2018 Pride parade in London
25 September 2023
Metamour is a word that has yet to make it into any major dictionary. It is, perhaps, best defined by Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton in their book The Ethical Slut:
Metamour Relationships
The word metamour is a recent coinage to describe your relationship with your lover’s lovers, and theirs with you. Beting a metamour brings up points of etiquette that Emily Post never dreamed of.
The word is a combination of meta- (above, beyond) + amour (French: lover).
The earliest use of the word that I have found is in the Urbandictionary, which in an entry from 19 July 2004 defines it thusly:
In a polyamorous relationship, where your lover has more than one lover, a metamour is the name given to your partner's other lover(s).
My partner and I went to see her metamour Jane at the weekend.
The earliest use of metamour I have found in print is from London’s the Independent of 4 April 2005 in an article on the growing (or at least becoming more open) phenomenon of polyamory in Britain:
Metamour Used to describe your relationship with one of your partner's partners
I did, however, discover a nonce use of metamour in a different sense in one of William Safire’s “On Language” columns for the New York Times. From 12 September 1982:
In passing, I derogated the supposed need for new words to cover highly specialized relationships, shrugging off the query from a reader who wanted to know what to call “an ex-wife with whom one was having an affair.” However, since most of the mail came in with suggestions for that query and not mine, let me pass them along:
“Because I am having an affair with my ex-husband,” writes an Arizona woman—how did I get involved in this?—“I have three suggestions”: conjugate, as a noun, is one; the others, interspersed with embarrassing and unnecessary confidences, are Paramate and metamour.
Other readers of Safire’s column suggested amorex, marry-go-round, mistrex (referring to an ex-wife with whom was sleeping), exspousal, and spousetress/spouster.
Sources:
Frith, Maxine. “‘Ethical Sluts’ Develop New Language of Love for Open Relationships.” Independent (London), 4 April 2005, 16–17. ProQuest Newspapers.
Hardy, Janet W. and Dossie Easton. The Ethical Slut, third edition. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2017, 204. Archive.org. (The word does not appear in earlier editions of the book.)
Safire, William. “On Language: The Bloopie Awards.” New York Times Magazine, 12 September 1982, 16. Nytimes.com.
Urbandictionary.com, 19 July 2004, s.v. metamour.
Image credit: Camerawalker, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.