“Don’t you get jealous?”
This is the number one question I have gotten over and over and OVER again in the course of my polyamory journey. Let me tell you all about it.
First, here’s my definition of jealousy: when we feel possessiveness over someone and the need to control their behavior in our favor.
I have two thoughts about jealousy:
1- This is a conditioned experience because we have been told to believe that our worth depends on other people’s actions and how they relate to us, so our knee-jerk response to others doing what they want is jealousy.
2- While feelings like jealousy are very real and can be hard to control, it is also very possible to undo the conditioned experience of jealousy by unwiring the story behind why we are jealous.
Let’s begin with the fact that jealousy is a conditioned response, meaning it is the “appropriate” feeling to have in response to certain situations. Jealousy often arises when we notice someone having something we don’t have. Some examples:
Your partner is out on a date with someone, and you are jealous of your partner having a good time that you’re not getting right now, and his date getting the kind of attention that you’re also not getting right now.
A friend got a promotion, and you are jealous of the fact that they have what you want. Worse, they were able to obtain that more easily than you would have gotten it. So not only do they have the promotion but also easier access to it, both of which don’t feel very accessible to you.
A fellow parent seems to have a tighter relationship with their kids. They have this kind of relationship that you would like but don’t.
The very first thing I really want to encourage is to acknowledge the experience of jealousy. Of course we’re going to be jealous if someone has something we don’t. It’s almost an evolutionary response because jealousy allows us to examine what we really want in our lives in order to survive and live the kind of life we want.
Something I like to do when I find myself shaming my experience of jealousy is to almost play with myself. Like, engage in playful and slutty banter with myself. I tell myself, “Oooh girl, you feeling jealous? You jealous little slut. You’re so kinky and bad with your sneaky little jealousy. What is jealousy doing to your juices, you freak?”
Kind of like BDSM play. You know? 😂
So it almost takes away the power jealousy has over you. It simply is a human experience.
When jealousy takes a more neutral seat in our brain, we get to examine it from a place of curiosity.
Then the question here is, why do we want these things that other people have? Maybe it’s attention, validation, money, status, time, or any other resource.
There has been a time where I was very jealous of those with fame and popularity. I was upset like, why is it that these people have all this fame and popularity that I don’t have?
A teacher, Fabeku Fatunmise, asked me, “What does fame and popularity do for you?”
It took a minute to realize that what I really wanted was attention and validation that came with fame and popularity.
But the reason I wasn’t really doing anything to get fame and popularity itself was that fame and popularity also invited the kind of attention that I DIDN’T want. So now the question was, what kind of attention and validation DO I want?
After looking at the kind of attention that I already had in my life that I liked and the kind of attention I found myself dreaming about, here is how I would describe it: I wanted the kind of attention and validation from people who would admire me in ways I have never been admired before. I wanted the kind of validation from people who were always willing to try to understand me because they valued my existence. I wanted the kind of people who just couldn’t help but listen to what I was saying because my words and actions felt like home to them.
Now I knew what I wanted in my life. Because (1) I was willing to feel jealous to glean information about what I wanted and (2) I decided that there was no place for shame in any part of this process.
This is how valuable jealousy is. It tells you exactly what you want. All you have to do now is get after it.
Another place in my life where I felt jealous was when Dan would spend a lot of time for himself and in gaming. I was jealous of this because (1) he had a self-sufficient method of taking care of himself in a way I didn’t and (2) he was giving his time and attention to gaming when I wanted his time and attention for myself.
So now the questions for me were:
(1) Where do I want to find a self-sufficient method of taking care of myself?
(2) Where can I find time and attention that doesn’t require anything from Dan?
Let me tell you, I couldn’t find answers to these questions for a LONG time because I thought there were right and wrong answers. Maybe I needed to make more friends. Maybe I needed to start gaming. Maybe I needed to fucking meditate my way to nirvana or stoicism or whatever.
None of those were MY answers.
So I asked myself, if there were no right or wrong answer to get those things, what would I do?
What am I fantasizing about that I am making myself wrong for?
I sat with this for a WHILE because these are hard fucking questions.
I slowly noticed my emotions continuing to swim over to people outside of our marriage that were giving me the kind of attention and validation that I was craving from Dan. This ranged from tiny acknowledgements from guys just in passing to sustained, prolonged attention from people I had established relationships with.
Now the question was, what if I had permission to want more of this?
Where am I suppressing my desires to fit into a paradigm around how I need to love?
What helped me answer that question was to seek refuge in those who were already doing this work. People who were already doing the work of decolonizing love and dismantling the institution of compulsory monogamy.
They offered a place where I did not have to feel shame for what I wanted.
They also offered time and tools to put language around what I wanted and how I could move forward with it. They held space for how I was going to talk about this with Dan, what that meant for our marriage, how I was going to respond to the potential scenarios that I was most afraid of.
By finding myself in community with those who cared about my desires, I had a place to practice courage for going after what I really wanted.
Jealousy brings out our truth in the best possible way. It allows us to find community. It allows us to reclaim our aliveness.
Jealousy is NOT a problem.
It does NOT mean that we are deficient in some way.
It does NOT mean that we are sub-human for having feelings when we’re “not supposed” to.
It does NOT mean that we don’t know how to be “independent.”
It just means there is something we want, and it is pointing us to it.
It’s kind of exciting. In fact, it’s reeaaaaaallly exciting.
So when jealousy tells us a bit about what we want, and we find a way to fill our cups with it, we find space to care for others and fill their cup, too.
For example, my cup is always being filled by the kind of attention I want now, and even if I am not drowning in attention in every given moment, I know how to get it. I get to trust my resourcefulness. Because filling my own cup is less of a problem, I get to find so much joy in others’ experiences of getting their cups filled because I already know what that’s like. I already have it. And when we experience something amazing, we want others to experience it, too. (This is why evangelizing is a thing.)
So when I see Dan going on a date and having such a wonderful time, I can’t help but feel joy and hope because he is experiencing the immeasurable joy I am already experiencing. There is nothing that I am lacking in that department.
That doesn’t mean that I am lacking in other areas. I will always be prepared for heartbreak. I will be prone to heartbreak from losing relationships of any kind. I still have that good girl inside of me that wants approval from certain people and doesn’t get that when she wants.
We get to experience both the heartbreak and the heartbeat that comes with the unpredictable forest of our humanity.
Often times, we feel the need to pathologize our jealousy because we feel that uncomfortable emotions are a problem.
This is a story that doesn’t have to be true.
Here are some questions to ask ourselves when we experience jealousy so that it feels more exciting than problematic:
What am I jealous of? What is it that I think I don’t have? What is it that I actually want?
If there were no right or wrong thing to desire, where would I go?
If there was no timeline or deadline on finding these answers, where would I go?
How do I want to care for the emotions that are coming up for me right now?
Is there something I feel called to do right now that I’ve been taught to be ashamed of doing?
What kind of privileges do I have that allows me to explore this part of me?
What am I afraid of that I will find when I follow the trail of jealousy?
We are always on a quest to fill our cups and always expanding our capacity for heartbreak. When we practice having our own back while engaging in this work, we become less afraid to lose even the most important relationships, like our partner in marriage. We get to practice honoring their sense of agency because we have developed such a strong sense of our own agency.
And when we are less afraid to lose, we act from a place of love rather than fear. And that allows us to get creative around how we want to love others because there are no longer restrictions around how we relate to each other and how we regard one another.
How do you want to handle jealousy today?
If there were no right or wrong answers, that is.
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As always, we have covered so much ground, but there are still a lot that I have not covered when it comes to jealousy because it shows up differently for different people. And I haven’t even touched on the intersectionality (e.g., gender roles) of jealousy. If you want support for your jealousy, you can find out how to work with me at angela-han.com.