I guess this is stupid, but I’ve always wondered: Do you ever get jealous about your partners having sex with or being in love with other people? How do you deal with it without forbidding them to do so or ignoring your own feelings? It seems like some poly people (at least on the Internet) are like: “I never get jealous, I just want my partners to have as much sex and love in their lives as possible, too bad for the partner of jealous controlling you!” which I don’t believe.

pervocracy:

I get jealous.

What I don’t get is so jealous I can’t tolerate it, or so jealous I have to act on it.  I get jealous the way I’m jealous of a friend who does fun things without me–I might feel mopey about it or need to talk it through, especially if I’m already feeling emotionally shaky for other reasons, but I don’t actually want to stop them.  I may be jealous of them, but I’m also happy for them.  Especially when they’re so goshdarn cute together.

(I’m expressing my personal experience via analogy, not saying “a lover with other lovers is literally just like a friend with other friends so you’re a possessive jerk if you aren’t okay with that.”  If you experience jealousy differently from me, that’s just a difference, not proof that one or the other of us must be evil.)

It’s tough to admit publicly that this isn’t always painless.  It feels too much like opening myself up to all the accusations of being a doormat who lets my boyfriend sleep around because I can’t say no, of just putting a nice face on cheating, of my lifestyle being inherently unstable.  But I don’t believe in facing those accusations by pretending the lifestyle is all sunshine and roses.  It’s sunshine and roses and cuddles and family and sometimes jealousy and sometimes pain and sometimes it works out in the end and sometimes it doesn’t.

Like any kind of love.