Green-Eyed Monster: A Guide To Leaning Into Jealousy in Polyamorous Relationships

I started thinking about non-monogamy six years ago while completing my degree in Gender and Sexuality Studies. It made a lot of sense to my logical brain – I remember saying many times to friends, classmates, acquaintances: “you don’t have one doctor who can treat every illness and injury you ever get, you don’t go to one store to get everything you ever need, you don’t have one friend who meets every platonic need you have. How could one partner ever fulfill every single romantic and sexual need and desire you have?” I always immediately followed it up with, “but I don’t know if I could every actually be in a polyamorous relationship – I just get too jealous.”

I’d had intense emotional relationships with people in the past and could easily imagine wanting to be able to have relationships with multiple of them at once. But I was also terrified of feeling constantly anxious, possessive, paranoid, clingy, and controlling. Knowing how jealous I got of past crushes, hookups, and lovers being flirted with or paying attention to anyone other than me, it seemed inevitable to me that polyamory would leave me mired in resentment and tear apart all of the relationships; I thought it was a prerequisite of any practice of non-monogamy to have transcended such petty emotions.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

I was finally confronted with the tangible possibility of practicing polyamory a little over a year ago when I first met my now-partners – we’ll call them Bryer and Sarah – who have been together for eighteen years. After meeting them through a Facebook group for American expats in Paris, Bryer and I quickly fell into a mutual six month long will-they-won’t-they courtship while Sarah and I more slowly developed an interest in each other. 

As I spent more time with them, and falling into bed (and possibly falling in love) with them seemed more and more inevitable, the fear of jealousy was still on my mind. Only a few nights before Sarah sat me down and asked if I wanted to see where dating might lead us, I went out for dinner with my best friend and told her, “I really like them, and I think it might be nice to try this out. But I still see myself only dating one person in the long run.”

What I meant was, I didn’t think I was capable of “being good” at polyamory.

But I remember the first time I got jealous after I started dating Bryer and Sarah. Bryer came home from hanging his art for an exhibition and, laughing, told Sarah and I that one of his colleagues had flirted with him a bit. He related the story as a joking aside, including how he had gently turned down his friend and collaborator. But I immediately felt the burning heat of envy blooming in my stomach, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, my breath catching shallow in my chest. Sarah immediately noticed and pointed it out. I’ve never been good at hiding when I’m upset. 

I knew how I was feeling was unfounded. There was no real intention behind the flirting in the first place. I was being silly. It would have been so easy for both of them to brush it aside. I expected them to brush it aside. But Bryer sat down on the carpet next to me, took my face in his hands, and put my mouth to his throat. Bite down, he told me. Harder, he said. He held me there, softly encouraging me to bite and suck on the thin skin of his throat until I had left a vast swath of deep purple bruising from his jaw to his collarbones. And then he held me, Sarah on my other side, her hand on my back, both of them telling me it was okay to be jealous, and now everyone would know that Bryer belonged to me. 

I’ve learned in the past seven months of dating Bryer and Sarah that there are so many different ways to be jealous in a polyamorous relationship. I can be jealous of people who pay attention to them, like that colleague of Bryer’s. I can be jealous of people they pay attention to, like the woman Sarah almost went on a Hinge date with a few days before the conversation that started our relationship. I can be jealous of their past partners, whom they discuss openly with me. I can be jealous of even the idea of potential future partners, if we choose to open our relationship at some point. And most of all, I can be jealous of their relationship with each other.

I’ve found over time, in my own experiences and in conversations with Bryer, Sarah, and my friends who engage in polyamory, that jealousy is most often rooted in insecurity. Insecurity such as doubting being a good match for your partner, questioning being wanted or cared for by your partner, not feeling seen by your partner, or worrying you aren’t meeting the needs and wants of your partner. 

And insecurity is not managed or healed by trying to remove its triggers. Nor is insecurity magically absent from monogamous relationships; the dominant western monogamous social contract that dictates the rules of relationships is just more standardized and more normalized, so it requires less complex communication in a monogamous relationship to give care regarding insecurity. It is fairly straightforward (though not necessarily easy) in a monogamous relationship to reassure a jealous partner, because monogamous partners are not having intimate relationships with other people.

It is far more complicated to give and receive reassurance for jealousy when the premise of the relationship involves intimate relationships with others. In my relationship, I get jealous of the eighteen years that Bryer and Sarah had together, without me, that gives their relationship an intimacy, depth, and security that I cannot possibly make up for. And due to that jealousy, I sometimes find it unbearable to face their relationship. The ways in which their relationship has concrete longevity – their shared bank account, closet, and apartment, the ways they know each other's habits and histories – trigger my insecurity that my relationship with them is less important, less valuable, and less intimate because it is shorter. That they want me less than they want each other. That my part in the relationship will only be fleeting.

They cannot give me reassurance that they are not interested in each other, nor would I want them to – the passion of their relationship with each other is one of the things that made me fall in love with them in the first place. They cannot remove the triggers – they can’t and shouldn’t split their finances and home, or hide their pasts and their intimacy with each other from me. To do so would be to hide a core part of themselves from me, and that’s not productive or sustainable for me building a long-lasting, healthy relationship with both of them.

What they can do is reassure me of their commitment to me and give care relating to the root insecurity. For us, that care can take many shapes. It looks like verbal reassurance of their desire for and commitment to a long-term relationship with me, taking intentional time for physical and emotional intimacy between all three of us and between me and each of my partners individually, giving me dedicated space for my things in their apartment, lots of cuddles, making sure I am also invited to events that they get invited to, and asking me to take part in household management – and it’s been delightfully frustrating to discover that chores can be both reassuring and annoying at the same time.

But the most reassuring thing for me has been to learn that they also get jealous and possessive – of me. That even with eighteen years of experience with non-monogamy, they need reassurance from me around their own insecurities, like when a girl starts talking to me at a bar, when a guy slides into my Instagram DMs, and most frequently, when they are jealous of each other. Sarah, who is on the asexual spectrum, sometimes gets jealous that my and Bryer’s higher sex drives match more frequently. And Bryer, who is also bisexual, sometimes gets jealous of the more obvious queerness of my relationship with Sarah. Sarah gets jealous of the ease and comfort with touch that Bryer and I share. Bryer, of the philosophical conversations Sarah and I often have.

As a partner to both of them, it would be unfair to Bryer if I tried to shut down my sexual attraction to him or to stop touching him to make Sarah more comfortable. Likewise, It would be unfair to Sarah to be less visibly affectionate or to make our conversations more shallow to make Bryer more comfortable, and it would be unfair to myself to cut off important aspects of my relationships with each of my partners.

I am learning to do what Sarah calls “additive reassurance” as opposed to “subtractive reassurance;” rather than “subtracting” a trigger for jealousy, “adding” a verbal or physical reassurance when jealousy comes up. Like when Bryer came home from his art show, he wasn’t going to (nor would I have wanted him to) remove a friend and colleague (who didn’t even know we were dating exclusively) from his life for a bit of friendly flirtation. Nor would him doing so have actually relieved the root insecurity. But him pulling me in, telling me to mark him, and holding me while he promised me he was mine actually soothed my fear that I could be easily replaced as a new partner.

I realize I may be making additive reassurance sound easy to learn and implement, but oh god, it is not. I am slow to master it and frequently fail to exercise it, such as when Sarah expressed slight discomfort at not knowing I was rehearsing a scene for a play where I was kissing another actor until after I had rehearsed it several times. I immediately became defensive over my work, because my brain still treads the worn neural pathway of insecurity leading to jealousy, which leads to blame, which leads to breaking up. Because of this, my instinctive reaction is still to defend myself against the expressed insecurity because if I can successfully defend myself, the insecurity and the jealousy is then unjustified, so there is nothing I can be blamed for and no reason to break up.

But what I am learning through practicing polyamory is that the expression of insecurity and jealousy is not an attack, it is a beautiful declaration of vulnerability and trust; vulnerability in baring the parts of you that are tender and delicate and hurt the most, and trust that your partner will embrace them and love you not just despite the parts of you that hurt but for them. Nor is it usually a request for you to become less of yourself, but an invitation to grow toward your partners. And most importantly, I’m learning that feeling jealousy is not a weakness or a failing in polyamory. Jealousy and insecurity are perfectly normal in both monogamous and non-monogamous relationships and present an opportunity to create deeper intimacy and connection with your partners.

So if you, like me, are also interested in polyamory or non-monogamy but think that feeling jealousy makes you ineligible for the club, I invite you to take the plunge. Or just dip your toes in. Wade out slowly, or do a cannonball into the deep end. You may find that jealousy truly is a dealbreaker for you, and that’s okay, but you may find instead a depth of intimacy you never imagined possible. And it would be a shame not to try, wouldn’t it?

Photography submitted by Christo Viola (@christomosca)