Buss insists that because love and infidelity are universal parts of the human emotional landscape, then jealousy must also be. In Sex at Dawn, authors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá disagree: “Some behaviors that seem normal to contemporary people (and which are therefore readily assumed to be universal) would quickly destroy many small-scale foraging societies, rendering them dysfunctional.”2 The point here is that small groups of people trying to live together harmoniously might not be able to survive if seized in the clutches of jealousy. So how is it that tribes like these have continued to thrive? Ryan and Jethá say it is because people in those small tribes actually don’t experience jealousy.3 And how is that possible? They theorize that it’s because they all sleep with one another regularly and nonmonogamously; so-called infidelity is therefore nonexistent.
We can’t all live in little tribes in which no one knows who anyone’s father is, so what are we Western city dwellers (and Facebook users) supposed to do? Do we have to accept jealousy as a natural part of all our romantic endeavors for the rest of our lovemaking lives?
We seem to have an easier time handling jealousy in other aspects of our existence; for example, Ryan and Jethá mention that firstborn children often feel jealous when a younger sibling comes along.4 I relate to that: when my sister, Alexis, was born, I tried to put her in the garbage can to get rid of her. (It didn’t work.) My mother constantly reminded me that I was just as special as Alexis and that she would always love us both exactly the same amount, but in different ways, because we were different people. And by the time I was four, I believed that. Why shouldn’t this tenet hold true in romantic partnerships, too?
But sometimes it’s not so easy. Jealousy is tricky; the truth is probably somewhere in between Buss’s idea that jealousy is evolutionarily advantageous and Ryan and Jethá’s suggestion that jealousy is mostly a learned trait, taught to us through social conditioning. Maybe musing about the evolution of a complex emotion like jealousy is ultimately not all that useful. “A more meaningful question,” Deborah Anapol writes, “might be, is it possible to overcome jealousy and its destructive effects, or does choosing polyamory imply signing up for a lifetime of jealous agony and melodramatic crises as some people fear?”5
The best advice I’ve found about jealousy is likewise not at all simple. It’s in a book called The New Intimacy, in which author Dr. Ron Mazur says that jealousy doesn’t have a single definition but instead, like love, has a spectrum of versions.6 Depending on which form of jealousy you’re experiencing, there are a range of solutions or things to try. For instance, you might experience what Mazur has dubbed possessive jealousy, fear jealousy, competition jealousy, ego jealousy, or exclusion jealousy.7 What—you don’t know the difference between those five jealousy types? Lucky for you, I’ve created a reference chart on the next page, complete with possible solutions.
Luke and I talk about jealousy all the time; these discussions are a central part of our relationship.
But it wasn’t always that way. Let’s back up a bit, to right before Luke and I moved to Chicago. After Jaedon and I transitioned out of our romantic partnership in February, Luke and I enjoyed a bit of a honeymoon period. Had we not told everyone we were polyamorous, our relationship would have looked a lot like a monogamous one. The only thing that separated it from out-and-out monogamy during that time, really, was the possibility that something would change.
And then something did change the summer before we moved to Chicago, when I met Bob (with whom, you’ll remember, I was extremely sexually compatible) at a summer camp where we were both counselors. Bob taught videography and I taught creative writing. I already knew of Bob and his artwork. He had done a set of “wigglegrams”—film photographs taken with a four-lens camera that were turned into 3-D animated gifs—for the online literary magazine I edited. Later that summer, I ran into him at a crawfish boil on the lake, and he introduced himself. He was wonderfully tall and had on an airbrushed T-shirt. I thought he was cute; before he left, he said he hoped he would see me around.
And now, here we were at summer camp—a place where crushes historically snowball in all the best ways.
On the second day of camp we were both placed in a small group tasked with making a video about how to not damage paintbrushes. We both took this project unnecessarily seriously. I went home and wrote a script that I hoped Bob would think was funny. (Bob was just so cool. He made very hip art. He’d recently produced a music video for Big Freedia.) The script required a real person to play the paintbrush, while another real person picked her up and dipped her hair in real paint and then painted with her. We found a waifish intern with the palest straw-colored hair and a strong-armed counselor to perform in the film. Bob spent hours filming takes. The four-minute video took an entire day to shoot.
After we had the initial footage, I sat in Bob’s classroom to record a few voice-overs. This was three days into our friendship, and it had become clear to me that I was flirting with Bob. I thought that Bob was probably flirting back. In the classroom, I dropped my favorite flirtatious line: “Tell me a secret.”
I expected Bob to pause, because that’s what people usually did. They usually looked intrigued by the question; ordinarily, a person who has been asked this question responds with flirtatious follow-ups: What kind of secret? Like a secret I’ve never told anyone before? Bob didn’t ask the follow-up questions, though. Instead he said, “Here’s a secret: I didn’t have sex for the first time until I was twenty-one.” And then he launched into a sordidly detailed version of the story of the time he lost his virginity.
I recognized this as a flirtatious countermove. You don’t tell a person about your sex life unless you want them to think about you having a sex life. I listened; I giggled at strategic moments; I told him the story of how I lost my virginity. The next day, in the afternoon, Bob kissed me in my writing classroom. And it was exciting. But also, it was awful.
It was awful because I knew it was going to upset the ease of the nice, functionally monogamous relationship I’d fallen into with Luke. Since Jaedon had left the picture, we’d never really discussed any rules; the only thing that we’d been explicit about was that we should tell each other if anything physical happened with anyone else. I think, though, that we both believed that nothing physical was going to happen with anyone else for a long time. We were very in love, and we got to tell all our friends we were polyamorous, so not only were we in love but we also appeared to be a little cooler than we really were.
In July, when Bob kissed me in my writing classroom, I felt the initial flutter of a first kiss (it was a good first kiss; just the right amount of tongue), but then came the sharp stomach plunge that accompanies the knowledge that you’ve done something you shouldn’t have. After camp, I contemplated telling Luke about the kiss with Bob, and then decided to wait. What if it was a one-time kiss? Luke didn’t have to know about a onetime kiss.
Luke came over to make dinner with me that evening. We liked to make coconut-milk curry—it was easy, because you could just throw lots of things into one pot, and the coconut milk made it taste good no matter what. As I chopped sweet potatoes at the kitchen table, my phone buzzed. It was a text message from Bob, I was sure of it. I checked: it was a text message from my sister, Alexis. Well, but, it could have been from Bob. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Bob was probably going to send me a text message. I was unable to concentrate on anything else. In my distraction, I cut the tip of my finger with the chef’s knife.
It was more like a blurt, an inadvertent sound rising up from my belly that I couldn’t keep from coming out of my mouth.
“Oh. Okay,” Luke said. He seemed unsurprised. I’d told Luke about Bob. I hadn’t told him we were mutually flirtatious, exactly, but I’d told him that I met Bob. And then I told him that I thought Bob was funny. And then I told him that Bob had texted me the funniest dog picture last night. And from there, Luke had probably pieced together that maybe we were starting to flirt with each
other.
Luke had been chopping zucchini, and he shoved the slices haphazardly into the already-bubbling saucepot while I went to get a Band-Aid. “Well, that’s cool. To tell you the truth, I’d been thinking about maybe trying to hang out with Kat.” Kat was the girl Luke had met years ago in New Orleans in a stupidly perfect way. (The short version is that he saw her from a distance one afternoon during his first weekend in New Orleans, essentially wished for her, set out to find that kind of girl in the evening, took home someone beautiful, and realized, upon seeing this evening girl’s sunglasses, that the evening girl was the afternoon girl. Luke tells it better than this, but for reasons I’m sure you can guess, it’s not my favorite story.) She was the kind of beautiful that defies description.
“Oh! Yeah. Yeah, you should! You should totally ask out Kat. On, like, a date.” I didn’t want Luke to ask Kat on a date. I understood that this was hypocritical of me, but I also didn’t think this was an even playing field. I mean, I’d been kissed, innocently, by a tall, gawky camp guy, one time! And here Luke was talking about getting back together (basically) with his gorgeous and perfect ex-girlfriend. Was he seriously thinking that these were comparable situations?
“I mean,” I added, “I don’t really think this thing with Bob is going to happen again, you know. I think this was really the only time. But, yeah! If you want to go out with Kat, go out with Kat! Yeah. I’m not going to stop you.”
“Cool,” Luke said. “Shit, we forgot the red onion.”
At this point, it’s unfair to make assumptions about what Luke was thinking. What I thought Luke was thinking was, “Oh, good, I’ve been waiting and waiting for Sophie to make the first move with some loser guy so I can finally have the opportunity to get back together with my gorgeous ex-girlfriend whom I am still totally in love with.” I continued to think that this was what Luke had been thinking until I began writing this chapter. Luckily, because Luke and I live together now, I was able to ask him about it.
I asked him one morning when he was drinking coffee and reading the New York Times Magazine and I was buried in books from the library about jealousy. (Spoiler alert—they all sort of say the same thing: “Jealousy is normal, but you can fight it!”)
“Don’t get distracted by my typing,” I said, transcription fingers ready. “Be as brutally honest as you can be.”
“Well, I guess I felt like I knew it. I felt like there was this confirmation that all my fears were coming true; but also that I knew in my brain that it wasn’t that big a deal and that it would be okay. But I didn’t feel that. There was just this thing where I saw this relationship with Bob coming but you kept denying it, and I felt like it was so obvious. I guess I felt that at some level you had been a little dishonest.”
“Hmmm. Okay. Interesting.” I was trying my best to mimic a therapist and not to seem personally invested in this conversation. “And then, when I told you about Bob, you told me you were going to ask out Kat.”
“I did? Okay, yeah, I guess I did.”
“Did you do that because you wanted me to be jealous?”
I pause here to note the following objective fact: Luke is a saintly person. I don’t know if I’ve adequately depicted him that way, but he really is. Like, he’s always giving up his Saturdays to do odd jobs for our (also odd) next-door neighbor. He loves to put up shelves for Stanley’s cowboy boots or South American relics, and he brings leftover soup to Stanley’s house when we have it. Luke is also the kind of person who gets giddy when you ask him to help you move. He’s there on time and has coffee for everyone and stays after everyone else has left to make sure you don’t need anything moved around.
Here’s another perfect example.
One time as I was watching a pair of cardinals at our bird feeder, I saw Luke (who had been picking up something from the drugstore) lock his bike to the No Parking sign outside our house and then run down the street to help an old lady carry her bags inside, like a kid in a 1950s advertisement for the Boy Scouts. He made three trips and then waved good-bye to her and came home and made me a cup of chamomile tea just because he thought I’d like one. The clincher here is that he never told me that he helped the old woman. I’ve only ever helped old women in order to tell people that I helped them. I recently signed up to volunteer at a soup kitchen, told every person I encountered that day that I had signed up to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and then canceled my volunteer spot the next day.
I add all this so you’ll understand why I assumed that Luke, saintly saint that he is, would tell me that of course he didn’t want me to be jealous! He was interested in going on a date with Kat, but he knew that he wasn’t going to leave me for her or anything, and he was going to take this opportunity—which opened up because I made out with someone else—to go on a date with a person he deeply cared about. And yet, when I asked Luke if he had wanted me to feel jealous, he faltered.
“Um . . . hmm. Maybe?” This threw me.
“Really!” I said. I felt like a scientist who, after months of false starts, had discovered that all mouse bodies react badly to sugar. What I mean is that if there was ever a person who was capable of entering into his first polyamorous relationship without allowing jealousy to dilute his compassion, it was Luke. That Luke, of all people, became a tiny bit malicious once jealousy was added to the mix confirmed for me that jealousy has the capacity to make monsters of us all.
So, the summer before we moved to Chicago, while I made out with Bob at a rich kids’ camp, Luke went on one date with Kat. He bought her a fourteen-dollar drink that was basically an alcoholic sno-ball. (A sno-ball is like a snow cone, but the ice is more finely ground, and New Orleanians don’t like it when you compare the two.) Then they went to Muriel’s restaurant, which is a witchy and mysterious building full of burgundy crushed velvet and gold tassels. They sat out on the balcony to talk. They made out in the Séance Lounge—which is a definitely haunted but nevertheless sexy space that no one ever goes to on the top floor of the restaurant. And I know all this because I asked Luke to tell me everything, and he very calmly did.
I went on lots and lots of dates with Bob, most of which I did not share with Luke. Mostly the “dates” were hooking up in different parts of camp. We had this map of the camp, and when we made out somewhere new, we marked the map with a sticker. Sometimes kids would see the map and ask what the stickers were all about, and we said that those were the places where we knew for a fact there were ghosts. I don’t know about you, but nothing heats up a relationship for me faster than openly lying to children.
“Hooking up” is one of those ambiguous terms that could mean anything from holding hands to penetrative sex (a wide range, I know). A 2011 study conducted by Amanda Holman at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln sought to define the word, but after interviewing 274 college students, she found that there was no real consensus.8 It’s a term that annoys me because it seems to imply a lack of emotional intimacy; it’s ambiguous on purpose to keep a loose framework around what might or might not happen on an alcohol-fueled night when one or both people get physical for the sake of “fun.”
I’m using the term “hooking up” here because I don’t want to incriminate myself as doing anything specifically naughty after hours at a summer camp for children. (The children had all gone home, just to be clear.)
Sometimes I drove Bob home in my Volvo sedan, which didn’t have a working speedometer or a driver’s side mirror. I took twisty routes that didn’t get us back to his house as quickly as possible. In the car, I told Bob stories about my greatest fears and shared my deepest secrets. In the front console of the car were stacks of mixtapes Luke had made me. Bob picked them up and asked why I had so many tapes when it was not 1993. I told him Luke was a mixtape wizard. Bob was enthusiastic about that and wanted to listen to the tapes. “Luke seems like such a cool guy; I hope we can spend some time together,” he said.
Once, Bob invited me to come into his house with him. He lived in a very inexpensive house in an expe
nsive neighborhood. I didn’t completely understand the story of the house, but it was something like this: the person who owned it didn’t want to bother with finishing it properly (it was a huge house), and so this owner let a bunch of people live there and pay cheap rent as long as the people didn’t complain about how there were no doors or how you could see the insulation in the walls or how the entire house seemed to be slightly rotting.
Bob had a regular cast of five roommates, and the house was big enough to accommodate any number of traveling guests at any given time. There were Polaroid pictures of naked women on the walls in the entry hallway; the kitchen was twice the size of my entire house, but it was crawling with cockroaches and geckos that came in through the ample holes in the ceiling. Getting to Bob’s room involved going through a bit of a labyrinth; I couldn’t find my way back to it after I went to the bathroom. (The bathroom didn’t have a door. You had to knock on the door frame before you went in so you didn’t walk in on anyone.) In the summer, when the sticky heat in New Orleans is all but unbearable, Bob put a huge, portable air conditioner in his room to keep it cool, but I still found the space intolerably hot. It seemed like a joke that he had a comforter on his bed—as though he didn’t throw it off every night so he could get as much of his bare skin up next to the AC as possible.
Many Love Page 13
