The Storm Inside: Jealousy in a Non Monogamous Relationship
Our experiences with raging jealousy and what we did about it
There is almost universal agreement on this aspect of non monogamy: if you’re in a non monogamous relationship assume you will feel jealousy at some point.
When we first opened up our relationship and became non monogamous, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily I could handle the jealousy. I’d watch my husband text with another woman, or get ready for a date, looking cleanly shaven, smelling good and all dressed up as he left the house, and feel a little twinge of something in my tummy, and pat myself on the back for being able to handle the jealousy.
Little did I know that there are different triggers and that jealousy comes in all shades; from twinge in the tummy to raging, mind-blowing painful spears of jealousy that ravage your intestines.
But before I tell you what happened, I want to start this post with a few definitions. I know we all think we know what jealousy is. But I’ve noticed it’s often confused with envy. It’s also the opposite of compersion, which is a word I heard for the first time only a few months ago (and that my computer tries desperately to auto-correct to “comparison”). So just to be totally clear on what I mean, here are a few definitions:
Jealousy is the feeling triggered by thinking you will lose someone to someone else. In other words, it’s an emotion that is felt when you are threatened by someone else taking what you have. It is a complex, unpleasant and incredibly challenging emotion. And, in a non monogamous relationship, you are opening yourself up to feeling jealousy because your partner is seeing someone else.
At its root, jealousy can be triggered by several different underlying feelings. Low self-esteem is a big one — that ugly voice in your head that says that you can’t possibly be good enough to keep your partner interested if they meet someone who is prettier, skinnier, more sexual, etc. Or it can be triggered by a need to control your life and the people in it. Jealousy can also be triggered by a rational fear or vulnerability to a particular situation where there is an actual risk of losing what you have — like, it’s not just in your head that your partner is drifting away from you or a new partner is trying to rope them in to leaving you. Sometimes the jealousy is rooted in a rational fear.
Envy is a desire, a deep-seeded want, to have what someone else has. So envy doesn’t involve three people, just two. For example, you can be envious about the amount of time your partner spends with other people. Or you can be envious about the experiences your partner is having that you’re not having.
Jealousy and envy are not always experienced separately. It’s possible to both feel jealousy and envy at the same time.
Compersion is the opposite of jealousy. It is the joy you feel when you see your partner with someone else. It is the holy grail of non monogamous culture — the desired state of being happy, not jealous, when faced with your partner exhibiting interest in, excitement, even love for another person. Compersion is a fairly new term, and there haven’t been a lot of studies on it. To learn more about compersion, you can check out this link to a recent research article.
Now that we know what we’re talking about, here’s our story of jealousy, envy and compersion.
What triggered my (raging) jealousy.
As I mentioned, when we first opened up our relationship and became non monogamous, I was pretty confident I could handle any jealousy. Seeing my husband go off on dates was easy. I even congratulated myself with feeling a bit of compersion. Turns out that while I was not overly jealous with my husband going out and having sex with other women when I did not perceive these other women to pose a risk to my husband’s interest in, attraction to or love for me, I was powerfully jealous — like mega-powerfully — when he started to date a younger woman.
It all started when he matched with a woman. At first I was happy for him. It had taken a long time for him to get a match, and I was relieved and happy for him when he matched with someone who didn’t ghost him or string him along. As we talked about this new match, everything sounded good. She was also non monogamous, seemed clear about what she wanted and didn’t want from a relationship, and didn’t play games.
However, one small detail about her gave me pause.
This woman was young. Like a less-than-half-his-age-still-going-to-grad-school, never-had-kids, as-young-as-our-niece kind of young.
“And suddenly, I was insecure about everything.”
As their relationship evolved, from first date, to first time having sex, to active and ongoing relationship, my jealousy blossomed along with their relationship. I became convinced that my husband could not possibly still find me attractive when he compared my 40+ year old body with her young lithe body. To be crass, I kept thinking about how her vagina had never pushed out a watermelon, let alone three like mine. And I became convinced that he liked her too much. Way too much.
Yeah… I was super jealous. As much as I had been happy for him early on, I was now in full jealous mode. I didn’t want to hear about her. Hated her. Sulked before and after every one of his dates. My proposed solution: he should stop seeing her.
I was exhibiting a classic “disruptive jealousy” reaction — I just wanted to get rid of my competition and punish my husband for continuing to see her.
My husband knew I was super jealous. He swore she wasn’t a threat. Yes, he liked her, she was sexually adventurous, she gave him lots of her attention and she was fun and lighthearted to be around. He said she made him laugh. But he promised that he didn’t like her “too much”. He assured me he didn’t compare my body with hers. His proposed solution: I should stop being jealous.
And he kept seeing her.
Yup… He was exhibiting a classic “not my problem, it’s your problem” reaction — he just wanted me to deal with it and didn’t want to validate or help me through the emotions. He was defensive, didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, and felt like I should just trust him. What I wanted (needed) for him to do was to acknowledge and respond to my feelings. I also wanted/needed him to show compassion and make extra efforts to make me feel less vulnerable and insecure during his NRE phase with this young woman.
I didn’t like his solution and he didn’t like mine. So we both kept doing what we were doing.
What triggered my husband’s jealousy (and envy).
Before meeting this younger woman, he had dealt with his own gut-wrenching feelings of jealousy for months. Whereas he had spent months on Tinder without a single first date, I had immediately been inundated with interest and had gone out with scores of men, and had sex with several, before he’d even gone to first base. And for weeks he watched me text other men, spend time on grooming and leaving the house looking like a million bucks. Sound familiar?
And yes, I admit, I was glowing from all this external interest. Loving the attention and positive feedback.
He was super jealous. And, going back to our definitions, I now realize he was also super envious. He was scared of losing me AND wanted what I had. If he’d had his way, he would have been going out on as many dates as me. I get why he would have wanted that. He wanted to feel desired and attractive like I was feeling; the positive feedback of so many online connections was intoxicating. There wasn’t an iota of compersion in his body. And he expressed this every time I went out by getting mad. So coming home after a date, I often faced 2 days of silent treatment. He also couldn’t sleep, eat or talk to me. He actually lost weight during this period, literally sick from the strong emotions he was experiencing.
But the thing is, I just didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. It wasn’t like I was breaking any of our non monogamy rules (see my post on that subject here). I wasn’t setting out to be a dating machine. And I definitely wasn’t trying to be competitive by getting more dates than him. I kept telling him that it wasn’t my fault that the ratios of men to women on the online dating sites were skewed in my favour. I figured he would eventually get a match and start dating and that the number of dates we each went out on didn’t have to be equal to be fair.
He wanted me to slow things down. He asked me to pause on my dating until he caught up.
I knew my husband was jealous and envious. I could see that it was difficult for him to see me to go out on dates every week while he swiped on his Tinder account. But I thought he was selfish in asking me to pause. I thought he should be happy for me. My proposed solution: He should get over it.
And so I just kept on dating.
I am not proud to admit this, but I was exhibiting the same classic “not my problem, it’s your problem” reaction as he had. And he was probably looking for the same validation and help that I had been looking for when I was feeling jealous.
What we didn’t do right for each other and ourselves.
In both our experiences of jealousy, we were both total jerks. And I think this was because we were totally and completely unprepared to handle jealousy. We didn’t know how to respond to it or how to understand it. We hadn’t done our homework, we didn’t have the proper tools or knowledge, to really respond to jealousy in emotionally intelligent ways.
Our approach to dealing with jealousy was to simply insist for the other to change. The problem was that neither one of us was willing to adjust anything ourselves. We both dug in our heels and stubbornly insisted that the solution was in the other person’s court.
He bought me a workbook on jealousy and wanted me to learn to deal with my jealous feelings.
I insisted on drafting up rules on allowable age differences with the people we date. I sent him articles on why the older man/younger woman dynamic is misogynistic.
He asked me to slow down. I wanted him to deal with his insecurities.
I cannot lie. It got really ugly between us. Because what this all revealed is that neither one of us knew how to handle our own, or the other’s, feelings of jealousy. Plus, to make matters worse, not only were we clueless on how to handle the jealousy, we were both unwilling to alter our actions for the other. We were choosing our individual happiness over the happiness of the other or of our couple. There was no desire to compromise, there was no empathy for the other person. Neither of us leaned into each other. We were in this for our own enjoyment. This was clearly not our proudest moment as a couple.
What we’ve now learned about jealousy.
Lately we’ve been starting to sort it out a bit. We finally agreed that we both desperately needed to do some work on individually figuring out where our jealousy comes from (self-esteem issues? competitiveness?) and what are healthier ways of expressing it (like say, talking to each other instead of sulking?).
It’s definitely been a steep learning curve to get to a place where we can both feel safe(r) to express our jealousy and to give what the other needs. We are not at a place quite yet where we can happily wave bye to each other as we go off on dates, but we are getting there, one small dose of compersion at a time…
