Problems with Love, Jealously, and Relationships

Matters of The Heart

Young Grasshopper, I'm going to give you some advice:

"Polyamory Website

This is a polyamory website designed to help people understand polyamory and how to deal the problems that arise not only in polyamorous relationships but in monogamous or any relationships: http://www.xeromag.com/fvmonopoly.html

Here’s an excerpt:

“About thirteen or fourteen years ago, I was dating a woman I’d met at college, who I’ll call R. During the course of our relationship, R started dating another close friend of mine, T. And for the first time in my life, for the first time in my history (at the time) of a half-dozen successful long-term poly relationships, I was jealous.

I don’t mean “You know, this makes me uncomfortable” jealous. I mean “completely overwhelmed, smashed to pieces beneath a tidal wave of feelings I could not anticipate or predict or control; gut-wrenching, wanting-to-puke” jealous. I mean the kind of jealous that consumes every other feeling and leaves nothing but ashes behind. I’d never felt those things before, and when I was in the middle of those feelings the only thing—the only thing—I could think about was making the feelings stop, however I could.

Because it happened when she was with T, and didn’t happen at other times, I made the logical, reasonable, and totally stupid assumption that the cause of the feelings was her relationship with T. From there, I reached the equally stupid conclusion that the thing which would make the jealousy go away was if she changed something about her behavior or her relationship with T. (I also didn’t really recognize the jealousy for what it was, powerful as it was, because I’d never felt it before, which only reinforced the notion that it was “caused by” her relationship with him.)

I behaved pretty reprehensibly, playing passive-aggressive games and just generally acting like…well, like a lot of people dealing with their first crisis in a poly relationship act. Predictably, it destroyed my relationship with her. She went on to marry T and cut me out of her life completely; the very thing I was afraid of came to pass because of my jealousy. Had I not behaved the way I did, we’d probably still be close, almost fifteen years later.

In hindsight, now that I have a lot more experience and a bit more emotional wisdom under my belt, I can see where I went wrong. When a person feels jealous, and attributes the jealousy to the things which trigger the jealousy, he doesn’t actually understand the jealousy. It’s a bit like a person who has never seen a rabbit except when it’s being pursued by a dog believing that the dog is the cause of the rabbit. In reality, jealousy is built of other emotions; jealousy is not “caused” in any direct sense by the action which triggers it, but rather by a different emotional response to the act which triggers it.

In my case, R and I had never really discussed her relationship with T; nor had we talked about, in any capacity at all, what her intentions with T were or what effect, if any, that would have on her intentions with and her relationship with me. Put most simply, I saw her and T together, I had no idea what that meant for her and I, so I became afraid of being replaced. The fear of being replaced, in turn, led to the jealousy.

Now, had I actually taken the time to examine the jealousy and really try to understand it, I probably would’ve figured that out. And, once I understood that the jealousy was caused by a fear of being replaced…well, a fear of being replaced is a fear that you can work with. A fear of being replaced, all things considered, is really not that difficult to address. All it requires is conversation about intentions, perhaps a bit of reassurance, and time enough to demonstrate that the conversations and reassurance are genuine, and hey, there you go.

Getting back to the refrigerator:

Fixing the refrigerator means doing exactly that. It means saying “I know that I am feeling jealous. I know that the jealousy is brought about by some other emotion—some emotion which is triggered by the action that makes me jealous. I need to figure out what that other emotion is, and I need to figure out why that action triggers that emotion.”

Until you do that, you are helpless in the face of the jealousy. If you don’t understand it, there is nothing you can do to address it. Trying to understand it isn’t easy; when you’re ass-deep in alligators, it’s easy to forget that the initial goal was to drain the swamp, and when you’re entirely overwhelmed by gut-wrenching emotions that are tearing you to pieces, it’s easy to forget that these emotions are grounded in some other emotions. In the middle of jealousy, all you want is for the jealousy to stop, and you don’t care how.”"

Read and contemplate, please.~

Love,

~Bliss


Originally Posted by the_original_starrchild
I am putting in the effort with R, and I sometimes am totally happy with her, most of the time in fact. But, I can't help but think of K, and I find it keeps happening when R and I are being intimate. And the thing is, K and I were never really that intimate. well, we were close, but like..

I want to be with R, I can still see myself spending the rest of my life with her. I just don't know how to stop my thoughts about K. And it doesn't help that I see little things that remind me of her constantly.

And thank you all for your input, it's nice to have people I can talk to about this, even though I don't know any of you.

Please take the time to read my previous post about jealously.~ This is an issue that can come up regardless of K, and at the worst can end up alienating you from everyone but your lover.~

It's sounds like you may be polyamorous meaning you love R, but you still want to see what a relationship with K would be like, not in the "I just want to have sex with them", but in the "I want to see if I can love K".~

No one's relationships are the same, you don't have to love one and only one person nor do you have to feel obligated to nor are you.~ There is abosulutly nothing wrong with loving your girlfriend but still falling in love with another woman to.~ YOU CAN LOVE THEM BOTH!~

The issue comes up with R's jealously, and this is NOT just related to K but is generally a symptom of a much deeper underlying problem that won't go away by taking K out of the picture.~ Please take the time to read my previous post in it's entirety as this issue is explained in full.~

Love,

~Bliss

I moved my advice from that forum section to here, because it's better for a man to post here than there and everyone can benefit from this advice.

 

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