Polyamorous Intimacies: From One Love to Many Loves and Back Again

Abstract

One of the emerging sexual stories (Plummer, 1995) of the early 2000s was that of consensual non-monogamous relationships. This story attracted intense public interest, with celebrities quoted as having open, or multiple, relationships, many newspaper articles and television documentaries focusing on ‘real-life’ experiences, and a burgeoning number of self-help style books being published on the topic. The cultural exposure of polyamory was such that the word entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 and elicits over a million Google hits due to the many online communities devoted to polyamory (mostly based in the US, Canada and Europe). There has also been increasing academic interest in the topic, with conferences, special issues of journals, and edited collections devoted to the topic of consensual non-monogamies (for example, Haritaworn et al., 2006; Barker and Langdridge, 2010). Polyamory is undoubtedly the form of non-monogamy that has received the most attention in recent years. This involves people openly having multiple romantic and sexual partners, and is often positioned as separate from other forms of non-monogamy such as swinging and open relationships.1