Polyamory

Ken Taylor
Is it even possible to be in love with more than one person at a time?

Ray Briggs
Isn’t monogamy just an outmoded cultural artifact?

Ken Taylor
Aren’t polyamorous just afraid of commitment?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor,

Ray Briggs
and I’m Ray Briggs, sitting in for John Perry. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I pretend to.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re talking about polyamory.

Ken Taylor
Now, polyamorous people have multiple romantic relationships at the same time. Personally, Ray, I find it hard enough to manage one romantic relationship.

Ray Briggs
Well, look, Ken, polyamory may not be for you. It may not be for everybody. But some people seem to find it a deeply satisfying way of being.

Ken Taylor
I’m afraid I have to admit, I don’t really see the attraction.

Ray Briggs
Well, isn’t it obvious? Loving more people is better than loving fewer people. Being loved by more people is better than being loved by fewer people. Variety is better than monotony.

Ken Taylor
Look, I grant you that having more friends, especially if they’re the right friends can be better than having fewer friends and and there are people who want to have more rather than fewer children to love and be loved by but romance. Oh, no, right. That’s different. Romance is meant to be a one on one kind of thing. No, I think that we’ll look around the world. Most people are in monogamous relationships around the world. Maybe we’re just hardwired for it. Maybe it’s evolution.

Ray Briggs
Ah, right. So-called monogamous people cheat on their partners all the time. And it’s not just people, it’s animals too. And even if they don’t cheat, the only way that most people get away with calling themselves monogamous is that they have a whole series of partners one after another.

Ken Taylor
Oh, yeah, sure. We don’t always live up to our commitments. I admit that. But and part of my animal nature, I guess. But But look, you can admit it would be better if we did live up to our commitments. And don’t you think there’s something cool something amazing about this grand tradition of lifelong romantic partnerships?

Ray Briggs
Well, traditions can be valuable. But they can be oppressive too. What about their tradition of women being financially dependent on their husbands or gay couples not being allowed to marry? monogamy is rooted in oppressive tradition.

Ken Taylor
Oh, come on. That’s a little much. Why do you say that?

Ray Briggs
The whole idea of monogamy is based on women as property. Men want a domestic servant to stay at home and take care of their children so they control women’s sexuality.

Ken Taylor
Ray, that’s so 14th century—we’re in the 21st century now. To some extent, we’re all feminists, we live the results of feminism. If men want their wives to be monogamous, they have to be monogamous too That’s how it works.

Ray Briggs
Oh sure, let’s make all the genders equally miserable.

Ken Taylor
But you would prefer polygamy that’s even more oppressive. Speaking of oppression, what about warmen fundamentalists who marry dozens of teenage girls who like that, and in some cultures, men can collect as many lives as they want, and then divorce them as soon as they become inconvenient like you don’t yesterday’s recycling you like that?

Ray Briggs
It’s not the number of wives that’s the problem. It’s the assumption that wives have to obey their husbands that husbands are supposed to have financial control over their wives. That’s what’s sexist about polygamy. And monogamy is just as bad.

Ken Taylor
Are you really saying that the number of wives is irrelevant to the oppressiveness of polygamy? Come on, Ray!

Ray Briggs
You’re so hung up on men and their wives, Ken—you’re so hetero-normative. Plus: Why does the nuclear family have to be the focus of everything?

Ken Taylor
You call it hetero-normative, I call it normal. Besides, how is this polyamorous stuff supposed to work out in practice anyway?

Ray Briggs
I’m glad you asked Ken. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, to ask some people how they found their way into non-monogamy. She files this report.

Alex
My name is Alex Schoenfeld. Monogamy almost killed me. It was like voluntarily lobotomizing myself.

Anonymous
When I was younger, there was a lot of isolation that came with divorce and like looking to sort of what type of romantic partnerships do I like see myself in I didn’t really see models that I wanted to replicate. I have been practicing non monogamy for seven years now. And I’m still figuring out how to do it.

Alex
In my early 40s, I started my first open relationship. I never had to pretend that she was the only person I was ever going to be attracted to. And that came as a revelation. We’re still together. And over the years we have had loving long term relationships with lots of different people.

Anonymous
My most recent relationship is the first close monogamous relationship I’ve ever been in. And it was this, you know this, I love this person a lot. And so I was really trying to meet them where they were. And through that relationship really realized that being in a monogamous relationship actually wasn’t something I could do. I don’t know if it’s an orientation, but it felt dishonest. Like, I felt like I couldn’t be my full self.

Alex
I think that being able to love often and easily is one of the better things about me. And I’ve always wanted to have sexual adventures and new people in that way. And my whole life, I thought that I could either have a loving, committed relationship where I could have the kinds of sexual connections with people that I wanted, and I couldn’t have both.

Anonymous
I’m really not even talking about sex just like this. This kind of connecting with people that can happen, that feels open and maybe charged with like, erotic energy or whatever, but just that like that, that would be okay. And that if it ever did develop, that would be okay.

David
My name is David.

Elena
I’m Elena.

David
For the last seven years, my primary partner has been Elena.

Elena
I think we’re pretty well aligned. Because we both believe in a hierarchical relationship where we are each other’s primary partners.

David
The major kind of categories of structure in poly relationships can be broken down into two things, you have relationship anarchy, and then you have hierarchical poly.

Elena
I last dated a guy for almost two years. You know, we had conversations around what does the future look like? Like? Could there be kids? How does his and his partner in mine David all intertwine life and looks like together? And we did not see eye to eye on the fundamentals of poly.

Alex
One of the hardest things to deal with in open relationships is dealing with either your own or your partner’s new relationship energy. A that initial falling in love with somebody else thing can be so intense and so overwhelming that can make somebody really annoying to hang out with.

Anonymous
Everyone’s like, so afraid of feeling jealous. This work to me is like okay, is this mine responsibility? Or Is this yours? Or is it ours together? And a lot of the time for me with jealousy. It’s actually my own work. Of like, yeah, okay, like so I’m feeling jealous. Okay, why do I feel jealous? Okay, I’m gonna tell them why I feel jealous.

Alex
You know, right. If only we live in a world where monogamous people were saved from jealousy and breakups and infidelity. I mean, I kind of thing monogamy is vanishingly rare, like real monogamy.

Speaker 5
We feel that like a lot of marriages could be saved or divorces can be avoided if they were just a little bit more willing to think outside the box. Because people believe that the grass is greener on the other side, that people always think that oh, I can have a better I could do better than you. Or that girl is way XYZ better for whatever reason. And if you oftentimes if just give them a chance to go on and date and explore, they’ll come back do you think’s make me appreciate the not quite as much as like going on first dates.

Anonymous
There’s a ways to do open relationships that are really horrible to other people and that, like, can be deceptive can be manipulative can be controlling. It’s so hard. It’s like exponentially. I mean, I think your feelings are abundant, but your time and energy is not.

Liza Veale
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Ken Taylor
What happens when your romantic ideals collide with real world challenges? I’m Ken Taylor, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re asking about polyamory.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Carrie Jenkins, who’s a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She’s the author of “What Love Is and What It Could Be.” Carrie, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Carrie Jenkins
Hi, there. Thanks for having me.

Ken Taylor
So Carrie, your book is about romantic love, which has been at the forefront of philosophers attention of the some philosophers a tangent for a long time. But it also discusses polyamory, a topic that typically gets a little less airtime, I’d say, what got you interested in polyamory?

Carrie Jenkins
Well, I mean, the the short answer is I’m polyamorous myself, I am married. I have a husband and I also have a long term boyfriend. And this is an arrangement that everybody knows about. So there’s no cheating involved. And you know, this has been going on for a few years now. And I started noticing various kinds of social rejection and stigma right away when I would start telling people about this and but one of the things that really struck me was how many of the really I’m a I’m a professional philosopher, I am surrounded by amazingly smart people all the time. How many of them even we’re not questioning whether romantic love could be anything other than monogamous. And so the confluence of noticing that there was work here for a philosopher to do. And, you know, realizing how impactful this was on my own life and the lives of a lot of other people that I knew, and was and was learning about and hearing about made me think I should I should maybe write a book about this or something.

Ray Briggs
So you’ve mentioned the cultural expectation of monogamy, which does seem pretty widespread. Where do you think that expectation comes from?

Carrie Jenkins
Well, I think that, ultimately, it’s about the control of paternity. And you can see this idea, I’m not the first person to think that you can see it in a lot of other philosophers who sit in Bertrand Russell, I can set in angles, this idea that the control of women’s sexuality was the way to secure paternity and thus, you know, things like the inheritance of property along the the male line, but that originally, of course, wouldn’t have impacted both men and women equally. So the idea that, that women should be entirely monogamous, but men, there’d be a lot more flexibility. That’s been a very common pattern, whether it was actual polygamy or just sanctioned mistresses. And so then what you see with with the beginning of early movement movements for gender equality, and women’s rights is a kind of leveling, whereby the monogamy norm is imposed on men as well, at least you know, in, in principle, but there are so many remnants of the original gender imbalance, like gaming, you know, just think about the word slot and the word stud, right? Those are very, very different connotations, at least, this, there’s current controversy over how much of that is actually packed into the semantic meaning, man, even if you look at the legal situations, a lot of parts of the world where adultery is against the law, so places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and actually lots of lots of parts of the US as well. So the UN is called for criminalization.

Ken Taylor
So there’s a lot there. I want to slow down a little bit. Yeah, because there is polygamy around the world. I read somewhere, Helen Fisher said something about 84% of cultures around the world allow polygamy, but women don’t go in for the won’t be the second wives have very many men only be the second lives of the very rich men. So most cultures that allow polygamy actually, there’s mostly monogamy because women mostly won’t put up with it. So it’s kind of complicated, isn’t it?

Carrie Jenkins
Depends what you mean. So you’re talking about a patriarchal polygamy structure where men are allowed to have multiple wives, but women are not permitted to have multiple anything. I’m not talking about that.

Ken Taylor
But women refuse in those cultures ought mostly to be the second wife.

Carrie Jenkins
In situations where they this would be the woman’s only source of income, then, you know, obviously, you need a certain amount of resources to be able to support a larger family. So that makes that makes sense, just from a financial from an economic point of view.

Ray Briggs
So polyamory means many, something many sort of loves, I guess, but many marriages, many relationships. What what is polyamory, about being poly? Because there are a lot of things that love could, could be. Yeah, quick question.

Carrie Jenkins
Yeah. I mean, the word comes from the word for love, the Latin MRA for love. And, you know, but the different people understand it very differently. It’s a word that has, it has a lot of scope within it for for people to find their their own way and their own path through it. And for me, it means having many loving relationships that fall outside of the monogamous norm.

Ken Taylor
So you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about polyamory with Carrie Jenkins from the University of British Columbia.

Ray Briggs
In our next segment, we’ll discuss the ethics of love and relationships. What do we owe to our loved ones? Does romantic love come with special duties and obligations? And if so, can you realistically have those obligations to more than one person at the same time?

Ken Taylor
Must divided love mean divided loyalty—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Mary Wells
I’ve got two lovers and I ain’t ashamed.

Ken Taylor
When you’ve got two lovers, how do you treat them both right? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, sitting in for John Perry, and we’re thinking about polyamory. Our guest is Carrie Jenkins from the University of British Columbia, author of “What Love Is and What It Could Be.”

Ken Taylor
So Carrie, many philosophers have conjectured that we have special obligations to our loved ones, including and perhaps especially to our romantic partners. So let’s think about what does that mean for situations where we have more than one romantic partner?

Carrie Jenkins
Yeah, so I mean, you know what, we have special obligations. Very obviously to our children. And so one might ask the same question about what happens if you have more than one child? And the answer is, you have special obligations to both children.

Ken Taylor
That’s true. I think you’re making an important point. And is one thing that puzzles me about the even the impetus toward thinking that romantic love is exclusive. Because you don’t think your love for your one child necessarily compete with your love for your other child, or you don’t think of your love for your one parent for love for your other parent, or your friends like so. Yeah, I get that. And that’s important. But somehow people still insist that romance is special. And I guess morally or ethically special. Do you think there’s anything to that thought?

Carrie Jenkins
I think, you know, it can be for some people. And so I mean, this is an important point. I’m not anti monogamy, I think it should be a choice that people make. And I think that actually is a way to strengthen monogamous relationships. So it’s the monogamy to be freely chosen out of the range of alternatives. So do we want to be ethically non monogamous in some way? Do we want to be polyamorous if the answer to that is no, because there’s something valuable about monogamy, then I think that people should choose monogamy. But the point is, at the moment, we just have this real kind of cultural emphasis on monogamy as the correct model.

Ray Briggs
So I have a sort of follow up question about monogamy is the correct model. So there are some exclusivity expectations that it seems wrong to place on my partner, like if I expected my partner to have no friends? Because I wanted to be their only friend, that would be extremely morally wrong. Yeah. And so where do you figure out which exclusivity expectations are sort of morally acceptable to place on your partner? How, how much sort of romantic exclusivity and monogamy is morally? Okay, and how do you sort of figure that out?

Carrie Jenkins
I mean, I don’t think anyone can do this for the people in the relationship. I think that’s something that people have to do themselves, and they have to make free and, you know, fully informed choices for themselves. The issue then is to remove social pressures that try to push everybody in the same direction. So you know, I think there should be more conversations when people are entering into relationships of any kind, including romantic relationships, what kind of relationship? Do we want this to be? Not does everyone else expect this to be but do we want it to be.

Ken Taylor
So you think—I mean, it sounds like you think it’s all up to us? I mean, if x and y who are in some relationship, I mean, but it’s not. I mean, is it there is some kind of social structure, take the runs relationship to one’s children. This, something like the state or something can say you owe your children this, right. You don’t get to negotiate yourself out of it. And there’s, and there’s morality that says, well, but you don’t owe your children that you owe the world has some calling you you can’t give all your resources to your children. So there’s something about most morally fraught relationships that have, you know, some kind of external constraints, some kind of internal negotiations I’m getting right.

Carrie Jenkins
So yeah, commitments a good way of thinking about this, right. So you know, if you have a child you’re committing to, to care and love, care for and love that child and to raise that child, if you enter into a commitment with another person, say, you know, I promised to be exclusive with you forever. And then you break that commitment. Of course, there you have your ethical failing. But if you don’t make that commitment, if you make a commitment, I will be with you forever. But I’m not promising to be exclusive romantically with you. And then you have another romantic partner, you haven’t broken a commitment. So I don’t think there’s an ethical failing in the second scenario, although there isn’t the first one.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve got a caller. Jenny from San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to philosophy, what’s your comment or question, Jenny?

Jenny
Thank you. Um, well, I’m wondering, is polygamy something or polyamory sorry? Something that all people are capable of? Or do you think it takes a certain kind of person to be capable of loving more than one person?

Ken Taylor
Good question, Jenny, what do you what do you think, Carrie?

Carrie Jenkins
I don’t know about capable. I mean, I would prefer to think here in terms of what people want and what people need and what they choose. So I think there are, in my experience, there are some people who chose monogamy and they knew they had alternatives and they wanted to be monogamous, and other people who don’t and I think I’m not sure it’s really about, you know, failing to be capable of the alternative, although maybe that is the case for some people. But I mean, you know, I am a little bit hesitant to think about not being able to go the other way, because that suggests that we have to make like a special allowance for those people who are incapable well being one or the other. And if there’s nothing wrong with either choice, that shouldn’t be a question of making a special allowance because they can’t do it, you know.

Ken Taylor
Well, you know, but people have to know people have lots of moralizing views about all kinds To things I’m not quite sure where those come from, but I want to shift the conversation just a little bit, because of, its connected to Jenny’s thing. MACUSA I think it was said that human beings are polymorphous, Li, perverse, and even Helen Fisher, whom you talk about a lot in your book. She says, we have these three systems, lost love and attachment. I know you have certain views about that. But one of the things about her her views about these three systems is that, you know, they don’t always work in sync. And she argues that there’s like, evolutionarily pressure toward pair bonding toward romantic love toward lust. And they you can, like, be attached to one person, but be in love with another person and what sex was still other people. So you know, it means or darn complicated. I think we’re capable off of all kinds of things, I think. I think Jenny has kind of a point. I think, all human beings are capable in this MACUSA way of polymorphous perversity, but culture and history and all this stuff comes in and tries to channel this. What do you think?

Carrie Jenkins
Well, I mean, this there’s capable and there’s capable, right depends what kind of what kind of possibility talking about that? Because a lot of people can make themselves do something so maybe someone who’s you know, who really wants to be monogamous could make themselves be poly? Maybe and some people might try to do this in order to fit in with with another person that they really want to be with. It’s this is a real world situation, right? So you want to be with a polyamorous person, you’re monogamous, but you try really hard to be polyamorous. So that you can be in relationship with this poly person. And you know it, maybe you’re in some sense capable of that. But if you’re miserable, how’s that a solution?

Ken Taylor
I get your point, I get your point. It’s points well taken. But I guess it let’s distinguish between like the as it were the psychology of individual difference, and the psychology of the human species, it seems to me that the psychology of the human species is really complicated. And if you look at the human species, you find even in monogamous cultures, Ray was right. I mean, adultery is like prevalent. It’s been prevalent ever since there was monogamy. Right? Why is that? That’s something about the human species, right? It’s something about we’re not just simply designed for X or Y, we’re going to design for x and y. And culture tries to settle the warring, you know, how we how we weigh the warring faction factors?

Carrie Jenkins
Yeah, and one of the ways I sometimes look at this as like when there’s a really, really strong social or cultural prohibition on something, and must be something a lot of people really wanted to do, right? Because otherwise, you wouldn’t need to have it be so met, you wouldn’t need so many messages telling you, you’re not allowed to do it. And so I think this is, you know, there are a lot of people who find monogamy difficult, at least in the very long term. And another point that Ray made, which is absolutely right, is that sometimes this is resolved by becoming serial monogamous. So you just cycle through a lot of partners, and that itself can be very destabilizing as a model, especially if we’re thinking about things like the commitments people have, to children, the commitments people have to other other folks in their lives. serial monogamy followed by serial divorce and, and separation can actually be very traumatic. And so it’s it’s a very complicated balance. And I don’t think ultimately, there is any getting away from the fact that we’re, we’re not just complex as a species, but each of us individually is complex as well.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question too. We’re sort of talking a bit about social models for relationships, and sort of serial monogamy is one and monogamy with cheating is another? So I want to know. So it seems to me like there’s a kind of commonly held model in which sort of, you meet somebody, you get into a monogamous relationship, you get married, you have children together, you share a household and finances, and then you sort of die. He’s still married. So that’s loaded to me. That’s one model. But where do where do I go for different models? And how do I sort of have several models and let people find the right one?

Carrie Jenkins
You know, this is part of the problem. We do have a dearth of role models, we have a dearth of representations and our shared culture you know, if you if you watch romantic comedies, you will pretty much always see a meet cute between a very, very good looking white boy and a very, very good looking white girl, followed by some struggles, but then, you know, union and they get together and my friend Mandy Khatron, who works on love stories has been explaining that this very kind of uniform pattern that we think of as a love story, where do people get other role models from? Well, I mean, you can you can read into literature on various types of non monogamous relationship structures. So there are books like opening up by Tristan Thomas No, my book looks at a few of the issues. But the part of the problem is we’re not really getting mass cultural represent

Ken Taylor
Well, yes right, because we’re—I’m gonna take a long view—we’re in a cultural cul de sac, because at any moment in history, we kind of tend to be in cultural coldest acts. What do I mean by that? So take a back on the Savannah, when pair bonding. First of all, there was kind of apparently serial monogamy, right? It lasted for a while women and men were more equal than when they were a hunter gatherer let me find it when they were hunter gatherers. I know, I know. And then farming happen. Helen Fisher says the worst invention for women was the plow. Right? Some people claim that we’re going forward to the Pleistocene, with women getting into the workforce and being financially equal to men. So you know, things change, culture changes, we’re right now, in a cultural cul de sac, our imaginations are constricted by the moment we’re in. And so that’s how it always is, we have to try and meet that’s what philosophy is for help us reimagine possibilities.

Carrie Jenkins
That’s what I that’s what I always tried to do. And it’s interesting to think about this cul de sac possibility. And I’m given to understand that some studies of millennial attitudes towards relationship are suggesting actually a bit of a backwards trend towards a higher preference for very, and I’m using air quotes here traditional looking gender roles in relationships compared to say, and then you know, the 1980s. So, you know, we can’t really assume that there’s, there’s a uniform progression in any one direction, I think these socially constructed things are really very much up to us. And it is, it is our responsibility to think about which direction we’re pushing things.

Ken Taylor
Who’s the US? What do you mean up to us? How does that work? Because I think this is a complicated thing. Because there’s this there is our biology. And I think one of the things I do like about your book is that you kind of are not an either or person. I mean, there is the facts of our biology.

Carrie Jenkins
I’m really not an either/or person.

Ken Taylor
There are the facts of our biology, which are relatively fixed, and then there’s culture. And then I’m not sure about how to think about the interaction between biology and culture. I don’t think people think enough about how biology constrains or cooperate or feeds into and how culture feeds back. It’s all very complicated, I think. And can you help us simplify?

Carrie Jenkins
Well, I have the analogy I try to use as an actor playing a role. And I can, you know, so you imagine, you see TV show, and there’s I don’t know, there’s this Captain Kirk, right, the character. And you know, that that’s also what you’re looking at. There’s also William Shatner, the actor. And then there’s this question of how good is that casting decision? I think of our biology, the biology of love, some of which I think is is very much the kinds of things that someone like Helen Fisher is describing, although I take issue with some of the ways she she theorizes about it. That biology is then given this script. So this is the kind of culture bundle of cultural attitudes and expectations, and then the question becomes, okay, how good a fit is that casting decision? And I think it really depends on the person. And I think part of the problem is handing everybody the same script, and it goes, so and so and so and so sitting in a tree kiss ing first comes love, you know, the rescue. We teach it to kid so early.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about polyamory. And we’d love to have you join this conversation. And Deborah from Nevada is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Deborah, what’s your comment or question?

Deborah
Hi. I have a friend who was a nurse. And she did research and fastness when it comes to giving, getting that women to have confidence in their partner have a lot easier time, both during the pregnancy and when it comes to giving birth to children. So this is probably one of the happy marriage to begin with. That that was you know, she researched to over 100 cases. That the conclusion. So what do you think about that?

Ken Taylor
Thanks for the question, Deborah. I didn’t quite hear it all, did you get the gist?

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So it sounds like Deborah is saying her friend who researches pregnancy, has found a correlation between being confident in your partner and having sort of successful outcomes in your pregnancy. And so wanted to know about the relationship between that and monogamy and marriage.

Ken Taylor
You got a thought, Carrie?

Carrie Jenkins
Well, I mean, that’s that sounds just on the face of it perfectly reasonable. Being being confident in your partner. Sounds like it would be very psychologically important to someone who was who was pregnant. And, you know, I would, I would imagine that would very easily have have ties to all kinds of successful outcomes along that line.

Ken Taylor
Let me ask you really quickly before we get into a break about you, what do you think of sort of evolutionary arguments? So pair bonding is rare in nature or some at some birds do it, few mammals do it. And that stuff you read, it’s all over the place. But one hypothesis educated fleas. Why bother, as you read is that having to rear children takes women away from the rest of the work of the species that makes it harder than they need a partner. And the species like birds or females to sit on the eggs needs a partner. What do you think of arguments like that?

Carrie Jenkins
Yeah, so I mean, there are lots of ways to raise children and the one that we tend to think of as the obvious one where basically, the woman does all the work and has to be dependent on someone else, in order to be able to do that is only one of the biologically available options. And so, you know, we could think about lots of other choices there, of course, is this sort of nuclear family model, but there are also lots of extended family models. There’s also much more communal child rearing options where you sort of have a crash scenario. And of course, you know, when Fisher talks about this, she sometimes talks about women having they’re literally having their hands full, because they had to, when we became bipedal, had to carry babies in their arms, rather than on their backs. But one of the things that you can do about that, as soon as you have the technology is wear a baby sling. And so, you know, we have to be a little bit more careful not to let I think some of the cultural attitudes that are predominant right now interfere with our theorizing about prehistoric, hominid evolution, because it’s very easy for that interference to start happening. Unless we’re really scrupulous about it.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re thinking about polyamory with Carrie Jenkins, author of “What Love Is and What It Could Be.”

Ray Briggs
In our final segment, we’ll be thinking about how social institutions affect our romantic relationships? Should we redesign the state and civil society to support different kinds of romantic relationships? And what would that look like?

Ken Taylor
The future of love—when Philosophy Talk continues.

New York Dolls
We’re all in love, we don’t care.

Ken Taylor
We’re all in love, but are we all going about it—but what are we going to do about it as a society? I’m Ken Taylor. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, sitting in for John Perry, and our guest is Carrie Jenkins from the University of British Columbia. And we’re thinking about polyamory.

Ken Taylor
So Carrie, we’re gonna do something for you that we do with our guests on philosophy talked him time to time, we’re going to give you amazing powers. We’re going to use czar of romance, you got the power to redesign the state, civil society, whatever institutions, you want our educational institutions, in order to make the world a better place for healthy romantic relationship. What’s the first thing that you’re going to do?

Carrie Jenkins
Oh, boy. So there’s so much that I think one of the first things has got to be looking at institutions like marriage laws. So one, and one of the big questions here for me is does the state really have any business choosing for us? What kinds of romantic relationships we may or may not want to be in? Does it have any business for example, making some sorts of relationships financially easier? Does it have any business dictating? Who gets to visit the bedside of a sick loved one? I don’t really see a long term future for that type of interference.

Ken Taylor
So are you are you are you suggesting so we’ve had a guest on Philosophy Talk, who suggested that the state should for various reasons, get out of the business of marriage altogether? That the state isn’t in the business of having Bar Mitzvahs be a state sanctioned institution? Why should marriage has so many different meanings, so many different forms? And she argued in a liberal pluralistic polity in which the state is supposed to be neutral? It should just not be in the business of marriage at all?

Carrie Jenkins
So I look, I’m pretty much in favor of Elizabeth Break’s view, which is that there’s there’s at the moment, we have a kind of unfair privileging of certain kinds of relationships that are supported by things like marriage laws, but not just marriage laws. Now, I do think there’s, there’s obviously a sense in which the state has an interest in children and the raising of children in safe and secure environments. And that’s a separate question from how it does or doesn’t choose our romantic relationships for us. But in stepping away from from marriage and laws, there’s also I think, a really big question about how we are envisaging the possibilities here because we tend to think I think, a little small, we tend to think, Oh, well, love has always been like this, and it’s always going to be sort of like that, but really, that’s not true. That’s that’s, that’s a picture that we like to tell ourselves that things have always been basically the way they are now. And actually, we’re really well placed to see that that’s not true, because we’ve seen just over the last, I don’t know, 1020 years, a really big shift in attitudes to same sex love. And then generation before that, a similarly huge shift in attitudes to Interracial Love. And I think these are indicators, that that the the ways that we socially construct and constrain love, especially romantic love can change if we want them to. And so this is part of why I think we don’t just need to look at things like laws and state regulations, we need to look at the idea of a love story, we need to look at what kinds of depictions of relationships we’re seeing on TV, or at the movies or reading about in books.

Ray Briggs
So I wanted to ask about sort of a third thing, besides love stories, and besides the law, which is sort of social norms outside the law, and whether you envision any changes to those and what sorts of changes.

Carrie Jenkins
I mean, I’m really talking about the law and love stories as a way of getting out those. So social norms are these sort of very abstract and difficult and sometimes unwieldy things to think about. But yes, ultimately, this is about changing social norms. And it’s about changing the ways that we we socially police each other according to those norms. So you know, you can step away from from marriage laws, but if, if someone is completely rejected by all their friends and their family, for being in a kind of relationship that other people don’t consider normal, that’s gonna make it very, very hard for them to choose that.

Ken Taylor
But you know, the way that social norms change and the way laws change mostly is through, well, lots of different things. But one of the things is through activism and resistance and people shouting and making noise and telling their story and alternative media and all that stuff. Is there a polyamory movement that has that kind of force behind it that say, the gay rights movement? Or the civil rights movement? Or is it—

Carrie Jenkins
There are a lot of differences? And certainly, like, at the moment, I think we’re still kind of in the early stages of people starting to have I mean, the kind of conversation that we’re having right now. And the question is still being framed in very much this way, you know, is there something morally wrong or you know, gross about this? So that’s, that’s sort of where we still are, unfortunately.

Ken Taylor
We’ve got a caller—Ella from Oakland, welcome to Philosophy Talk, what’s your comment or question?

Ella
Hi. My question is, the practicality of what the guests were seeing her situation is, so she has a husband and she has a boyfriend. First of all, I’m not sure it would qualify as polyamorous. Maybe it’s more dual Mrs. But the other thing is like, what do you do about holidays? What do you do about weekends? What do you do a both your husband and your boyfriend had a really important work party that they want you to come to? That your boyfriend had his own family and wife? Is there, you know, all the the logistics of what now?

Ken Taylor
Thanks for the question. Carrie, you can be as open you can abstract away from your own case, or take your own case, whichever you prefer there.

Carrie Jenkins
Okay, I can tell you a few things about my case. But really, I mean, there’s a sort of general answer, which is everyone has to work out those details. And the lack of role models can make it challenging, because everyone has to sort of figure it out for themselves. But then again, everyone has to figure it out for themselves anyway, like even if you’re married, and suddenly, your sister has a very important engagement, that that coincides with something that your husband is doing, then you have to make a choice. And so you know, if that happens, one has to make a choice. And sometimes it’s a matter of just scheduling around things. I, you know, I tried to arrange my own life, I’m quite an organized person, I have lots of Google calendars on the go. So I try to have awareness of when these potential scheduling conflicts are going to come up. And sometimes we can work around them. Sometimes we can’t. And that’s that’s part of life. Really. I mean, if you have two kids, and they both have a school performance, what do you do?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so I want to ask about the like, what if you have two kids? So a lot of the conflicts that you just described, are conflicts that don’t seem particular to love, like if you have two people that you care about? And so I’m kind of wondering about the emphasis on love relationships as the most important kind of relationships that you sort of suspend everything for, which seems to be really culturally common. Do you think that that is a reasonable emphasis?

Ken Taylor
Can I add to this before you answer I just want to add to this though, Carrie, because I have a similar thought I don’t mean to pile on. But but it but I do think there is something that’s not in your question, right that needs because romantic relationships are a form of intimacy. and deep connection that is different from all these other love religions. I love my country, but I’m not intimate with it. I love my my siblings. And I care about keeping up with their lives, but it’s not as day to day kind of management and commingling of—

Ray Briggs
I don’t know, I’m like really close to my best friend and we don’t make out with each other. And that’s okay. That’s true. You really important to each other.

Ken Taylor
That’s true, but the person you do make out with, but anyway, Carrie.

Carrie Jenkins
I’m gonna put a label on this. We’re not labeling you. I’m labeling this, this bundle of attitudes. So a moto normativity, which is basically that again, that’s a mouthful. Yeah, it is kind of a mouthful, our motto normativity. So this is the idea that romantic love relationships have this kind of traditional expected kind, where it’s basically two people in a permanent romantic and sexual relationship, that those are more important than anything else. That is an assumption, we can question it. And I think we should question it. Because there there are people who live in extremely intimate and committed and long term relationships with a friend with a family member, which are not romantic, and they’re not sexual. And yet, those are the most important relationships.

Ken Taylor
Right, I get you, I get you. But there is a kind of there a kind of source of meaning these kinds of special relationships in a human life that is different have a different contour and texture. But there’s a caller who wants to again, and oh, this is a email. Joanne from Francis, San Francisco has a question regarding government and marriage, it seems to me that the government is needed as a sort of neutral arbiter when it comes to a fair property division among partners without rules and government enforcing those rules, one partner or the other, maybe disadvantage leading to the unfair division of property accumulated during the marriage. So this is going back to my liberal argument for getting the state out of the business of marriage. Joanne is pushing back on that.

Carrie Jenkins
Right, right. And so I mean, this, this amounts to kind of effectively a control of property and resources in a in a broad in a breach of contract. So I think, you know, contract law could be able to handle situations where a commitment has been made to be an economic unit with another person. Yeah, we already have a lot of laws and regulations for corporations that handle these sorts of things. And then that contract is broken, or the corporation needs to break up. So there are ways of doing that, that don’t have to be they don’t have to be dictating things like who can have sex with whom, at the same time, right, right.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I wanted to sort of jump in on that point, because it seems that sort of love relationships, and romantic relationships are not the only relationships that create those kinds of vulnerabilities. Like, if I’m taking care of an elderly parent, I might want legal protections for me and for them.

Ken Taylor
You got a comment or thought about that, Carrie? This will be your last comment or thought. So give us your last closing thought.

Carrie Jenkins
All right. Okay, so my last closing thought has been the steam that’s been going through all of my comments, which is really, we need more diversity of representation, we need to understand that there are lots of things we don’t question that we should we need to, for example, the centrality of romance, the idea of monogamy as the only option. But ultimately, each person’s got to ask those questions for themselves. I can’t tell anybody else what to do. And neither can you.

Ken Taylor
How can we silence the culture—the droning other, as I tell my students that keep telling you, here’s how you should answer that question, Carrie? How do you do that?

Carrie Jenkins
That’s really, really hard. Because after a while, it’s in your head as well. Right? And so, I mean, you just you have to, it’s like a muscle, you have to keep training.

Ken Taylor
Yes. And here’s, here’s my last offer to you, Carrie. That’s what philosophy is for. That’s why I tell these students they need to take philosophy courses so that they know how to respond to the droning other who has power and influence, but not necessarily reason.

Carrie Jenkins
The cultural white noise that’s just coming at you all the time. Yes, you’ve got to be able to tune into that so you can hear the messages and decide if you agree or not.

Ken Taylor
So on that note of deep agreement, Carrie, thank you for this conversation. It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you for joining us.

Carrie Jenkins
Thanks very much. Had a great time.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Carrie Jenkins. She’s a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and author of “What Love Is and What It Could Be.” The conversation continues—it’s already started with Ray’s blog—at philosophers corner, at our online community of thinkers, where our motto is—get this—Cogito Ergo bloggo, I think therefore I blog. And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed on today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send your question to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we might just feature it on the blog.

Ray Briggs
And you can also become a partner in the community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org. And now: a voice we all love no matter how fast—it’s in Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Western culture is based on monogamy. But there’s not much that causes more trouble than one partner messing around. Couples can get in trouble from being too together, Macbeth and his lady, Oedipus and his Mom, Cleopatra and Marc Antony. Another problem: stability and variety are constantly at war with each other. That’s why we have hookers and orgies and affairs and porn and swingers. And also polygamy, as once practiced by Mormons and others, and other multi-partner relationships. Polyamory has only been called that since the ninteies, when the term was coined for a usenet group. Free love was an earlier example, as practiced by the 19th Century Oneida Community, where consent was the only restriction. Not to mention the Order of the Oriental Templars, founded by the wicked Aleister Crowley, the motto of which was “Do what thou wilt.” In 1956, a man named John Pelts Presmont, called “Bro Jud,” started a community called Kerista. He took Crowley’s basic idea, that is sex, drugs, and a lot of late night yakking, and took all the Satanist stuff out. Bro Jud was a good natured libertarian hippie, in other words, who moved the outfit to San Francisco in 1971, where I used to encounter them, in the form of their zines, which could be found in fine laundromats all over Haight Ashbury and the Inner Sunset. Kerista was based on units they called called BFICs, or best friend identity clusters. And doesn’t that sound sexy? This was the basic social block of the commune, which actually humorously called itself a utopian sex cult. Most BFICs were four or five people, one was twenty. The idea was you were faithful to the group, but did not stray outside the group. So you get the stability, but you also get the variety. This involved scheduling, to promote non- preferential coupling, and to drive out jealousy. Otherwise things were communal, car sharing, buying in bulk, sharing rent. And the group started its own business, called Abacus, a Mac support group in the early days of Apple. Wow. This is still what some people think San Francisco is really like, when it’s not gay or doing the bidding of George Soros. How could Kerista fail! Well, sometimes you might get tired of a person in your BFIC, and not want to have sex with that person for that night, or ever again. Not wanting to hurt that person’s feelings, you would make up some “impurity,” as they were called, at the group’s “Gestalt o ramas,” which was the cult’s way to air grievances, refine ideologies, and so forth. Get the person evicted from the commune, you don’t have to have sex with them ever again! These group meetings became problematic in other ways, as they were run by either (a) the loudest and most insistent, that is, the bossiest, or (b) the one who understood the internal ideologies the most, that is, the priestiest. Since they were all just making it up as they went along, this led to resentments and conflict. Also, when you have a job, you meet people, which means you might become interested in somebody outside the BFIC. Also, the computer business started to decline, as businesses do, and nothing puts more pressure on a relationship than lack of money. Nothing. Anyway, Kerista is no longer active in San Francisco. Among other factors that brought it low, one would have to throw in “the toxic value of purity,” which is what one former member called the tiresome judginess of the group meetings. And you have to factor in the complicated scheduling required for your love life. When you need to check a day planner before you take off your trousers, well maybe you should just go back to bitter solitude. Works for me. I gotta go.

John Perry
Last few talk is a prison tation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2017.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin.

John Perry
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Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Audrey Dilling, and Collin Peden.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Ken Taylor
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) in this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders—not even when they’re true and reasonable.

John Perry
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too, can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m John Perry

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.

Annie Hall
You know what you are? You’re polymorphously perverse. You’re exceptional in bed because you got you get pleasure in every part of your body when i touch it. You know what I mean? Like the tip of your nose and if I stroke your teeth or your kneecaps, you get excited.