One of the speediest films to sell out at this year’s BFI Flare festival was entitled Portrait Of A Serial Monogamist. Programmer Emma Smart and I joked about how it represented an uncomfortably familiar lesbian archetype. For behind the romantic-comedy fiction is a stark truth. It might be fun if, like the film’s protagonist Elsie, you’re the one doing the leaving. But if you’re the one left scratching your head and wondering what the hell just happened, then not so much.
This reality has played out on my Facebook news feed. Every joyous anniversary is offset by a break-up. In late 2013, the Office For National Statistics released figures showing civil partnership dissolution rates that were twice as high for female couples as for males. It’s not just the frequency of separations that has shocked me. The sheer emotional violence and one-sided nature of many of them has forced me out of my own monogamous comfort zone to seek refuge in the more conscious, compassionate values of polyamory.
This doesn’t mean that I’m engaged in some kind of round-the-clock hedonistic orgy. Yet my primary partner and I have found a framework and language that encourages us to celebrate our deep, platonic connection rather than carelessly discard it. Certainly the poly community we’ve got to know tend to define it in a literal sense as “many loves”, taking the emphasis away from sex.