From deciding to become polyamorous to learning to live as friends, lovers, and as a family in conservative South Korea
The moment polyamory enters the conversation, a familiar question tends to follow: “If you truly love someone, how could that possibly work?” And this book will offer a compelling answer, inviting readers to reconsider what love and family can look like.
For Hong, her love life is as mundane and ordinary as anyone else’s, rather than the salacious or thrilling sexual fantasy many people imagine polyamorous relationships to be. Her typical day consists of getting up, seeing her lovers Wooju and Jimin off to work, discussing what to have for dinner, and meandering chit chats over food.
With an uplifting tone, this book features Hong’s lighthearted stories and thoughts about learning the importance of carving out alone time, getting along with Wooju’s and Jimin’s parents, and taking a family portrait with her partners to commemorate their first year of living together. The book concludes with an extended interview with Wooju and Jimin that captures the three lovers’ humour and chemistry, and allows Wooju and Jimin to speak for themselves. That being said, Hong doesn’t shy away from delving into more difficult experiences. She writes about her parents’ failed marriage, Jimin being outed as non-binary and polyamorous, and the time when a professor sexually harassed her, under the guise of explaining polyamory.
I Live With Two Lovers is ultimately a book about love. Their story is proof that any relationship built on love, commitment, and effort is real and worthy of respect. The author offers this book to readers with the hope that they, too, will come to believe that it’s okay to be different and that what seems strange to others may be an ideal kind of love for oneself.
If I say, ‘We’re polyamorous,’ the world says back to me, ‘You’re strange.’ And when I type ‘polyamory’ into the search engine, I’m met with an explosion of outrage. Promiscuity, cheating, forces of evil, the final form of decadence, Sodom and Gomorrah. Those words pull me away from myself and my own life. All the sweet simplicity of ‘good morning’s and ‘goodnight’s, of the bright conversations and petty arguments that add colour to my days eclipsed by a disorienting unfamiliarity.
