Tarot Interviews

Romance, Reason & Rebellion: Carrie Jenkins on Redefining Love

• Fin | Tarot Interviews • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Professor Carrie Jenkins is a philosopher and poet whose work explores the nature of love, identity, and the complexities of the self. She is the author of What Love Is: And What It Could Be and Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning, which challenge traditional ideas of romantic relationships through both philosophical inquiry and personal experience. Her recent book Nonmonogamy and Happiness: A More Than Two Essentials Guide asks how often we hear a non-monogamous love story with a happy ending?

Carrie is a professor at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches philosophy and writes about metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of literature. 

Learn more at her official website: carriejenkins.net

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Fin:

Tarot Interviews. Carrie is a philosopher, author and poet whose work explores the nature of love, relationships and what it means to be human. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge, and is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She's the author of what Love Is and what it Could Be, and Sad Love, where she challenges conventional ideas about romance and happiness. Beyond philosophy, carrie's poetry explores emotional landscapes. Today, we'll let the tarot lead us through a conversation about love, creativity and the unseen connections that shape our lives. Let's shuffle the deck and begin. Hello, my lovely, can you hear me okay? Is it working? Yeah, it's working. There we go. It's Professor Jenkins.

Carrie Jenkins:

How are you? Oh, my God.

Fin:

I'm very, very well. I am here shuffling your cards. What kind of a day are you having today?

Carrie Jenkins:

A day. Well, I woke up and read the news and that was a big mistake. So, being in Canada, you know we're kind of just we're very close to the hub of a lot of the news and not the good stuff and not not the good stuff and it kind of felt some someone I saw compare it to, uh, like you live in the apartment upstairs from a meth lab, which is which is kind of how we all feel right now I'm a bit terrified.

Fin:

Let's uh, let's try and distract ourselves a little. I'm currently shuffling my usual rider weight deck and uh, okay, right, so I'm going to split the deck there, put that to one side, so there's no chicanery or nonsense, and I'm going to keep shuffling away I was looking forward to the chicanery and nonsense that's the lovers the lovers. Okay, so, from your understanding of the tarot, from your own experiences and looking at the card that you can see on the camera there, what do you see?

Carrie Jenkins:

So the first thing that I tend to think of these days when I draw the lovers is its visual parallelism with the devil card.

Fin:

I have never noticed that, but absolutely.

Carrie Jenkins:

Yeah, if you put them side by side, both of these cards have two naked figures down in front and they have a kind of big looming supernatural figure behind the two. And then on the lover's card there's an angel with wings. On the devil card it's a devil with horns, but the shapes are actually really very similar. That that kind of um, I guess it's a kind of like a duality, that that between them they they cover what are you typically viewed as very positive and very negative things, while being each other's kind of flip side I was going to say.

Fin:

I mean, a good night out would hopefully involve both cards.

Carrie Jenkins:

Yes, ideally.

Fin:

I mean, my understanding is that it's authentic desires of love for life's broader choices, decisions made from the soul, that type of thing. But I'm going to have to sit down after this interview and put both of those cards next to each other, because that's something that I rarely do.

Carrie Jenkins:

I tend to either look at them in threes or as a spread, but not one next to another. I do like not two. Yeah, it can. It can be useful. I've been doing pulls of two quite a bit lately. Actually, my pull for this morning was also a two and I I I don't know why, but that the pairings. I'm a gemini, so maybe it's just that I'm like twins and and the lovers is a card quite often associated with Gemini itself, just because it's the two figures on the card.

Fin:

My question, based on the lovers, is how has your exploration of love's nature influenced your personal relationships?

Carrie Jenkins:

What a good question. All right, here's the thing I've been thinking about a lot lately the interconnectedness of things, the kind of inseparability of things that we trained and taught to separate, and so one of those is personal life and professional life, or working life, work life. People talk about work-life balance. You know this idea that you've got to trade off one against the other, but there's another kind of way of looking at a person and the things that they do which is more holistic, and that's it's true in spades.

Carrie Jenkins:

For my, my work on love, um, and I kind of had to acknowledge this like right from the start, going into it, I I'm going to be writing from my own personal experience. I'm not going to be doing this in a kind of abstract way, and I don't. I actually was trying to make the point that nobody's doing this in an abstract way with no purpose. Everyone's got baggage, and as soon as you start thinking and writing, talking about something like love, your baggage is there, whether you want it or not, whether you're acknowledging it or not. So the two things have just always been like 100% intertwined, inextricably intertwined. The only kind of little exception to that is, you know, I talk in my books about living in polyamorous relationships, for example, and I talk about what that means in terms of you know my understanding of love and the baggage I bring to the table. You look like you wanted to ask me something else there.

Fin:

I was yeah. Which book does that feature in?

Carrie Jenkins:

Both what Love Is and what it Could Be and Bad love. Talk about it a little bit. And then my latest, uh, non-fiction, which is a little book called non-monogamy and happiness. Um, obviously it's, uh, it's talking about those issues as well. So I talk about that in my work because I'm kind of interested in, conceptually, what are the assumptions we make about the nature of love having to be monogamous. For example, if it's romantic love, that you know, in doing things like interviews or public talks or what have you about my work, people would start asking about my private life. So the one little piece of separation that I did try to pull down was like there's parts of my private life that stay private and they don't show up in the work and they don't show up in interviews, despite some journalists actually being really, really persistent about certain kinds of very personal questions. Um, I, I just have to be like no, there are actually some things that I I am not going to talk to you about because they're not related to the work and you don't need to know them. That said, even things that I typically think of as being private, really private, they influence how I think, they affect how I, how I think about love and how I think about everything. Really, yeah, the reverse is true as well.

Carrie Jenkins:

So when I've written something, I don't have a very good memory. Actually, I've always had a very, very bad memory. So sometimes I've, actually I've forgotten pieces of my own thought process. And I go back and read one of my books, like like, what love is is now kind of getting on for 10 years old and I was working on it like longer ago than that. So I go back and read some of it and I'm like, oh yeah, that's what I, that's what I think. And then it turns out that that piece of of I don't know, that piece of conceptual technology is what I needed to solve a problem in one of my own relationships or one of my own kind of friendships or family connections or whatever it might be. So yeah, sometimes that interconnectedness works out really well. Other times it can be something a little bit tricky to navigate.

Fin:

Yeah, thank you so much for guiding us through that, and it's funny. You should mention the book what Love Is. I saw it in a local bookshop not a few weeks ago and had to pick up a copy, so it's sat on my to-read pile.

Carrie Jenkins:

Back at my old hometown and all fantastic card number two are you ready? I see a hand grasping a big stick with leaves, hands coming out of a cloud.

Fin:

Okay, I don't know quite how defined a webcam is, but that, of course, is the Ace of Wands. Is it one that you've come across before?

Carrie Jenkins:

No, yeah, yeah, I've gotten to know my deck pretty well now. I read for myself most most days and, and more than once if I have questions, I tend to have this sort of a bit of running dialogue with my tarot cards throughout the day wow, do you have like um, I don't know like a, like a pouch or a bag that you keep them in?

Fin:

so you've got them like near that.

Carrie Jenkins:

Oh, there we are I do, yeah, I got. I actually got this at a local witch's market in vancouver. It's a nice little silk on the satin on the inside and um purple spiderweb design on the outside that is gorgeous yeah, quite cool hey, and it just, it folds over astral alchemy.

Fin:

That's the maker wow, okay, right, well, ace of wands. So it's a card of creative energy, a spark of inspiration symbolizes raw potential and passion and enthusiasm. It's a very positive card to begin with that, and the lovers as well. We keep our fingers crossed for a good third card as well. Um, so yeah. So it's a card of embracing your inner drive and instincts. So let me think of a question to ask you what are you drinking over there? It's a card of embracing your inner drive and instincts, so let me think of a question to ask you what are you drinking over there?

Carrie Jenkins:

it's a lot later in the day for you than it is for me oh, this is cold, hard water, right?

Fin:

so what sparked your passion for philosophy?

Carrie Jenkins:

oh boy, my relationship with philosophy is so complicated now, um, that that's a. That's a really tricky question because it kind of depends what you mean, what you mean by philosophy, like back in the day when I was, um, let's say when I, what is? I know, right, I, literally I. So one of books. The first line is tell a philosopher you love her and you better be ready to define your terms. And then again the next line is it's funny because it's true it is. We can't switch it off Like anything. Love philosophy, any word at all. But with this one, I mean part of the thing is are we talking about philosophy like the academic discipline, the university subject or the activity that pretty much everyone does, like little kids around about the age of 18? Um, because I started reading some, I got turned on to it by things like Descartes and Bertrand Russell and and some really, like you know, classic figures of western philosophy.

Carrie Jenkins:

I was gonna maybe Sophie's choice, but yeah, I read that and I loved it and so I was like, yeah, this is fantastic, you can think about whatever you want and like, have a great time. I want to do that for my job. So I was like, yeah, this is fantastic, you can think about whatever you want and have a great time. I want to do that for my job. So I went to study it and I was lucky enough to get a job teaching philosophy. In fact I moved around a lot for different jobs teaching and researching philosophy.

Carrie Jenkins:

But then, you know, over time the kind of the rose-tinted bets came off and I realized actually the formalized concept of philosophy has some problems the way people think about it.

Carrie Jenkins:

It can be quite narrow, constrained to that particular tradition of Western analytic thought, not very inclusive of anything or anyone else and other ways of approaching life and philosophy, uh, in the broader sense of just, you know, thinking hard about stuff.

Carrie Jenkins:

So, yeah, I I kind of um, the short answer to like what first stopped sparked me was this I it's kind of pure intellectual love for the kind of questions and the kind of things, kind of ways of discussing them, the open-endedness of it, the fact that you could seemingly think about anything in these ways and not be told that it's irrelevant or stupid. And yeah, I loved all of that. Eventually, you know, having gotten a little bit disillusioned with the academic discipline, was what led me to start. I actually went back to school and I got a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing to kind of broaden my horizons a little bit. That's why I started writing the poetry and the fiction as the way of kind of doing some of the work that, as I see it, the academic discipline doesn't quite make room for, but other kinds of writing do. That's a long, rambly answer to your question, but it's complicated. These things are complicated.

Fin:

I think my follow-on question would be out of all of the famous philosophers that I would have heard, of which one was your first love?

Carrie Jenkins:

Bertrand Russell. Have you heard of Bertrand Russell, or do I need to go more into the greatest hits, guys?

Fin:

I have, but some people who are listening to this may not have done so. Can you uh refresh my memory about why?

Carrie Jenkins:

yeah, and he's, he's not still someone I would place in the beloved philosopher category, to be clear. Uh, he's, he's one of those problematic faves, you know where. Sure, they did a lot of really interesting philosophy of mathematics and and their, their theories of logic uh, very cool, very interesting. And then mathematics and and their, their theories of logic uh, very cool, very interesting. And then they go and write books about eugenics and stuff like that and it's like ouch um, so you know again, like complicated, complicated person, um, but he was, he was at, uh, trinity college in in cambridge as a, as a young, and then he kind of eventually he fell completely out of favor with Cambridge because he was a pacifist during the war. This is early 20th century. This is when he's around there and he ends up working in the US and they don't like him over there either because he's arguing for things like free love and sex outside of marriage and non-monogamous relationships, which was unusual at that time. Goodness, yeah, fascinating guy. Fascinating guy.

Carrie Jenkins:

But also, I mean, none of that was what I was reading. I was just reading his philosophy of mind and his philosophy of mathematics, which were things I was super into Early on. I got really interested in mathematics. Just like think about like what, what are numbers? How do they work? How do we know about two plus two equals four? How do you know that like that to me is like super fascinating question. He had lots to say about stuff like that. So I'm like this is, this is very cool. And then, many years later, I was like yeah, and you said this other very cool stuff and this completely shocking and horrific stuff and oh, my goodness. So yeah, that's Bertrand Russell for you. Thank you so much. Also a member of the British aristocracy.

Fin:

Oh, really, mm-hmm. Oh, I did not know. I'm going to have to look him up and a bit of a public intellectual before it was cool. Was it ever cool.

Carrie Jenkins:

No, it's never been cool, let's face it, it's not. It wasn't. But uh, yeah, he was one of the one of the earliest people to be quite interested in actually writing his, his philosophical stuff out into the world. And he was an activist too, anti-nuclear, pro um, early advocate of gay rights for men in the uk, or at least decriminalization, which was where where that discussion was at at the time okay, I mean from your super interesting guy, from your warm and glowing description, it sounds like that maybe the good outweighed the bad.

Fin:

But I'll need to look into more about some of this politics it's very hard to weigh these things.

Carrie Jenkins:

You know, it's sort of like it's everything all at once. There's some very cool stuff and some very, very bad stuff. Very hard to weigh them against each other. I don't remember exactly the source for this. I might need to check it, but he was involved in the creation of the CND logo that became a peace sign. He was involved in these early uh campaigns for nuclear disarm, disarmament that um uh created that that logo.

Fin:

It became, you know, kind of internationally recognized symbol of peace well, I would have recognized at aged eight I think I was eight or seven. I was on the greenham common marches with my mum oh yeah, and it was. I was there standing outside the barbed wire with a pink balloon that said gaze against the bomb.

Carrie Jenkins:

Okay card number three you got, you got started early right, I have a pile of cards.

Fin:

we have two down down, one to go and I would cross my fingers for another good card, but I would drop them.

Carrie Jenkins:

All the cards are good and bad, all of them, just like all of the people. There is no. I've really gotten, I've really started to get into feeling this more and more over time. But there aren't good cards. I don't think the Lovers is necessarily a good card, for example, like if you notice there's, uh, there's chains in that card, uh, and I, I think people have a natural tendency to think of it as uh, something, something they want to see when they're, when they're doing readings.

Carrie Jenkins:

But, um, in, in a lot of ways I it can be, it can be pretty scary too. Sorry, not chain a snake, um, the chains are in the in the devil card. So so the, the, the parallelism of the of the devil card and the and the lover card is that there's chains in the devil and the snake in the lover, um, in the lovers, and the snake is kind of twining around the, an apple tree behind the, the, uh, the, the woman figure, woman figure in the card and sort of whispering in her ear. It's all very biblical. There's always trouble in paradise, is what I'm saying.

Fin:

It's funny you're talking about the possibility of the lovers being a card of misfortune, because my children are really into the Greek myths myths. One of the story, one of the stories they're really enjoying at the moment, is the judgment of paris. So the idea of turning down athene, turning down hera and then choosing aphrodite, because what could go wrong?

Carrie Jenkins:

right what could go wrong?

Fin:

spells an epic disaster and it's always apples.

Carrie Jenkins:

For some reason people, people like it doesn't break a good apple, does it.

Fin:

Do you know what I hate? Apples.

Carrie Jenkins:

It's the one thing I can't stand. But yeah, they're always kind of a fruit. I guess they're always bound up with discord and disquiet, even in what look like heavenly environments, but yeah, the lovers.

Carrie Jenkins:

Coming back to the interaction of my work and the other things, I think my work on love is quite critical, especially of romance, the idea of romance as a kind of a myth or a narrative that we live by. I think it's responsible for a lot of BS and causes a lot of damage to a lot of a myth or a narrative that we live by. I think it's really it's responsible for a lot of BS and causes a lot of damage to a lot of folks. And if we have better ways of understanding love that maybe didn't look as much like what we're seeing on the lover's card but had more flexibility in terms of like, well, what could love look like? Does it have to be a naked man and a naked woman doing something sinful with an apple? No, not really. There are actually a lot of other pictures of love. So it's not love per se that I think is to blame, but certain ways of imagining it and kinds of limitations maybe that we artificially place on love. I think that's a problem.

Fin:

I think you're absolutely right. I think the figures there should be more formless in a way. And, as you say, why are there just two?

Carrie Jenkins:

Why are there two? Why is there a male and female figure?

Fin:

What are we?

Carrie Jenkins:

doing with our myths.

Fin:

Time to pick one.

Carrie Jenkins:

All right, let's do it.

Fin:

Let's do the last one. Let me know when you're ready. What do you see?

Carrie Jenkins:

Well, I don't have like good and bad cards, but I definitely have favourites, and this is one of my favourites. This is the Queen of Wands. I love her.

Carrie Jenkins:

I see a lady on a throne in yellow robes with a sunflower and a black cat, and everything about that is awesome and what she meant to you in the past oh, I mean the kind of thing, the kind of thing I associate with her are, you know, we're talking about that creative energy in the ace of wands card, that spark of passion, um, I think you know, in the ace of the suit of wands that that energy is obviously in a beginner form. It's, it's ready to go and it's just, like you know, getting getting things moving. It's very motivated, very, very powerful. But the queen of wands is, um, she sort of represents, I guess in some way, the later stage of that process. It's more in control, more in command.

Carrie Jenkins:

She's, uh, she's already grown her sunflower and she's very happy with it and like, here it is, and she's, she's got this black cat which you know, uh, a lot of context would be regarded as unlucky, or you know something that, uh, that people are scared of, uh, but she is, it looks like that's her pet cat, right, or or maybe just a cat, her familiar, right, and this is the cat who hangs out with her, that she's friends with, and so she's kind of defiant of other people's stupid ideas about what is and isn't a good kind of cat to have around, and she's, she's, she's moisturized and and in her lane and she's like, you know all of that good stuff. So that's that's what I see um part of why I see part of why she's one of my favorite cards and someone who embraces their inner fire.

Fin:

Can I ask do you have a cat at the moment?

Carrie Jenkins:

I do um. In fact, I have a black cat. Um, she's also a hairless black cat, she's a she's a sphinx cat, so yeah, well moistur. I have a black dog and also that's need to be moisturised, because you know that hairless cats. Actually you have to give them a regular bath, which mine hates, but it's good for her skin and she does get a little bit of dry skin now and again, so you have to pop the oil.

Fin:

She still kind of licks herself clean and things yeah she does, she herself clean and things.

Carrie Jenkins:

Yeah, she does, she licks herself and and cleans herself. It's just that the the oil builds up and then, you know, a hairy cat hair would sort of carry the oil away from the skin, but she doesn't have any hair, so it just kind of sort of sits there a little bit and so, yeah, bath bath once every week or so and a little bit of olive oil if she gets patch of dry skin. Okay, but she helps me with my tarot readings in exchange.

Fin:

She sounds like a very good familiar. I do have. I've got two.

Carrie Jenkins:

Her name's Drusilla.

Fin:

Oh, Drusilla yeah From Buffy.

Carrie Jenkins:

After yes, yeah, after the vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because she actually looks pretty similar with the kind of wrinkly forehead.

Fin:

And the same peculiar accent. Yeah.

Carrie Jenkins:

Obviously yeah, and she's obviously a spacey witch cat, so it's just a perfect name.

Fin:

You won't be able to see either of my two because I've got my ginger nonsense sleeping on the bed here who hasn't moved all day. I've got one of these um stand-up desks and you press a button and it raises and lowers. Oh yeah, he was snoozing on that and I pressed the button, it moved.

Carrie Jenkins:

He just did not care why would he, as long as the bed is still there?

Fin:

of course. And my tabby just over here again. I mean she's a very sweet, lovely little creature, but, of course, and my tabby just over here again, I mean she's a very sweet, lovely little creature, but they could snooze as an Olympic sport, these two, right? My question for you is how do you feel that you've inspired and led people in your field?

Carrie Jenkins:

Right, this might be aspirational because I don't know that I've done any of that kind of thing, but what I'm trying to do, what I'd love to do, it has to do with an idea about sort of creating and crafting the work which I feel like should have a capital W, like I'm an alchemist or something, the work that I do in ways that are not dictated by, like, my job contract or or a manager or something like that, right, so? So I'm paid by a university which, uh, which is, uh, you know, an institution actually, but the one I work for now it's very, very big university, big institution, run by the government, british Columbia, well, and funded by the government of British Columbia. Well, I'm funded by the government of British Columbia, and so, you know, it has all the kinds of suite of disadvantages and advantages that you get along with that. You know, in many ways the goals of the institution are not well aligned with my own, and so what the institution views as my job obviously that's the kind of thing I have to do to get a paycheck Now, does that mean I have no leeway to kind of craft and make it work for me, make it cohere with the rest of my life and the things that are actually meaningful and valuable to me. No, I can do that, and so part of what I would love to be able to do is be part of redefining or reshaping what an academic life can be Like.

Carrie Jenkins:

What can a scholarly life look like? Because the kind of model for it that I've inherited I suppose is the right word inherited, or been handed is one where you're working mostly for other scholars and writing articles that then get hidden behind paywalls and are anyway written in very inaccessible language and that concern things that only a few people in the world are interested in. Now I do do that like, and I actually do think some of that's valuable activity. I don't like the paywall part. I wish that would. Just people would just get over it and publish things. Open access that's a whole separate rant we could get into. I think there is something really valuable about doing these kind of technical investigations of things that aren't very interesting to many people and using the conceptual vocabulary that goes along with all of that. It's just. I don't think that's the only thing that scholarly life can look like. So you know, I wanted to be a writer as well. I want to write fiction and poetry as well. I want that to be a writer as well, I want to write fiction, poetry as well. I want that to be understood to be part of what scholarly life can look like. I want reading tarot to be part of what scholarly life can look like.

Carrie Jenkins:

I'm not the only one who does this. There's, there's a few, there's quite a few of us, and so I'm kind of, if there's, if there's a kind of thing that I would love for to be able to kind of make more possible for other people later by doing it now, it's that it's being able to make this kind of job, this kind of life, into something that coheres with what I think will actually best use my skills and abilities, um, in ways that I think are meaningful and valuable. Um, and for me, that that does involve more things than I was trained to do and more things that are in my job contract, and I want to make it more okay to have that kind of approach to really any kind of job and any kind of role in life. So this is really very much of a piece with some of my arguments about love and relationships, which are just. You know, we should be able to craft these things to fit the shapes we need and we want, and so you know people who want to live in non-monogamous relationships. You know that's part of what I call love crafting, which has nothing to do with Cthulhu but is more like job crafting, which is a concept that actually comes out of business and management studies of all places. But this idea that I'm talking about, where you can kind of make the job more of a fit with your own values and skills and interests, that's been described as job crafting and I've tried to argue yeah, we should be job crafting, we should also be love crafting and we should be life crafting and not kind of fitting ourselves to predefined scripts or our ideas that are handed to us and that may actually be very, very harmful and limited, in the same way that that kind of picture of what love can be on the lover's card is limited and harmful if we think it's the only picture.

Carrie Jenkins:

That felt like quite a ramble, but there we go. That's that's why that's that's one thing I would love to be able to to do. I do so. This happened yesterday, which reminded me I. Sometimes people write to me and they say look, I really liked your book for some reason and and a lot yesterday, cause I'm I've been having a bit of a rough, rough ride the last couple of weeks I read that and I was like oh, that's so lovely. And I just started crying, because it is nice to be reminded that there are people out there and something you've done or something you've written has helped them or moved them in some way. But I mean, obviously that's a big part of it too, that feeling that the actual products of my work and my writing are helping someone, you know, someone somewhere. If I'm able to do that, then it feels like it's worth it.

Fin:

A huge thank you to Carrie Jenkins for sharing her wisdom and insights with us. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow the podcast and leave a review, because it really helps. You can also connect with Carrie and explore her work through the links in the show notes. And until next time, keep exploring, stay curious and let the cards reveal their magic.

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Fin

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