On Jealousy in non-mono
“I know there’s so much more going on, as I’ve been on the other side, but my threat response is I can feel right now…”
The verb ‘trigger’ sounds a bit abrupt. The analogy of lighting a taper or portfire promotes better imagery, having the potential to start the fuse, building with fiery potential inside, counting down to a TNT boom or a damp squib of a cartoon pop. The feeling we get when our partner is connecting emotionally or physically with others behind closed doors or even in front of us, is a nauseating, creeping conflagration we are all bound to experience.
I’ve typically been very good at handling my partner spending time with others. But I got pangs of jealousy when Maya would duck out of the room to speak to FWB Xav, or when my mind jumped to the assumption that she was arranging to meet with Kuba’s friend Juan, or when she disappeared with FWB Todd for a week, or when she invited new dates to her gigs without me, or when she spoke to other people at clubs and concerts. Jealousy isn’t typical for me. I realised that it was something about my unsureness about what I meant to Maya that filled that gap with doubt that we were an item. And so I would turn, unreacting, to my mantra, the aspartame to her sucralose.
When eventually Maya would explain that she was doing various innocuous and even explicit things in the name of fun, I could relax. Every such time, I would chide my imagination for exaggerating the risk, the truth being more benign and even beneficial to our growing connection when these extra dates of hers turned out to be a juice not worth the squeeze.
Jealousy in non-mono rears its head mainly when our partners are at hang-outs, hook-ups. Another common scenario is during group sex, when one party becomes convinced that their partner is enjoying another playmate more than they ‘should’. How to combat it is the most common question in non-monogamy, thus I’d be missing a trick not to provide a powerful guide to managing it.
Working with the definition that envy is the feeling of desiring something that someone has, then jealousy is the fear-based reaction to the idea of losing someone’s attention/time/affection which we value greatly. The primary source of all jealousy is insecurity and scarcity mentality regardless of whether the insecurity was reinforced by upbringing or as innate as studies on social primates have highlighted.
Work by Behaviouralists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal in 2003 showed that capuchin monkeys are content to be rewarded with cucumber pieces for completing a simple task, that is until one monkey’s reward is openly upgraded to a sweet grape. The ‘short-changed’ monkeys then have a 50% likelihood of refusing the reward or ceasing participation altogether. The effect has been observed too in canines and corvids. In fact, primates, canines, and rats have been observed sharing their more potent rewards out of compassion if they see that fellows have received smaller rewards for the same task as theirs, but also out of reverence for social standing if the short-changed tribe member is of higher status.
In humans, Güth’s Ultimatum Game in 1982 showed that people on the bum-deal end of a money splitting decision of another will reject unfair offers, forgoing any cash, even at a cost to themselves. Dividing $10, $8 for me, $2 for you was met with rejection in order to instinctively punish inequality.
The classic Relative Income study by Solnick & Hemenway in 1998 saw that many people given a choice of earning an extra £10,000 per annum whilst department colleagues earn an extra £5,000 each was more popular than choosing a raise of £20,000 on the condition that others receive a raise of £40,000 each. This is interpreted as people valuing status over absolute welfare, or preferring to avoid being behind others regarding reward, even at a cost.
The story of Kenneth Feinberg, who had to design a compensation system for September 11th’s (11th September’s?) victims’ families. His initial approach was to structure payouts based on projected lifetime earnings meaning a deceased high-earning professional’s family would receive far more than, say, a cleaner or firefighter’s beneficiaries. This triggered reactions that map closely onto the controlled experiments where families weren’t bypassed questions of “Is this enough money?” to ask “Why is that life worth more than my late father’s?” Some families refused compensation. This would be an apt moment to take stock of how our isolated envy spikes in the context of our partner spending an evening with a playmate compares to the dilemma that mourning victims of terrorism continued to be traumatised in such a public way for decades after their loss.
Takahashi’s fMRI scans in 2009 showed that envy correlates with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex which is engaged typically in pain or conflict processing. Furthermore, when a high-status rival suffers a setback, reward areas activate, giving credence to schadenfreude as an instilled trait — a sort of evil twin of envy, as if envy wasn’t evil enough. In fact if feeling bad that someone had some good luck is envy, then the congruent notion of feeling bad that someone had bad luck is ‘pity’, and feeling good that someone had good luck is ‘compersion’.
So in the context of a partner going out with a friend, are we envious of our partner for getting to experience an evening sitting at the pictures? Or being treated to a meal at a fancy restaurant? Or getting to connect with a nice person found on a dating platform?
More likely we are jealous because of, not ‘at’, the external person robbing us of our partner’s time, resources, and attention. It’s important to restate at this point that love is not limited, but time, resources, and attention are the finite currency of love. On antonyms again, if feeling bad that someone took resources from us is jealousy, then the opposite is altruism. Feeling good that someone gave us resources is ‘appreciation’, and feeling bad that someone gave us resources is ‘guilt’.
It is a legitimate tactic to avoid the trigger using a ‘don’t ask don’t tell primary strategy. We hear this deployed in some open relationships, not because the partners think open is amoral (although in their lack of sharing within and without the partnership, it be a bid for secrecy if they feel that outsiders are less understanding), but because they are talking around uncomfortable topics that incur more pain than is worth dealing with directly or indirectly by working on the instilled belief system that maps partner’s egredient sexuality to our own coital insufficiency in the bedroom.
Think back to the times when we’ve been most envious, say, our sibling getting an extra cuddle or chocolate bar, or our colleague getting an unwarranted raise, or our friend landing a partner who has access to a second home in Cyprus, and note the following:
Recompense: We feel less envious when the recipient has worked for the reward.
Plentiful Supply: We feel less envious when we know that a similar success could happen to us, the source not being exhausted.
Stranger: We feel less envious when we are not proximal to the recipient.
Altruism: We feel less envious when the recipient intends to treat us as a condition of their good fortune.
Time and distance: We feel less envious when the receipt happened a long time and way away.
So the instinctual negative feeling is a mixture of unfairness, resource competition, emotional investment, and altruistic skepticism. Envy can be legitimately accompanied by feelings of warmth when we know that the recipient worked for their reward, the rewards are still available for others, we love the happy sod, and that happy sod is a selfless sod. Leaning into these facts the next time an acquaintance shares good news will help steer us away from wholly negative instincts.
As for jealousy, the ransoming of our friend’s time by another contender can be thought of in terms of a risk of disruption to our world. ‘Threat response’ is a better term. Such a comparison has been studied:
The most quantitative view of jealousy was developed by Pfeiffer and Wong in 1989. Their framework sought to measure jealousy through operationalised variables, allowing for empirical assessment rather than purely descriptive or theoretical approaches. By constructing scales and categorising different dimensions of jealousy, they provided an evidence-based foundation for understanding its intensity, triggers, and behavioural manifestations. This approach enabled researchers to analyse patterns across populations and distinguish between situational and dispositional aspects of jealousy, forming a basis for subsequent psychological studies.
One such research was American Psychologist David Buss, who showed in 1992 that men reported more jealousy at partners’ physical infidelity, and women more at emotional infidelity. The evolutionary explanation for this is grounded in paternal uncertainty and resource diversion.
Layering on attachment theory, Guerrero & Andersen showed in 1998 that pursuantly attached individuals experienced the most intense jealousy. Barelds & Dijkstra showed in 2006 that low self-esteem leads to higher jealousy. Hart & Behrens showed in 2013 that high neuroticism strongly predicted jealousy intensity. Agreeableness reduced it.
Moors, Conley, Edelstein, & Chopik showed in 2015 that non-mono partners don’t feel less jealousy overall than monogamous partners, but they cope more effectively through communication about the interactions and tapping into compersion, having more opportunities to watch partners enjoy other people, seeing it for the same non-threatening act that they too enjoy with their FWBs.
American Psychologist Terri Conley found in her 2017 study that non-mono subjects reported less jealousy when rules were clarified; secrecy was more toxic than casual sexcapades.
Now that we understand a bit about the nature of jealousy, we can explore key strategies to tackle it.
Using IPRO Therapy, we can address the 4 cognitive stages in turn:
Ask for better Input. We don’t know the facts until they are shared with us. For those who find it hard to hear what their partner is doing with someone else, it’s not best to just let them tell us every detail, whilst enduring anecdotes if there’s something they really want to tell us. Everything outside of the facts of the report must be strictly scrutinised, lest our hallucination run riot.
By leaning into past experiences of our partners having fun encounters and returning at the end of the day or week, then mature Processing means we are following our subjective albeit empirical data collection rather than imagination. We can also map our partner’s time with others onto our own similar past dates, or by discussing and comparing similar situations from fellow non-monogamists. Then we will gravitate towards a non-hypocritical belief about the event that finds that it is fair and non-threatening.
If your instinct is landing on “I’m losing more than I signed up to risk”, considering alternatives is easier said than done. In principal it involves understanding that we are losing not as much as we feel whilst being okay with surrendering more, at least temporarily. A jealous Result is one of feeling that we are losing, if it can even be said that we are even entitled to, let alone administrator of our partner’s attention. A mature result factors in that our absent partner wants to think of us as someone who supports them in their actions and pursuance of fun.
The default Output is a desperate panic to sabotage, since course-correction is out of our power. Our job with every course of action is to pull the relationship into a direction that we prefer whilst being mindful of our partners preferences. If the gap is too far then the relationship will struggle. If the gap if foggy, then the output is to ask for more input. And so the IPRO analysis cycles with fine-tuning and aligns lives as it does so.
To slow down and focus on the good, is a decent heuristic for IPRO. There’s a lot to be said for adopting the energy of an experienced non-mono friend we admire. We might summon their energy and role play as them. We might even reach out to them and ask them what they might do and what they would feel in the same situation. In time, conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.
The most powerful tool in jealousy management is factorisation. The factors of a jealousy-worthy situation (partner’s playdate date or group sex) are 3 fold:
What qualities does my partner have that are causing the response?
What qualities does the FWB have that is causing the response?
What qualities does the setting have that is causing the response?
Here are some examples of what we might newly recognise once this factorisation is executed.
Partner: “I feel more jealous when my partner…”
“…is (un)communicative.”
“…shows/hides that they enjoy the experience.”
“…prioritises the experience over things we mentioned doing together.”
“…invests (no) attention and resources in the experience.”
“…is physically (not) very X.”
“…is emotionally (not) very X.”
“…is logistically (not) very X.”
FWB: “I feel more jealous when my partner’s playmate…”
“…is male/female”
“…shows/hides that they enjoy the experience.”
“…invests (no) attention and resources in the experience.”
“…prioritises the experience over things they mentioned doing with their friends.”
“…is physically (not) very X.”
“…is emotionally (not) very X.”
“…is logistically (not) very X.”
Setting: “I feel more jealous when the scenario…”
“…involves intimate moments.”
“…involves doing something special or unique.”
“…involves doing something that is normally our ritual.”
“…involves some duration/ ratio of playing and not-playing.”
“…involves doing things that I can’t do/haven’t done.”
For examples of X we can turn to my PEL-SAC analysis [See — On Compatibility] for 10 of Physical, Emotional, and Logistical traits. They are powerful questions to ask ourselves as some example germinating seeds of jealousy lie in some very specific and counterintuitive attributes of partners’ playmates. I provide the following examples of how we sub-factorise first the Partner:
“I grew jealous with this partner because they are more/less attractive than others.”
“I grew jealous with this partner because they are more/less sexually experienced than others.”
“I grew jealous with this partner because they are more/less emotionally raw than others.”
“I grew jealous with this partner because they are more/less extroverted than others.”
“I grew jealous with this partner because they have more/less free time than others.”
“I grew jealous with this partner because they live closer/further than others.”
Now here are some examples of sub-factorising the PEL of our partner’s playmates:
“I grew jealous when my partner played with someone who enjoyed oral sex more than I do. My partner enjoys giving it but my bits are too sensitive to endure their tongue.”
“I grew jealous when my partner played with a blonde person. My partner always had a thing for blondes.”
“I grew jealous when my partner got with a tall person. My partner always had a thing for tall people.
“I grew jealous when my partner went gay for an evening. Why do they suddenly have the confidence to experiment when I’m not in the picture?”
“I grew jealous when my partner went home with their ex for old times’ sake.”
“I grew jealous when my partner got with someone who’s richer, younger, prettier than I am. Is that who they wish I was?”
“I grew jealous when my partner got with someone who’s poorer, older, and uglier than I am. Have they no taste? Sex with me can’t be about my good qualities.”
“I grew jealous when my partner found someone that lives just round the corner from them. My partner will dump me out of convenience.”
I could compose a specific IPRO to each of these, but they would all be variations of:
Input: Be curious. Ask for more details about why your partner seeks opportunities or is spending attention and resources with particular people. Be prepared to take “because it’s fun” for an answer.
Processing: Be introspective. Hold on to what really matters in the relationship, namely alignment in values (and timelines thereof), compatibility in attraction, and love and monitor that what you put into the relationship you also get out of it.
Result: Be gracious. If your conclusion is anything other than “my partner and their playmates are doing this to hurt me” then rejoice. If “I think I’m being replaced” then recapture the thought process of your similar experiences and find that the nature of non-mono is far from that. Further detachment between sex and romance, between kink and life-purpose may be required [See — On Sex positivity].
Output: Be patient. Explain the shape and nature of your jealousy, and if there are no glaring threats to your partnership, then continue to support your partner in their exploration of new dynamics. Let us not condemn our partner’s acts, when their acts are necessarily following on from the drivers of their brain.
One key technique is to project experientially. What, based on conversations or personal experience, is our partner likely to be thinking and feeling about us. The result is never going to be that they think worse of us for letting them choose to spend their time or their body with someone else. When we are on a date, although we might be so in the moment that we aren’t actively thinking about our partner, our love for them grows in correlation with every freedom of ours that they ‘let us have’ or more accurately, vow to uphold from the day they met us. And so that is the mindset we must assume in our partner and be glad that we are the enabler of their being able to do what feels natural and enjoyable to them.
One more powerful note on ‘speaking the feeling out’. I don’t just mean saying what we fear, but stepping through what we imagine in every possible detail and diving into what element of it is scary. For most of what we might conjure, our partner is likely to say “but I don’t do that with my FWB”, or “it doesn’t feel like that with my playmate”, or “but you and I regularly do that together too”.
One of the themes of Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication (2015) is to look behind the covert acts of looking through our partner’s phone, questioning our partner about their nights with friends, or tracking our partner to see where they are, to vocalise the source of these intrusions. This will nearly always be some variant of “I need to feel as important to my partner as they are to me”, and the relationship strategy for how to achieve this might be “I want to share as many moments and words as I (people tend to) need in order to be convinced”, and the tactic for how to execute this might be “I need to know that no matter the significance of what my partner does with others, they would be happy to share experiences of a similar significance with me”. Note that we aren’t saying “Their most significant experiences are with me”, but we are always listening to what we need as a minimum to feel special enough for how we like to love and be loved. Most of us would want to prioritise and be prioritised by our partner to know that they are the most important connection in our lives; this is the case in 99% of relationships.
At the end of the evening, we never want to be at the centre of why our partner should have any reason to regret their time doing what felt right for them. If behaviours and triggers were reversed in that situation, would we want our partner to understand that pursuing what feels right for us is instinctual and sometimes carelessly unilateral. But let’s not allow there to be any more reason to fall out beyond the trappings of our own selfish, deprogrammable minds. It is our minds which we are all singularly responsible for understanding and putting to better use than finding ourselves replaceable by the person who we love and who loves us in return.
