Probing That Green-Eyed Monster``SirBlackWhip
I submit that jealousy should be our teacher. Jealousy can lead us to the very places where we most need healing. It can be our guide into our own dark side and show us the way to total self-realization. It can teach us how to live in peace with ourselves and the entire world if we allow it. For many folks, the biggest barrier to free love is the emotion we refer to as jealousy. Jealousy feels really rotten and most of us will go to great lengths to avoid feeling it. However, I believe that many people take the destructive power of jealousy way too much for granted, that they give jealousy far more power than it deserves. After many years of living free and dealing successfully with jealousy, we tend not to remember that we live in a culture that considers it acceptable to divorce or even murder a sexually explorative partner who committed the unthinkable crime of arousing jealousy in us. We danced happily for years to a bouncy Beatles' tune before we realized the lyrics that threatened, "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to see you with another man..." Let us point out here that monogamy is not a cure for jealousy. I had a dear friend who managed to become pathologically jealous without his girlfriend ever cheating. We have all had experiences of being ferociously jealous of work that keeps our partner away or distracted from us, or of our lover's decision to cruise the Internet instead of our bodies, or Monday {Tuesday, and Wednesday and.....} Night Football. Jealousy is not exclusive to sluts; it is an emotion we all have to deal with in our relationships. Many folks believe that sexual territoriality is a natural part of individual and social evolution, and use jealousy as justification to go berserk, and cease being a sane, responsible, and ethical human being. Threatened with feeling jealous, we allow our brains to turn to static on the excuse that we are acting on instinct.
We cannot ask this question too often. What is jealousy to us? Does jealousy really exist, and is it what we think it is? Once we are willing to confront the feeling of jealousy rather than run away from it, we can see more clearly what jealousy truly is for each of us. Jealousy may be an expression of insecurity, or fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, feeling left out, feeling not good enough, or feeling inadequate. Sometimes what we perceive as jealousy is actually something else. Think through the details of how jealousy works with us. What bothers us the most? Is it that we don't want him or her to do those things to someone else, or that we want him or her to do them for us? Jealousy might actually be envy, and envy is often very easy to repair: why not make a date with our lover to do what we have just discovered we are missing? Sometimes jealousy has at its roots feelings of grief and loss, which can be harder to decipher. We have been taught by our culture that when our partner has sex with another, we have lost something. Not to sound dumb, but we are confused. What have we lost? When our partner comes home from a hot date with another, often he or she is excited, aroused, and has some new ideas they would like to try out at home. We fail to see what we lose in this situation. On the other hand, sometimes the truth is that we are becoming aware on an intuitive level that our partner is moving away from us, and it might be true that we are losing the relationship that we cherish. That does happen. And the fact that supposedly monogamous folks everywhere often leave one partner for what they perceive as greener grass with another is not much consolation when it happens to us. I watched my best friend, Nelson, go through feelings of deep grief and loss when he perceived that his partner's lover was trying, quite nearly successfully, to abscond with her. In this case, his pain threw a spotlight on some dishonesty and manipulation on the part of the third party, and gave his partner the strength to break off from the lover and to find other lovers who had greater respect for her primary bond. On the other hand, this scenario might just as easily have ended in a breakup; we will discuss more about breakups, and dealing with them ethically with care for our own and our partner's feelings, in a subsequent essay send.
Jealousy might also be associated with feelings of competitiveness and wanting to be number one. I submit that we should just the throw the damn ruler or measuring stick out now, because sexual achievement is not measurable. We cannot rank each and every one of us on some hierarchical ladder of who is or is not the most desirable, or the better "fuck." What a horrid idea! We want to live in a world where each person's sexuality is valued for its own sake, not for how it measures up to any standard beyond our own pleasure. And if we learn from someone else's experience something that we would like to add to our own repertoire of skills, we can certainly learn to do it without wasting time trashing ourselves for not already having known how. Fear of being sexually inadequate can be particularly potent. But allow me to reassure you that eventually, when we succeed in establishing the lifestyle we are dreaming about, we will be so familiar with so many different individuals' ways of expressing sexuality that we will no longer have to wonder how our sexuality compares to another's; we will know from direct experience. We can learn from our lovers, and our lovers' lover to be the sexual superstar we would like to be.
To change the way we experience a feeling requires time, so expect a gradual process. learning as we go, by trial and error. And there will be trials, and we will make errors. Start by giving ourselves permission to learn new ways. Allow ourselves to not know what we don't know, to be ignorant. We must allow ourselves to make mistakes, we have no choice. So reassure ourselves: there is no graceful way to unlearn jealousy. It is of like learning to skate. We have to fall down and make a fool of ourselves a few times before we become as graceful as a swan. The challenge becomes learning to establish within ourselves a strong foundation of internal security that is not dependent on sexual exclusivity, or ownership of our partner. This is part of a larger question of how to grasp our personal power and learn to understand and love ourselves without such a desperate need for another person to validate us. We become free to give and receive validation, not from need or obligation, but from love and caring. I suggest most strongly that we put some effort into learning to validate ourselves, believe me, we are worth it. Many folks find that as they develop their poly amorous families, they actually get validation from lots and lots of people and thus become less dependent on their partner's approval. Their needs and their sources of nourishment get spread out over a wider territory. I cannot tell you how to banish jealousy, or how to exorcise it as if it were a demon. Jealousy is not a cancer that we can cut out. It is a part of us, a way that we express fear and hurt. What we can do is change the way we experience jealousy, learn to deal with it as we learn to deal with any emotion, until it becomes, not overwhelming and not exactly pleasant, but tolerable: a mild disturbance, like a rainy day rather than a tornado.
Once we have made a commitment to refuse to act on our jealousy, we become free to start reducing the amount of power we let our jealousy have over us. One way to do this is simply allow ourselves to feel it. Just feel it. It will hurt. and we will feel frightened and confused, but if we sit still, and listen to ourselves with compassion and support from the scared child inside, the first thing we will learn is that the experience of jealousy is survivable. We have the strength to get through it. We sometimes accuse others of being jealous like it is a crime. Do not try to deny it! It is particularly critical that we own our jealousy, to ourselves and to our intimates. If we try to pretend that we are not jealous when we are, others will perceive us as dishonest, or worse yet, they may believe us, and see no need to support or protect us because we are fine, right? If we pretend to ourselves that we are not jealous when we are, then our own emotions may try devious routes to bring themselves to our attention, which can generate intensely irrational feelings and behavior, temper tantrums, and rage fits, or perhaps even make us physically ill. When we try to deny jealousy to ourselves, we take from ourselves the opportunity to be in sympathy with ourselves and to support and comfort ourselves. When we deny jealousy, or any other difficult emotion, we put ourselves in a harsh and difficult landscape, full of pitfalls and land mines. "Acting out" means doing things we don't understand, driven by emotions we have refused to be aware, and denying our jealousy can lead us to act out harsh feelings in ways we will regret later. Many times the acting out takes the form of making ultimatums about what our partner may and may not do, or worse, trying to enforce retroactive agreements by getting all righteously indignant about how anybody could have figured out that is was not okay to take some other date to a movie we wanted to seem and are not both of them inconsiderate and rotten? We cannot deal destructively with jealousy by making the other person wrong. Jealousy is an emotion that arises inside of us; no person and no behavior can make us jealous. Like it or not, the only person who can make that jealousy hurt less or go away is us. The way to unlearn jealousy is to be willing to experience it By actively choosing to experience a painful feeling like jealousy, we are already starting to reduce its power over us. First, we decide that we will not allow our jealousy to make us run screaming over the horizon. And so we exercise our first form of control over jealousy: We will hold steady and stay with ourselves and feelings. When we hold still with our jealousy, we will discover that it is possible to feel something difficult without getting frantic, or doing anything we don't choose to do. We will have taken our second step at dis-empowering our jealousy. We have told our jealousy that we will not allow it to destroy our loving relationships. In closing, I want to say to briefly mention a few more other things to help make jealousy less powerful in our lives and relationships. We should feel our own feelings, baby ourselves, and bite the bullet when the green-eyed monster creates emotional tension. Sharing and remembering the good things about who we are go miles toward helping to render powerless the scared child that exists in all of us. Play hard! Be consensual and safe! So long for now!
