Envy: Deadly Sin or Just a Flesh Wound?

By Maria Padhila

I’m so jealous of Amanda right now. Or maybe I’m envious. It’s a little confusing.

She’s at Burning Man, and I’d rather be there than working, as much as I’m happy to be out of the dust. Before she left, she gave me permission to quote from a short play on the topic of ‘envy’ that she co-wrote. The idea is that the man moves from a state of jealousy to one of envy as he learns more about the woman’s perspective on relationships:

MAN: Did you need to train when you began? Were you a limper?

WOMAN: Well … not a limper, but I wasn’t the fastest in the race. I had to go step by step. But I wanted to learn. I wanted this because it actually feels more solid, more real, much healthier than wallowing in insecurity. The focus is on abundance, not lack or fear of loss. Fear and insecurity undermine what love is. So, if jealousy pops up, we dive into it instead of avoiding it. We get to its root, which is always somewhere inside ourselves, and come out the other side. The other side is love.

I love that she’s having that experience, really. But am I envious or jealous? Many think the terms are interchangeable, but that’s not so.

To do the play, Amanda had to research the differences in definitions. So did I. Most define jealousy as a threat response, the fear that something will be taken away. Envy, on the other hand, is seen as acquisitive, a desire rather than a fear. You want something another person has. The other person can still have it, even; you just want one like it. The other person can even have five or six of it. You just want one too. Feeling jealousy means feeling fear; feeling envy means feeling desire.

It could be that this is why, in what I read and hear about polyamory, people are more willing to cop to envy than jealousy: e.g., I’m not jealous if Chris is making out with a hot woman at Burning Man. I just want to be making out with a hot woman at Burning Man, too. This applies completely to my envy of others’ publishing successes: I’m genuinely glad they’re getting published (unless they kind of suck at writing, in which case I feel sorry for their readers, but to each her own). I just want to be published, too.

Polyamory activist and counselor Anita Wagner, whose handout on jealousy I’ve cited before, even lists ‘envy’ as one of the components or forms of jealousy, not as a synonym for it.

It’s also common for poly people to say, “Of course I feel jealousy. We just work through it.” This sounds fine, but it’s not something I have to deal with. I’m ever-mindful of protesting too much, but I’ve tapped and tapped at the boundaries of this emotion, and I can’t figure it out any other way: I don’t feel jealous. I think I lost the ability to feel this many years back, even before I got married. Maybe it’s that I go directly to the fear—I don’t seem to locate these bad feelings in a relationship. I’m afraid of losing health insurance. I’m not afraid of feeling grief or pain. I’m afraid of things I can’t control (Asteroid! The Spanish Inquisition!), but I work hard to keep from trying to control them as a reaction. That’s a constant sort of exercise.

Jealousy really has nothing to do with polyamory. If you’re jealous, you’re going to be that way whether your lover is sleeping with someone else or not. We’ve all heard of or even known a jealous person who has stalked another, read mail, suspiciously questioned a partner’s every move. That person would act that way no matter what the partner was doing.

Yes, I’m afraid of being dumped, left out, unwelcome, unwanted. But whether my lovers have others or not isn’t going to have any bearing on whether that will happen or I’ll feel that way. They’re either going to treat me lovingly or not. And believe it or not, there are loving ways to tell the person you’re with at a party, for instance, that you’d like to run off with someone else for the rest of the night, and even to do it. You do it kindly and openly and reassuringly, and you don’t do it in cases where you know you’re leaving them in a ‘hostile environment’ (a work party, a Thanksgiving dinner full of uptight in-laws, that sort of thing). There are completely crappy ways to do this, too: how about getting someone to haul all her performance gear around for her and then sneaking off to make out with someone else?

On some level, I think all the worry about who’s gonna take your man away (or woman or twink or your adjective of choice) amounts to a political/social distraction. There’s no doubt it’s born out of scarcity thinking. But there are so many other things to worry about, from decent child health care to global warming.

So yes, I’m practicing getting rid of the envies I do have: yes, swallow, I’m not envious that you got published. I’m so glad for you making millions of dollars on your self-published book about your poly triad experience. I’m not envious that you got there first even though you aren’t as good a writer as I am. Really, truly, it’s good for all of us, and I’m feeling so much compersion right now. Oh, you have trouble getting to that compersion stage? You know, I had a lot of trouble with that, too. Until I learned the secret. It’s so simple. If you want to feel real, genuine compersion, all you have to do is pick up the check. Doesn’t that feel great? Can I give you a hug?

I was lucky enough over the past couple weeks to take short hikes on both the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail. Jealous, or is that envious, yet? So I lost touch with a few things in default world. Catching up: Alan P’s Poly in the News column informs that a triad in Brazil has applied for a sort of civil union. The Brazilian press apparently calls them poliamoristas, and in the future I would like to be referred to by this term, thank you.

If you are feeling a bit down, an extremely funny writer is tearing it up at a site called theblackleatherbelt, livesnarking about the Showtime Polyamory reality show. Check out episode 4, which has commentary from characters from The Wire!

Here’s a sample of her work:

Okay, folks, this week we’re going to see if we can hobble through despite my tragic inability to tell the difference between all these skinny mostlywhite cisgendered bisexual girls. This is a real problem for me. I mean, I am a skinny, white, cisgendered bisexual woman — hell, when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, half the time I don’t even know who the fuck I am. I’m pretty sure Oliver Sacks is going to write an essay in the New Yorker about my curious neurological condition.

I love the show and admire the people making it, but I also admire somebody who can make me laugh. Us Geminis can do that shit.