Origianlly published - The Times April 8, 2005
© Jane Shilling / The Times
Some of you may be thinking that this is just a fancy new word for what our grandparents used daringly to call “free love” — a form of behaviour which, in one guise or another, has surely been going on as long as human reproduction itself. But there is evidently more to it than that, for a couple of polyamorous psychologists, Dr Meg Barker of London South Bank University and Ani Ritchie of the Southampton Institute, have gone to all the trouble of presenting a paper on the phenomenon to the British Psychological Society.
Miss Ritchie and Dr Barker are themselves polyamorous, as it happens, with each other, and lots of other people as well. This is how it works: Dr Barker has “two main partners — Ani and Erich — and two other fairly regular partners. I live with two, spending about half my time with each, and see the other two maybe once a week. Two are male, two are female.” Oh, do try and keep up at the back.
Initially, the polyamorists were anxious about polyphobia from friends and family — “coming out is hard”. But, as Dr Barker cheerily remarked: “After an initial ‘Eek!’ most of them have settled down to the idea.” As for the children of these polyandrous ménages, well, they’re fine too: “Some of us have children and they’re as good as any parent.” Though how she can be sure, until those children grow up into happy, well balanced adults — or not, as the case may be — she does not say.
Leaving aside, for a moment, the objections to polyamory of traditional Christian morality, to which British society still vaguely adheres as an ideal, it is still not hard to think of reasons not to become polyamorous. All the skittering about from household to household, for a start. Half a week with one lover, half with the other, plus a couple of nights with each other’s others. You’d have to keep a full set of kit in every household: four toothbrushes, four hairbrushes, four lots of face cream, and tights and underwear . . . Imagine the expense!
Besides the toothbrush side of things, I can’t help worrying about the conversation as well. It has always struck me that the essence of a really successful love affair is that it is a kind of intricate, fascinating, non-stop conversation about all the things that interest you both most deeply (principally, of course, yourselves). And, indeed, that the conversation running out is a more reliable early indicator of the end of the affair than the sex going off.
But I can’t see how that would work polyamorously. Wouldn’t it be frightfully exhausting, having four such intense conversations all going on at the same time? And how on earth would you remember what you’d said to whom? Since you are all supposed to love one another, perhaps it wouldn’t matter. But in that case, wouldn’t the delicious intimacy that characterises a love affair collapse into a kind of amorphous conversational porridge?
On the positive side, I can see some advantages to Dr Meg’s idea. On a purely practical level, polyamory certainly does away with all the farcical trappings of covert adultery. As Fabrice, in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, memorably put it: “When I was young I liked to run all kinds of risks. I used to hide in wardrobes, be brought into the house in a trunk . . . climb in at windows. But now I prefer to be comfortable . . . and have my own key.”
Then, philosophically speaking, the notion of truthfulness in love affairs is a deeply interesting ideal. Human beings are cruelly ill adapted to fidelity by nature, and have spent much of their long existence attempting to bridge the caesura between their spiritual and animal natures. Half a second’s thought brings to mind a multitude of polyamorous ménages — those of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Lord Byron, Sir Francis Younghusband, Sir Oswald Mosley, Sir John Betjeman, E. Nesbitt, plus the whole of Bloomsbury, just for starters. (Curious how the practice seems to prosper mainly among the upper and upper-middle classes.)
Meanwhile, the history of our imaginative life is filled with polyamorous archetypes, from the uneasy ménage à trois that brought tragedy to the court of King Arthur to that modern-day Guinevere, Emma Grundy, whose unfolding tragedy (with Will in the King Arthur role and Ed a convincing Lancelot) is being trailed with such indecent relish on Radio 4 at the moment.
Do I sound convinced? Am I about to set up home with Erich and Ani and the good-humoured rest of them? Oddly enough, I am not. It isn’t the thought of the germs that puts me off so much as the twee vocabulary. The polyamorists have a language of love to make you retch. You know those Valentine’s Day small-ads with snuggly bunny and cuddly catkin? It has always struck me that there is no surer sign of bad faith in affairs of the heart than words ending in a double consonant plus -ly. They are the linguistic equivalent of soft toys on the double bed. But the polyamorists adore them.
“Frubbly” expresses the joy at seeing partners happy in the company of other lovers. “Wibble” is when a partner finds another lover and the original partner requires assurances. Yeah, right. In plain English, frubbly means your lover is thrilled to be rid of you, and “wibble” means you have made him utterly wretched with your selfish infidelity. On the whole, I think, class, that Ulrika is right after all. Polyamory is a new word for a very old problem.
Books of matches
I WAS fascinated to read, in an interview with Sandra Howard, that the old creature of the night had wooed her by chatting to her at dinner about F. Scott Fitzgerald and then — the clinching move — sent round a copy of Tender is the Night to her house in the morning.
The instant you know this, it becomes impossible not to speculate on which volume might do the trick for you. Drawing up a brief seducer’s shortlist (Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, Peter Beckford’s Thoughts upon Foxhunting), I was struck by the melancholy fact that I already own a copy of every single book with which a hopeful suitor might possibly woo me. Hey ho. You can never be too thin or too rich, but there’s evidently such a thing as being too well read.
Knees and toes
STILL in the books corner, I read at the weekend a very strange story. The poet Craig Raine, writing on the oeuvre of the present Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, alleged that he had no knees. I thought at first that this might be an obscure poetic idiom — a lack of knees implying some kind of moral deficiency, like Captain Jack Aubrey saying of a shipmate that “the fellow’s got no bottom” or a journalist complaining that a story’s “got no legs ”.
But no, it appears that, like Edward’s Lear’s Pobble, who swam the Bristol Channel only to find that he had been robbed (“His face at once became forlorn/ On perceiving that all his toes were gone!”), the Poet Laureate really does have no knees. Or rather, he has them, but not in their proper place at the junction of his upper and lower legs. Instead he keeps them in a jar of formaldehyde, where they have dwelt since being surgically removed in his teens.
This aperçu came up in the course of a meditation on how we might take seriously the poetry of this (or any other) Poet Laureate upon our nation’s great occasions. I think it was intended to be helpful, but if it was, it didn’t work. Now when I read the Poet Laureate’s thoughts on the marriage of Charles and Camilla, uppermost in my mind is sure to be not the delicate imagery and exquisite metre with which he celebrates their matrimonial bliss, but the mental image of the great man’s kneecaps floating like pickled eggs in a jar upon the mantelpiece.
