Book Review: Many Love, A memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s)

Many Love, A memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s)
Sophie Lucido Johnson
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8978-4

What I love most about this book is Sophie Lucido Johnson's holistic approach to polyamory. What she offers is not just polyamory as a way to structure relationships, or even polyamory as a relationship orientation. Her book (to me) offers polyamory as a way of being, living and loving. Her book's holistic approach expands the concept of "many love" to encompass the loving intimate space we call friendship, and the loving intimate space we call romance and also the loving intimate space in between.

My first wife and I opened our marriage in the late 70s. There was no Internet. There was not any narrative for what we did (that we knew of anyway.) Lacking rules, there were some negative experiences as we experimented and found things that didn't work. But, there being no rules was also a positive. We explored the "loving intimate space in between" as well as having other sexual partners. There was nobody to tell us we were "doing it wrong." There were no poly police. We went outside of the box and found things that worked that would have been unconventional even in the poly community that emerged much later. Over time we rolled our own version, our own way, of what has since come to be known as polyamory.

Decades later, as I learned about this thing called polyamory, I still found little out there regarding that space in between. Now there were rules: there were friends, and there were partners; and those were two totally different buckets. In a podcast years ago (2016 I think, not sure which episode) I recall the folks at the Multiamory Podcast referring to the "separate buckets" with friends being one bucket and "partners" in another bucket. I said, "I need more buckets."

Gracie X (author of Wide Open) spoke about it (and wrote some about) what she called emotional polyamory. She contrasted this to what the mono-normative community sometimes calls "emotional affairs." But, mostly it has seemed to me, many in the polyamory community then heavily privileged sexual relationships. The good news is the community seems to be evolving, incorporating more concepts from relationship anarchy. That's a very good thing!

So, I especially appreciated Johnson's chapter on "Just" Friends. It's nice to now look back and feel that those loving intimate "no label" relationships in between, that I so fondly still treasure, are finally being seen as something as amazing as they were. Sophie Lucido Johnson did that!