Honesty, compersion and metamours: Understanding polyamory with Arundhati Ghosh.
Women Uninterrupted is a podcast by The Hindu. We bring you difficult, different and uninterrupted conversations about being a woman.
Host: Anna Thomas
Guest: Arundhati Ghosh
Editing: Tarshish Kurien
Title music: Maya Dwarka
Exploring Polyamory: A psychologist’s take on love in many form
By Ila Kulshrestha, clinical psychologist
Polyamory revolves around the belief that individuals can form deep, meaningful connections with multiple partners while maintaining integrity and respect for everyone’s autonomy and boundaries.
Ila Kulshrestha
Central to the practice of polyamory is effective communication. Partners in polyamorous relationships engage in open and honest dialogue about their desires, needs, boundaries, and expectations, creating a supportive environment where emotions, concerns, and insecurities can be openly addressed. Access to language that allows us to articulate these needs and desires is so crucial in navigating and writing a new script for oneself.
I see, in the last decade of my work as a psychotherapist with individuals and couples, that there is more tendency to challenge the traditional monogamous structures due to this increase in access to language around polyamorous practices. Often, I hear young clients discuss how principles of traditional monogamy don’t fit with their lived experiences of navigating urban isolation, long distance connections to original communities, finding potential partners on dating apps and many parallel pursuits and conversations on relationships and intimacy. Polyamory often shows up as a possible choice to navigate this scenario. It allows individuals to look at their needs and desires authentically without the added pressures to be everything to everyone.
Polyamory values openness, honesty, and communication within relationships. From a psychological perspective, these principles form the foundation for any healthy and fulfilling connections. Moving away from the wider cis-het scripts of relationships allows individuals to truly examine what they consider important in relationships instead of trying to mimic popular or borrowed ideas of love and intimacy.
However, it’s important to recognise managing multiple relationships requires a high degree of emotional maturity, effective communication skills, and the ability to navigate complex emotions such as jealousy and insecurity. Conflict resolution in poly relationships can often look more complex and layered when truly explored outside the conventional expectations of monogamous partner roles.
In the Indian context, where cultural norms and values around relationships often emphasise monogamy and marital fidelity, polyamorous couples may face a lack of validation and acceptance from their families and communities. Onlookers may be accepting on the face of it but insist on still fitting the experiences into a normative lens by asking questions around who is the “main” partner, assuming that newer partners are transient and temporary, considering all partnerships to be based on sexual gratification.
As with anything that challenges norms, polyamory is not a uniform concept. There are many different ways that poly relationships can be established and maintained. This lack of a conventional or popular script can often lead to biases and prejudices from those who haven’t taken the time to understand the choices and the motivations to practice polyamory.
As a psychologist, I’ve observed how individuals engaging in polyamorous relationships often develop resilience and coping strategies to address these challenges, leading to personal growth and self-discovery. While it may not be the right fit for everyone, for those who embrace it, polyamory can be a source of profound personal growth, emotional fulfillment, and authentic connection.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
Host: This is Anna Thomas, your host on Women Uninterrupted, a podcast on The Hindu website. And, in this episode, we have with us Arundhati Ghosh, a poet, a writer and a cultural practitioner. On this season of Women Uninterrupted, we are talking relationships and I wanted to have you on our curtain raiser episode, Arundhati, because you are a conversation-starter in your own right.
In 2023, you wrote two articles in which you discussed polyamory and you declared that you are polyamorous. What were you thinking, literally? I mean, what did you think would be the reactions when you first started talking in public about polyamory? Were you among the first to talk of it in India?
Arundhati Ghosh | Photo Credit: Darshana Dave
Arundhati: Well, I came out as a polyamorous person to myself and people who are close to me - my partners/friends - a long time ago. I’m 51 and I’m talking about at least, if not more, 20-30 years ago. However, it was only in the last 7-8 years that I started writing on social media about polyamory because I felt that, as I was meeting more and more people who were like me, there was very little conversation/discussion, or even understanding about what this was all about, and lots of misconceptions/myths about the way we are, as well. I wasn’t thinking anything, actually. But the day the first newspaper article came up, I did wake up in the morning and say, “What the shit have I done?”
Host: Let’s start with the etymology (of) polyamory. How would you define love in a polyamorous situation? “Loving many.”
Arundhati: So, love is love, and it is as difficult, as hard, as troublesome, as pathetic, and, needing as much courage in every way. I really believe that love and life can only give you hope. It can’t give you guarantee: whether you might love one person, love more than one person and no matter what sexual preferences you have, what gender you think you are, love is love actually. As far as I am concerned - and it depends who you’re asking - I don’t make too many distinctions between: Oh, this is this kind of love, this is just friend, that is that kind of love. I think people I care about, people who mean something to me, people who care about me and who light up my life in different ways; those are the people I love. With some I do also have sexual relationships with; some I don’t. With some I have physical intimacies but not sexual relationships. With some others, the kind of love is more romantic than what I would say is like an everyday kind of love. It’s more magical. Some are less. But these are ways in which I can describe and differentiate them. What I do not want to do is put them in different boxes and immediately label them. That’s how I would define love within polyamory.
Host: A little more about vocabulary - because vocabulary helps us to express ourselves and, for our listeners, it would be useful if you could tell us - you mentioned compersion, yeah? Let’s go through some terms…
Arundhati: Compersion is actually the opposite of jealousy, because, you know, one of the first things that anybody will ask you the moment you say that you have multiple lovers - they will ask, but aren’t you jealous? And of course, simple answer is yes, you’re always jealous; it’s about what you do with this jealousy. And if you’re not jealous, that’s a good thing, and very few achieve that point. But the point is, compersion is the opposite of jealousy. And that’s something that most of us in polyamory try to achieve. Which means that I’m not actually feeling upset that you’re spending time and feeling good with someone else, but because I love you, I’m actually happy that you’re spending time and feeling good about being with someone else. And the happiness that you get out of it also transmits to me, as long as you don’t start thinking of those people as things that you own. Yeah, and words come up. You know, you talk about language: words come up because we try and express new kinds of relationships. So, for example, I use the word co-lover to explain to someone - if I’m in love with you and there’s somebody else in love with you: what used to be the sauten or the co-wife in a polygamous situation, in a polygynous situation – but within the polyamorous world, this is called a metamour. So, there are lots of these words that come up because you figure that you haven’t spoken about these things. Language is developing as you’re practising and now you want to express, so, you have to find new words if the languages don’t give you the words already.
Host: How did you communicate to people you really cared for from the older generation?
Arundhati: So, if I can explain it in plain English or whichever language I’m speaking – like with my mom, I speak in Bangla and I just told her (when I shared with her for the first time) that I fall in love with people. And it doesn’t get restricted to one person. And when I fall in love with another person, it doesn’t mean that the one I was loving before stops. And the only thing I want is - I want everyone to be honest with me and I want to be honest with everybody. And then if there are jealousies and difficulties etc, we’ll see, because our relationships have it. My mom actually understood this and she was more worried that oh, but then you know who will look after you (laughs) when you’re old? That was her question, and I told her: so many. Quite a few of them, I guess. I think it’s easier to explain to people if they don’t come with prejudices, if they really care about your happiness and if they are willing to keep an openness of mind to understand. As for the rest, who cares if they understand or not?
Host: Yeah, we’re talking about people you care for…You are a practicing solo polyamorist, am I right?
Arundhati: Yeah.
Host: So, that means that you don’t have a nesting partner.
Arundhati: Yeah, for many reasons. And solo polyamory is a thing: that people who have…very intimate long-term lovers/partners want to still stay single because of many reasons. I’ll just speak of three that I can think of right now. One is: not having a domestic nesting partner gives you a certain kind of freedom to be and to be the master of your own time and also to be the master of your own decisions in terms of how you’re going to play out your life. And that’s been very important to me, given that I do have many people who I need to give time to. The second thing is – and it’s my problem - I’m a control freak. I like my world and my life and my home to be the way I want them to be. So, while I love it when they come spend time with me for, you know, weeks and months. I think by about the 6th week I start thinking I want my space back. So, this space is very important. I also like travelling solo a lot, so that’s the second thing. And the third thing is, I feel the practice of polyamory becomes slightly easier if you’re not living with one partner…the difficulties, hardship, struggles, negotiations are so much more. I have friends who have nesting partners and I find that they have to put in much more effort into their negotiations than I have to. So, easy way out.
Host: Would this be more difficult for a married polyamorous couple?
Arundhati: Absolutely. But also, if you’re talking about a married polyamorous couple, you’re already saying that their marriage is within the understanding of polyamory. So I think having a domestic partner, being married, having children with one partner, makes it even more complicated than somebody who’s solo and child free like me.
Host: Two underpinning concepts here in polyamory would be mutual consent and emotional attachment.
Arundhati: Honesty? Honesty with all partners. That’s another thing that all partners must know - that you do have other partners and the limits of honesty are also discussed between partnerships. Our partner may say, hey, look, I’m just interested in headlines, don’t give me details; I don’t want to know. Somebody else may say: hey, I want to know a little more, and then you negotiate and you come to a space about how much they will know about other partners or not. There are also partners who say: I don’t want to know anything about any of your other partners. The time that you and I spent is the richness that I want from this relationship and that’s it. I don’t want to know what you’re doing when you’re not with me.
So, it depends.
Host: How would you identify when you like someone?
Arundhati: I don’t identify. What I generally do is, I get very honest myself and the moment I realise I’m liking somebody, I say that I’m polyamorous, if they don’t already know. But that’s one good thing; being public about it, people know…mostly people know that you’re polyamorous. As a woman - and you have to be a little careful about this - there are also a lot of cisgender heterosexual men who just sometimes use this word these days to sleep around. Men have always found, I guess, ways of exerting their power in some way or the other. And that’s a red flag that I always keep. So obviously within polyamory, just like in your other heteronormative patriarchal world, if you are queer, if you are a woman, If you are trans - if you are any of these your chances of being abused, being taken advantage of is much, much higher.
Host: You mentioned that polyamory may or may not include sexual intimacy. Is that different from friendships?
Arundhati: I tend not to define friendship. Love for friendship, love for lover. In some cases, you’re also sexually attracted; in some cases, you’re not. In some cases, you may have physical intimacy; in some cases, you may not. I don’t like putting them into boxes. So as far as my life is concerned, I like to say like, the polyamory network of my family includes friends, lovers, partners…so you can have all these varieties of people in your larger polyamorous network. That’s why you’ll never find me saying, Oh, she’s just a friend, because I think I don’t like that word ‘just’ before friendship.
Host: You were in your 20s when you were first exposed to the concept of polyamory. Did you have support groups? Did you have peers? Did you find friends who were in polyamory? And who understood polyamory?
Arundhati: Yeah, Anna, that’s a brilliant question because when I figured that I fall in love with more than one person, growing up in the 90s - I’m talking about in Kolkata - you thought of yourself as a freak. You really thought of yourself as shallow, as fickle, as not having the qualities for developing this one and only one true-love kind of situation that all kinds of popular culture, including films, books and songs, etc, told you - that you have to find that: the one right. I was glad that I had a friend, Kaushik, in my life who had read a little bit and was also, in his own life, discovering that he may be polyamorous. So, we used to discuss it a lot. And a little later he went to the United States and he gave me a book, The Ethical Slut, And I think that opened my mind to the possibilities. And I realised why I was having difficulty with this typically heteronormative kind of monogamous world that we all come from and I think that helped me a lot. At that time, there weren’t too many people one could talk about. And I wasn’t sure. I went through many phases of monoamorous and polyamorous relationships through time, sometimes, because I felt, oh no, this is not working out. It’s only in the last 20 years, I would say, that I’ve understood this is me - in my 30s - this is me; I have to accept it. I can’t run away from it. And if this is who I am, then I’m going to do this well. So, I think that took some experience, some hardship, some heart breaks and some disasters to bring you to that point where you acknowledge who you are and then you live your fullest.
Host: So, Arundhati, we look forward to you contributing a lot more to literature - Indian literature on polyamory.
Arundhati: Thank you so much, Anna.
Host: Yeah, so thank you, Arundhati. And, here’s to a world where hate is the only taboo and where love attracts no stigma. Signing off on this episode of Women Uninterrupted, a podcast where we host difficult, different and uninterrupted conversations between women. Brought to you by The Hindu.
