‘I Have Multiple Loves’
Carrie Jenkins makes the philosophical case for polyamory
By Moira Weigel
FEBRUARY 3, 2017
‘I Have Multiple Loves’ 1
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins and I have plans to meet her boyfriend for lunch. But first we have to go home to walk the dog. Her husband, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, is out of town at a conference for the weekend, and earlier that morning Mezzo, their labradoodle mix, got skunked; Jenkins says Mezzo is still feeling shaky. Before I traveled to meet her in Vancouver last June, she told me on the phone that most “mono” people misunderstand the challenges of polyamory — the practice of being openly involved romantically with more than one person at a time.

“People ask, ‘Tell me about the downsides,’ ” Jenkins says. “They expect the answer to be that it’s so hard jealousy-wise. But the most common answer is timing and scheduling. I’m a fairly organized person, so I don’t find it super challenging.”

The claim is easy to believe. In her professional life, too, Jenkins is managing to do several things at once. Since 2011 she has held a prestigious Canada Research Chair in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia; she has taught 200-person lecture courses in metaphysics to undergraduates and advanced graduate seminars in epistemology. This semester she is co-teaching an interdisciplinary survey on the theme of “Knowledge and Power,” introducing students to Freud, Russell, and Foucault in short order.

Jenkins is also in a band, called 21st Century Monads, in which she and several other academics write songs about the philosophy of numbers. They live in different cities, she says, so “mostly we just email audio files to one another.”

She is also spending more and more time writing for nonacademic readers. Since July 2016, she has been enrolled part time in the M.F.A. program in creative nonfiction at British Columbia. When I visited, she had just finished the manuscript of her first trade book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be, which Basic Books published in January.

Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to. She and her husband were tired of living in the closet.
When we arrive at Jenkins’s house, Mezzo rushes, slipping, across the bare wood floor to the front door, and leaps on her. The dog’s black curls still smell like tomato juice.

“See,” says Jenkins, gesturing at the living room as she clips on Mezzo’s leash, “We’re a very boring and respectable couple!” Two sofas, bookshelves, a wire stand displaying a volume of essays co-edited by her husband, also a philosopher at UBC. On the wall hang sepia-toned photographs of someone’s relatives. On the front porch are a swing and a coffee table with an ashtray on it. The ashtray is full, as if they have just had a party, or someone has been sitting out there, for a long time, thinking, while gazing into the street.

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As we walk Mezzo around Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood about 20 minutes away from campus by the green electric scooter that Jenkins drives to work every morning, she starts explaining why she prefers the term “polyamory” to “nonmonogamy.”

“Nonmonogamy can include so many forms,” she says. “You could just be ‘monogamish’ ” — a term coined by the advice expert Dan Savage for long-term relationships in which partners allow each other to have occasional flings. “You could be swinging; you could have a ‘friend with benefits’ while looking for more-traditional romantic relationships. I sort of switched over to using the ‘polyamory’ label because this really means multiple loves. I have multiple loves.”

Over lunch, she and her boyfriend, Ray Hsu, explain that it took a little while for both of them to realize how deeply they felt for each other. They met in 2012. (Jenkins and her husband married in April 2011; they have always had an open relationship and wrote their wedding vows to reflect this. They made no promise to “forsake all others.”) Hsu is a poet who also teaches at UBC. He and Jenkins worked in the same building, but they met through OkCupid. They still communicate primarily through text messaging and social media.

“I think we broke Facebook,” Jenkins laughs, when Hsu brings up how many messages they have sent over the past four years.

It took about a year, Jenkins recalls, before “I started to realize that I was in love with Ray as well as in love with Jon. And it probably took even more time to acknowledge it.” After that, “the poly label started to feel like more of a useful fit.”

Despite the personal clarity that she has gained on these points, socially the relationship has not been easy. Even in liberal settings, where people might not blink at the idea of a friend sleeping around or dating someone of the same gender, Jenkins says that “mononormativity” persists: The ruling assumption is that a person can be in love with only one other person at a time. (She recalls a colleague becoming extremely discomfited recently at her husband’s birthday party, when Hsu introduced himself as “Carrie’s boyfriend.”) Still, Jenkins believes that we are in urgent need of a more expansive concept of love. And she believes that philosophy, the discipline named for the “love of knowledge,” needs to become more expansive — treating a wider range of questions and addressing a broader audience — in order to help create it.

Jenkins did not set out to become a love expert. After growing up in Wales, she entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and pursued a degree in analytic philosophy; she stayed on to write a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of mathematics. “There’s a tradition of philosophy that I grew up in which is quite narrow in terms of the topics that it would address, in academic journal publications,” she recalls. “We were addressing fundamental problems about space and time.”

She published her first book, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge (Oxford University Press), in 2008. According to a review in the journal Mind, Jenkins offered “a new kind of arithmetical epistemology” — one that challenged the unstated assumption that the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge was that only the latter involved empirical data from the physical world. On the contrary, Jenkins argued that a priori concepts, such as intuitions of numbers, also relied upon the senses.

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Following that book, Jenkins published a series of articles on theories of explanation. However, she began thinking more and more about love. It seems logical that a thinker who spent so much time re-evaluating the ways in which experience shaped metaphysical knowledge might attempt to analyze her own life using the tools of philosophy. As Jenkins tells it, however, her inspiration came from Bertrand Russell — one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and a titanic presence at Cambridge.

“What I didn’t realize when I was studying his philosophy of mathematics was that he wrote about all these other things,” Jenkins recalls. She particularly means his 1929 book, Marriage and Morals, in which Russell advocated for what he called “free love.” Jenkins calls the book “a precursor of the contemporary sex-positive movement.” She thinks that a lot of Russell’s work on love and marriage was ahead of its time, but that he himself remained blind to its philosophical importance.

“He just didn’t call Marriage and Morals philosophy,” Jenkins says. “And I think that it’s partly fed into the conception of analytic philosophy as a very gendered thing: The mind, the logic, the mathematics is very specifically men’s business, and his work on love, sex, relationships, society — all the ‘women’s business’ — he cordoned out.”

While philosophers trained in the Continental tradition — thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida — have written about love, analytic philosophy continues to dominate North American departments. Increasingly, Jenkins has become frustrated with the way it separates philosophy from “real life” concerns.

Personal considerations finally drove her to start making this argument in public. Jenkins wrote about polyamory because she felt she had to: She and her husband were tired of living in the closet. In July 2011, shortly after their wedding, they published an open letter about their open relationship in the journal Off Topic. At the time, they were just about to move to the University of British Columbia. They were nervous, they said, but they agreed that they needed to come out.

The couple was worried about people judging them and their relationship. They had been lectured before, and they were familiar with the accusations against their lifestyle: That it was not healthy, physically or psychologically; that it was not natural; that it was not ethical; and so on. But they had well-reasoned answers to each of those charges.

“Despite these various kinds of nervousness (justified or otherwise) about disclosure,” they wrote, “being closetedly non-monogamous (effectively, mono-acting) has its disadvantages too. We’re ready to be done with it. Academic philosophy is a small world; certain areas of it are very small indeed. What if someone happens to see one of us with somebody else, and assumes (not thinking about the alternatives) that we’re cheating? We each hate the idea of being taken for a cheater, or of being pitied as the spouse of a cheater. And we hate very much indeed the idea of some poor well-meaning friend feeling awful about having witnessed some apparent cheating, and agonizing over whether they ought to say or do something.”

Jenkins and Ichikawa took the most common charges they had heard against nonmonogamy, and they refuted them one by one.

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Carrie Jenkins with her husband (right) and boyfriend (left).
JIMMY JEONG FOR THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Carrie Jenkins with her husband (right) and boyfriend (left).
Take, for instance, the claim that it’s unhealthy to have multiple sexual partners. Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that this was simply untrue. It is perfectly possible to maintain sexual health with multiple partners; indeed, a person who has openly discussed the pros and cons of opening a relationship with a partner is more likely to practice safe sex than is the frustrated partner who resorts to “drunken flings, clandestine affairs, or other ill-considered hookups.”

What about the assumption that nonmonogamy is psychologically damaging? “Different people are different,” Jenkins and Ichikawa wrote. Many nonmonogamous people report that they come to feel less jealousy over time; conversely, many monogamous people complain of experiencing sexual jealousy. In response to the charge that nonmonogamy is “unnatural,” Jenkins and Ichikawa pointed out that virtually no species are sexually monogamous, even if they are socially monogamous or pair-bond for life. (“Not even swans.”)

They called their letter “On Being the Only Ones.” Soon after they published it, they learned that they weren’t. Strangers, and couples they had known casually for years, started approaching them at conferences, they say, and thanking them for writing the piece. Many said they had quietly lived the same way and felt relieved to be able to speak about it. Emboldened by a new sense that she had an activist mission — that her coming out might help others like her, and that she, as a tenured professor, had the privilege to do so — Jenkins began writing more about nonmonogamy. She wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and Slate. She went on CBC to give radio interviews. But even in contexts in which people were willing to give her an audience, they struggled with her argument that polyamory and promiscuity were not the same thing.

Throughout history, Jenkins points out, society has sexualized people or behaviors that it considers undesirable or impermissible in order to discredit them. Take young single women who moved to cities in the early 20th century, for instance, or couples who came together across racial lines, or gay men. Jenkins notes that in order to gain respectability, LGBTQ folks have had to adopt lifestyles that look like straight monogamous marriage.

Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control?
There is no necessary connection between polyamory and promiscuity, Jenkins argues. She thinks like a logician, and to her, this is simply a confusion of concepts. She points out that a person could fall in love with two people at the same time, have only two partners her whole life, and be considered a “slut.” Meanwhile, someone can sleep around while dating, or go through a string of brief, monogamous relationships, and have dozens of partners without receiving censure. Still, Jenkins recognizes that most people will struggle with her ideas.

About a year ago, she gave an interview to Cosmopolitan UK about nonmonogamous relationships. She emphasized the point that polyamory did not mean the same thing as promiscuity. She spoke at length with the writer about the damage that confusing the terms could do, and asked to read a copy of the article before it ran. The author, who had listened painstakingly, seemed to get it. She ran the text of the story by Jenkins, and Jenkins approved it. So when Jenkins received a copy in the mail, she was dismayed. The cover asked, “Is the foursome the new threesome?” Inside, the centerfold blared: “THREE ISN’T A CROWD,” beside a photo spread that showed … an orgy.

“Not a small orgy,” Jenkins laughs. “Like maybe 25 people.” When she texts me a photograph of the Cosmo issue later, I count 20, but it is hard to tell. They are writhing in a tangle of limbs and haunches like some flesh-toned version of the Indiana Jones snake pit.

The Cosmopolitan UK spread not only conveyed the opposite of the message that Jenkins had wanted to send. It turned her into a target of abuse online. Like many women who write for the public, particularly about gender or sexuality, Jenkins gets a steady stream of hate mail. Strangers threaten her on Twitter: Why are you acting like this is an ok thing? Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day. One message she shows me is from someone whose handle contains the name RAMBO and whose feed features pictures upon pictures of guns. Jenkins says that she feels safer living in Canada than she would if she lived in the United States, but who knows? It takes only one angry man.

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Meanwhile, Jenkins has had to contend with harassment within her discipline, too. She declines to offer specifics but says, “Anonymous commentaries in the philosophy blogosphere can be pretty grim.” The field has been widely criticized from within by scholars who say that not only is the curriculum male-centric, but gender discrimination is routine. In recent years, several high-profile cases of sexual harassment have further sullied its reputation.

A paper published last July by Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California at Riverside and Carolyn Dicey Jennings of the University of California at Merced found that women made up just 25 percent of philosophy faculty at 75 institutions in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. When the researchers took rank into account, they found evidence that women experienced higher attrition rates, lower promotion rates, and lower rates of senior recruitment.

Jenkins thinks a lot about philosophy’s gender problem. “It’s a complicated situation, and a lot of factors contribute to it and reinforce it,” she says. “There’s the stereotype of the philosopher, a genius, as someone who looks like Socrates, with a big white beard. One of the things that’s noticeable is that women leave philosophy, even as undergraduates, even if they’re doing well. One plausible explanation is that we’re not cultivating the sense that this is a field for women.”

Jenkins emphasizes that this image not only affects who is doing philosophical work. It also shapes what kind of work gets done. Elizabeth Brake, an associate professor at Arizona State University who also works on feminist philosophy and philosophies of love, agrees, even as she expresses some measured optimism. “Philosophers have been writing on love and sex since Plato’s Symposium,” she says. “And over the past 15 years, especially with philosophers writing on same-sex marriage, the topic has become much more accepted within political philosophy.” Still, she stresses that “people writing on new topics face the burden of proving that the topic is philosophy.”

John Corvino, chair of the philosophy department at Wayne State University and author of What’s Wrong With Homosexuality? (Oxford University Press, 2013), says that scholars who work on “applied philosophy” — a term he dislikes — usually have to prove themselves first in other areas: “Jenkins’s first book was on the philosophy of mathematics. Jason Stanley, who recently has done interesting work on propaganda and ideology, made his name in philosophy of language and epistemology. Old prejudices about what counts as ‘serious’ work — and relatedly, who counts as a ‘serious’ philosopher — linger.”

The debate over what kind of philosophy gets rewarded blew up recently in a more specific storm, in which Jenkins found herself at the center. It started as a set of disputes surrounding Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor who founded the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and ran it until recently. The Gourmet Report ranks philosophy departments, based on surveys filled out by hundreds of academic philosophers every year, and enjoys enormous influence within the field. It has also caused consternation among critics who have questioned its methodology and say it is biased against philosophy departments with a Continental orientation or an Asian one.

“There are many reasons, feminist and otherwise, to be concerned about the Gourmet Report,” says Jennifer Saul, a philosophy professor at the University of Sheffield, who runs the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? In 2012, Saul published a paper arguing that Leiter’s publication encouraged the perpetuation of “pernicious biases that hinder the accurate evaluation of work and that perpetuate stereotypes and unjust inequalities.” It was one of several critiques of the Gourmet Report that prompted a flurry of online and email exchanges between Leiter and his critics, and preceded a statement that Jenkins published in the summer of 2014 pledging to behave with civility in her professional life.

Many in the field, including Leiter, read the statement as an attack on him. He responded by sending Jenkins a derisive email and tweeting that she was a “sanctimonious arse.” When Jenkins made the email public, other philosophers rallied to her defense. They circulated a “statement of concern,” eventually signed by 600 faculty and students, saying that Leiter’s actions had harmed Jenkins’s health and ability to work, and refusing to participate in the Gourmet Report’s surveys until he stepped down as the editor. Leiter published a series of posts complaining of a “smear campaign” and that October stepped down, though he remains on the Gourmet Report’s advisory board. Later that year, he threatened to sue Jenkins for falsely portraying him.

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Jenkins refuses to speak about the Leiter controversy. Last summer she — along with Jennings and two other vocal critics of Leiter’s — each received an envelope full of human feces. Leiter denied sending the packages and has attributed them to someone who must be trying to embarrass him, noting, for example, that one or more of the envelopes used his law school’s return address.

In contrast with these dramas, Jenkins’s book What Love Is reads calmly. It is not a how-to book — unlike The Ethical Slut, which remains the most widely read manual on polyamory. But it is not a dry philosophical argument, either. The book opens with an autobiographical anecdote. (“The first draft began with a list of definitions,” Jenkins says with a laugh; her editor pointed out that this might not be the most gripping opening for a general audience.) Jenkins reflects on how the experience of feeling in love with both her boyfriend and her husband led her to question what love was. Could she be in love with both? Was she mistaken about her own feelings? Or was it that the definition of romantic love was in error and needed to expand?

“We are creating space in our ongoing cultural conversations to question the universal norm of monogamous love, just as we previously created space to question the universal norm of hetero love,” Jenkins writes. “I’m personally invested, as are you. Just as we all bring our experiences with us, and just as we are all biased, we are all personally invested. Nobody is agenda-free.”

The central goal of What Love Is is to abolish what Jenkins calls “the romantic mystique,” a deliberate allusion to Betty Friedan’s classic second-wave text, The Feminine Mystique. “On the one hand, we’ve accepted the idea of love as a tremendously significant social force: something that shapes and reshapes the entire trajectories of lives and serves as a focal point for all kinds of values,” Jenkins writes. On the other hand, “we have simultaneously normalized the idea that love is a mystery: something hard or impossible to comprehend.”

In characteristic fashion, Jenkins rejects the aversion to reflecting on love for fear of destroying it, professing to be “more worried about the tangible dangers of underthinking than the putative dangers of overthinking.” And so she proceeds to examine how experts, including philosophers — from Plato to Nietzsche to Russell, and to her contemporaries, like the University of Miami’s Berit Brogaard — have defined romantic love, and works to break down common assumptions about it. Some of those, like Nietzsche’s assertion that a woman “wants to be taken and accepted as a possession,” are easier to refute than others, like the idea that “if you’re not in romantic love, or at least looking for it, then you’re doing life wrong” — an idea Elizabeth Brake calls “amatonormativity.”

“While I don’t agree with that on an intellectual level, the internalized attitude is hard to dislodge,” Jenkins writes. “In the same vein, I can’t just stop caring about monogamy norms because too many other people care about them. And last but not least, it’s impossible for me to stop caring about whether my situation counts as a genuine case of romantic love because I know that its being recognized as such could be a powerful way of convincing people to take my relationships seriously.”

Key to that campaign is Jenkins’s exploration of whether romantic love is primarily a biological drive (a theory ascendant today) or a social construct. While most feminist theorists and humanists and social scientists in general have been inclined to treat the two in opposition, rejecting biological essentialism or conceiving of romantic love as a social expression of a biological phenomenon, Jenkins is not satisfied with either. Which features of love are biological and which social? she asks. What can we control?

Ultimately, she argues, love is both: “ancient biological machinery embodying a modern social role,” not unlike an actor embodying his character on stage. Jenkins is not alone in this new openness to biology, history, and sociology — which have often been bracketed from philosophy. Brake remarks that to write well on a topic like love, “you have to be empirically well informed. It’s important to know about history of marriage law, rates of marriage, policy and statistics.” In 2015 the feminist philosopher Elizabeth A. Wilson argued in her book Gut Feminism (Duke University Press) that feminist theorists needed to learn to account for scientific data in their arguments.

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While Jenkins criticizes those who are too quick to call “insufficiently examined ideology … ‘natural’ or ‘biological,’ ” she also emphasizes that recognizing the biological elements of romantic love can have socially emancipatory effects. For instance, brain scans that showed similar neurological activity in gay and straight subjects expressing love played an important role in compelling scientists and the general public to recognize same-sex love as legitimate.

“Let’s not forget that it took many years of serious scientific research to convince (most) people that there is no biologically superior race or gender,” writes Jenkins. “Getting a proper grip on the biology of love may help us unravel the idea that there is one biologically superior way to love.”

Moira Weigel is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature and in film and media at Yale University and will join the Harvard Society of Fellows as a junior fellow in 2017. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

Corrections (2/9/2017, 12:13 p.m.): An earlier version of this article erroneously described the allegations of a Statement of Concern about Brian Leiter. It also mischaracterized the timing of his threat to sue Jenkins, and mistakenly referred to the Philosophical Gourmet Report as a “blog.” And it incorrectly described John Corvino as a co-author of What’s Wrong With Homosexuality? He is its sole author. The article has been revised to remove those inaccuracies.

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Illuminating Love: On Carrie Jenkins’s “What Love Is”
January 28, 2017 • By Skye C. Cleary

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What Love Is

CARRIE JENKINS

THESE ARE JUST A FEW TIPS from the ancient Roman poet Ovid — five things you can do now to cure your broken heart: stop eating onions, take a vacation, keep busy, humiliate the one who has scorned you, or criticize their weight.

Indeed, love potions and cures have enchanted humans for thousands of years — and yet it’s debatable how much closer we are to discovering love’s secrets. These days, some patch their problems over with sexual desire “dysfunction” and “disorder” medication such as Viagra and Flibanserin. Others pursue Band-Aid solutions — internet clickbait articles that promise quick fixes, self-help books, secret porn, couples therapy, sexy lingerie, and infidelity — to keep relationships on life support long after the plug ought to have been pulled. Others resign themselves to lifelong relationship boredom.

In What Love Is: And What It Could Be, Carrie Jenkins argues that it’s about time we give up on these pathetic and “desperate” solutions and, instead, think more expansively and inclusively about relationships. Arguing that lifelong monogamy isn’t natural and doesn’t work for everyone, Jenkins challenges the “normatively prescribed” but elusive romantic ideal that funnels lovers into the “cereal-box nuclear family.” Jenkins, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, published her first book on the philosophy of arithmetic. “I never planned to work on love,” the author explains, “But love snuck up on me and wouldn’t let me drop it.” On the first page of What Love Is, she describes how love seduces her:

On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend’s apartment to the home I share with my husband, I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own experiences with romantic love and the way romantic love is normally understood in the time and place in which I live (Vancouver, Canada, in 2016).

Jenkins’s analysis of love springs from her lived experience. The problem she faces is that she feels as if she has the biological machinery of romantic love with her husband and boyfriend simultaneously; but because her experience doesn’t fit neatly into the monogamous nuclear family model, she’s not sure if she can call it romantic. She points to this as one of the most alarming problems in our society; that is, we don’t know what love is, we treat it as something too mysterious to question, and we’re afraid that if we do question it, we’ll destroy it. Yet, since many people make major life decisions based on their romantic feelings, not to try to better understand is perplexing if not downright dangerous, since, as Jenkins suggests, we might end up in relationships and with families that we did not actively choose.

There are many different biological, social, and philosophical theories of romantic love, but Jenkins proposes that none can explain it entirely. Biology is tackled first, and celebrity anthropologist Helen Fisher — famous for her fMRI brain scans of lovers, TED talks with millions of views, and books such as Anatomy of Love — is Jenkins’s primary target. Jenkins disagrees with Fisher that the dopamine-fueled intense rush of the early stages of romantic love defines it exclusively. Oxytocin, Jenkins argues, though normally associated with the calm phase of attachment and affection, should be just as valid an indicator for romantic love: “It seems possible for romantic love to be calm and stable from the outset; why not?” According to Jenkins, romantic love is like a daiquiri. Most have rum, sugar, and citrus, but variations abound: frozen or on the rocks; strawberry, banana, kiwifruit, or any other flavor; and they can be made without rum, too. Just as daiquiri recipes vary, Jenkins suggests, “There is no one way to have a human biology. Romantic love is no exception to the rule.”

Helen Fisher also argues that monogamous romantic love was an evolutionary solution to “female neediness”: once women became bipeds and, arms full, could no longer carry babies on their backs, we needed males for protection. Because men couldn’t protect whole harems of women, heterosexual monogamous nuclear families emerged as the norm. With swift and graceful logic, Jenkins points out that this is highly unlikely, primarily because,

if over 1 million years passed between the arrival of bipedalism and the evolution of love, then there must have been other solutions to the problem of having one’s hands full of babies that worked well enough to keep hominid evolution going for over 1 million years […] And if bipedalism posed such a problem for female ancestors specifically, how come we didn’t end up with male-only bipedalism?

Jenkins considers other theorists as well — such as Anne Beall and Robert Sternberg — who describe romantic love as a social construct. For example, romantic love in Victorian England was based on respect and admiration for the beloved, rather than sexual desire. In our contemporary society, the script of love tells us that we are expected to fall in love, marry, have children, and be monogamous for life. We get tax breaks for doing this, and are punished for choosing otherwise, which is why divorce is such a messy business, and why anyone who deviates from the norm is ridiculed, if not shamed. Those who indulge in too much love or sex are unfaithful, adulterers, cheaters, or sluts. Those who do not indulge enough, preferring to be alone, are discriminated against on the basis of “amatonormativity” — the idea that being single is abnormal.

After assessing these and a few other biological and social theories of love, Jenkins turns an antagonistic gaze toward philosophy, which she describes as: “a frankly embarrassing catalogue of pompous people tripping over their own assumptions.” Likening philosophies of love to a junky garage sale, she picks out a few “gems” in need of a really good wash. The work of rebel thinker and Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell is one such diamond in the rough. She describes his work Marriage and Morals as “intoxicating if a bit dodgy” because he advocated for open relationships and sex positivity, was fired from the College of the City of New York in 1940 for his radical views, although, to Jenkins’s disappointment, “he still thought that sex without love was of ‘little value.’ And he still ultimately presented extramarital sex and love as inevitable and forgivable rather than as things people might actively choose and prefer for their own sake.”

A passing nod is given to, among others, Plato, Simone de Beauvoir, Lucius Outlaw, Charles Mills, bell hooks, Berit Brogaard, as well as popular authors such as Dan Savage. Simon May’s Love: A History is jettisoned because it focuses on the views of 12 white men and treats women as subjects of contemplation rather than as thinkers. Schopenhauer is criticized for reducing love to heteronormative and sexist stereotypes. The author’s cool attitude toward philosophers of love seems, in some cases, overly hasty; for example, when Nietzsche is flippantly dismissed primarily on the basis that Jenkins finds him to be ambiguous: “And even before I knew there was such a thing as philosophy, I learned from my mother — who learned it from her grandmother — that there comes a point when you have to say what you mean and mean what you say.”

¤

Just like Jenkins’s vision for more inclusive relationships, so too can we have a more inclusive theory of love. Jenkins explains that she has “custom designed” one of her own that mixes the best parts of the biological and social approaches in a philosophical way. The crux of her “dual theory” is that “[s]ome of our ancient, evolved biological machinery — a collection of neural pathways and chemical responses — is currently playing a starring role of Romantic Love in a show called Modern Society.” Romantic love’s “biological machinery,” which has evolved over millions of years, includes natural and universal chemicals such as dopamine or oxytocin. The “show” is about the nuclear family and gender roles. We should, however, abandon the mistaken idea that romantic love is naturally monogamous and tear up Modern Society’s romantic script that channels us into nuclear families.

Rather, Jenkins proposes that biology of romantic love evolved simply to encourage us to socialize and cooperate and that the monogamous nuclear model does not, and should not need to work for everyone. “As a species, modern humans are a romantically diverse bunch. What ‘comes naturally’ to us varies: our infinite variety cannot be reduced to one or two standard models” and “[i]f I know anything about romantic love by now, it’s that it’s not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon.”

Yet, to be able to call a relationship “romantic,” we do need to be able to check both the biology and social boxes. Operating systems (computers, phones, robots) — like “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) in Spike Jonze’s Her — may play the right social role in a romantic relationship; but because Samantha lacks the relevant brain chemicals, Jenkins concludes that she does not qualify for romantic love. Conversely, lesbians in the 18th and 19th centuries may have had romantic chemicals swirling about in their brains, but because they could not play the social role, were unable to express affection publically, marry, have children, or parent, they, too, were ineligible for romantic love. However, just as the biology of love persisted, the social script evolving to include queer relationships into the norm, so does Jenkins hope that society will evolve to be accepting of those who do not marry or procreate, those who love more than one person at a time, and those who reject romantic love altogether.

The book culminates with chapters devoted to the future: what we can change and what we need to do to make changes happen. While neuroscience might well have answers for us in the future, the discipline is still relatively new. Even if manipulating love’s biology does become possible, Jenkins advises that we ought to proceed with great caution, since “[o]ur track record is not a shining example of humanity’s ability to wield medical technologies with competence and compassion.” Purported “cures” to homosexual love — such as “chemical castration” and “conversion therapy” — are examples of how medicalizing love can be ethically problematic.

The social side of romantic love is “malleable,” Jenkins argues, and acceptance of new relationship forms is high on her wish list for creating a new picture — what she calls new “contours” — of romantic love in modern society. While rejection of marriage, refusal to procreate, and singledom might seem so ubiquitous in the 21st-century Western world to be of little concern, Jenkins points out that polyamory is particularly controversial because it rocks the boat of patriarchal oppression: it threatens “paternity control through the sexual restriction of women and the conception of a romantic partner as one’s private property.” This may go some way to explaining why gender stereotypes persist — such as the idea that women ought to earn less and do more housework than men even if they work more — and that the highest ideal of love is for women to be obedient and loyal to husbands. Jenkins rightly points out that such stereotypes can perpetuate discrimination, oppression, and abuse. For example, it’s perfectly normal to be a serial monogamist; but “[i]f you have two permanent relationships simultaneously, you are ‘a degenerate herpes-infested whore.’” In some places, polyamory is punishable by death. There are anti-adultery laws in the United States, too, although Jenkins points out that the last time this law was tested was in 2004 and the punishment was community service. Overturning such outdated laws and leaving behind damaging stereotypes and stigmas would, Jenkins suggests, be good first steps toward reshaping the future of love for the better.

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Jenkins does not explicitly encourage those who don’t fit into the nuclear norm to “come out” and risk the tyranny of the majority. Although she proposes that “[i]t’s time we got to choose our own adventures,” she does not think it’s achievable in the near term. The book’s immediate call to action is for readers to “think about love for yourself.” This is where using herself as a case study works to her advantage: she lets readers in on some personal secrets, thereby creating the feeling that the book is a safe thinking space. Her personal approach also humanizes her argument because it gives readers concrete examples about the aggressions, judgments, and discriminations to which she has been subjected.

Nonetheless, it’s a risky philosophical move to use oneself as a case study. Jenkins justifies it by acknowledging that it’s difficult — if not impossible — to be completely objective in one’s thinking but that all we have to do is be honest and acknowledge the baggage that we bring with us. The problem is that she writes as if polyamory is a kind of utopia — if only it weren’t for everyone else being so judgmental. Jealousy is a non-issue; there is no discussion of the emotional and psychological intricacies of creating and being in polyamorous relationships. Simone de Beauvoir is one of the few philosophers that Jenkins admires; yet, there is no acknowledgment that de Beauvoir herself wrote extensively about juggling her many long-term love relationships. The book acknowledges, briefly, that polyamorous and polyandrous cultures have existed, but there are no insights into how those societies worked, in what ways such structures were successful, what the obstacles were, and why they didn’t survive. If Jenkins has not herself experienced these issues, this reveals a major limitation of using only herself as a case study. If she has come across these kinds of complications, and omits them to paint an idealistic picture of polyamory, then the book does not reflect the “careful, rigorous, honest thinking” that she aims for.

Jenkins also glosses over arguments about romantic love and overlooks important thinkers. For example, it’s unclear why Simon May is singled out for criticism, while other contemporary philosophers of love, sex, and marriage — such as Harry Frankfurt, J. David Velleman, Roger Scruton, Irving Singer, and Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins — remain untouched. She does not consider religious arguments for monogamy — for instance, the view that love unites two individuals to one other, to nature, and to God. Then, too, she applies the term “romantic” very broadly, to relationships that might more accurately be described as passionate, erotic, or conjugal. Because she wants to assume that romantic love dates back millions of years, the fact that love wasn’t described as “romantic” until the Romantic Movement of the 18th century doesn’t register as an issue. As Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, for example, point out in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, romantic love emerged specifically as the alternative to arranged marriages with the rise of Western individualism and capitalism.

For the Romantics, romantic love was built on a foundation of sexual desire. For Jenkins, it is not. The omission of sexual desire from her theory could be part of a broader strategy to divert the focus of polyamory away from sex. In July 2016, Jenkins published a piece with The Establishment critiquing the media for its propensity to publish articles about polyamory with pictures of multiple sets of feet under a white duvet, thereby implying that “polyamory is all about having sex with lots of people.” Sexual desire and the dopamine rush that Helen Fisher attributes to romantic love are optional add-ons in Jenkins’s theory: all we need is oxytocin, the chemical that seems to fuel affection and attachment. But since attachment and affection describe all kinds of love, it’s unclear what makes love romantic in Jenkins’s dual theory.

To her credit, Jenkins foresees this criticism — that romantic love might become indistinguishable from other forms of love. She writes:

I don’t see that this would be a common problem; often a selection of the optional extras would be present, helping to determine that the love involved is romantic. But in an ideal world — where we have ceased privileging romantic love as the norm for everybody — who cares?

However, it’s not at all certain that we will be able to identify love as romantic from an infinite buffet of possibilities. How will we know if it’s friendship or romantic love? Ultimately, what we call a relationship doesn’t matter to this author: “If it’s a close call whether a relationship is romantic or platonic, the people in the relationship could just call it how they want it. Why not?” Nevertheless, since Jenkins has spent the book arguing that we need to get rid of the “romantic mystique” in order to understand what romantic love is, declaring that it’s whatever we want it to be — and does whatever we want it to do — risks creating even more confusion and mystery.

However, despite these limitations and the author’s penchant for frivolous rhetorical questions such as “who cares?” and “why not?”, the book does give an exceptionally clear and easily readable account of the current research into romantic love and ideas for how we might think differently about it. It’s a warm and friendly sort of book; the tone is bubbly and chatty, as when she aptly promises: “it’ll take us into the realms of medicine, magic, queerness, wisdom, dopamine, gender, Romans, rainbows, rationality, Sappho, soul mates, politics, and, of course, human nature. Buckle up!” and when she introduces the challenges of thinking about love:

Answers are not going to appear neatly tied up with a heart-shaped bow. We can and should trace out the broad-brush contours of love, but if we go looking for sharp edges — a tidy, simple theory — we are bound to be disappointed. Trying to state the nature of romantic love with precision is like trying to nail some Jell-O to a wall made of Jell-O, using a Jell-O nail.

In her prologue, Jenkins proposes that “[l]ove is an extreme sport, and we don’t skydive without parachutes.” While love (in general) does survive the leap herein, romantic love is at risk of being theorized out of existence. Nevertheless, if one takes What Love Is in the spirit in which the author intends — “not to passively absorb my ideas but to question, challenge, and ultimately push these investigations far beyond anything I can imagine right now” — if we can have a conversation about our assumptions and expectations and how we exercise our agency in relationships, perhaps we will eventually find ourselves more accepting of the alternatives and of those who choose them.