Many Love Read online

  Eventually, I was bothered so much that I decided to reach out to Melissa. I messaged her on Facebook, telling her I wanted to get to know her better. When she didn’t respond immediately, I was no longer only jealous, I was downright angry. This girl, I felt, should be dropping everything to talk to me so that my feelings could be quelled. A real low point arrived. I got very mad at Luke and listened to a lot of whiny-sad breakup music (the kind with a piano and a singer and nothing else) while riding the bus. When I tried to explain my anger to Luke, I didn’t feel any better. He tried to tell me that his relationship with Melissa really wasn’t that serious, and that I was, maybe, overreacting.

  Tip: Never tell an angry person that she’s overreacting. If things weren’t ignited before, using the word “overreacting” will explode the situation beyond recognition.

  And then, eventually, Melissa messaged me back. Sure, we could get to know each other better, she said. I asked her about her likes and dislikes. She asked me what I did with my free time. She told me about her childhood, and I told her about mine. For days, we messaged back and forth; the messages were sometimes paragraphs long, and I found myself telling her things that some of my best friends didn’t even know. Eventually, we talked about love; we talked about our pasts; we talked about Luke. A week into our conversation, I noticed that the fire in my gut had died down. I actually liked Melissa. I thought Melissa really liked me, too, and it seemed that she had no interest in taking anything away from me. I closed my eyes and imagined Luke leaving for a weekend to hang out with Melissa and noticed that, for the first time since he’d met her, I felt pretty okay with that idea.

  As I was working on this book, I spoke to lots of people in polyamorous relationships, secretly hoping to find someone who had beaten the whole jealousy thing. As far as I know, there isn’t a person out there who has it all figured out. Dan Savage, celestial being that he is, told me he still gets jealous sometimes. When I asked a woman in the Chicago polyamorous community, who throws sex parties and has two partners and talks about all of it with ease and excitement, if she feels less jealous than she did when she started with polyamory, she couldn’t answer because she was laughing so hard.

  Louisa Leontiades, a poly blogger who lives in Sweden, also acknowledged that jealousy never totally fades, but she, at least, was very reassuring. She told me that in time, her jealous tendencies had lessened. “In the beginning, I didn’t realize I had huge holes in my self-esteem,” she said. “I’ve had to do a lot of work on myself and my fear of abandonment, and that work has helped me become far less jealous. I still have those kicks, but now I’ve developed a better prefrontal cortex response to them.”

  Valerie White, a polyamorous woman in her early seventies, said that she still feels jealous, but she’s learned a few coping strategies:

  “When jealousy happens—and it will—it’s incumbent upon everybody to cherish the person who’s feeling threatened,” White said. Jealousy, like all emotions that involve suffering, has to be honored and treated with love. It sounded so simple when she said it, but when I thought back to the times Jaedon told me he was jealous, I remembered that I didn’t cherish him; instead, I was defensive. It was hard for me to take a step away from my ego when I felt like I was in trouble. It was hard to understand that the jealousy really didn’t have much to do with me at all.

  I was lucky with Luke and Melissa, because they both took the time to cherish me when I was feeling jealous. They both graciously stopped what they were doing with each other to pay attention to me and to let me see into their world. Melissa wasn’t scary when I got to know her; she transformed from a major threat to another human being simply doing her best. And really—from the very bottom of my heart—going into the scariest reaches of my emotional reality with Melissa and coming out on the other side totally safe was one of the single most fulfilling experiences I’ve ever shared with another person.

  Understanding the value of other people’s emotions—all of them, and maybe even especially the ugly ones—is what polyamory is really all about. One of the great gifts of jealousy is that it gives us the opportunity to love each other even harder, to warmly greet the humanity in one another and—this is more difficult—the humanity in ourselves.

  PART 7

  Relationships without Borders

  I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in my relationship with Luke, and the beauty of polyamory is that we don’t have to have a plan. I see myself having children, but I’m not totally attached to that idea. If we both met someone we wanted to live with, I would be open to that. I feel open to everything. I’m not the only one on earth who believes in polyamory, and there are plenty of people who have made it work for decades—living in multipartner households, raising children, and redefining “family” as circumstances require.

  But as of now, I want to be a mother more than I want probably anything else in the world. In some ways, I feel embarrassed about this; a lot of younger folks in my circle of poly friends have decided that they definitely don’t want children, and there’s real liberation in that decision for them. I’m not a person who believes—even a little bit—that children complete a family, or that a woman’s purpose in life is to procreate. But I like kids much more than I like adults, as I never emotionally matured beyond the age of seven. (As I read that back to myself, I realize that it may not be the best argument for my being in charge of another human life, but there it is.) More important, I want to take care of someone who I get to watch grow. My itch to be a parent was only confirmed when I was a teacher. The worst part of the day was when the kids had to go home.

  The first time someone said to me, “Well, you can’t be polyamorous and have kids, though, right?” I sort of stammered. Of course I could! Why couldn’t I? And then I began to wonder—as you are maybe wondering—about the logistics of such a thing. I didn’t know any poly people with kids. Maybe I was setting myself up for failure.

  And so I went where one goes when one thinks something might be impossible: Google. And Google took me, wonderfully, to Louisa Leontiades.

  Leontiades has two children, a girl and a boy, who are six and four, respectively. She’s fairly well known in the UK for writing a memoir called The Husband Swap, which chronicles her journey with her now ex-husband into a polyamorous relationship with another couple. She publishes a wonderful blog and advice column, and she often tackles questions about raising children in a polyamorous household. In one of her blog posts about poly parenting, Leontiades acknowledges some of the difficulties of raising children while in multiple relationships: balancing needs, dealing with children’s questions, and coping with the emotional impact of fluctuating relationships. She writes, “There are solutions—many of them tough to swallow—but that’s what parenting is about: suddenly having to make the difficult choices and assuming a lot more responsibility than you ever thought your shoulders were ready for.”1

  Leontiades lives in Sweden with her “nesting partner,” whom she refers to publicly as Morten. Morten is the father of Leontiades’s two children, but they no longer have a sexual relationship. Leontiades has a boyfriend, who has an apartment in the city; and Morten has a girlfriend, who recently moved to Berlin. “Morten and his girlfriend have an open relationship, but they are less polyamorous in the sense that they’re not looking for any long-term relationships,” Leontiades told me. She and her boyfriend, on the other hand, also have an open relationship but are not interested in hookups. “It’s a matter of preference,” she said. She and Morten are still very close, though; they raise their children with a sense of community in mind, which Leontiades describes as being like a tribe. When Leontiades told her mother that she and Morten “had transitioned,” her mother took it to mean that they’d split up. But Leontiades insists that they never actually split up; it’s just that the nature of the relationship changed.

  I wanted to know what it was like raising children in a nontraditional arrangement. I wondered if it worked any differently
than the nuclear model. “For me, polyamory is a godsend to my kids,” Leontiades said. All four of the people in Leontiades’s love life have different jobs and lifestyles—one is a scientist, for example; another is a corporate executive—and they all have different national backgrounds. Her children, therefore, witness a “panoply of options” for what they could possibly grow up to be. “They have this wide range of influences; they have supported care, different role models,” Leontiades said. She likes that her children won’t ever feel boxed in by one way of life.

  Valerie White also told me that having more than two parents was a major advantage in raising children. White, who is seventy-one and has been practicing polyamory for decades, co-parents fourteen-year-old twins with her partners Judy and Ken.2 Ken is fifty-five and Judy is sixty; Ken and Judy have been seeing each other since 1979 and added Valerie to their relationship in 1994. While Valerie and Judy are each partnered with Ken and not with each other, they live happily together in one house. When Judy decided she wanted to have children, Valerie’s daughter offered to let Judy use her eggs (Judy was having trouble getting pregnant on her own), so Valerie is technically the twins’ grandmother, but is functionally another parent. And that’s just what’s going on in the house! All three parents have or have had secondary relationships with other people since they started living together. While it might sound complicated to you, to Valerie this model mostly makes sense—especially when it comes to raising children.

  “When it’s one baby, it takes a village; with twins, it takes a small metropolitan area,” she told me, laughing. When the twins were babies, White tended to them at night while Ken and Judy slept. “I need less sleep, and I’m more resilient about going back to sleep when woken up,” White said. “When they woke up, if they needed feeding, I would change them and then call Judy over the intercom. It was a great system.” As she talked about it, I couldn’t believe how nice it sounded to have more support in raising your children. I told White that I’d never thought about what it would mean to be able to raise a child in a community, and that it sounded really amazing. White, who had previously been married and had children before she entered into her relationship with Ken and Judy, told me that she couldn’t understand why more people didn’t raise their children like that.

  “Way back when my oldest child was a baby and I lived in England, there were six moms who had kids at the same time. And during the day, two of the moms would look after all the babies for a few hours in the mornings while the other moms had a chance to go out. For the two of us, when one of the babies needed feeding, we just fed it. We just nursed it. Since then, I’ve heard from other women that the idea of somebody else nursing their baby made them feel intensely jealous, and they would feel like they were betraying their baby,” White said. But for White, sharing that kind of responsibility was the most natural thing in the world.

  This idea that what for some is uncomfortable is utterly natural to others is at the center of what makes polyamory so difficult for people to understand. We tend to want things to have a firm set of guidelines; if we follow the rules correctly, we’ll be successful. Polyamory isn’t like that at all. As Dan Savage reminded me over the phone, “no two polyamorous relationships are alike.”

  Savage has talked on his podcast about how polyamorous relationships are like snowflakes in this way. Monogamous relationships are all structured with the exact same rules: I love you, you love me, and we’re not allowed to be with anyone else. Polyamorous relationships, on the other hand, are all uniquely structured to accommodate the people participating in them. No two of them are exactly alike.

  There are a few common threads, though. To simplify a little, I’ve provided a guide to some of the most common types of polyamorous relationship structures:

  While a lot of this terminology is still coalescing, nontraditional family structures like those described in the chart are really nothing new. Queer communities have been stretching the meaning of the word “family” for decades. I spoke to the artist Chuck Thurow, who’s lived in a multiperson household for most of his adult life. He and his first partner, Dale, each took on other partners; eventually, five men came to live in a house together, continuing to love one another regardless of sexual commitment. “Our whole ethos at that time was to smash the nuclear family model,” Thurow said. “We came out strong when we created gay liberation. If anything, we were too strong on the other side. There was something wrong with you if you had a closed relationship.” Thurow was trying to say that in his circle, everything but the norm was acceptable.

  Thurow told me that the relationships he had with the men he lived with—all of whom have now passed away—were deep and rich, and ultimately had little to do with physical intimacy and much more to do with a kind of self-described “forever friendship.” “They were the closest friendships I ever had, and they were technically with my exes,” he said. At the time, nonmonogamy was an assumption in the gay community Thurow was part of. Now, he feels grateful that he lived his life with a family that broke all the boundaries around the traditional definition of the word.

  “I must say, none of my straight friends get what this gay family thing is all about,” Thurow said. He has experienced relationships as they change, and he sees value in all their iterations. “I tell my nephews when they break up with someone, ‘You spent eight years with that woman; there was obviously something there. And now you’re going to lose all that because you’re not dating anymore?’ ” (Thurow, for the record, said that he doesn’t really feel jealousy, so there’s some indication that the Big Bad J-Word isn’t so bad for all of us.)

  When Thurow was describing his family structure to me, I couldn’t stop thinking about Hannah—about how I could imagine spending a life with her in the kind of “forever friendship” he was describing. I thought back to those days when the last thing I wanted in the world was to see anyone or talk to anyone or do anything except watch trashy shows on TV and order a pizza and eat the entire thing, and then not throw the box away and fall asleep on the box so my dreams would smell like pizza. On those days, Hannah seemed to sense that I was in despair and didn’t want to see her; she would gently coax me into the kitchen, saying that I didn’t have to stay and talk too long. She would make salad. At first I wouldn’t want to talk, and then, all of a sudden, I would. Hannah would listen and talk, and all that hurt would magically heal. This was pure magic. I wanted it in my life forever. I wished there was a way I could explain my feelings to her without making her feel pressured. I wondered if someday we might live in a community together like the ones I’d been reading about. The only thing that really sucks about Chicago is that Hannah isn’t here.

  But she did come to visit recently. She flew into O’Hare International Airport on a weekday; I left class early to take the hour-long train ride to meet her there. It wasn’t the first time someone had visited me in Chicago; Luke and I had been in the Windy City for a year already. It was, however, the first time I’d gone out of my way to meet someone at the airport. I not only met Hannah at the airport but I also got there twenty minutes early and stood by the escalators waiting for her to come down. When I saw her, my heart skipped a beat like it did when my crush walked into my birthday party in second grade. Hannah was here! Hannah!

  The feelings I had for Hannah were confusing to me. When we talked on the phone and one of us had to go, I felt like I’d been punched in the chest. Afterward, with the wind knocked out of me, I would think to myself, “Jesus, Sophie, get a grip! What’s the big deal? Just call her again tomorrow!” This was strange because it was intense, even for me (and, if you haven’t caught on by now, I have fairly intense emotions), and I haven’t felt this way about any of the boys I’ve dated. Why did I miss Hannah so much? How could I explain this kind of love?

  By the time Hannah got to Chicago, I’d made a list of things we could potentially do together, although I knew we wouldn’t have time for even half of them. She would be staying for only two full days, a
nd we both had work to finish that would prohibit us from spending every waking minute together. The place she wanted to go most, and the place I wanted to take her most, though, was the Garfield Park Conservatory—an enormous, free conservatory stacked to the gills with every kind of plant imaginable, and an outdoor area with an edible garden, a labyrinth, and a wall of carnivorous plants, among other growing green things.

  Luke and I had been to the conservatory together twice—once to scope it out (it was better than we could have hoped), and the second time to see a corpse flower bloom. The week before Hannah was in town, Luke took Melissa to the conservatory while I was at work. If the conservatory had been in New Orleans, I think we would have gone at least thirty times over the course of a year, but Chicago is so much bigger and more spread out; there are too many things to do on a given day here. Mostly when we have free time, we go bird-watching outside. (We’ve become sort of amateur birders since we started dating.)

  I couldn’t really believe we’d lived in Chicago for a whole year. The day our lease began again, I printed out the email marking its renewal and read it to myself in bed a few times. To me, the lease was a symbol. I had been in an adult relationship—I had lived with a partner, and we had adopted cats and purchased joint furniture and built shelves—for an entire year. I lay in bed staring at this printed-out document and mused about whether or not I’d really changed all that much since I daydreamed about doing this with my first boyfriend. I felt like mostly the same person, but with some extra layers—like I was the centermost Russian nesting doll, now with a few added selves donned for protection.