By Maria Padhila
I stopped doing a lot of things in the ’80s, and one of them was being jealous.
I realized this because I started to think back, trying to test myself to see if what I thought was my freedom from jealousy was real or just something I was gritting my teeth and trying to maintain. I think I owe it to myself and the people I’m with to do that kind of self-test, that awareness check-in, from time to time. While there are times a variety of jealousy jumps out and grabs me like a cat from under the bed — more about that later — it’s just about as significant, and makes me laugh (unless it’s just annoying because I’m in a hurry — or unless the ambush is intended to leave a scratch, in which case it needs investigating).
“Don’t you get jealous?” is the big question people ask when they talk about polyamory. The lazy answer is no, we don’t get jealous, we feel ‘compersion’, and that’s what I’d say if I fully understood compersion, which I may never do. The surface definition is that you enjoy another’s pleasure independent of you as much as you enjoy your own. Compersion is a very complex topic, and to write about it, I think I better bring in an expert at a later date.
But back to the ’80s — if you can stand it. Younger people I know seem to love to rehash those days. My daughter, set to work cleaning out her drawers and closets today, just came downstairs in a tulle skirt, leggings, glitter belt, torn t-shirt, one fingerless glove, and a pile of necklaces. I could have been looking into a time-tunnel. And there I was in my leggings and torn t-shirt (pretty much what I still wear today), face down on my then-boyfriend’s king-size bed that filled his basement apartment, in misery because he was out with his old girlfriend.
It was 1986, I think; maybe ’87. Working sweatshop hours in a sexist industry with mergers & acquisitions-caused layoffs threatening, trying to finish up a college degree after dropping out once, severely underweight from wrongheaded treatments for undiagnosed health problems, broke as hell, car breaking down, trying to write, up late drinking and clubbing on top of it all. And I was crying with jealousy.
Bad health and a life full of struggle leads to bad feeling, bad thinking. In some odd way, it’s easier to push all your unhappiness as being caused by a single person, rather than face that there are class/gender/economic/culture oppressions that you don’t even know how to begin to address. I was crying for myself, I can see now. But it’s so tempting to believe that everything else would be OK if this one person would only…
See, he was so tall and handsome. And kind of a ‘normal’ guy. I was an outsider, a weirdo, a punk. The young people who celebrate the ’80s forget the Reagan factor, the Preppie Handbook, the high price you paid for looking and being different back then. And she was the girl he really loved. Clear skin, straight blond hair, New England collegiate perfection. They were both WASPs — a culture I’d never belong to and found scary and fascinating. She worked to explore and fulfill herself, not to pay the rent. If she was sick, she would stay home, or go home to her parents, and wrap up in a handmade quilt and sniffle and call friends, who would all feel bad for her and come and bring her stuffed animals. If I was sick, which seemed to be all the time, I would go to school, and go to work, and take extra smoke breaks, and mainline coffee and diet soda until work was over, and go out for drinks, and wake up and do it all over again. I was the kind of girl who took care of herself, out of pride and because no one else had ever cared much to.
I did have a good time during those years, and I learned a lot. And he was great to be with — we’re still friends, and I’d go to great lengths for him if he needed it. His first wife I liked OK; his current wife I’m crazy about. (Don’t get any ideas; they’d neither of them go for it.) But there were some very low days in the ’80s, and this was one of them.
The jealousy came from insecurity — class insecurity, appearance insecurity, economic insecurity; but deeper than that, I didn’t have a place in the world and didn’t believe I’d ever have one. I still doubt there’s a place in this world for me — I don’t believe those with the big money who are running the show really want most of us around — but the difference is, nowadays I don’t care. I’m here whether you want me or not.
A few years later, I saw our ‘relationship’ wasn’t going to ‘go anywhere’. I was still thinking that everyone must follow a trajectory to marriage or break things off and try elsewhere. But I stuck around another year because I like him, and I loved sleeping with him, and that’s rare. I’d gone out with two other men over the years we were together — not really all that honestly and openly, but he knew and I knew he knew, we just didn’t talk about it. When I look back, I see similar evidence that I was never cut out to be monogamous.
After we broke it off, I began doing more walking and running in the woods near where I live. I took trips by myself. I’d always loved the natural world — I was raised camping — but the connection this time was enriched by my growing pagan practice and understanding of the environment and the nature of creativity. This was a place I would always belong, even as sick and poisoned as I was and as it was becoming. I could feel and love the natural life teeming all around me, see its beauty, and enjoy its every function, even though, truly, it had nothing whatsoever to do with me. A rock doesn’t long for the warmth of my hand. A creek doesn’t flow to me in the hope of making my heart beat faster. A tree does not pine for my presence. Yet what I feel for them can only be described as love. So this is my version of compersion — I delight in existence.
I may be doing it wrong, but for now, it works.
So get in the DeLorean and head forward 25 years to the Next Time I Got Jealous. We’ll visit the website — no such thing in the ’80s! — of polyamory advocate and educator Anita Wagner, whom I’ve met at several events and who has been very helpful and welcoming to all three of us on occasion. She has downloadable materials about jealousy on her site; one article, “Making Peace with Jealousy,” I found hit home.
Chris was out with a (young, beautiful, talented) woman. I had been cheering him on, and I was very curious about what would result. It was while I was working the next afternoon that I realized I hadn’t heard anything from him in a while. Chris and Isaac are both communicative guys, who call or text or email several times a day.
Hmm. I work on, but I’m easily distracted.
Oh, you know, I should finish up that poem while I’m waiting for that client to call. Then I can post it to my blog, so I can get comments from a couple of people who think I’m a good writer. Now let’s check out some email groups; post something sort of intriguing and seductive. And Facebook, of course, the go-to source for instant and ersatz social reinforcement. Post and share a couple things — one article of urgent importance, and I’m not just posting it to demonstrate my exquisitely honed social conscience. And share the one about the indie film, because I want to promote my friend’s work, no, it’s not just because I want to prove I’m still the coolest woman in the room. And a few sharp, funny comments here and there, because I’m really, really good at that kind of thing. Before long, I’m dealing with such a flurry of return mails and comments that I have to shut everything down if I want to get any work done.
And then I did get a text from Chris — a picture of the other woman’s pet, in the window of her beautiful, stylish apartment.
“It is safe to assume you will be jealous at some point when the circumstances arise that push your particular jealousy button,” the article says. “Jealousy is almost always made up of more than one emotion.”
The article looks at four kinds of jealousy, including possessive jealousy, which I don’t think I have much of. Fear of exclusion is another. Maybe. Jealousy appears to have more masks than a director’s cut of “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Competitive jealousy? A direct hit. According to the article, it is “triggered in response to fear that whatever made the relationship ‘special’ is being shared with or surpassed by another”; and by “implications surrounding need to be ‘most special’ and concern about losing that status.”
I realize that part of being an artist means you need to ‘put yourself out there’ and show up on stage or at the event. I do this and sometimes enjoy it, sometimes wish I could hide. I get some pleasure out of pushing that shyness. ‘Forgetting yourself’ and getting into the flow of the work is supposed to be the gold standard, but I don’t know that I’ll ever achieve that, so I instead work with the dynamic of self-consciousness and make it part of what I do.
But what I was doing that day was just pure, plain, being a showoff. Competitive. Waving around my skills to try to prove that I’m the one who’s the biggest deal around here. Being an attention suck. Waving a signal flag for reassurance that, when it truly comes down to it, I didn’t really need or want as much as I thought I did. I looked at that photo of the serene cat in the window and had to laugh at myself, lashing out a paw from under the bed.
“Remember that there is no shame in being jealous, no nobility in a lack of it,” says the article. “We are what we are.”
If you’re interested in going deeply into the jealousy question, Planet Waves has posted the article Jealousy and the Abyss, a profound work on the topic.
These responses are something else entire–it’s like getting six blogs for the price of one–well, even tho we’re all free, it’s still pretty great.
I had an interesting experience when I was pregnant–my mother kindly and honestly told me I had been a “mistake.” Catholics! Anyway, it popped everything into clarity. Explained a lot about feeling unwanted–it literally went back to conception. But from this, a gift. Self-sufficiency (radical self-reliance) is not such a bad thing, as long as it’s not a brittle shell or coverup–and no less so in emotions or sexuality than when it comes to keeping yourself healthy, fed, sheltered.
Carrie, one thing that helps for me is stopping second-guessing. One can try not caring about motivations if you’re getting what you want, and if you’re not, ask. What’s the worst that can happen? They can refuse, ouch, but you’ll live; they can bargain, and you can negotiate. I know it’s hard to turn off the intuition/perception, but you can always do the second-guessing and just file away what you know for later, or be amused at it. If you’ve looked deep and know you’re honestly not manipulating, then if others choose to act in certain ways because of what you do, that’s their business. And also? I try to let go of any expectation that just because I’m (doing something nice), that others are going to do the same for me.
I guess the theme is, please yourself and the rest will follow 😉
Some of us know more about being on the outside looking in than otherwise. I was at a poetry event the other night where I got to read a couple of my things. Beforehand I was experiencing in retrospect the feelings of having nothing good to offer and why do I even bother (compared with others) balanced against a gut-wrenching need to express myself (I’m just as good as anyone else!) and maybe a silent third party in there somewhere who says “So what!! Good, bad or indifferent, just go for it! Get it down on paper and see what happens!! Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!”
At the poetry event, it was great to find myself cheering on my fellow poets, blown away completely by some of them and amused by others, but able, when it was my turn, to put my energy into my own performance of my poetry and seeing it appreciated, glitches and all. Life is about making space. Not just for myself but for others. Elbow room. Everybody needs it.
Overcast, Half? I hope you finally got the weather we’ve been getting on the east coast today. Wow!
Jealousy is an interesting subject for me. I’ve always wondered why it is that I’m not particularly jealous from a possessive point of view — I check in a lot to make sure it’s not a case of simply lying to myself. When I do feel something, it’s more akin to dread or fear. It’s only when I look back at my own childhood that I find answers. From birth, I was raised primarily by nannies. My mother has always been unerringly honest about her lack of a maternal instinct, and so there was a procession of other women in my life until about the age of 14 – some of them wonderful, some of them awful – all of them impermanent.
This has shaped my relationships to this day, and one of the offshoots of this is a distinct lack of possessive jealousy because my life relating to primary care-givers always involved more than one person. What I *do* experience is what Maria refers to as jealousy based on a “fear of exclusion”. I was excluded from my mother and my father’s emotional lives. I tend to replicate that in relationships; and there nearly always tends to be a third person on the periphery. I don’t see this as a fault as much as how it was set up from the get go. Having said that, I am profoundly glad I don’t experience possessive jealousy. I have seen how damaging and controlling it can be.
Maria, Another wonderful piece from you! I love when I see that you have published.
“The jealousy came from insecurity — class insecurity, appearance insecurity, economic insecurity; but deeper than that, I didn’t have a place in the world and didn’t believe I’d ever have one. I still doubt there’s a place in this world for me — I don’t believe those with the big money who are running the show really want most of us around — but the difference is, nowadays I don’t care. I’m here whether you want me or not.”
This paragraph zeroed in on something I hadn’t quite examined before in my discovery of jealousy in my life:
The right to exist.
For most of my life, I have had that concurrent theme and have worked to understand and shift that seemingly innate feeling of not having the same right to exist as others.
As if they were from separate worlds, I have written about jealousy, picked apart jealousy, talked about it, rehashed it, until the bones come up clean, but I think I missed this little tid bit at least from this precise pinpoint. Ouch! Voila! Thank you!
If I have this paralyzing feeling that I do not have the right to exist, I will be living from a sense of lack only to be triggered by an external situation or person.
Just a few observations on an overcast Sunday morning here in the UK.
Mention was made by Maria about compersion while Carrie raised some very important thoughts about how human interpersonal and social needs are experienced on a psychological level – and whether this crops up in the same way in poly situations.
What both links and separates these two aspects namely, i) sexual ii) psychosocial neatly, is the whole idea of masturbation that Eric emphasizes regularly. Although masturbation can be drawn into compersion practice I find it is the auto that screams out for me much of the time and not just sexually.
If Freud was correct in linking sex to life so comprehensively through the libido construct then EVERYTHING is sex and to suggest otherwise would be to violate ‘reality’.
So there is an intimate relationship:
We see relationships fail regularly when the whole life is not connected the sexual exchange – where life force cannot penetrate and flow vitality through the social contract to fertilize and energize it. Intimacy is compromised. Knowing them, sharing with them on many levels is what allows libido to be driven by something more than a visual or a concept of imagination. “I want to have sex with you, I desire you, because you care for our babies, because you work hard for our shared life together” etc
Now, coming back to auto-eroticism, what would the equivalent be? Have you taken the time to develop a relationship with yourself? Is it thorough and deep? How do you demonstrate to yourself concretely day by day that you love and value you?
I have known some fine people who have *always* been in relationships – many of whom have been women who have brought children into the world early (for whatever reason) and then have security needs pressing in a very immanent way that does not afford many of the luxuries that freedom from such allows. One such person (with who I am intimate) would recruit my support with parenting issues at a distance (she has a selectively supportive husband who uses the children in power plays) but at times she would reject my input, claiming I couldn’t know about such experiences as she was describing because I’m not a parent.
My reply was always the same “and you’ve never been single”
She doesn’t use her line any more!
The point I’m making however is that if time and space are not reserved for building a relationship with oneself then it is always much easier to build a connection with someone nearby, fail to fulfill the pre-conditions for true contentment, and project that discontent onto others for ‘not nurturing me’.
Now of course, partnership can bring many things, regardless of how many partners are in view and how complex the interactions are. Nurture is not the exclusive remit of others to provide. For those folk who have never taken the time in their life to be on their own, it seems to me that they may always be susceptible to lacking a key experiential resource for separating off sexuality, nurture, the practicalities of personal responsibilities and social obligations.
While they aren’t actually separate within the life lived it is important not conflate and confuse them.
Masturbation as purely sexual practice is equally susceptible to impoverishment. Maybe the interesting contrast point for us in this ongoing debate is the question of singleness.
Yep, singleness! Have you done it? Can you do it? Forever if necessary?
There is something about singleness that guarantees that you can’t miss the key issues – because you have nobody to blame or look to other than yourself.
Monks do it – people on retreat do it and, unlike bonobos, if we can’t spread the libido love across the whole tribe, then maybe we should go solo a while and gird our loins for a new day.
A day when the phoenix may indeed rise from the ashes.
Loved your article, Maria. And your comment. Carrie. I hate it (jealousy and being ignored), but I like the phrase “there is no shame when it pops up and no nobility if it doesn’t” concerning jealousy. Thanks.
As for being ignored, it just sucks. In my opinion. And it is my responsibllity to fill the hole, I have found. Easier said than done, it seems to me so far. ((((Maria and Carrie))))
I love this article, Maria. Jealousy does have many reasons and layers. The flip side is when my husband felt insecure about my feelings, he began doing things he knew I wanted in order to “keep” me. Now that I have realized the other person didn’t have feelings for me, I have walked away and my husband has returned to his regular, complacent self. That feels like crap because I think, “why doesn’t he want to please me for me? Why does it take his fear of losing me to impel him to do things he knows I have always wanted?” I try to do things he always wants because I know what it feels like to be neglected so I don’t take him for granted. I dislike feeling taken for granted. I wonder if people in poly relationships deal with this same stuff?