Polyamory and Jealousy by Eve Rickert & Franklin Veaux

Author:Eve Rickert & Franklin Veaux [Rickert, Eve & Veaux, Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thorntree Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN YOU FEEL LEFT OUT

“How do you deal with feeling lonely and left out when your partner is off on a date with someone else?” This is a question Franklin gets often in emails. The answer is, perhaps, not intuitive: Focusing on how lonely and left out we feel is not the only way to respond to such a situation. This is more obvious when we aren’t talking about polyamory. For example, what would we say to someone who says, “I feel lonely and left out for the eight hours a day my partner is at work”? We might think that was a little strange.

Our social values tell us it’s okay for our partners to leave us for big chunks of time: for work, for errands, for military service, for all sorts of things. Yet we still tend to assume that if a partner is left behind for another romantic relationship, the natural response is to feel alienated and jealous.

Of course, it’s not only romantic relationships that trigger these feelings. Many people feel left out when their partners go to the bar with drinking buddies or join a roller derby league. It’s as if we have two classes of activities: those where we don’t expect to feel left behind, such as work or school, and those where we do, such as a date or a derby night. It’s as though we expect to feel left out when our partner is engaged in a social activity, but not if a partner is engaged in a more mundane task. So really, the feeling isn’t about a partner doing something without us. Only certain kinds of activities, usually involving social situations, make us feel this way.

Maybe this is because being in a romantic relationship carries social status. Maybe it’s because we don’t mind missing out on mundane activities but don’t want to miss out on enjoyable ones. A solution might be to build your own hobbies and social circles, so you don’t have to rely on your partner to provide for all your social needs. Or maybe the feelings come from a sense of exclusion—if a partner is building a relationship with his fishing buddies, we are being rejected. The solution to this might be to work on your sense of self-worth.

Creating a strong sense of self-worth is a process, and there’s no easy shortcut to doing it, but we talk about some approaches in Chapter 4 of More Than Two. Something to remember is that worthiness is not a state you need to attain, and there’s no magic bar you need to cross before you’ll be “good enough” to be poly. Worthiness, courage and compassion are stars to navigate by. They are not innate character traits, but practices you can cultivate, skills you can learn.

Worthiness is not the same as validation. A sense of self-worth comes from within, not from someone else. It can be tempting to look to the outside for validation: to look to your partner and say, “They love me, therefore I am worthy.

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