What Can Make Even A #Poly Person Jealous? #polyamory #polyamorous

Q.   What can make even a poly person jealous?

A.   The same things that make non-poly people jealous.  Because, here’s a secret … you ready?

Poly people are people.

That’s right, we’re just regular old human beings like everyone else.  We are not emotionless sociopaths, we are not aliens, we are not relationship wizards.  We’re just people.  We have all the same emotions as you do, and we fuck up our relationships just like you do.

The only real difference is that we have a culture that prioritizes curiosity, authenticity, and autonomy.  That doesn’t mean that individual monogamous people don’t prioritize those things and it doesn’t mean that individual poly people are necessarily *good* at those things.  It means that we like to *say* that those things are important to us.

So we are pressured, from our culture and from our own internal sense of morality, to respect our partners’ right to make choices about their own bodies and emotions, and we are pressured to constantly inquire within ourselves about what the signal light on our dashboards is trying to tell us, and then to solve the actual problem.

Because that’s what jealousy is - it’s a signal light telling you that something is wrong.  That’s all. Sometimes that signal is trying to tell you that you’re in a relationship with someone who is not respecting *your* autonomy, or your boundaries, or whatever.  Sometimes that signal light is trying to tell you that you have unresolved issues to deal with that aren’t your partners’ fault.

Some people don’t like signal lights.  They’re annoying.  So they put a post-it note over their dashboard and try to pretend like the light isn’t on at all.  That’s the culture that most people come from, including most poly people.  It’s the culture that tells us that if you see a signal light, if you feel jealousy, you need to make the thing that’s lighting up your dashboard go dark - you need to stop the activity that’s making you feel jealous. Doesn’t matter *why* you feel jealous, just stop the feeling whatever the cost.  Take out that light.

Poly culture tells us to pop the fucking hood and get your hands dirty trying to figure out why the damn light is on in the first place, and then fix. the. problem.

Unfortunately for us poly people, none of us are born mechanics.  We’re all learning this shit as we go too.  So our signal lights go on for the same reasons everyone else’s do.  We all got the shitty factory programming.

But *some* of us stop the car, get underneath it, and shine flashlights around until we find the problem.  Some monogamous people do that too.  Because we’re all just people.