Jana Antonissen on polyamory

The Uncanny Allure and Anxiety of Polyamory. Imagine standing at the bathroom mirror when a stranger’s voice suddenly draws you into a reflection on love, desire, and the shapes our relationships take. Polyamory, often touted as the ultimate form of self-realization and freedom, promises open doors, consent, and the thrill of new connections. But beneath its sheen lies the question: can we truly dismantle our primal fears, or do we risk tumbling into an uncanny, even nightmarish, territory when our experiments with love go awry? The narrative blends personal anecdotes with philosophical musings. The chance encounter with an enigmatic older woman, who seems to be a future version of the narrator, triggers a journey through memory, mirror stages, and the disorienting experience of seeing oneself—and one’s desires—reflected and refracted in others. Psychoanalytic thinkers are invoked to illuminate how our earliest recognition of self is already tinged with alienation, how the search for unity is perpetually frustrated, and how sexuality is haunted by a sense of lack. Within this framework, polyamory is both a promise and a provocation. The narrator, having struggled with monogamy, enters an open relationship seeking honesty and liberation. Rules are set, boundaries negotiated, but the lived reality proves more complicated. The thrill of new encounters quickly gives way to confusion, jealousy, and a haunting sense of being replaceable—a feeling sharpened when an ex takes up with someone uncannily similar. Science fiction is evoked as a space for thought experiments, where alternative relationship models—like the prescribed four-person marriages of imaginary worlds—both tantalize and exhaust. Moments of intimacy in polyamorous configurations oscillate between pleasure and pain, excitement and alienation. The presence of a double, a lover’s new partner who mirrors oneself, invokes not just jealousy but something deeper and more unsettling: the fear of being substituted, the collapse of uniqueness. This is the territory of the uncanny, where repetition and doubling reveal our romantic paradox—we are each irreplaceable, yet always potentially replaced. The story draws on cultural references, from speculative fiction to psychological case studies, to explore how the unfamiliar can feel both exhilarating and terrifying. Ultimately, the experiment with polyamory doesn’t neatly resolve; the narrator returns to exclusivity, but with the recognition that no model—monogamy or polyamory—offers a final answer. Each comes with its own set of challenges, illusions, and disappointments. The human quest for connection is an endless confrontation with desire, loss, and the limits of satisfaction. In the end, the journey through polyamory becomes a meditation on the strange, sometimes frightening freedom of love—a freedom that always hovers between fulfillment and the uncanny possibility of being replaced, transformed, or lost.