Shahana Goswami says she is in open relationships: ‘I’ve many partners but it’s never casual’

She further said, “So for me, at this point, openness means there’s no clear-cut partnership with anyone, but there is this feeling of long-term bonding and connection that stays with you, no matter what form it takes. Sometimes it’s just friendship. Sometimes it might be physical too. There’s no need to force it into some specific direction. The baseline is simple: love and friendship. A friend means someone you have a human-level love for, that’s what they are to you.”

When asked about ghosting in open relationships, she recounted, “Actually, that doesn’t happen. I mean, it’s not like I ghost people, but this just doesn’t happen. Because I also know the thing is, when you’re this free, you know, it’s not like this just comes out of nowhere. It’s not something from childhood. Maybe there was some potential leftover from childhood, but to get to this point, you really have to work hard on yourself. It’s not easy. It looks easy from the outside, but you have to deal with your own jealousy,” she said.

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When people walk away

Goswami is conscious of the effect she tends to have on people who get close to her. She said that some people in her relationships have found her way of being so unfamiliar that they have stepped back, not after a fight or a falling out, but simply because they felt overwhelmed. “I’m different from anybody else those people have encountered, and I bring out insecurities in others,” she explained. Not because she sets out to, but because her freedom forces a kind of self-reckoning that not everyone is ready for.
She said that when people meet her, they feel scared, precisely because she is so free. The reaction, in her experience, is fairly consistent.

What films and songs taught us about love

Part of why that fear exists, she argued, comes down to how love has been defined for generations through popular culture. Films and songs, she said, have spent decades romanticising the idea of owning someone in a relationship. ‘The language of possession, the notion that love means belonging entirely and exclusively to one other person, has been absorbed so thoroughly that any relationship structure sitting outside it feels destabilising to many people.”

Knowing early, choosing freely

She said she became aware of open relationships at a young age, which gave her an early framework for thinking about love outside the conventional template. That awareness settled into a conviction she has carried since. She said, “I always felt that love should be free, that it should not become something that limits or confines the people involved in it. That belief has shaped not only the relationships I have chosen but how those relationships have taken shape over time.” A lot of her open relationship partners have met each other, a detail that points to the degree of honesty and communication that makes these arrangements actually work.

The gap between looking free and being free

What Goswami seems most determined to correct is the idea that her life looks the way it does because she has somehow been spared the harder parts of human feeling. The freedom she carries is not the absence of difficulty. It is what remains after you have sat with the difficulty and refused to run from it. That distinction is easy to miss from the outside. It is, she suggested, exactly the thing most people miss.