Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [57]
Sometimes acting out takes the form of making ultimatums about what your partner may and may not do or, worse, trying to enforce retroactive “agreements” by getting all righteously indignant about how anybody could have figured out that it wasn’t okay to take Bob to the movie you wanted to see, and aren’t both of them inconsiderate and rotten? You cannot deal constructively with jealousy by making the other guys wrong. Foisting your feelings off on your partners is a dead end strategy; it just plain won’t work. Jealousy is an emotion that arises inside you; no person and no behavior can “make” you jealous. Like it or not, the only person who can make that jealousy hurt less or go away is you.
Listening to someone who is feeling jealous can be difficult, particularly when the jealousy is focused on you. Sometimes when a lover is jealous and in pain, you may find it easier to feel angry and push that person away, rather than staying close, staying in empathy, listening, caring. When you blame this person for being jealous, what you’re really saying is that you can’t stand to listen to how much your beloved hurts when you’re on the way out the door to play with someone else. This seeming indifference is a crummy way to avoid dealing with your own feelings of guilt.
There are easier solutions. Feelings like to be listened to—other people’s feelings, and your own. Once you understand that you are doing something constructive when you just listen, or ask someone else to just listen to you, you can get those troublesome feelings out in the open and learn to satisfy them. The idea is to be nice to your feelings, to welcome them as guests, till they feel finished and move on through.
If this sounds familiar to you, if you have experienced times like this in your life, we recommend that you practice the skill of staying quietly with both your own and your lover’s pain. Remember, you don’t have to fix anything: all you have to do is listen, to yourself or another, and understand that this hurts. Period.
Janet and a life partner had a difficult moment when she first told him that she was in love with one of her lovers.
I’d been seeing this woman for a while and realized, much to my surprise, that my feelings toward her had gone beyond simple sexual friendship and into a deep romantic emotion that I identified as being in love. When I told my life partner about this, I think his first impulse was to feel threatened, insecure, and, yes, jealous. I could feel him getting close to exploding. It was hard for me not to try to fix things, to take back what I’d said about being in love, or to simply leave the discussion altogether because I felt scared and guilty.
But he stayed on course, allowing the feelings to present themselves, but not allowing them to drive him into acting angry or defensive. He asked me some questions about what exactly this meant to us, and I was able to explain that I wasn’t planning to leave him, that my love for her was in no way a threat to my love for him, that she and I weren’t expecting to become primary partners—that, really, nothing had changed except my own emotions and the words I was using to describe them. We went on to revisit this discussion from time to time, especially when our busy schedules permitted me to spend some extra time with my lover.
She and I drifted apart fairly easily later on as we moved on to other things in our lives … and, for that matter, so did he and I, less easily. But all three of us who were involved in that particular triangle can look back with pride at the way we gave each other the space and respect we needed to process a change that at first felt terribly threatening to us all.
You can feel