Poly and Jealousy – Part One

Oy, it kills me when people say, “I can’t do poly because I get jealous.”

No kidding. So Do I. I’m actually a very jealous person. I don’t just get jealous over my partners. I get jealous over my friends, over possessions, over jobs, over my godsdamn cats. I’ve been successfully poly for the last several years because I put a lot of hard work into learning how to process these feelings.

And still they say, “You don’t understand, I *really* get jealous.” Yeah, me too. Even after all these years, I still occasionally feel like someone let all the air out of the room, I’m gasping for breath, and falling and falling and no one’s going to catch me, and I feel sick to my stomach.

But I’ve learned how to identify the true sources of these feelings, process them, and move forward.

As a reward, I get to share my love, heart, soul, and bed, with more than one person. I get to watch the people I love find joy and happiness with people who can give them things I can’t. I get to feel new relationship butterflies again without sacrificing long term life partnership. I get to explore connections with people I wouldn’t have considered before because they can’t give me everything, and find that they can give me something I need and want perfectly.

Our society has decided jealousy is the one negative emotion it’s better to just avoid if you can, and ignore if you have to. They don’t say this about anger, or sadness, or grief, or guilt. There are whole fields of study devoted to how to deal with each of those. By deciding it’s ok to never learn how to deal with jealousy, western culture is missing out on an awful lot of wonderful things.