The Ethical Slut (18 page)

As you get skilled at finding and expressing your feelings, you can try a more challenging task: see if you can write about or talk to your friend about your feelings without blaming anybody. Not your lover, not your lover’s lover, and especially not yourself. This exercise is not easy: you will be surprised how readily we all slip into that blaming mode, but it is very, very worthwhile to learn to have your feelings without foisting them on someone else.

It also helps to pay attention to how we attribute intention. “You’re just doing this because you want to make me mad”: how often do you suppose that’s actually true? We just about never make anybody mad on purpose; the results are usually unpleasant. It’s easy to invent other people’s intentions for them in order to try to make sense of what you’re feeling … but it can be very hard for them to speak their truth if someone’s accusing them of intentions they never had.

Only when we’re all willing to own our emotions, and let our lovers and friends own theirs, does anyone have the power to change and grow.

When your emotions are overwhelming and chaotic, it can help to ask yourself if there is anything you could do that would help you feel just one tiny bit safer. Let go of the big picture: maybe it’s too big to figure the whole thing out right now. A few deep breaths, conscious relaxation of some muscles, soothing music. Try wrapping yourself in a soft blanket. It may not seem like much, but once you manage to do anything that improves your lot even the littlest bit, you are moving in the right direction to build some confidence that you can learn to deal with your jealous feelings.

Give yourself permission to take good care of yourself while you learn to work through jealousy and other hard feelings. Learn to nurture yourself. What are the things you find comforting? Give them to yourself. Hot chocolate? Warm towels after a long soak? A long session with your most beloved movie or computer game? Your favorite teddy bear? Effective self-nurturing often happens on the level of body awareness, so nice physical experiences—massages, hot baths, skin lotion, flannel pajamas—can give a sense of comfort and security even when your mind is anxious and your thoughts are a mess. Give yourself permission to take the best possible care of yourself. You deserve it.

When you anticipate feeling jealous, make plans to occupy your time. It may be too much to ask that you always have a hot date at exactly the same time as your lover: most people’s schedules are too complicated, so what do you do when your partner’s date comes down with the flu? Do you cancel your date? The people you make these dates
with might be counting on you, the time they have with you might be important to them, and their feelings might get hurt. Third parties have a right to some predictability in their lives too.

But even if you can’t round up a hot date for yourself, you can probably find a friend to watch a movie with, talk obsessively (with due attention to confidentiality, of course) on the Internet, grind your teeth, eat cookies, chew your fingernails, whatever works. We do not recommend drinking and drugging, as getting high might very well increase the intensity of your disturbance and disinhibit you enough that you might forget your commitment to experience your jealousy without acting on it. A certain amount of escapism is fine, but if you anesthetize yourself so that you feel nothing at all, you will lose the opportunity to develop skills at dealing with all the feelings you’re having.

Acquiring these skills takes practice, like meditation or learning to skate. At first you feel stupid and wonder why you’re doing it, and it doesn’t work very well. But if you practice taking good care of yourself, after a while your view of the world changes a little, and it becomes a much more friendly and welcoming place, because you’ve created it that way.

All these ideas about taking good care of yourself apply whether you are single or partnered, but those of us who live alone have to make special preparations to avoid becoming isolated with our feelings. (We’ve written about this at much more length in
chapter 19
, “The Single Slut.”) You need to reach out to close friends or perhaps get to a support group or a munch in your area. Make agreements with friends to
listen to each other’s feelings. And don’t forget to plan time for serious communication with your nonresidential partner. Being single, or other than the life partner, does not mean you will never feel jealousy or any other difficult feelings. When we are dating, however intensely, we rarely make time for serious discussions of our feelings, our differences, or, for that matter, how we each understand and appreciate the relationship we are having.

To make time, a lot of poly people place a special value on actually sleeping together, and the sharing of coffee, the slow awakening, and even ordinary old breakfast. If each time you connect with your sweetie is intended to be hot and heavy sex, it can be hard to make space for simple conversation, talking about feelings, hearing feelings. If you don’t sleep together, try getting together for lunch or brunch at some other time, or make a date to hike in the country or on a beach, or visit a botanical garden or a museum.

When no better plan is available, there is nothing wrong with gritting your teeth, biting the bullet, and hanging in there till it’s over. Dossie remembers her first challenge after she decided to never be monogamous again:

Here’s a good question to ask yourself as you seek to understand your jealousy: “What are the specific images that disturb me the most?” Chances are you are already imagining along these lines, so you’re not likely to make yourself feel worse by thinking about the scary stuff on purpose.

Those disturbing images, the ones that really bother you, are not telling you what your partner is doing—you actually don’t know what your partner is doing. The images you see in your mind are the perfect reflection of your own fears. One way to come to terms with your fears is to acknowledge them: “Yes, I’m afraid of that.” You can take it even further and work through the fears by envisioning the worst possible scenario that you can imagine. Go ahead, wallow in it. Elaborate it until it becomes ridiculous. Maybe that other guy has a dick three miles long, that girl is a perfect replica of a living Barbie doll. Maybe you can laugh at your fears: that’ll take the sting out of them. Silly is the opposite of powerful, so disempower away.

Reality is almost always less terrifying than fiction. You can counter your fears with reality testing. Our minds, like nature, abhor a vacuum. We get nervous. Think of the last time you were waiting for someone to return a call or a family member was significantly late coming home. Did you call the highway patrol? Send out frantic texts? Imagine terrible possibilities? We all do this. Janet and her partner have an agreement to call each other before they leave a lover’s house for the trip home, just to help prevent this kind of worry.

When we don’t know what’s going on, few of us are able to just say “I don’t know” and stop thinking about it. We fill in the blanks, and in order to do that we make something up. What you see when you fill in the blanks has nothing to do with reality, it is a picture of your
own worst fear. So now you know what you are afraid of, and nothing about what is really happening.

Pay attention also to your imaginings that are less dangerous, less anxiety-ridden. This is where you feel safer. You may be surprised to find that imagining your lover in the midst of sex with someone else is less scary than you thought it would be, or maybe images of kissing bother you more than intercourse, or whatever. Try writing down your imaginings on index cards, then putting them in order from the most to the least scary. Then you will know what parts scare you the most and what the safer-feeling parts are. Now you have something to turn your mind toward that will help you feel a little bit safer, which is your first step on the road to becoming perfectly comfortable.

Make a list of everything you value about your relationship and put it aside for a rainy day. Be an optimist, turn your mind to the positive end of things. Value what you have and what you get from your partner: the time, attention, and love, the good stuff that fills your cup. Avoid being the pessimist who focuses on what is not there, the energy that goes somewhere else. That energy is not subtracted from what you receive; relationships are not balanced like checkbooks. So when you are feeling deprived, remember all the good stuff you get from your partnership.

You and your partners need to practice talking about jealousy. When you try to pretend that you’re so perfectly enlightened that you never feel jealous, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to work with your feelings and share support with your partner. And when you try to
protect yourself and your partner from jealousy, you are engaging in a deception that can only lead to more distance and can never bring you closer.

A couple we know tell us that they have developed a convention in their relationship that each can ask the other for what they call a “jelly moment.” In your jelly moment, you get to say what’s bothering you. Perhaps you feel scared and jealous, nervous about saying goodbye for the weekend, small and silly, and your knees are feeling like, well, jelly. Your partner’s commitment is to listen, sympathize, and validate. That’s the response: not “Okay, I’ll cancel my date with Blanche,” but “Aw, honey, I’m sorry you feel bad. I love you, and I’ll be back soon.”

When we tell our partners that we feel jealous, we are making ourselves vulnerable in a very profound way. When our partners respond with respect, listen to us, validate our feelings, support and reassure us, we feel better taken care of than we would have if no difficulty had arisen in the first place. So we strongly recommend that you and your partners give each other the profoundly bonding experience of sharing your vulnerabilities. We are all human, we are all vulnerable, and we all need validation.

Your strategies for surviving periods of jealousy will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life, and you will use what you learn about yourself from this practice over and over. All of the techniques listed above are applicable to other difficult events, like job interviews and writing your resume. Now you not only have a repertoire of ways to deal with bouts of jealousy but also to handle other painful emotions that may come your way. So when you get this far, congratulate yourself. Celebrate your successes: Write “I am a genius” two dozen times with lots of bright colors. Buy yourself something nifty. You’ve done a lot of hard work, and you deserve a reward.

So when you grow beyond your jealousy by doing the healing that your jealousy is calling on you to do, you’re also stepping out of old paradigms and familiar assumptions, into the unknown, which is scary. Working to change your emotions requires that you open up, be willing to feel, flinching when necessary, to become more conscious. Isn’t that what spirituality is, an opened and expanded consciousness?

Jealousy can become your path, not only to healing old wounds but also to openheartedness—opening your heart to your lovers and to yourself as you open your relationships to fit in all the love and sex and fulfillment that truly are available to you.

A final note about love: One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you’re feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone, and see what happens.

CAN YOU IMAGINE love without jealousy, without possessiveness—love cleaned of all its clinginess and desperation? Let’s try. We can take some thoughts from Buddhism: What would it be like to love without attachment? Or to open our hearts to someone with no expectation beyond another heart opening in return? Loving just for the joy of it, regardless of what we might get back?