What Polyamory Has Taught Me About Jealousy

When I was 24, my core group of three girlfriends had a huge falling out when two friends accused the third of having hit on their boyfriends. I spent hours and hours thinking about what each claimed had happened, and could not reconcile the idea that my dream of a Golden Girls-esque future was kaput. I imagined how I would feel if one of my best friends, in a good place after years of depression, had planted a sloppy drunken kiss on or danced suggestively with my boyfriend on her birthday. I truly could not see letting a moment like that ruin ten years of friendship.

I have never been what you might call a “jealous person” in my romantic relationships. My friends, on the other hand, turned venomous towards the woman they perceived as having interfered in their romantic relationships. She was kicked out of one friend’s wedding, and that was the end of our close-knit foursome.

A decade later, in my three years leading our local polyamory discussion group, jealousy is a topic that comes up at every meeting in one way or another. Sometimes we dive in with the green-eyed-monster as the main topic, but in other meetings it almost always comes up in the natural course of our discussions.

Often, the questions being asked center around eliminating jealousy. How do we stop ourselves from feeling jealous? Sometimes, those new to non-monogamous relationships would ask “but, don’t you get jealous?” The idea that polyamorous people don’t get jealous is a misconception. We definitely do! It’s a topic we talk about a lot.

In my experience, jealousy just needs to be re-framed and explored.

Recently, one of my favorite Medium writers traceybyfire wrote about the role jealousy has played in her life.

Knowing ourselves and recognizing our boundaries and limitations is awesome, and it’s not always easy work. I’m not one to believe that humans are naturally non-monogamous, I think different types of relationships work for different people on a wide spectrum. Lots of reasons exist for people not to have polyamorous relationships, but I don’t think jealousy should be one of them.

Jealousy has a place.

I believe that jealousy does have a place in our romantic relationships and our lives, sometimes quite an important one. Jealousy is just an emotion, and it is okay to feel it. Feeling mad, sad, anxious, or jealous isn’t inherently bad, but we react to all of these feelings very differently.

We don’t say anger or sadness or happiness don’t fit into our relationships because as we grow up we are given tools to handle them. In our culture we aren’t given any tools for handling jealousy. We are taught that jealousy is bad, and means something is wrong and needs to be fixed. This causes us to develop a strong gut reaction to jealous feelings.

Relationships ebb and flow, and resources for finding our way back are out there, but seldom address the concept of handling and figuring out jealous feelings. I see jealous feelings in my relationship as an opportunity. When we are feeling jealous, we have a chance to turn that feeling into a tool for identifying what is going well and what is not working for us.

Why do we treat jealousy so differently from other emotions?

Humans have invented anger management classes, but no one has ever heard of a jealousy management class. You can attend couple retreats and seminars to learn about love, connecting physically, or self care, but not about how to dig to the root of jealousy. Relaxation exercises and breathing techniques exist to help with anxiety, but there are no exercises to help you disentangle yourself from a web of jealous feelings.

Jealousy is uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel good. It reminds me of how I feel when I’m anxious and haven’t yet taken the time to try to figure out what’s underlying the anxiety. I feel flushed, my skin crawls, and a pit opens up in my stomach. Sometimes I feel tinges of anxiety, fear, loneliness, or sadness. When I’m jealous, sometimes I feel irritable and down on myself.

Jealousy can help us know ourselves better.

By paying attention to when you feel jealous, you can identify patterns and trends. The time I feel the most jealous is when my cup is too full and I’m feeling like I need support. For example, say my boyfriend has a date on Friday night. If I’ve had a good week, work went well, and I got a good night’s sleep the night before, I’m much less likely to experience feelings of jealousy than if I had a stressful week, my car broke down, and I was up all night with a sick kid.

One of the advantages to all of the communication and thinking that’s involved in healthy polyamorous relationships is that it allows for, in fact demands, a lot of getting to know yourself. When you have to answer to your partners about what your needs are, what your expectations are, and what your boundaries are, you have to actually figure those things out first.

Polyamorous relationships take work, and some of that work is on ourselves. We have to work with our own emotions and with our partners to cultivate security in our relationships. Two individually secure people together make for a more secure relationship, and I’ve found that by working on myself I put less pressure on my partner to provide validation or answers for me.

Jealousy isn’t an unsolvable mystery. Like any emotion, it has underlying causes that are more complex than a one-word answer. The biggest mistake we make is thinking that the cause of jealousy is someone else’s actions. The real cause of jealous feelings comes from inside ourselves, and when we can learn to break that down, we can often identify our insecurities and what we need to feel better.

Jealousy can identify your desires.

There’s a big difference between asking for what we need and asking a partner to stop something they’re doing because it’s sparking an emotion in us. The idea that jealousy doesn’t have a place in relationships also comes from the idea that if one partner is feeling jealous, it needs to be fixed. Whether this is by not dating other people, or by cancelling plans, doing those things isn’t actually fixing the underlying problem.

Whether jealous feelings are pointing towards general insecurity, the need for extra love right now, feeling unseen or unheard, needing extra check-ins, or a myriad of other things, they’re a clue that some need or desire is not being met. Rather than demanding a partner spend all of their time with us or give up on things they are excited about, we can shift the focus to asking for what we need.

This is a great time to practice I statements and good communication skills. Perhaps this is saying “When I think about you leaving for your date later, I’m feeling really jealous, so it would help me a lot if you could be home before bed so we can fall asleep together.” Or maybe you choose to reach out to your partner for support with “I’m having some pretty jealous feelings. I want you to have fun tonight, and was wondering if we could carve out some one on one time tomorrow to talk through why I’m feeling this way.”

Sometimes, we might just need to let ourselves feel it. There is something to be said for letting feelings happen, getting a good night’s sleep, and seeing how morning feels. I’m a big fan of letting myself feel things when I’m having a particularly gloomy day, doing lots of self care, and knowing that tomorrow I can try again.

When jealousy IS a warning sign.

Of course, there are cases where when you may investigate and find that there are legitimate concerns underlying your jealous feelings. If your partner is acting outside of the bounds of your relationship agreements, you might start to feel jealous of their time with other partners when the underlying feeling is unhappiness at having your boundaries disrespected.

Jealousy can become a way to control our partners, and that definitely doesn’t have a place in our relationships. In our society, jealousy is sometimes framed as just a manifestation that your partner cares about you. The trope of the crazy-eyed, yelling, jealous boyfriend or girlfriend is perpetuated over and over again. It’s often ended with something like, “it’s just because I love you so much baby,” and that can be a dangerous road to go down.

Everybody feels jealous sometimes.

Learning to deal with jealousy and recognize its usefulness as a tool is helpful in situations far beyond just polyamorous relationships. Who among us hasn’t experienced jealousy when a friend makes plans with someone else, or a coworker gets something we wanted for ourselves? Even in monogamous romantic relationships, feelings of jealousy can arise when a partner has a new friend or hobby they’re spending time with or an important new project at work.

In our relationships, jealousy doesn’t only happen when we think of our partner expressing interest in another person romantically or sexually. It’s a natural emotion that we can encounter in the most unexpected places. By having the confidence to stare it down and figure out what it means, we take the power away from a knee-jerk reaction and get to know ourselves better.

All of the things I’ve learned about communicating and expressing my needs and desires to my partner are the same things I need to tap into when I want to express that I’m having jealous feelings. By stopping and examining what’s really going on in my head and my heart, I can turn what initially feels like something bad into a good, constructive tool for bettering myself and my relationships.