He, 24, and Ryan, 26, have been together for seven years, though never monogamously,

Patrick and Tina, 23, fell in love three years ago. She knew that he was already seriously involved with Ryan, but that didn’t deter her.

"Never was into the whole normal relationship thing," explains Tina. "Tried it. Ended up with a stalker for my first boyfriend."

Patrick encouraged a romantic relationship between Ryan and Tina, but they just weren’t attracted to each other. And that was okay.

"I liked Tina," affirms Ryan, "so I rolled with it."

Love: multiply splendoured

You might not know what polyamory is, exactly, but you already know that it sounds lovely. All those soft, wooing vowels. Poetic, really.

Polyamory’s root words mean "many love."

And a lovely idea it is.

"Who could be against love?" asks Dr. Gregory Forth, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta.

Polyamory is an alternative form of romantic love. Alternative, that is, to monogamy–loving just one other person–our society’s idea of the right way to love.

I stress that it’s our society I’m talking about here. As Forth explains, "Western notions of romantic love tend to be quite specific to Western culture... The majority of known societies have in fact allowed polygamy or plural marriage. While there may be the general impression that monogamy is the [universal] norm or is more common, you could certainly challenge that."

Whereas monogamy is about love, sex, and/or marriage between a couple, polyamory is about multiple-way love amongst more than a couple. And although polygamous marriages might be polyamorous, they aren’t necessarily. Polyamory is all about love, love, love. It can take many forms: in a poly-V relationship, like our trio’s, one person is romantically involved with two others, who are not involved romantically, but who are often good friends; in a poly triangle, all three people are romantically involved with one another; there’s also the poly-Z or N, which you can probably figure out.

Beyond these, you could of course have several people with any combination of romantic relationships going on, or even a whole community. You don’t have to be a permutation and combinationist to see that there’s a crazy number of forms that these relationships might take.

Can’t you just...

Patrick, Tina, and Ryan are pretty low-key about their relationship. They don’t go out of their way to hide it, but they don’t broadcast it either. "There are some people I don’t tell for obvious reasons (like my boss)," says Tina.

The worst reaction Patrick has gotten was from his mother: "‘I wish you’d just pick straight or gay... It’s too hard to try to explain why you have a boyfriend on one arm and a girlfriend on the other.’"

Tina’s mother’s reaction wasn’t much better: "‘I wish he wasn’t so selfish as to have two people. Why can’t he just have one like everyone else?’"

People often want to know what’s more natural. What were we really meant to be, they ask, poly or mono?

But does it matter? And can we even know?

"I would say that in this regard human nature is pretty flexible," says Forth. "Looking at individual cases, there are people who are perfectly capable of maintaining romantic relationships with more than one person at the same time."

Animals might give us some idea of what Nature had in mind–long-term monogamy is extremely uncommon in the animal world–but humans differ, and differ drastically, from other animals in multitudinous ways, so this doesn’t necessarily say much.

Dr. Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality, and Professor of Philosophy at the U of A, discusses the difficulty of pinning human relationships down to biological drives:

"Given the extraordinary range of both actual behaviors and norms in different contexts, it’s very hard to conclude much about what is biologically preordained.

"Monogamy is normed in so many different ways," explains Heyes. "If you look at our cultural fables... you see that narratives in which a couple comes together and stays together, ecstatically, are what move us."

Popular songs feast on monogamy. "Just the two of us, we can make it if we try." Well, okay, maybe you can make it, just the two of you, but maybe if you threw in an extra person or two...

Occasionally, you’ll hear a song that makes monogamy look like more of an opportunity fucker, like Elliot Smith’s "Twilight": "She’s a pretty thing, and she knows everything. But I’m already somebody’s baby." But the obstacle is somehow justified by the idea that love is limited, that you can only share your love with one other person. Your soulmate. That’s as good as it’s gonna get, so forget that other pretty thing, who knows everything. You can’t possibly have enough love for two or three or four other people–and most definitely not at the same time!

"In most of these constructions," Heyes says, "having sex with more than one person at a time looks like ‘unfaithfulness,’ ‘cheating,’ ‘betrayal,’ or ‘exploitation.’"

Wrestling the green monster

More often than jealousy, Patrick feels "compersion."

Compersion is the opposite of jealousy in romantic relationships. You feel compersion when you get pleasure from thinking about your partner getting pleasure from someone else. The whole idea makes the jealousy in monogamous relationships look terribly selfish. If my partner is sexually and emotionally fulfilled, shouldn’t that make me happy? Even if I’m not the only one fulfilling him? Can we learn to overcome jealousy?

Tina doesn’t mention compersion, though. She says she does get jealous sometimes: "Like when he [Patrick] says he’s not sleeping in my bed tonight, and he’s sleeping in the other bed," she explains. "But we switch off as to who gets who and when."

All three are quick to admit that they face difficulties, but the troubles they describe are often familiar, albeit sometimes with a twist. Like anyone involved in a romantic relationship, they worry about what they’ve gotten themselves into, and what might come of it. "[I fear] I’ve bitten off more than I can chew," admits Patrick, "I fear hurting people I love; I fear losing them; I fear alienating them through my shared love."

Tina laughs as she concedes her fear: "That I am here only to make babies!"

"Moving in together... was a big, scary step," Patrick remembers. "Two people who share me, moving on to sharing a home together with me."

Moving in together? You can hear the barricades being personed in greater numbers the farther we get into the subject, mostly by the same persons who played a part in sticking us with the monogamy thing in the first place.

"The Church has had quite a lot to do with it," says Forth. "In Christianity it’s the rule that you can only have one spouse."

And that you should have a spouse!

"That’s the Western ideal... till death do us part and all that."

Making it work

Once our trio all lived together, communication became even more important. "We all sit down very regularly, and discuss the relationship," he explains. "The usual check-ups that a relationship needs."

This sounds so matter-of-fact to them. I don’t remember regular check-ups in my monogamous history. A lot of break-ups, but not a lot of check-ups.

Patrick, Tina, and Ryan admit that their relationship takes a hell of a lot of work.

"A poly relationship is a lot like gardening," Patrick meditates. "You spend so much time on your hands and knees mucking around in the dirty chores . . . and sometimes you’re down there so long you almost forget to straighten up, take a look around you, and see the beautiful things you’re helping to grow. Just like gardening too, everyone’s interested in the finished product, but very, very few people are interested in the work it took to get it this way."

Before digging into polyamory, then, best to consider if you’re up for this kind of labour–and if the flowers will be worth it. If you’re looking for ease and efficiency, polyamory probably isn’t the way to go. As Heyes explains, (speaking of polygamy, but I think the same goes for polyamory) many people feel that "it would be impractical to have more than one spouse.

"I think this shows just how deeply instrumentalised marriage has become!" she adds.

Sex on the brain

Moving in, multiple partners... Inevitably, people will want to know...

"Oh do I want kids!" exclaims Tina. "[I’ve been] bugging Patrick for a while now to have them."

They’ve all obviously thought a lot and talked a lot about bringing children into the relationship. "We’re approaching the topic with cautious optimism," Patrick remarks, "but we all acknowledge that those newfound stresses and priorities once a child is born could spell the end of the relationship as it stands."

People tend to see polyamory as just a step away from polygamy, with all its negative connotations. As Heyes explains, "there is tremendous anxiety that marriage to more than one person will mean scary fundamentalist polygamy, with downtrodden and sexually exploited women locked away behind barbed wire in Montana somewhere."

"People are often concerned that someone is being taken advantage of," explains Ryan, "that a harem is being kept."

Ryan also points out that often people find the idea of polyamorous sex unpalatable. "There’s the squick factor," he says. "If there’s more people, then there must be more sex, they must all be sluts, there’s too much sex going on to be healthy, etc."

There might be more sex, there might be a greater variety of sex. It seems to me that the "squick factor" Ryan speaks of has a lot to do with monos resenting the fact that polys can overcome feelings of jealousy and possessiveness, and that they just might be having better sex for it.

Patrick expects that fewer than five hundred people in Edmonton identify as polyamorous, but he, Tina, and Ryan all believe that polyamory’s popularity is growing. As Ryan suggests, "People are slowly moving away from the one-size-fits-all relationship, and just doing what feels right for them."

Will this mean the end of that great old excuse? The next time you hear "Sorry, I’m already seeing someone," you might try pushing the romantic envelope.

"Really, only one? You should give me your numbers, I’ll take you out for Valentine’s Day."