麻豆约拍

"Overcoming jealousy is the biggest thing for people to understand"

13 May 2021

We hear a lot about searching for 'the one', but what if you're happier being in a relationship with 'more than one'?

Polyamory is the practice of having intimate relationships with multiple partners who all consent to it.

Willow Smith made headlines when she revealed she is polyamorous on American talk show Red Table Talk, which she hosts alongside her mum Jada Pinkett-Smith and grandmother Adrienne Banfield-Norris.

So how do polyamorous relationships work?

Listen to Felix’s interview in full on The Hayley Pearce Podcast.

Felix Jones has two female partners

For me, polyamory is the practice of having multiple partners, but the key difference is that you tell everybody about it, make sure that everybody knows what’s on the cards and that everyone’s agreed… communication is key.

Sometimes in polyamorous relationships you have groups of people that are all collectively interested in each other. In my particular polyamorous relationship, it’s me and my two female partners who are with me, but not with each other. I spend half the week with one partner and half the week with the other.

My parents were interestingly baffled, but they’re settling in. The reactions of my two partners' parents were both very interesting. The first one asked, “so, does that mean no kids?”. If we were to raise kids it would be perfectly possible to raise them as part of a community.

“How could you be OK with that?”

Overcoming jealousy is the biggest thing for people to understand and that’s become one of the most common questions. We’ve had people say, “I don’t know how you could be OK with that”. I think firstly, there’s recognising that jealousy – although a very natural emotion – can come from an unhealthy place of possession. To me, love is all about honesty and communication. That honesty is about loving that person for who they are, in their entirety, including their desire to be with other people.

Is it cheating?

Cheating I would say comes from having a relationship contract. When your relationship contract is monogamy, you are breaking that relationship contract by cheating. If it’s part of your relationship contract that you can do those things, then it’s not cheating.

One issue that is discussed in polyamorous circles is people trying to bring new people into a relationship because they need to fill a gap and spice it up. That’s something that people think polyamory can be. In my book, it’s not what polyamory should be, it’s about meeting people. There’s no implication of the other partner being left behind, it’s about incorporating new people into the relationship – you love equally.

There’s one term that comes up a lot when talking about polyamory: compersion, which is the emotion of being happy for your partner when exploring other romantic situations irrelevant to yourself, without feeling like it’s some kind of betrayal.