I’m curious, because I feel like I can understand where you are coming from:
Does it feel disorienting when dealing with spoken or unspoken rules that go into dealing with a monogamous relationship? Like it is difficult to understand what they want, or that it is irrational and frustrating?
Do you have a felt aversion to feeling like your partner (you could use a hypothetical here, or one of your existing or previous partners) is restricting you through expectations that interfere with your freedom of interacting with other people? How intense is this feeling?
Do you have a similar felt aversion to feeling like you are restricting your partner in similar ways? How intense is this feeling?
What do you think about relationship anarchy?
Oh yeah, also could you mention your gender, sexual orientation and intensity of sexual drive? If you are, say, female asexual romantic, the context of your felt senses for the questions above would probably be quite different compared to that of, say, a male heterosexual heteroromantic.
Roughly 30 year old male, heterosexual, heteroromantic. Sex drive: the most obvious metric is how often I masturbate, which averaged 8 times a week during 2023; some googling yields an article saying it’s 3 times a week for 84% of men aged 18-30, so I guess that’s significantly higher than median—interesting, never realized that. Oh, and I figured out back in middle school that my sex drive and romantic drive are distinct: sometimes they overlap, and certainly the activities that fulfill one will likely inflame the other, but also I can definitely feel either one without the other; more detail here.
For background… in high school, I found that, among my social group, it seemed like most of the girls who had boyfriends were comfortable with at least a hug, and a few were comfortable with quite a lot of physical affection. I benefited from this and appreciated it, and pondered the morality of it… and eventually decided on most of the stuff in the grandparent comment. Since then, all my relationships have been explicitly poly.
Does it feel disorienting when dealing with spoken or unspoken rules that go into dealing with a monogamous relationship? Like it is difficult to understand what they want, or that it is irrational and frustrating?
It’s similar to how I think of religious people (I’m an atheist): generally “I’ve learned to shrug and not bother people about it”, but if I think about it, it becomes “irrational and frustrating”—so I usually avoid thinking about it.
Do you have a felt aversion to feeling like your partner (you could use a hypothetical here, or one of your existing or previous partners) is restricting you through expectations that interfere with your freedom of interacting with other people? How intense is this feeling?
This is hypothetical, but what I would want to do is go through the rationale: exactly why do you have this preference? Ok, you bring up this reason; is that your true objection, or do you still object to situations where that doesn’t apply? There would likely be a lot of iterations of this, as outlined in the GP comment. Possible outcomes: (a) she converts to polyamory, (b) she admits it’s an irrational preference but nevertheless she holds it, (c) she finds the process some combination of insulting, unpleasant, and lowering her trust in me, and it doesn’t lead to a constructive end. I expect the result would be (c) for most people who aren’t, like, >95th percentile devoted to the ideal of “clear rational thought, and getting offended is low-status” [and many of those people seem to already be polyamorous, though my sample is probably biased], which is why this remains mostly hypothetical. [I did ask one pretty-rational monogamous person where she drew the line in terms of what forms of touch counted as cheating, and it was from her that I got the “If you’re asking this question then we’re not compatible”.]
I might be able to work with (b), depending on the details of the arrangement. To answer your question… The thing that I feel is, if you’re imposing a significant restriction on your partner, you should do your best to factor it down—do I really need all that, or is it just a subset? If you haven’t factored it down, and aren’t willing to when asked, then you might be unnecessarily harming your partner’s happiness, just because you don’t want to deal with thinking it through. This strikes me as inconsiderate, and quite odd if you also claim to love your partner. Or maybe there’s something else going on, and if they aren’t able to articulate it, that’s a mark against their capabilities of introspection and communication.
If I take that person’s word—that it’s not about having preferences about my behavior, it’s about wanting someone who has the entire monogamy ethos and psychology built into their brain (one consequence of which is that I wouldn’t be asking such questions)… Well, ok, I can treat that as like wanting someone who subscribes to the same religion as you. (I believe she’s also religious.) If that’s really the story, it would be nice if more people, on all sides, were aware of it.
Do you have a similar felt aversion to feeling like you are restricting your partner in similar ways? How intense is this feeling?
Well, I don’t think I feel the urge to impose such a restriction. I’ve been in various poly relationships, and I don’t think I’ve felt anything I’d call “jealousy”. When she’s being affectionate with her primary boyfriend or husband, my reaction is “Ah, good.” If she’s experimenting with a new partner, and I imagine that she likes him more than me—well, then I might want to figure out why. Depending on the scenario, it might be “He is in fact better than me on certain dimensions she cares about”, or “This looks like a short-term thing”, or “He’s treating her in a way she likes a lot, and perhaps I should understand better the difference between that and how I normally treat her”. At worst it might lead to self-doubt or something; but being angry at either of them seems stupid. (Or, I guess, in context, it could constitute a broken promise [like if she’s not using protection with a new partner] or a lie or something—that would probably be the worst, and being angry at that is reasonable.) But jealousy, as an inherent “I’m offended at the idea of her being with someone else”, doesn’t seem to be a thing for me. Perhaps I’m better at factoring down my responses. :-P
If I imagine wanting to impose other kinds of restrictions, like “Don’t go get addicted to drugs” (although that seems like a sufficiently impulsive and stupid thing to do that I’m unlikely to get involved with anyone who would do it absent any restriction)… Anyway, ethically speaking, I think the way it works is, if it affects me, then I have a right to complain about it, proportional to how much it affects me. “Don’t go spending all your time elsewhere and have no time for me”—that is reasonable to the extent that it means I get a less-than-reasonable (or less-than-negotiated) amount of time with her. My ethics dictate what I have standing to complain about (if anything), and I let my emotions follow. I think that has worked reasonably well. Incidentally, I’m a libertarian and generally don’t want to restrict other people’s behavior in any circumstance.
What do you think about relationship anarchy?
Depending on exactly what it means… Looking through the original post… There’s various fuzzy stuff I’m not sure about, and some stuff I dislike. Things I would agree with, with some editing (including reordering the paragraphs because I think this order is more sensible):
Customize your commitments
Life would not have much structure or meaning without joining together with other people to achieve things—constructing a life together, raising children, owning a house or growing together through thick and thin. Such endeavors usually need lots of trust and commitment between people to work. Relationship anarchy is not about never committing to anything—it’s about designing your own commitments with the people around you, and freeing them from norms dictating that certain types of commitments are a requirement for love to be real, or that some commitments like raising children or moving in together have to be driven by certain kinds of feelings. Start your designs from scratch and be explicit about what kind of commitments you want to make with other people!
Change through communication
For most human activities, there is some form of norm in place for how it is supposed to work. If you want to deviate from this pattern, you need to communicate—otherwise things tend to end up just following the norm, as others behave according to it. Communication and joint actions for change is the only way to break away. Radical relationships must haveprobably need conversation and communication at the heart—not as a state of emergency only brought out to solve “problems”. Communicate in a context of trust. We are so used to people never really saying what they think and feel—that we have to read between the lines and extrapolate to find what they really mean. But such interpretations can only build on previous experiences—usually based on the norms you want to escape. Ask each other about stuff, and be explicit!
I do think having preexisting norms for what a “relationship agreement” usually looks like is useful, but I also think any single norm applied to everyone is going to be suboptimal in many cases, particularly to people who aren’t typical (like me); and it seems obviously a good idea for people to alter their agreements to fit them better. In theory, you should be able to negotiate any mutually positive relationship into existence, barring transaction costs (and the more unusual the terms, the longer it takes to negotiate them, so that’s a cost one should consider, but it’s finite). A potential danger is if one person is much better at negotiating than the other… but, well, there are plenty of other ways for people to be abusive, and I don’t think this significantly increases that risk. There’s a potential awkwardness if other people don’t know what words to use when talking about your relationship, but that seems a trivial concern. And yeah, communication, and therefore introspection, seems obviously very important.
I notice that you go ‘principles / ethics first, then emotions’ in the way you seem to reason about things in your comment. I find that I endorse the opposite: ‘emotions first, then principles / ethics’. That is, I trust that my emotional core informs what I care about, and why and how I care about something, significantly more than whatever I believe or claim my principles are. And then I investigate my emotions, after putting a high importance on them making sense. (You can interpret this extremely uncharitably and claim that I have no principles whatsoever, but this is a low-effort attempt by me to elicit something I notice and am trying to point at, that is deeper than words and involves cognitive algorithms that mostly aren’t verbal.) This is kind of why I asked the questions from an emotions-first perspective.
This is hypothetical, but what I would want to do is go through the rationale: exactly why do you have this preference? Ok, you bring up this reason; is that your true objection, or do you still object to situations where that doesn’t apply? There would likely be a lot of iterations of this, as outlined in the GP comment. Possible outcomes: (a) she converts to polyamory, (b) she admits it’s an irrational preference but nevertheless she holds it, (c) she finds the process some combination of insulting, unpleasant, and lowering her trust in me, and it doesn’t lead to a constructive end. I expect the result would be (c) for most people who aren’t, like, >95th percentile devoted to the ideal of “clear rational thought, and getting offended is low-status”
I expect people on the other end of this conversation would feel pressured and uncomfortable and forced to accept some logically reasoned argument for something that they don’t feel comfortable about. I wouldn’t want to subject people to such conversations, because I don’t expect this would actually change their opinion or result in outcomes they would reflectively endorse. I think this is downstream of you believing your way of reasoning about things might help or apply to other people—because I do the exact same thing when trying to help people or even elicit a more accurate model of their beliefs (see the questions I asked you for example).
At worst it might lead to self-doubt or something; but being angry at either of them seems stupid.
Yeah, I don’t think anger is the emotion most often associated with the emotional distress one would experience if they see someone they consider their partner having romantic or sexual interactions with another person. I don’t think most people in the rationalist community who seem to be more comfortable in monogamous relationships would agree with that statement, and this IMO is an uncharitable interpretation of what goes on in their heads.
Or, I guess, in context, it could constitute a broken promise [like if she’s not using protection with a new partner] or a lie or something—that would probably be the worst, and being angry at that is reasonable.
It seems like you police your emotions, and dislike feeling emotions that seems ‘unreasonable’ to you. This is interesting. I think ymeskhout accepts and seems to endorse all emotions he feels, and I try to do similar. I think that is genuinely a better way of doing things than the opposite.
I don’t think I have a better mechanistic understanding of my friends who seem to have similar romantic and sexual orientations due to this conversation, partially because most of them seem to also follow a significant amount of ‘emotions first’ decision-making, and therefore I think it is unlikely that your mindspace is close enough to theirs that I understand them better. I’ve tried hard to understand them though, and I’m glad I feel like I understand better where you are coming from.
Sometimes I look at what I want based on my emotions, then see if there’s anything nearby that ethics allows. Sometimes I use ethics to see what’s permissible, then use my emotions to decide if I’m satisfied with any of them. Both strategies have their place. Shrug.
Yeah, I don’t think anger is the emotion most often associated with the emotional distress one would experience if they see someone they consider their partner having romantic or sexual interactions with another person. I don’t think most people in the rationalist community who seem to be more comfortable in monogamous relationships would agree with that statement, and this IMO is an uncharitable interpretation of what goes on in their heads.
In a recent community study of jealousy 15% of both men and women reported that they had, at some time, been subjected to physical violence at the hands of a jealous partner (Mullen & Martin 1994). The role played by jealousy in both initiating domestic violence and in attempts by perpetrators to justify their violence cannot be overstated. [...]
Gibbens (1958) in his study of 195 homicide cases reported that jealousy was the prime motivation in 22% of the killings. In Wolfgang’s (1958) study of 588 homicides and in West’s (1968) study, jealousy was the third most common motivation. In a more detailed study of homicide in Detroit, jealousy emerged as the leading cause of domestic killing while among the male killers the violence emerged both in response to apprehended infidelity and to desertion.
I think suspecting anger is a reasonable prior to have, and especially if you weight by what emotion / reaction is most dangerous (especially in a man), I stand by the idea that worrying first about anger is reasonable. (Maybe I should adjust for rationalists being n standard deviations less violent than the general population? Though we do have our Ziz people. At any rate, I didn’t say who I was comparing to, and intended the general population of monogamists.)
That aside, the point is that, from what I can tell, it doesn’t look like I have any hardcoded negative reaction due to jealousy (i.e. one that isn’t rationally explained by other context), or if I do it’s too small for me to detect it. I haven’t gone as far as witnessing sex acts by my partner, so I can’t completely rule out some primal reaction… but, well, I’ll note that “Exhibitionism/Voyeurism” is historically one of my favorite categories on Literotica, and it is plausible that my net reaction would be positive.
It seems like you police your emotions, and dislike feeling emotions that seems ‘unreasonable’ to you. This is interesting. I think ymeskhout accepts and seems to endorse all emotions he feels, and I try to do similar. I think that is genuinely a better way of doing things than the opposite.
Let’s think about another sense of the term “jealousy”. (Or maybe “envy” is the right word; some people draw a distinction between the two, and I’m not sure if people agree on what the distinction is.) I mean the scenario where something good happens to one of your friends, and you have a negative emotional reaction to this.
If that means you punish your friends anytime they do well (“crabs in a bucket” syndrome), that seems absolutely awful; I certainly would not want my friends to do that to me, and therefore I shouldn’t do that to them. Still, it seems that something resembling it is a reaction some people have. Is there anything potentially legitimate in it? Why, yes:
If there is some allegedly fair judge or other process that’s supposed to hand out windfalls, and your friend gets much more than you do despite you thinking you’re entitled to the same, then it may be that the judge is unfair and someone is lying to you. Then it makes sense to get mad—at the judge. It only makes sense to get mad at your friend if your friend is in cahoots with the judge, or is otherwise contributing to the unfairness of the process.
To my mind, if your emotions seem to propel you in a dangerous or unethical direction, then usually there’s something adjacent to it or a version of it that’s safe and good, and if you discover that, and imagine the variations on situations, you often find that the “good” reaction is emotionally satisfying. (I went through the above reasoning sometime during high school, and since then I think I’ve had appropriate reactions to any windfalls my friends have received.) Whereas if you act badly on those emotions before figuring that out, in retrospect it’s childish and stupid and regrettable. So if my emotions push me in a direction I know is bad, I would tend to hold them in abeyance, avoid acting on them, until I understand the situation better.
Oh, and on a general note, I don’t assign ethical valence to having emotions, only to the actions you take. Yes, that includes e.g. wanting to murder someone; as long as you don’t act on it, there’s nothing immoral or unethical about having the emotion. (It seems to be received wisdom that feeling guilt or otherwise punishing yourself for emotions is counterproductive.) Better to think through “These are the situations in which killing someone is appropriate (e.g. self-defense), those are the ones where it’s not”, and be done with it.
I’m not sure exactly what qualifies as “policing” my emotions. But the above probably has enough to decide that.
I did ask one pretty-rational monogamous person where she drew the line in terms of what forms of touch counted as cheating, and it was from her that I got the “If you’re asking this question then we’re not compatible”
I think this is evidence in favor of the hypothesis that she wanted someone who was conceptually committed to monogamy, not just committed to monogamous behavior. For such a person, that question sounds like “I want to be as non-monogamous as possible up to some arbitrary line, and then stop, so as to avoid breaking my commitment to you. Please tell me where that line is.” I think if you imagine all potentially non-monogamous-ish behaviors on a one-dimensional X axis, with some kind of intimacy-weighted frequency on the Y axis, then this question implies that your frequency graph might be flat or even increasing up until the “policy line”, and then down to (hopefully) zero.
I would submit that the behavior of an actually-monogamous person would look more like exponential decay as you move right on the X-axis, and that you may not want or need a “policy line” except that, because the Y-axis is intimacy-weighted, you likely reach a point where it’s not possible to engage in more than zero of that behavior while continuing the exponential decay curve.
I think this is correct. A parallel scenario could be agreeing to go vegetarian but then asking for an upper limit for how much meat you can eat second-hand from your friends (since they were going to throw it away anyways). You would be revealing a frequency graph that is similarly increasing up to the policy line, indicating serious reluctance to be a vegetarian. There’s nothing wrong with this necessarily, but if someone is screening you for how much you really care about being vegetarian, it’s reasonable for them to harbor suspicion.
I’m curious, because I feel like I can understand where you are coming from:
Does it feel disorienting when dealing with spoken or unspoken rules that go into dealing with a monogamous relationship? Like it is difficult to understand what they want, or that it is irrational and frustrating?
Do you have a felt aversion to feeling like your partner (you could use a hypothetical here, or one of your existing or previous partners) is restricting you through expectations that interfere with your freedom of interacting with other people? How intense is this feeling?
Do you have a similar felt aversion to feeling like you are restricting your partner in similar ways? How intense is this feeling?
What do you think about relationship anarchy?
Oh yeah, also could you mention your gender, sexual orientation and intensity of sexual drive? If you are, say, female asexual romantic, the context of your felt senses for the questions above would probably be quite different compared to that of, say, a male heterosexual heteroromantic.
Roughly 30 year old male, heterosexual, heteroromantic. Sex drive: the most obvious metric is how often I masturbate, which averaged 8 times a week during 2023; some googling yields an article saying it’s 3 times a week for 84% of men aged 18-30, so I guess that’s significantly higher than median—interesting, never realized that. Oh, and I figured out back in middle school that my sex drive and romantic drive are distinct: sometimes they overlap, and certainly the activities that fulfill one will likely inflame the other, but also I can definitely feel either one without the other; more detail here.
For background… in high school, I found that, among my social group, it seemed like most of the girls who had boyfriends were comfortable with at least a hug, and a few were comfortable with quite a lot of physical affection. I benefited from this and appreciated it, and pondered the morality of it… and eventually decided on most of the stuff in the grandparent comment. Since then, all my relationships have been explicitly poly.
It’s similar to how I think of religious people (I’m an atheist): generally “I’ve learned to shrug and not bother people about it”, but if I think about it, it becomes “irrational and frustrating”—so I usually avoid thinking about it.
This is hypothetical, but what I would want to do is go through the rationale: exactly why do you have this preference? Ok, you bring up this reason; is that your true objection, or do you still object to situations where that doesn’t apply? There would likely be a lot of iterations of this, as outlined in the GP comment. Possible outcomes: (a) she converts to polyamory, (b) she admits it’s an irrational preference but nevertheless she holds it, (c) she finds the process some combination of insulting, unpleasant, and lowering her trust in me, and it doesn’t lead to a constructive end. I expect the result would be (c) for most people who aren’t, like, >95th percentile devoted to the ideal of “clear rational thought, and getting offended is low-status” [and many of those people seem to already be polyamorous, though my sample is probably biased], which is why this remains mostly hypothetical. [I did ask one pretty-rational monogamous person where she drew the line in terms of what forms of touch counted as cheating, and it was from her that I got the “If you’re asking this question then we’re not compatible”.]
I might be able to work with (b), depending on the details of the arrangement. To answer your question… The thing that I feel is, if you’re imposing a significant restriction on your partner, you should do your best to factor it down—do I really need all that, or is it just a subset? If you haven’t factored it down, and aren’t willing to when asked, then you might be unnecessarily harming your partner’s happiness, just because you don’t want to deal with thinking it through. This strikes me as inconsiderate, and quite odd if you also claim to love your partner. Or maybe there’s something else going on, and if they aren’t able to articulate it, that’s a mark against their capabilities of introspection and communication.
If I take that person’s word—that it’s not about having preferences about my behavior, it’s about wanting someone who has the entire monogamy ethos and psychology built into their brain (one consequence of which is that I wouldn’t be asking such questions)… Well, ok, I can treat that as like wanting someone who subscribes to the same religion as you. (I believe she’s also religious.) If that’s really the story, it would be nice if more people, on all sides, were aware of it.
Well, I don’t think I feel the urge to impose such a restriction. I’ve been in various poly relationships, and I don’t think I’ve felt anything I’d call “jealousy”. When she’s being affectionate with her primary boyfriend or husband, my reaction is “Ah, good.” If she’s experimenting with a new partner, and I imagine that she likes him more than me—well, then I might want to figure out why. Depending on the scenario, it might be “He is in fact better than me on certain dimensions she cares about”, or “This looks like a short-term thing”, or “He’s treating her in a way she likes a lot, and perhaps I should understand better the difference between that and how I normally treat her”. At worst it might lead to self-doubt or something; but being angry at either of them seems stupid. (Or, I guess, in context, it could constitute a broken promise [like if she’s not using protection with a new partner] or a lie or something—that would probably be the worst, and being angry at that is reasonable.) But jealousy, as an inherent “I’m offended at the idea of her being with someone else”, doesn’t seem to be a thing for me. Perhaps I’m better at factoring down my responses. :-P
If I imagine wanting to impose other kinds of restrictions, like “Don’t go get addicted to drugs” (although that seems like a sufficiently impulsive and stupid thing to do that I’m unlikely to get involved with anyone who would do it absent any restriction)… Anyway, ethically speaking, I think the way it works is, if it affects me, then I have a right to complain about it, proportional to how much it affects me. “Don’t go spending all your time elsewhere and have no time for me”—that is reasonable to the extent that it means I get a less-than-reasonable (or less-than-negotiated) amount of time with her. My ethics dictate what I have standing to complain about (if anything), and I let my emotions follow. I think that has worked reasonably well. Incidentally, I’m a libertarian and generally don’t want to restrict other people’s behavior in any circumstance.
Depending on exactly what it means… Looking through the original post… There’s various fuzzy stuff I’m not sure about, and some stuff I dislike. Things I would agree with, with some editing (including reordering the paragraphs because I think this order is more sensible):
I do think having preexisting norms for what a “relationship agreement” usually looks like is useful, but I also think any single norm applied to everyone is going to be suboptimal in many cases, particularly to people who aren’t typical (like me); and it seems obviously a good idea for people to alter their agreements to fit them better. In theory, you should be able to negotiate any mutually positive relationship into existence, barring transaction costs (and the more unusual the terms, the longer it takes to negotiate them, so that’s a cost one should consider, but it’s finite). A potential danger is if one person is much better at negotiating than the other… but, well, there are plenty of other ways for people to be abusive, and I don’t think this significantly increases that risk. There’s a potential awkwardness if other people don’t know what words to use when talking about your relationship, but that seems a trivial concern. And yeah, communication, and therefore introspection, seems obviously very important.
I notice that you go ‘principles / ethics first, then emotions’ in the way you seem to reason about things in your comment. I find that I endorse the opposite: ‘emotions first, then principles / ethics’. That is, I trust that my emotional core informs what I care about, and why and how I care about something, significantly more than whatever I believe or claim my principles are. And then I investigate my emotions, after putting a high importance on them making sense. (You can interpret this extremely uncharitably and claim that I have no principles whatsoever, but this is a low-effort attempt by me to elicit something I notice and am trying to point at, that is deeper than words and involves cognitive algorithms that mostly aren’t verbal.) This is kind of why I asked the questions from an emotions-first perspective.
I expect people on the other end of this conversation would feel pressured and uncomfortable and forced to accept some logically reasoned argument for something that they don’t feel comfortable about. I wouldn’t want to subject people to such conversations, because I don’t expect this would actually change their opinion or result in outcomes they would reflectively endorse. I think this is downstream of you believing your way of reasoning about things might help or apply to other people—because I do the exact same thing when trying to help people or even elicit a more accurate model of their beliefs (see the questions I asked you for example).
Yeah, I don’t think anger is the emotion most often associated with the emotional distress one would experience if they see someone they consider their partner having romantic or sexual interactions with another person. I don’t think most people in the rationalist community who seem to be more comfortable in monogamous relationships would agree with that statement, and this IMO is an uncharitable interpretation of what goes on in their heads.
It seems like you police your emotions, and dislike feeling emotions that seems ‘unreasonable’ to you. This is interesting. I think ymeskhout accepts and seems to endorse all emotions he feels, and I try to do similar. I think that is genuinely a better way of doing things than the opposite.
I don’t think I have a better mechanistic understanding of my friends who seem to have similar romantic and sexual orientations due to this conversation, partially because most of them seem to also follow a significant amount of ‘emotions first’ decision-making, and therefore I think it is unlikely that your mindspace is close enough to theirs that I understand them better. I’ve tried hard to understand them though, and I’m glad I feel like I understand better where you are coming from.
Sometimes I look at what I want based on my emotions, then see if there’s anything nearby that ethics allows. Sometimes I use ethics to see what’s permissible, then use my emotions to decide if I’m satisfied with any of them. Both strategies have their place. Shrug.
That take surprises me. Erm… After a bit of googling:
I think suspecting anger is a reasonable prior to have, and especially if you weight by what emotion / reaction is most dangerous (especially in a man), I stand by the idea that worrying first about anger is reasonable. (Maybe I should adjust for rationalists being n standard deviations less violent than the general population? Though we do have our Ziz people. At any rate, I didn’t say who I was comparing to, and intended the general population of monogamists.)
That aside, the point is that, from what I can tell, it doesn’t look like I have any hardcoded negative reaction due to jealousy (i.e. one that isn’t rationally explained by other context), or if I do it’s too small for me to detect it. I haven’t gone as far as witnessing sex acts by my partner, so I can’t completely rule out some primal reaction… but, well, I’ll note that “Exhibitionism/Voyeurism” is historically one of my favorite categories on Literotica, and it is plausible that my net reaction would be positive.
Let’s think about another sense of the term “jealousy”. (Or maybe “envy” is the right word; some people draw a distinction between the two, and I’m not sure if people agree on what the distinction is.) I mean the scenario where something good happens to one of your friends, and you have a negative emotional reaction to this.
If that means you punish your friends anytime they do well (“crabs in a bucket” syndrome), that seems absolutely awful; I certainly would not want my friends to do that to me, and therefore I shouldn’t do that to them. Still, it seems that something resembling it is a reaction some people have. Is there anything potentially legitimate in it? Why, yes:
If there is some allegedly fair judge or other process that’s supposed to hand out windfalls, and your friend gets much more than you do despite you thinking you’re entitled to the same, then it may be that the judge is unfair and someone is lying to you. Then it makes sense to get mad—at the judge. It only makes sense to get mad at your friend if your friend is in cahoots with the judge, or is otherwise contributing to the unfairness of the process.
To my mind, if your emotions seem to propel you in a dangerous or unethical direction, then usually there’s something adjacent to it or a version of it that’s safe and good, and if you discover that, and imagine the variations on situations, you often find that the “good” reaction is emotionally satisfying. (I went through the above reasoning sometime during high school, and since then I think I’ve had appropriate reactions to any windfalls my friends have received.) Whereas if you act badly on those emotions before figuring that out, in retrospect it’s childish and stupid and regrettable. So if my emotions push me in a direction I know is bad, I would tend to hold them in abeyance, avoid acting on them, until I understand the situation better.
Oh, and on a general note, I don’t assign ethical valence to having emotions, only to the actions you take. Yes, that includes e.g. wanting to murder someone; as long as you don’t act on it, there’s nothing immoral or unethical about having the emotion. (It seems to be received wisdom that feeling guilt or otherwise punishing yourself for emotions is counterproductive.) Better to think through “These are the situations in which killing someone is appropriate (e.g. self-defense), those are the ones where it’s not”, and be done with it.
I’m not sure exactly what qualifies as “policing” my emotions. But the above probably has enough to decide that.
I think this is evidence in favor of the hypothesis that she wanted someone who was conceptually committed to monogamy, not just committed to monogamous behavior. For such a person, that question sounds like “I want to be as non-monogamous as possible up to some arbitrary line, and then stop, so as to avoid breaking my commitment to you. Please tell me where that line is.” I think if you imagine all potentially non-monogamous-ish behaviors on a one-dimensional X axis, with some kind of intimacy-weighted frequency on the Y axis, then this question implies that your frequency graph might be flat or even increasing up until the “policy line”, and then down to (hopefully) zero.
I would submit that the behavior of an actually-monogamous person would look more like exponential decay as you move right on the X-axis, and that you may not want or need a “policy line” except that, because the Y-axis is intimacy-weighted, you likely reach a point where it’s not possible to engage in more than zero of that behavior while continuing the exponential decay curve.
I think this is correct. A parallel scenario could be agreeing to go vegetarian but then asking for an upper limit for how much meat you can eat second-hand from your friends (since they were going to throw it away anyways). You would be revealing a frequency graph that is similarly increasing up to the policy line, indicating serious reluctance to be a vegetarian. There’s nothing wrong with this necessarily, but if someone is screening you for how much you really care about being vegetarian, it’s reasonable for them to harbor suspicion.