The Ethical Slut (17 page)
Authors: Dossie Easton
When you deny your jealousy to yourself, you take from yourself the opportunity to be compassionate with yourself, to offer yourself support and comfort. When you deny jealousy, or any other difficult emotion, you put yourself in a harsh and difficult landscape, full of pitfalls and land mines. “Acting out” means doing things you don’t understand, driven by emotions you have refused to be aware of. Denying your jealousy can lead you to act out harsh feelings in ways you will regret later.
Sometimes acting out takes the form of making ultimatums about what your 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 it wasn’t okay to take Bob to the movie you wanted to see, and aren’t both of them inconsiderate and rotten? You cannot deal constructively with jealousy by making the other guys wrong. Foisting your feelings off on your partners is a dead end strategy; it just plain won’t work. Jealousy is an emotion that arises inside you; no person and no behavior can “make” you jealous. Like it or not, the only person who can make that jealousy hurt less or go away is you.
Listening to someone who is feeling jealous can be difficult, particularly when the jealousy is focused on you. Sometimes when a lover is jealous and in pain, you may find it easier to feel angry and push that person away, rather than staying close, staying in empathy, listening, caring. When you blame this person for being jealous, what you’re really saying is that you can’t stand to listen to how much your beloved hurts when you’re on the way out the door to play with someone else. This seeming indifference is a crummy way to avoid dealing with your own feelings of guilt.
There are easier solutions. Feelings like to be listened to—other people’s feelings, and your own. Once you understand that you
are
doing something constructive when you just listen, or ask someone else to just listen to you, you can get those troublesome feelings out in the open and learn to satisfy them. The idea is to be nice to your feelings, to welcome them as guests, till they feel finished and move on through.
If this sounds familiar to you, if you have experienced times like this in your life, we recommend that you practice the skill of staying quietly with both your own and your lover’s pain. Remember, you don’t have to fix anything: all you have to do is listen, to yourself or another, and understand that this hurts. Period.
Janet and a life partner had a difficult moment when she first told him that she was in love with one of her lovers.
I’d been seeing this woman for a while and realized, much to my surprise, that my feelings toward her had gone beyond simple sexual friendship and into a deep romantic emotion that I identified as being in love. When I told my life partner about this, I think his first impulse was to feel threatened, insecure, and, yes, jealous. I could feel him getting close to exploding. It was hard for me not to try to fix things, to take back what I’d said about being in love, or to simply leave the discussion altogether because I felt scared and guilty.
But he stayed on course, allowing the feelings to present themselves, but not allowing them to drive him into acting angry or defensive. He asked me some questions about what exactly this meant to us, and I was able to explain that I wasn’t planning to leave him, that my love for her was in no way a threat to my love for him, that she and I weren’t expecting to become primary partners—that, really, nothing had changed except my own emotions and the words I was using to describe them. We went on to revisit this discussion from time to time, especially when our busy schedules permitted me to spend some extra time with my lover.
She and I drifted apart fairly easily later on as we moved on to other things in our lives … and, for that matter, so did he and I, less easily. But all three of us who were involved in that particular triangle can look back with pride at the way we gave each other the space and respect we needed to process a change that at first felt terribly threatening to us all.
You can feel jealousy without acting on it. In fact, flying into a rage and breaking all the crockery, or calling your lover’s lover and hanging up every fifteen minutes during your first sleepless night, or picking a fight with whoever’s handy actually won’t help you feel better. All these are things that people do in order to
not
feel jealous, in order to
not
feel scared and small. Anger can help us feel powerful when we use it to push vulnerable feelings away, but it won’t actually make us stronger or safer.
When you hold still with your jealousy, you will find that it is possible to feel something difficult without doing anything you don’t choose to do. You will have taken your second step at disempowering your jealousy. You’ve told your jealousy that you will not allow it to drive you to do anything that might destroy your loving relationships.
Khalil Gibran wrote something truly profound about the nature of pain: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”
So here you are, shell cracked, with waves of pain washing over you. What do you do? Get as comfortable as you can, and see how you can learn to ride those waves instead of drowning under them. Gather up the courage to feel what you’re feeling. Explore your feelings, nourish them, treasure them—they are the most essential part of you.
Be good to yourself, and remember that the most important part of love is not loving someone’s beauty and strength and virtue. The real test of love is when someone sees our weaknesses, our stupidities, and our smallnesses and still loves us. This unconditional love is what we want from our lovers, and we should expect no less from ourselves.
Experiencing painful feelings is not a moral issue—it is in no way “wrong” to feel what you feel and to want what you want. Only actions can be crimes. Let us repeat that one: emotions are never wrong; only actions can be wrong. Emotions are an expression of our emotional truth, and truth cannot be wrong. Nor do they need to be justified. They just need to be felt.
Remember, as you look at yourself, to look kindly, and also remember that you are not balancing a checkbook: anything you see that you don’t
like, or that you want to change, is not a debit that you subtract from your virtues. When you learn to reflect on your strengths, it becomes easier to look at your weaknesses with acceptance and compassion. Keep your virtues at their full value, and cherish them.
Start by setting yourself the task of getting through a short period of time with your jealousy, like an evening or an afternoon when your partner may be off with another. Make a pact with yourself that you will stay with your feelings, whatever they may be, for this brief time. If a whole evening or night seems like too long, start with five or ten minutes, then arrange to distract yourself with a video or whatever.
One of the possible, and indeed common, outcomes will be that your partner will go off on a date with another and you will feel just fine. Surprise! Your anticipation may have been a lot worse than the actual event. Experienced sluts often find that they feel jealous only now and then. When they do experience jealousy, they examine these specific experiences to see what they can learn about themselves, and then brainstorm strategies to make this particular sort of event safer and easier.
One couple we talked to is working to maintain their primary relationship in a difficult situation: One of them is out of town most of the time on business, and thus much of their activity with other partners takes place under circumstances that prevent them from reconnecting physically afterward. One of their agreements is that they talk on the phone every single night, regardless of where they are or how busy they are. Often, their conversations take place after one of them has spent time connecting with an outside partner. One of them notes that during these conversations,
He allows my feelings. I don’t hesitate to say anything I want; in fact, he encourages me to. I’ve found that just being allowed to say these things, to talk about my jealousy and sadness, somehow defuses them. They lose a lot of their power because they meet no resistance from him; he just listens to them and lets them be.
Painful feelings, even the most intense of them, have a tendency to run their course if you let them, so an initial strategy is to make yourself as comfortable as possible and wait. Find your jealous feelings—hurt or anger or whatever—and let them flow through you, like a river. Your mind may be racing with nasty thoughts, angry, blaming, focusing on some detail that you’re absolutely certain those other people did wrong, obsessing on believing that someone is taking advantage of you or riding roughshod over your naked emotions. You hurt a lot, so surely it must be somebody’s fault! But sometimes there is great pain and there is no villain. Allow us to reassure you: we all go through this. Don’t die of shame, just let these thoughts run through you, too.
Feelings, once uncovered, can be better understood by reflecting on them. It is useful to have scripts and strategies for self-exploration. Journal writing, preferably with total disregard for grammar and syntax, can be a good way to vent feelings and learn about yourself at the same time. It is okay to cover pages of your journal with FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK I HATE THIS! in bright red ink; if this feels good to you, we recommend you get an extra-large journal. Try writing down your stream of consciousness, which means whatever you find in your head whether or not it makes sense, and see what you get. Treasures, jewels of self-knowledge, are often found here.
You can get a big drawing pad and a set of oil pastels, which are crayons for grown-ups. These big crayons encourage expression with bright colors and discourage getting hung up on details (they’re too fat to get crabby with). Sometimes you will draw and get squiggles, and that’s great; the smallest thing you can accomplish still helps you hold still for a while and rant in color. Other times, you may surprise yourself with a drawing that is profoundly meaningful to you. Both of us use drawing a lot to vent our strong feelings and discover things about ourselves. Dossie quit smoking this way, and Janet used it as an important tool to get out of suburbia and recover her sluthood, and we assure you that neither of us is a great artist.
Some people like to express their feelings with their bodies and might like to run, or work out at the gym, or clean the kitchen, or dig in the
garden. Safety note: if your feelings like intense physical expression, you will need to keep a piece of your mind alert to the fact that you’re heavily adrenalized and feel stronger than you actually are, so give a little attention to what you can do without injury. Dossie once hiked up a big hill in a stressed-out state and felt powerful and wonderful—she remembers thinking about how she must be in much better shape then she thought she was. The next day was agony of the physical kind, with strained muscles and swollen joints.
Try finding music that fits your mood, angry or sad or frantic, and dancing your feelings out. It can be very satisfying to get a cheap plastic tennis racket and beat up your couch. Kneel in front of the couch, raise the racket above your head, and bring it down with all your strength. Keep your eyes open, imagine anything on the couch that you are angry at except yourself, and yell, loudly, how you feel.
When you express yourself, you get to know yourself better and work out some of the most intense stress constructively. The least you could wind up with would be a clean kitchen, and you might actually feel good after a self-indulgent afternoon on the beach.
Try focusing on the feelings in your body: where do you feel these emotions, in your throat, chest, gut? Turning your attention to the physical sensations can intensify them and might bring up tears, but they will move on through even more readily if you allow yourself to feel them on the physical level. If rage comes welling up, you can pound on a pillow. If you start to cry, let it flow, remembering the sense of relief that comes after expressing intense emotion in tears. Janet likes to seek out a tearjerker book or movie to help her get tears out when she feels stuck. (
Terms of Endearment
has never failed her yet.)
Some people have trouble doing this because they’ve been taught that it’s wrong to feel sorry for yourself. So who else should you feel sorry for? Stay in sympathy with yourself: you feel bad, so be kind to yourself.
You can talk to a friend, or your other lover, presuming you have made agreements about confidentiality with everybody who might care if you gossip. Janet has a deal with a good friend of hers for telephone support. She can call her friend up and ask for five minutes of
“poor baby,” and if her friend is available, she pours out her feelings and her friend says, you guessed it, nothing but “poor baby” till she is through. This dialogue may sound silly, but don’t knock it till you try it. Comfort is a good thing in hard times.
EXERCISE
Reassurance
Here’s an exercise you can do with your partner to learn how to “poor baby” each other even when times are hard.
Make a list of ten things your partner could do that would reassure you.
Avoid abstractions—focus on behaviors, not emotions. “Love me more” is an emotion and thus pretty hard to act on: how will you know that your partner loves more? “Bring me a rose” is a behavior that anybody with a dollar can perform. Write your list in private, your partner can do the same, and then you can get together and look at each other’s lists. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to be reassuring when you have a list.
This assignment may be more complicated than it sounds. Many questions may come up in your mind: How could I ask for that? Shouldn’t my partner already know? If I have to ask for it, does it really count? If my partner loved me, wouldn’t this be happening already?
If you’re having thoughts like these, imagine what it might feel like to be asked for reassurance by your partner. Wouldn’t it feel good to know how you could help? We can’t read each other’s minds, but we do care, and we can help once we know how.