I am considering opening up my relationship with my boyfriend, but I am worried about feeling jealous. How do you recommend dealing with jealousy in an open relationship?
First of all, jealousy is not confined to non-monogamy, so you might benefit from looking at how you have managed difficult emotions in the past. You also need to make sure this change in your relationship is what you both really want in order to avoid unnecessary resentment in the future.
The thing about jealousy is that its not actually an emotion, but an umbrella term that covers any number of emotions. Fear of loss, insecurities about our own merits as a partner, or feeling left out of fun can all be parts of jealousy. So you’ve got to get to the bottom of it. That’s a really difficult thing to do with scary and painful feelings.
Lots of us never allow ourselves to actually sit with our emotions because we are afraid they will hurt too bad or take over completely. That won’t happen– emotions are like waves. They build up force, reach a climax, and then fade away. If we allow them to come and go, they will, but that means we have to sit tight and let them come.
Many people, especially ones who consider themselves sexually liberated have a hard time accepting jealousy. How could a good open-minded person feel something as silly as jealousy? Well, you’re human. If we allow ourselves to feel bad about our emotions, they become more difficult to shake.
So when jealously happens to rear its little head, what do we do? Allow the feelings to come without pushing them away or clinging to them. Recognize what the emotion we label as ‘jealousy’ really is. Accept our primary emotion without adding others to it.
Finally, we may not have control over how we feel, but we do have control over how we act on feelings. If you do what the jealous feelings make you want to do, you are allowing jealousy to have power over you. Try to sit with the feelings and do nothing. Its important to talk to your partner about how you feel without blaming them. You can do so by using ‘I’ statements (”I felt left out when you went on your date with Sally” instead of “You made me feel left out when you went on that date”).
If you let it, jealousy can lead you to deeper understanding of yourself and greater intimacy with your partner. If you want to learn more, pick up a copy of Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up or Easton and Hardy’s The Ethical Slut.
