The Ethical Slut (16 page)

It’s been more than ten years since Dossie wrote this story, and she is no longer with this lover. The relationship ended for many reasons,
none of them particularly about jealousy. Some readers were upset by this story when we included it in the first edition of this book—it’s not exactly cheerful and it doesn’t have a happy ending. But we are including it again anyway, because we think it’s important that our readers know that even accomplished sluts struggle with pain, miscommunication, mismatched desires, anger, and, yes, jealousy.

We cannot ask this question too often. What is jealousy to you? Does jealousy really exist, and is it what we think it is? When we choose to confront the feeling of jealousy rather than run away from it, we can see more clearly what jealousy truly is for each of us. Jealousy is not an emotion. It can show up as grief or rage, hatred or self-loathing—jealousy is an umbrella word that covers the wide range of emotions we might feel when our partners make sexual connection with somebody else.

Jealousy may be an expression of insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, feeling left out, feeling not good enough, feeling inadequate, feeling awful. Your jealousy may be based in territoriality, or in competitiveness, or in some other emotion that’s clamoring to be heard under the jealous racket in your brain. Sometimes it may show up as blind screaming rage—and being blind can make it very difficult to see.

Dossie, when she first started thinking about and challenging her jealousy, felt an almost intolerable sense of insecurity, along the lines of “nobody will ever love me because something is wrong with me and I’m unlovable.” She discovered this about herself in the early years of feminism, so it fit perfectly with her feminist explorations to go to work on her self-esteem and build a foundation of security that didn’t need to be granted by another person and that no one else could take away. You can probably figure out how valuable a lesson this was and how many more uses she has found for feeling secure within herself. Thank you, jealousy—without this lesson she wouldn’t be confident enough to be writing this book.

If you experience your jealousy as insensate rage, then you might want to read something about anger, how other people are thinking about it, working with it, dealing successfully with it; perhaps you can take a course in anger management. Maybe you can come to terms with your anger. Maybe you can get to a place where you and your lovers need never fear your anger again. Wouldn’t that be worth working on?

Many people find forms of jealousy in themselves that are actually pretty easy to deal with—nagging doubts, bits of nervousness about performance or body image. Others find themselves falling into a whirlpool of terror or grief, difficult even to look at, much less to tease apart into separate feelings like fear of abandonment or loss or rejection. Why do we sometimes feel this way? Dossie the therapist has a theory about this, based not only on her own experience but also that of many clients she has worked with on these issues.

Jealousy is often the mask worn by the most difficult inner conflict you have going on right now, a conflict that’s crying out to be resolved and you don’t even know it. Because it’s rooted so deeply, it can be incredibly difficult to stay aware when jealousy peeks over the horizon: we twist and turn and writhe in our attempts to not feel it.
This is when your emotions are most likely to bring you to grief—when you believe that you need to avoid feeling them at any cost.

One way to not-feel a feeling is to project it onto your partner. Projection is a psychological defense that involves trying to move a painful feeling outside yourself by running your emotional movie on someone else, as if that person were a screen for your fears and fantasies and not a human being. It may be that this is the only real definition of jealousy: it’s the experience of projecting one’s uncomfortable feelings onto one’s partner.

But here’s some good news. If you recognize yourself in any of this, then some part of you has decided that you are strong enough to acknowledge the underlying emotion, and that means you’re in an excellent position to do some healing right now. Use your jealousy as a signpost: “Work on this feeling here!” Take a class, join a group, find a good therapist, start practicing meditation—go to work on yourself. You have a golden opportunity, so make the most of it. You could get a whole lot of bang for your buck if you do the work that’s presenting itself now: heal old wounds, open up new possibilities, gain health and freedom from fear … and somewhere in there, almost as a bonus, you get to grasp your sexual freedom as well.

Sometimes what we perceive as jealousy is actually something else. Think through the details of how jealousy works in you. What bothers you the most? Is it that you
don’t
want your partner to do those things with someone else or that you
do
want your partner to do them with you? Jealousy might actually be envy, and envy is often very easy to fix: why not make a date with your lover to do what you have just discovered you are missing?

Sometimes jealousy is rooted in feelings of grief and loss, which can be harder to interpret. We have been taught by our culture that when our partner has sex with another, we have lost something. Not to sound dumb, but we are confused. What have we lost? When our partners come home from hot dates, often they are excited and turned on and have some new ideas they would like to try out at home. We fail to see what we lose in this situation.

Or the sense of loss you feel might be the loss of an ideal, a picture you have been holding in your head of what a perfect, monogamous relationship might look like. It may be helpful to remember that all
relationships change through time: people’s needs and desires shift according to age and circumstance, and the most successful long-term relationships are the ones with enough flexibility to redefine themselves over and over again through the years.

Occasionally, our discomfort means that we are becoming aware on an intuitive level that our partner is moving away from us, and it might be true that we are losing the relationship we cherish. That does happen. The fact that supposedly monogamous people everywhere often leave one partner for what they perceive as greener grass with another is not much consolation when it happens to you.

We watched a friend of ours go through feelings of deep grief and loss when she perceived that her partner’s lover was trying, nearly successfully, to abscond with her partner. In this case, her pain threw a spotlight on some dishonesty and manipulation on the part of the third party and gave her partner the strength to break off from the outside lover and to find other lovers who had greater respect for his primary bond. On the other hand, this scenario might just as easily have ended in a breakup; we’ll talk more about breakups, and dealing with them ethically with care for your own and your partner’s feelings, in
chapter 20
, “The Ebb and Flow of Relationships.”

Jealousy might also be associated with feelings of competitiveness and wanting to be number one. There’s a reason there is no Olympics of sex: sexual achievement is not measurable. We cannot rank each and every one of us on some hierarchical ladder of who is or is not the most desirable or the better fuck. What a horrid idea! Your authors want to live in a world where each person’s sexuality is valued for its own sake, not for how it measures up to any standard beyond our own pleasure. If you find out about something that you would like to add to your own repertoire, you can certainly learn to do it without wasting time trashing yourself for not already having known how.

Fear of being sexually inadequate can add up to a very deep and secret wound. But allow us to reassure you that eventually, when you succeed in establishing the lifestyle you are dreaming about, you will be so familiar with so many different individuals’ ways of expressing sexuality that you will no longer have to wonder how your sexuality compares to another’s; you’ll know from direct experience. Great lovers are made, not born. You can learn from your lovers, and your lovers’
lovers, and your lovers’ lovers’ lovers, to be the sexual superstar you would like to be.

To change the way you experience a feeling takes time, so expect a gradual process, learning as you go, by trial and error. And there will be trials, and you will make errors.

Start by giving yourself permission to learn. Allow yourself to not know what you don’t know, to be ignorant; Buddhists call this beginner’s mind. You must allow yourself to make mistakes; you have no choice. So reassure yourself: there is no graceful way to unlearn jealousy. It’s kind of like learning to skate—you have to fall down and make a fool of yourself a few times before you become as graceful as a swan.

The challenge comes in learning to establish within yourself a strong foundation of internal security that is not dependent on sexual exclusivity or ownership of your partner. This difficult work is part of the larger question of how to grasp your personal power and learn to understand and love yourself without such a desperate need for another person to validate you. You become free to give and receive validation, not from need or obligation, but from love and caring. We suggest most strongly that you put some effort into learning to validate yourself: believe us, you’re worth it.

Many people find that as they develop their polyamorous families, they actually get validation from lots and lots of people and thus become less dependent on their partner’s approval. Their needs and their sources of nourishment get spread out over a wider territory.

We can’t tell you how to banish jealousy or how to exorcise it as if it were a demon. It may be your inner demon, but it is not a cancer that you can cut out. It is a part of you, a way that you express fear and hurt. What you can do is change the way you experience jealousy and learn to deal with it as you learn to deal with any emotion: work with it until it becomes, not overwhelming and not exactly pleasant, but tolerable; a mild disturbance, a warm summer shower rather than a typhoon.

One woman we talked to had some very good ideas about what you can do about jealousy:

Once you have made a commitment to refuse to act on your jealousy, you become free to start reducing the amount of power you let your jealousy have over you. One way to do this is simply by allowing yourself to feel it. Just feel it. It will hurt, and you will feel frightened and confused, but if you sit still and listen to yourself with compassion and support for the scared child inside, the first thing you will learn is that the experience of jealousy is survivable. You have the strength to get through it.

A large part of our difficulties with jealousy comes from our attempts to avoid feeling a scary or painful emotion. Perhaps long ago when we were children, truly powerless in the world and with a very limited set of tools for dealing with our emotions, we felt something scary and told ourselves, “I will never feel this again, it’s too awful, I’ll die, I’ll kill myself.” So we stick the feeling, and the event that inspired it, into something like a pot, and put the lid on good and tight. As the years go by, whenever something comes along that reminds us of what’s in the pot, that rattles the lid a little, we push down on that lid. “Gotta keep the lid on that pot,” we tell ourselves—we may not even remember why. And the pressure builds and builds, not so much from what’s in the pot as from our frantic struggles to keep the lid on.

When we grow up and we need to take the lid off so that we can deal with our emotional reality as an adult, it can feel really scary. But surprisingly, often when we actually look at what’s in our pot and feel it, it’s much more manageable than we had feared. You can indeed open your pots, look at what’s bubbling away in there, and then put the lid back on. Your old defenses will continue to work just fine when you want them to.

We have heard sluts accuse each other of being jealous as if it were a crime: “See? Look at you! You’re jealous, aren’t you? Don’t try to deny it!” It is particularly important that you own your jealousy, to yourself and to your intimates. If you try to pretend that you are not jealous
when you are, others will perceive you as dishonest, or worse yet, they may believe you and see no need to support or protect you—because you’re fine, right? If you pretend to yourself that you are not jealous when you are, then your own emotions may try devious routes to bring themselves to your attention, manifesting themselves as intensely irrational anger, unreasonable behavior, crushing anxiety over anything at all, temper tantrums, crying fits, or even physical illness.