Perks and pitfalls of polyamory

MY LOVELY young friend came and stayed with us recently. I last saw him and his wife two years ago in London. We trawled Brixton for gin, art, plantains, fish and beer.

In the evenings, we sat in their overgrown garden talking about music, books and love. They took me to see Amanda Palmer. I watched her surfing above us as hands of fans held her aloft.

I felt young and heady and bought a very bad necklace. I fell in love with Brixton, with its boom boxes, reggae and grubby sun. The fish we bought at the market had flabby eyes. It fell apart on the braai and tasted like chewed paper. But still.

My lovely young friend and his wife are now separated, but remain friends. They still go to concerts together and hold stars aloft. He brought his lovely young Polish girlfriend to stay with us.

We drank beer. He showed me his new tattoo. We sat in our overgrown garden and talked about music, books and love. He asked me if I was still violently analogue – attached to physical books and physical music, as though I could claim them. “It’s a generation thing,” I said, “you wouldn’t understand.”

Then he told me he and his girlfriend are in a polyamorous relationship. She lives with her boyfriend of eight years but is also involved with my lovely young friend. Everyone knows about it. Everyone is cool.

That night I lay in bed feeling very analogue and very old. I wondered about this ownership thing. I wondered about jealousy. I wondered about attachment. I wondered about the nature of love. I whispered to my husband, “Do you think we should try polyamory?” He asked if it was a type of margarine and whether it’s allowed on the Banting diet.

The next day, watching my lovely young friend and his lovely young girlfriend, I wondered some more. I’ve always wanted to live with someone who can play the harp – preferably a Danish man with slender fingers and the ability to make good scrambled eggs. I’ve also fancied the idea of being with a car mechanic – it’s something to do with the nostalgia of blue overalls and broken manifolds. A birder would also be handy for those afternoons I sit on the veranda watching unidentified grey feathery things wheeling overhead. I think they might be pigeons from a nearby loft, but I’m never quite sure.

I carried this wish list with me into the day. How easy would it be to be polyamorous in Claremont? I drank coffee at a shopping centre café and gazed around. An old geezer with ears larger than giant spanakopitas gazed back at me and winked. A young hipster stroked his beard and his iPhone. A grey-haired man in a pink business shirt flapped open a newspaper with hairy knuckles. There were no harpists there.

At the supermarket, I hung out in the pet food aisle, watching the bags of bird seed. A nice old man heaved 5kg of sunflower husks into his trolley. “You a birder?” I asked, trying to not seem creepy. “No, I just have Norman, my parrot. He’s such good company, although he’s learnt some rude words from my grandchildren.”

While polyamory might not be thriving in Claremont, it’s a growing movement in South Africa. There are polyamory websites, polyamory twitter accounts and polyamory meetings. Our president might even argue that he is hip and polyamorous, but there is that small matter of a cheating wife and a dead bodyguard.

In the evening, I watched my two lovely young friends playing with our dogs. She made corny jokes, he rolled his eyes teasingly. We ate vegetables. Next door, a woman shouted at her children. Cars drove in and out of driveways – husbands coming home to wives, girlfriends coming home to boyfriends. There is no right or wrong way. Love comes unbidden.

That night, B snored while the pets gradually crept up on to the bed. I suspect they hold daily planning meetings where they discuss strategy and stealth. First up was the three-legged cat. His breath

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