Jealousy In Polyamory Isn't A Big Problem And I'm Tired Of Being Gaslit By Big Self-Help

The nuance is in the post, guys

Books about how to be polyamorous devote an enormous amount of page space to jealousy. Consider, for example, More Than Two, by Eve Rickert and the disgraced Franklin Veaux, devotes an entire chapter to jealousy, including paragraphs like:

So you're finally in a polyamorous relationship. You're involved with someone who has another partner. There you are, cruising along, and wham! You see something, or hear something, or think about something, and now you're in the thick of it. Jealousy. It happens, sometimes when we least expect it. When it does, we can feel like we want to set fire to the world before running into a dark cave screaming "I will never let anyone get close to me ever again!" (Or maybe that's just us.)

Sometimes jealousy is triggered by public behavior we often associate with "couplehood": holding hands in public, sending flowers to a partner's workplace, meeting a partner's parents. Peter felt jealous when Eve started wearing a gold necklace Ray had given her, and Eve felt jealous when Clio posted a picture on Facebook of a necklace Peter had made for her. As we discuss in chapter 18, on mono/poly relationships, Celeste felt jealous when Franklin's partner Bella wanted to have portraits taken with him, as did Mila when her metamour Nina posted family portraits to Facebook that included their partner Morgan…

As mentioned, a common trigger for jealousy is seeing your partner being physically affectionate or flirty with someone else. This can bring up fears of being replaced or activate the "Why am I not enough?" script. It can also lead to destructive comparison with your partner's other partner: "Is she sexier than I am? Prettier? Smarter? Better?"

Physical evidence of intimacy between your partner and another lover, like a condom wrapper in the trash or extra slippers at the foot of the bed, can trigger jealous feelings. So can seeing your partner do something for the first time with a new lover.

It even recommends a jealousy workbook for people who have so much jealousy they have to read a whole different book about it.

As good poly people, we are supposed to mumble something about how jealousy is a real problem that can be managed but never truly eliminated, and we have all of these therapy-honed techniques to deal with it, and so on. Well, I’m tired of this. I am breaking the silence! I am pointing out the emperor’s nudity! I am going to stand up and say:

• I have never in my life felt jealousy seeing a condom wrapper in the trash can.

• I don’t stare at my trash can attempting to figure out how frequently my husband has sex.

• I almost never think about what’s in my trash can, unless I accidentally dropped my debit card in it.

• I don’t know how I would tell whether it was my condom wrapper or someone else’s condom wrapper. It’s not like they have nametags.

• I don’t think I have ever had an emotion about a discarded condom wrapper other than annoyance when it’s on the floor instead of being in the garbage can where it belongs.

I’m not saying that I’m some highly evolved person who is beyond your petty mortal emotions.¹ I behave in all manner of perverse, counterproductive, and downright dysfunctional ways, which is to say that I’m a normal human. When I fight with my partners, I say mean things on purpose and then am shocked and appalled when they feel sad; I melodramatically play the victim because I feel too ashamed to ask for what I want; I ignore the dishes even though they’re my chore in the hopes that someone else will give in and do them and then I won’t have to. But I do not specifically experience a form of romantic or sexual jealousy, distinct from the jealousy I experience about my friends having other friends, excursions to see Broadway shows that I can’t afford to go on, or the concept of Minecraft YouTube.²

Sometimes I want to ask my monogamous friends, “but how do you do it? How do you constantly police your emotions so that you don’t accidentally fall in love with your friends? How do you maintain the rigid separation between romantic and nonromantic feelings, without them blurring into each other so that it’s impossible to tell what you’re feeling? How do you cope with the many, many opportunities for sexy or romantic freeform, tabletop, and live-action roleplaying that constantly come into your life? How do you avoid feeling like you’re a rat in a sadistic experiment where they put you in a box that is big enough to start, but the walls slowly start getting closer and closer together, and you’re watching their inexorable movement, full of dread, knowing that someday soon you’re going to be crushed?”

And they say to me, “Ozy, I’m monogamous because monogamy doesn’t make me feel like a trapped rat desperately flailing to escape. Also, literally no one besides you does that much sexy roleplaying, that is not a real problem.”

Similarly: it makes sense that many monogamous people assume that poly people are jealous all the time, because if they imagine their partner having sex with someone else, they would be jealous. I do not feel jealous when my partner has sex with someone else, which is why I am poly in the first place—just like monogamous people don’t feel trapped by monogamy, which is why they are monogamous in the first place. I think—based on my decade-plus of experience being poly—that this is the usual case.

Ordinary Jealousy

To be sure, sometimes everyone experiences jealousy in a romantic/sexual relationship.