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. A philosophical exploration of what happiness is and the search for meaning in nonmonogamous relationships. More Than Two Essentials is a series of books by Canadian authors on focused topics in nonmonogamy. It is curated by Eve Rickert, author of More Than Two, Second Edition. Learn more and find all forthcoming titles at morethantwo.ca. "In Nonmonogamy and Happiness, Carrie Jenkins writes about love in a way that is both extraordinarily sophisticated and as intimate as a conversation with an old friend. Her writing never fails to make me feel like a smarter, calmer, more generous person-both in and out of love." Acknowledgements
