A quick reframe on jealousy in poly relationships.
In the first few years of being poly, I read about five hundred pages’ worth of poly advice. Much of it, of course, centers on jealousy, and implicitly works off a framework that I’ll call the narrative model of jealousy, which is that the mind has one relatively harmonious explanation about how the world works, and your reactions and emotions spring from that explanation. This explanation lives in a huge metaphorical text file or database of beliefs. You – the conscious, verbal, rational part of you – can update that database using the “narrative protocol” (essentially talking to it a lot). If it feels true enough, the database will update, and so will your reactions and emotions.
When you experience jealousy, the poly books seem to go, there’s usually some insecurity or probably-false belief underlying that emotion, like “I’m not interesting enough to hold my partner’s attention” or “I am likely to be emotionally abandoned” or such. If you update the metaphorical text file, the jealousy will largely go away.
(I don’t want to make fun of this too much, not least because that’s actually how most of my other problems work. And it seems like it works for lots of people, otherwise they wouldn’t keep writing and recommending unified cognitive framework blog posts on jealousy.)
Wanting to dissolve my jealousy, which I found inconvenient, I introspected on the sources of my insecurity and found very little to work with. I didn’t seem to have the relevant kind of belief in the first place to dispel. I wasn’t insecure, I just didn’t like the situation where my partner was getting pulled away unexpectedly sometimes, or finding traces of the new partner in the shared bathroom. A few iterations in, I noticed that
- These not-liking feelings just went away. On their own.
- It seemed unrelated to how much or little work I put into feeling more comfortable.
- It took a weirdly uniform amount of time – 4 months. At that point I would be as perturbed by hearing them having sex as I would be by the sex noises of a housemate I wasn’t dating, which is to say, mildly.
(Important note: in all of these cases I was on friendly terms with my metamours – saying hi and chatting a couple times a month. While I felt viscerally uncomfortable at first, their fine qualities were always salient to me and I had no desire to get in the way of my partner spending time with them, and I always perceived this was symmetric. Matters would be different if there was real adversarial intent on either side. In that case I’d probably be fucked.)
I’ve been doing this long enough that when I feel the not-liking-this-situation feelings, I chill out and just wait it out. I do expect to go through it every time – having a few months of “whooOO are you”, “argh, am I socially obligated to like you”, and “are you better at fucking than me???“.
I feel fine with a wide range of outcomes (how often the new pair will do dates, whether the new person will come to preexisting group events), but not knowing which equilibrium the pair will settle into feels bad. At the beginning of having a new metamour, even mild friction or disruption feels scary. Later, mild friction is just fine.
Last year, I stumbled on a relevant Wikipedia effect on animal territorial behavior (lightly edited for brevity):
The dear enemy effect is an ethological phenomenon in which two neighbouring territorial animals become less aggressive toward one another once territorial borders are well established. As territory owners become accustomed to their neighbours, they expend less time and energy on defensive behaviors directed toward one another. However, aggression toward unfamiliar neighbours remains the same.
The dear enemy effect has been observed in a wide range of animals including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and invertebrates. It can be modulated by factors such as the location of the familiar and unfamiliar animal, the season, and the presence of females.
I went, oh! That’s so much more relevant-feeling than working on my insecurity or patching my narrative. This exactly matches my internal experience.
Let me propose a complementary framework of looking at jealousy in poly relationships, which I’ll call the reflex model. In this framework, a decent chunk of the mind is a disparate collection of primitive perception-reaction heuristics. (I think of them as 10 line functions in write-only memory.) These perception-reaction cannot be updated using the “narrative protocol”. They don’t work on a verbal level. You cannot patch them by telling them new stories. Sometimes, you’re going to feel a certain way because it was so useful for your ancestors to feel that way that the reaction got hardcoded into your psyche.
A non-romantic example is feeling unokay when you tell a joke in a large group and there’s dead silence. A romantic one is feeling unokay when your partner is putting on nice clothes to go on a date with someone they’ve just started seeing.
The ick also seems to fall under the reflex model. There’s not much narrative around suddenly losing sexual attraction to someone after they inattentively walk into a screen door! It’s just that some low-level heuristic is telling you that this person’s perceptual/motor/whatever modules aren’t working well and they’re not a good person to reproduce with.
The advice I’d give to my past self, which surely is applicable to some other people getting into poly and freaking out about their first experience with jealousy, is: Sit tight, play nice, don’t set anything on fire, and wait for your animal brain to do the thing animal brains do.