Ask Anahit: That's Poly-amoré!
In this month's advice column, one reader wonders how to open up a relationship successfully
Me and my partner are thinking of opening things up. Do you have any advice on how to do this in a healthy way and to limit any jealousy?
Ah, polyamory. The 1960s had the swingers, the millennials had It’s Complicated on Facebook, and we have the mainstream-ification of polyamory, ethical nonmonogamy, and a series of increasingly confusing acronyms on Feeld. What I’m not going to do here is try and persuade you to do it (“it’s kind of fucked, really, to control someone else’s sexual autonomy”) because I am not in the pocket of Big Polyamory, nor am I going to try and talk you out of it (“listen, it’s a very utopian idea but how many successful examples have we actually seen”) because I am not a Tory. But what I will do is gently prod this idea that difficult feelings need to be limited or dispensed with if you’re to have the relationship structure that you want.
What if I told you that you don’t have to get rid of your jealousy! What if it didn’t have to be this shameful emotion, but rather a way of processing your feelings, and an opportunity to sit with your partner and allow you both to tend to whatever anxieties it represents! What if we could understand jealousy not as a crisis response but a natural product of the ways we’ve been socialised to understand love as scarcity, and as an opportunity to reframe that!
I just wonder if it’s time to decouple this strong association we have between polyamory and jealousy – I’ve been in monogamous relationships that gave me far more to be jealous of, and polyamorous relationships that were tended to with tenderness and care. It is, arguably, more important how your partner helps you manage those feelings, than crafting artificial situations where you can pretend those feelings don’t exist. Like, on a practical level: go to couples therapy (and see it not as failure but as support), be honest with yourself about what you want, maintain strong boundaries and lines of communication. But maybe also be OK with the jealousy. If Inside Out and Inside Out 2 taught me anything – and boy did they – it’s that sometimes, we have to welcome our most difficult feelings, accept that they will always be there, and realise that that is no bad thing.
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