Carrie Jenkins

The love story we're all familiar with ends with '...and they lived happily ever after.' But how often do we hear a nonmonogamous love story with that ending? In all kinds of contexts, nonmonogamous happiness is erased. From the ubiquitous 'friend who tried it once and it didn t end well' to Dan Savage's long-term jokes about never being invited to a polyamorous third wedding anniversary, we are repeatedly assured that nonmonogamy leads to misery. In 'real' love, we are taught to expect the opposite: to expect happiness. When we want to ask if someone's relationship is going well, we ask if they are 'happy with' their partner. We might even ask whether their partner makes them happy. But what does love have to do with happiness? Doesn't love have space to accommodate the full range of emotional experience? Carrie Jenkins thinks it does, or at least it can. She draws connections between the expectation that love will make us happy and the undue focus on positive emotions to the exclusion of 'negative' ones. She argues that love-monogamous or otherwise-might better aim at being eudaimonic than at being happy, and that we have a better chance of achieving this if we are able to make relationship choices free from the prejudices and distortions that lead to an unduly rosy view of monogamy and an unduly miserable picture of the alternatives.

As polyamory continues to make its way into the mainstream, more and more people are exploring consensual non-monogamy in the hope of experiencing more love, connection, sex, freedom, and support. While for many, the move expands personal horizons, for others, the transition can be challenging, leaving them blindsided and overwhelmed. Beyond the initial transition to non-monogamy, many struggle with the root issues beneath the symptoms of broken agreements, communication challenges, increased fighting, and persistent jealousy. Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern and restorative justice facilitator David Cooley share the insights they have gained through thousands of hours working with clients in consensually non-monogamous relationships. Using a grounded theory approach, they explore the underlying challenges that non-monogamous individuals and partners can experience after their first steps, offering practical strategies for transforming them into opportunities for new levels of clarity and intimacy.

As polyamory continues to make its way into the mainstream, more and more people are exploring consensual nonmonogamy in the hope of experiencing more love, connection, sex, freedom, and support. While for many, the move expands personal horizons, for others, the transition can be challenging, leaving them blindsided and overwhelmed. Beyond the initial transition to nonmonogamy, many struggle with the root issues beneath the symptoms of broken agreements, communication challenges, increased fighting, and persistent jealousy. Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern shares the insights she has gained through thousands of hours working with clients in consensually nonmonogamous relationships. Using a grounded theory approach, she explores the underlying challenges that nonmonogamous individuals and partners can experience after their first steps, offering practical strategies for transforming them into opportunities for new levels of clarity and intimacy. Polywise provides both the conceptual framework to better understand the shift from monogamy to nonmonogamy and the tools to navigate the next steps, allowing you to not just survive in open relationships, but thrive in them.

As a woman with a husband and other partners, philosopher Carrie Jenkins knows that love is complicated. Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can let us down badly. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, wouldn’t we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognizes that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Jenkins calls “sad love” offers no bogus “happy ever afters”. Rather, it tries to find a way properly to integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love. It’s time we liberated love. Also available as an audiobook.

As a woman with a husband and other partners, philosopher Carrie Jenkins knows that love is complicated. Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can let us down badly. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, wouldn’t we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognizes that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Jenkins calls “sad love” offers no bogus “happy ever afters”. Rather, it tries to find a way properly to integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love. It’s time we liberated love. Also available as an audiobook.

Plato's Symposium depicts a group of men giving a series of speeches about the nature of love, with themes ranging from religion and metaphysics to medicine and pregnancy. The lone woman in the room, a "flute girl," is sent away as the discussion turns to serious matters; at the same time, the wisest of the men attributes his theories to a woman, the possibly fictional Diotima. Despite their absence from this important intellectual exchange, women are part of Symposium. What can contemporary feminist readers do with this troubling yet immeasurably influential work? In Uninvited historian Carla Nappi and philosopher Carrie Jenkins talk back to Plato in poetry, inspired by the voices of women characters who were not previously permitted to speak. Images and ideas from Symposium are refracted through multiple lenses to reveal a tumult of mystical, intellectual, pedagogical, and sexual ideologies. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrific, these poems dance within and between the lines of Symposium, carving space for new kinds of conversations about love, with themes ranging from gender and voice to power and violence. Designed to be read with or without prior knowledge of Plato, this book invites the uninvited to join a strange, amorphous, and unending conversation on the nature of love and desire - and on the possibilities intellectual and creative activity can offer.

What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is , philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations) we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed,to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships,and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, What Love Is is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say I love you." Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love.