Laura at the throuple's Bay of Plenty home with their dog, Ru. Photo / Troy Baker
I’ve had a few burning questions since my sister brought her two girlfriends home to meet the family in Christchurch several years ago.
Do you get jealous? How did you meet, and who’s in charge of killing the spiders? The basics, really.
But prior to interviewing Laura about her five-year three-way relationship, there is just one seemingly trivial tidbit I am dying to know.
“Literally at work people are like, ‘I don’t care about your relationship, I just want to know what size bed you have’,” she says.
The answer is a king, if you’re wondering.
But in the early days, they made do with a double, synchronising when to roll over in the night.
Coming of age in a relatively hetero-normative Christian environment and attending a religious school, Laura followed the same path of committed monogamy paved by generations before her.
“I had a boyfriend in high school, and I just kind of had a boyfriend, I just thought that was normal.
“We’re still friends, and I think our relationship was kind of different to normal relationships. Like, I think at the time I was going through the motions of having a boyfriend, but then we would kiss other people and I would kiss girls and I was like, that’s just normal.”
Then she started dating women.
There was no point of discovery, no lightbulb moment drawing her to non-monogamy, so she continued in committed, albeit now queer, relationships for several years.
Befriending her now-girlfriends, who were already in a relationship with each other, in a West Coast hospital ward changed everything.
“When I met them I liked them both, and I was like, ‘This is different, what does that mean?’”
Laura, a nurse, is now in a long-term committed relationship with two other medical professionals, who were supportive of her sharing her story but unable to speak at the time.
Their relationship and lifestyle in Bay of Plenty, in a tiny home complete with a dog, several chickens and work in the medical field, sits outside what people usually think of when it comes to polyamory.
They’re not a married couple looking to spice things up with a relationship on the side, a person dating multiple partners, or a man with two committed girlfriends.
Nicky, a friend and former flatmate of Laura’s, inhabits a different side of polyamory.
The fellow nurse was introduced to it through a colleague she worked with in Canada five or six years ago.
“She was like, ‘I live with my partner and his wife,’ and I was just like, ‘What?’, and she’s like, ‘Yeah’, and I was like, ‘That’s so cool’.”
Up until that point, Nicky had never heard of anyone exploring love in that way, and admittedly had “a thousand” questions for her colleague on how the relationship actually worked.
Previously she had felt “trapped” by monogamy, and says she was used to giving her partner her “absolute everything”, and in doing so, losing herself.
Something, she tells the Herald on Sunday, always felt missing.
“It didn’t quite fit the mould of how I saw my life panning out, but I don’t really think there was ever a point of being like, ‘Oh, this is what I want’.”
Now she has multiple relationships at the same time, believing you “get feelings for who you get feelings for, you can’t change that”.
It’s also helped her recognise her own wants and needs, she says.
A recent study by dating app Bumble shows Nicky is not unique in her feelings about monogamy.
Conducted both here and in Australia, it found one in three Kiwi singles either don’t believe in monogamy or believe in ethical non-monogamy, which is when all partners consent to opening up their relationship.
The same study found Gen Z is less likely to believe in monogamy (58 per cent of respondents), compared to Millennials (65 per cent) and Gen X (80 per cent).
Sometimes touted as a miracle treatment for partners straying too far from the porch, “opening up” or adding a “third” to a relationship is tabled as an option by well-meaning friends or hopeful partners looking to expand their sexual horizons in an ethical way.
But each relationship is different, and while it opens the door for other experiences, depending on the situation, there are still boundaries.
Polyamory, Nicky says, is about “removing your own ego” and understanding that your partner has other needs and desires that you can’t meet.
In her view, it’s a process of unlearning what it means to be faithful to someone.
Meanwhile, Laura is in a closed polyamorous relationship, meaning she doesn’t date anyone outside of her throuple, but in the future, if one of them wanted to change that, she says it would just need to be communicated.
“I think I probably would find it harder than this, because it feels really secure.”
She explains the concept of ‘compersion’, the positive feelings people get knowing their partner is happy in their relationship with their other partner.
But polyamory can’t insulate against the jealousy, comparison and poor communication that can be common in all types of relationships.
Both women have felt jealous in their relationships, and for Nicky, who says she experiences it when she feels her relationships are threatened or compromised, she tries to overcome it by “backing” herself.
“Back your own relationship and really, like, reflect upon what you really have to offer and what is special to your relationship.”
In hindsight, Laura believes her throuple could have done things better when they first began dating, and says it has taken them five years to “do it well”.
“I’ve heard being in a throuple is like level 100 of polyamory, and you should not start there.”
Speaking to a psychologist well-versed with queer and polyamorous issues every few weeks or so also helps them with communication and sharing their emotions, she says.
“Before the two girls, I never thought that you could love more than one person, like you always had to choose between people, but from learning from polyamory, I’ve learned that you can love more than one person, and it doesn’t detract from the other loves that you have.”
Laura says their lifestyle has “really high highs”, but it still has lows.
Just a few days ago, she experienced what she recognised as jealousy in her relationship for the first time, and found herself comparing her relationships with that of her partners’.
“The worst was last year. We all got the flu, we were all home for a week and it was raining the whole time, and I think that was really hard.”
In usual times, despite the confines of their tiny home - smaller than 30 square metres - their differing hospital shifts allow them time apart so they can hang out “in twos”, which she says they believe is important.
“A lot of people talk about polyamory as a lot of communication, and a lot of calendar [planning] and work. So a lot of people have Google Calendar, which is where you can share all your stuff and you can figure out all of the kind of boring things, like when your WoF is due.”
Serafin Upton, a sex and relationship therapist who works with polyamorous clients, says like every other relationship, being polyamorous requires being deeply relational and having healthy communication skills.
While she doesn’t see this as different to monogamous relationships, Upton says it requires people to be “more of an expert”.
”People that are poly tend to have better communication skills and better relationship skills than people who aren’t, because they know you need to put in far more focus when you are having more than just one primary relationship.”
Upton says we all experience jealousy, and what she often sees when working with straight, monogamous couples is that this emotion will arise over friendships or relationships with a colleague or a neighbour.
“It’s not sexual or romantic jealousy, we’re not talking about that. It’s actual jealousy to do with, ‘I feel left out, I feel like there’s being energy pulled from [our] dynamic’.”
But the dynamic we have with one individual, she says, is so unique it cannot be replicated with anyone else.
“What people in relationships and friendships are in [them] for, is that energy, that connection, that dynamic that happens between two people. That feeling of cracking up laughing with someone that you know really well - you might not be able to get that with another person. There’s something very, very profoundly special about a connection.”
As well as this, Upton believes some people are wired in a way where they do not feel sexual or romantic jealousy.
“Any attachment style can experience a complete absence of erotic jealousy.
“Having multiple relationships really gives us profound opportunities for spiritual, emotional and psychological growth because we get to access different parts of ourselves.”
Although the world is undoubtedly becoming more queer-friendly, Laura says some people speak of having to “come out” again with their polyamorous identity.
“You come out as gay, and that’s quite a big thing, and for a lot of queer people that become polyamorous, you have to come out twice.”
Our mum, Robyn, says when Laura first came out, she felt proud of her and how she had individuated to the extent that she knew who she was and what she wanted.
“Especially because she had grown up in a Christian context where the kaupapa around relationships was monogonous and binary,” Robyn says.
“In fact, we had pastored a church for many years. I thought she was brave.”
Again, when Laura later revealed she was dating two wāhine, her mum said she also admired her courage and was excited to meet her new partners.
“They are generous, smart, kind [and] funny, and we are so grateful to have them in our lives. They combine the massive responsibilities of their jobs with an itinerant fun lifestyle and give a lot of time and energy into our family, and extended family as well.”
Through seeing their relationship flourish, Robyn says she’s learned partnerships like that can work.
Laura was always fairly “closed off” about her private life and for the first few years just shared her relationship with friends and those close to her.
“Until maybe a year ago, when I was like, I feel like I should just tell people, because it just gets too complicated. And so I started a new job last year and I was like, from the get-go I just need to be open with everyone, because then it will lead to less confusing conversations later on.”
Throughout Laura’s relationship, she says people have become more aware of polyamory, especially younger generations, so it’s not as much of a shock as it may have been in the past.
“There’s a lot more people that are coming out as queer or within the LGBTQ+ rainbow, and I feel like people that are queer and more accepting are kind of the drivers of polyamory, because there’s no set script of what you should say or what kind of relationship you should be in, and no one can tell you that’s not the normal way.”
Those in the public eye, like US actors Bella Thorne and Willow Smith, have also begun sharing their polyamorous relationships publicly.
New Zealand-born Ruban Nielson, of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, also revealed in 2015 how a relationship he and his wife had with another woman inspired their third album, and this year, one of the contestants on Australia’s The Bachelors, Jessica Navin, introduced the world to her open relationship. She ended up being chosen by one of the show’s three bachelors, but they are believed to have broken up.
Nicky, who travels frequently, says she has never introduced her family to any of her partners since she became polyamorous.
But her parents are aware of her stance on monogamy being “bullsh**” and of her being in relationships with multiple people at the same time.
“Someone once said to me, ‘you don’t have one best friend, or one child that you love and don’t love the other’.
“For some reason, we seem to go down this route of being like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to have one relationship’.”
Although she tells the Herald on Sunday society says you should find the love of your life and get the “two and a half kids”, you don’t have to play by those rules.
“It’s not for everyone, and some people really struggle with it because of past experiences or just personal experience. But it definitely is a way to live life,” Laura says.
International flights returned to Hamilton for the first time since 2012.