HELL’S KITCHEN, Manhattan — Open Love NY is one of the largest support groups for the polyamorous community in the country. They meet on a regular basis in Hell’s Kitchen.
“Polyamory for me is when you engage in multiple romantic and sexual relationships at the same time,” explained the group’s president Gette Levy.
Levy believes polyamory is part of her identity.
“I felt very awkward through puberty I was attracted to multiple people at the same time, I got a lot of social cues that I should be jealous or that it was wrong for me to like multiple people at the same time I should be searching for that 1 person and that never happened for me.”
Today, Levy leads Open Love NY discussions on balancing time, family, and multiple partners. Levy opened up to PIX11 about her own love life.
“Me and my girlfriend have been together for 6 years, my boyfriend and I have been together for 3 and in the intermediary I’ve had partners of multiple years.”
The polyamorous community is growing in numbers and in visibility. Earlier this year, online dating site OkCupid added a feature for non-monogamous daters. In March, DIRECT TV launched the first poly-romantic series, You Me Her.
But Dr. Helen Fisher points out, “sharing a spouse or partner is difficult for the human animal, we are not built for it.”
Dr. Fisher is a biological anthropologist, she built a career studying how humans fall in love. Dr. Fisher found there’s another side of polyamory.
“It’s largely jealousy, its largely wanting to know what happened where.”
“And they’ve got rules. And maybe they’ve decided not to ask each other any of the details because that just pulls up more jealousy and more perhaps anger.”
