‘I’m a boring middle-aged professor with a husband... and three lovers’
telegraph.co.ukHe was someone else I cared for, someone else who was supporting me, and actually it’s a loss to us all if I lose that. But obviously, I was the only one heartbroken.’Jenkins’ romantic experiences have caused her to rethink how we love, and in her 2017 book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be, she made a philosophical case for polyamory, having multiple sexual relationships at the same time, with the consent of everyone involved.
Next month, she publishes a follow-up, Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning, in which she challenges the idea of romantic love. ‘We romanticise romantic love,’ she says. ‘We think it’s the best kind of love.
A lot of the point of the book is to say, maybe not!’ Sad Love zings with frustration at fairy tales, Valentine’s cards, romance novels and the ‘happy ever after’.
It’s not just, as Jenkins puts it, an irrational fantasy. ‘A lot of what romantic love does is very damaging to people’s lives in huge ways,’ she says.I speak to her via Zoom from her home, high on the 36th floor of an apartment block in a fashionable district of Vancouver, Canada, where she lives with Ichikawa, her labradoodle and two hairless Sphynx cats.
Read more on telegraph.co.uk
