates an essential, relevant conversation in a novel, inspiring way.

● At the American Spectator, a paleo-conservative organ, Robert Stacy McCain is fuming: They Even Hate Love (Feb. 14):

...Feminism’s goal is to achieve equality through androgyny, eradicating masculinity and femininity so that men and women become exactly identical and, in such an egalitarian post-patriarchal utopia, what basis could there be for romantic love?

None whatsoever, as feminist Carrie Jenkins explains in her new book.... Professor Jenkins, who teaches philosophy at the University of British Columbia, is an advocate and practitioner of polyamory. Her book has been praised by her fellow feminists as an argument against “traditional, heteronormative, monogamous, pair-bonded, procreative, romantic love.” It is wrong even to imagine that kind of love, Professor Jenkins recently told an interviewer: “This idea that it’s very romantic to be swept off your feet by a Prince Charming figure and rescued from a life of poverty or whatever by a wealthy man, is feeding into these gendered stereotypes. This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life.”

● Announcement on Booklist (Dec. 1, 2016):

...Equally important to its subject matter, the book is a master class in how to think and why. Jenkins researches, questions, unpacks, considers, and examines. A philosophy professor, Jenkins uses her readable book to advocate for thinking both critically and in great depth as a form of self-protection and self-advocacy. Tolerate no one admonishing you for overthinking love, she advises. Love is an “extreme sport,” and we need parachutes. In so arguing, she empowers her readers in regard to not just their love lives but also their whole lives.

● Continued in Additional post.

● More reviews are linked to from the book's website, with highlights of glowing quotes.

● Further recent news coverage.

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Philosopher Carrie Jenkins: Make way for polyamory

Now here's some cool stuff getting attention! Carrie Jenkins is a Kind of a Big Thing philosopher at the University of British Columbia. She's an out poly with two male partners and has just published a book, What Love Is, And What It Could Be.

Let's start with a long article of hers that's going around. She originally published How a hackneyed romantic ideal is used to stigmatise polyamory in the thinky magazine Aeon. It was then picked up by the major newsmagazine The Week, which retitled it Monogamy is Out. Polyamory is In (a grabby title but not the point of the article). Yahoo News reprinted it from there.

Excerpts from the article as published in The Week:

There's no longer anything unusual about wanting an open relationship. Many who consider themselves progressive about sex, gender, love, and relationships know this. It's just that almost nobody in an open relationship wants to be open about it. What's surprising is that so many people feel the need for secrecy.

I've been out as polyamorous for years. Because of this, non-monogamous people who aren't out often feel able to talk to me about their own situations. When I go to conferences, I can't help noticing all the philosophers who are in closeted non-monogamous relationships. This discrepancy between reality and socially acknowledged reality can be disorienting; the "official" number of non-monogamous people in the room is almost always one (me).

So what's going on? No doubt there are several factors at work, but I want to talk about one that's both powerful and insidious: Non-monogamy isn't considered "romantic."

Romantic love is widely considered to be the best thing life has to offer: "Failing" at romance is often construed as failing at life. ... This monogamous ideal is supposed to appeal to women especially.

...According to the stereotypes, single women are desperate to "lock down" a man, while men are desperate to avoid commitment. There's nothing new here: Monogamy has historically been gendered. Even in situations where marrying more than one woman has been illegal, it has often been normal for men to have mistresses, but different rules have applied to women....

Our language undermines gender-related optimism about monogamous romantic ideals: there is no word for a male "mistress"; romantic comedies are "chick flicks." "Romance" novels are marketed to and consumed by women. Brides are "given away" by men to other men. ...

...Women who enter voluntarily into non-monogamous relationships are a direct challenge to the idea that women are "naturally" monogamous. They are socially penalized to maintain the status quo. A non-monogamous woman will be portrayed as debased and disgusting — a "slut." When I have discussed my open relationships online, I have been called many other colorful names.

My internet trolls focus on sex, partly because presenting non-monogamous relationships as "just sex" makes it easier to degrade them, and partly because women who violate the monogamy norm — whose sexuality is out of (someone's) control — are a threat to an ancient feeling of entitlement over women's sexuality and reproductive potential. In contrast, a non-monogamous man is, at least sometimes, liable to be regarded as a "stud."

Apart from monogamy, the only other relationship structure that controls paternity in a similar way is patriarchal polygamy, which is stigmatized in contemporary North America, for reasons including bona fide feminism as well as racism and cultural imperialism. One effect of this is that monogamy is seen as the only fair and liberal alternative.

Actually, there are many alternatives. But to tolerate them is to tolerate widespread social uncertainty about who is having sex with whom....

I believe that the "romantic-ness" of romantic love is largely socially constructed, and as such malleable. We collectively write the "script" that determines the shape of the privileged ("romantic") relationship style. This script has changed, and will continue to change. But currently that process goes on largely below the radar: We aren't supposed to see it happening, or realize that we can control it....

We must get beyond this. We need to question the limits we have placed on what counts as a "romantic" relationship. Freedom to love — the right to choose one's own relationships without fear, shame or secrecy — is critical, not just for individuals but for us all collectively. Non-conformity is the mechanism that reshapes the social construct to better represent who we are, and who we want to be. Instead of forcing our relationships to conform to what society thinks love is, we could force the image of love to conform to the realities of our relationships.

But it won't be easy. If the love of a polyamorous triad is seen as "romantic" and hence as valuable as the love of a monogamous couple, then the triad should have the same social and legal privileges as the couple....

Nor could we defend the countless ways in which non-monogamous people are stigmatized and rejected....

It's far easier to pretend that this is not really happening. Or that it's not really a big deal. Perhaps you feel that way right now: Perhaps you're thinking you don't know any non-monogamous people. But I wouldn't be too sure. Until quite recently, an awful lot of people thought that all their friends and relatives were straight.

Read the whole article in The Week (February 9, 2017) or in Aeon (February 3).

Coming next: more about the book What Love Is, And What It Could Be.

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