Oh, people actually feel jealousy. I’ve been not grokking monogamy: falling in love with a second person seems to be a wonderful thing for exactly the same reasons it’s wonderful to fall in love with a first person. If jealousy is a big thing for other people, though, that could be the perspective I haven’t been understanding.
Of the half dozen people in polyamorous relationships I know well, one feels some jealousy, it’s not anything significant for the others. Personally I don’t think I’ve ever really felt jealousy. Could someone who has describe what it feels like? Is it a primitive emotion, or a combination of things like the following?
“My partner is having a great time with a new person. I’m worried they like the new person more than me, which would be bad solely because then I’d get to spent less time with them.”
“I feel insecure about myself. The fact that my partner wants to date someone else too suggests that I’m not good enough for them.”
“Since my partner and I are in a monogomous relationship, we have an implicit contract that we won’t kiss other people. Despite that, my partner kissed someone last night and hid that fact from me. That is bad because it’s a betrayal of trust and because they knew that that kiss would endanger our relationship and went for it anyways. Though if we hadn’t had this implicit contract, the kiss wouldn’t have been a big deal.”
Anyways, yeah, if you have a strong negative emotional reaction to your partner having a good time with other people, maybe don’t do polyamory. Sorry that you were told otherwise.
Roughly: jealousy is an emotional primitive and the feelings you’re describing here are sums of jealousy(+other things.) I of course can’t know what’s in your head, but if you’re anything at all like me and you have had these feelings before, I suspect that you do experience jealousy, but are inserting arguments to project all feelings that involve it into a non-jealous subspace.
(Maybe addendum: I find it very easy to apply reasoning to my emotions, but very hard to causally intervene this way. Descriptions of the sort you provide here, something like ‘[emotion] feels like [fact, extrapolation of consequences, judgment of the expected intervention that fact will have on my goals]’, are exactly backwards to me. In my case this is a thought pattern that I’ve only ever used when I’m failing to admit that my idealized, goal-directed, reasoning self is not my realized self. I expect that this is not true for you, but is probably true for most people, and it’s possible that this difference in experiencing emotion is a driver of the dynamics described in OP.)
The thing about jealousy is that its basis is an entirely reasonable fear: fear that you’re going to be abandoned, or at least lose a share of the resources (time, attention, money, sex, child-raising help, etc) you were getting/expecting from your partner.
It is possible to have a situation where there are little-or-no grounds for fear. For example “he loves and wants both of us, he’s very happy with the two of us, he’s not going to add anyone else or leave either of us, and I’m happier with a half share of his attention, plus some of her attention, than I would be with some other guy all to myself”. But a throuple is a more complicated situation than a couple, it has more moving parts, there are thus more ways for it going wrong, and there are more people who need to be reassured. Larger polycules are even more complicated.
I have never felt any of those three examples, I constructed them as things that might get glossed to jealousy if jealousy were a fuzzy category rather than an emotional primitive. They all bottom out at a different emotion because they’re based on the premise that jealousy isn’t primitive, and the reasoning is there to explain why you might call that other thing “jealousy”.
If jealousy really is a primitive, I have definitely never felt it.
And here, despite having heard the word “jealousy”, I remained baffled why people thought monogamy was a good idea because I couldn’t quite imagine it being a primitive emotion nor strong enough to actually matter.
Does jealousy have a physical correlate? That is, if you imagine being really jealous can you track what changes in how your body feels, like how anger raises your heart rate and tenses your muscles?
Does jealousy have a physical correlate? That is, if you imagine being really jealous can you track what changes in how your body feels, like how anger raises your heart rate and tenses your muscles?
Yes, it definitely does have a physical correlate!
To me, it feels like my heart is being crushed in an ice-cold Iron Maiden while my limbs are being simultaneously pulled off.
At least at the levels of jealousy I’ve experienced in the poly world—times someone you are deeply in love with is actively courting someone else and you are supposed to “do nothing about it”.
I experience jealousy, though not in a romantic context, and I don’t feel like it is a primitive emotion but rather, always caused by another concern like the ones listed.
Oh, people actually feel jealousy. I’ve been not grokking monogamy: falling in love with a second person seems to be a wonderful thing for exactly the same reasons it’s wonderful to fall in love with a first person. If jealousy is a big thing for other people, though, that could be the perspective I haven’t been understanding.
Of the half dozen people in polyamorous relationships I know well, one feels some jealousy, it’s not anything significant for the others. Personally I don’t think I’ve ever really felt jealousy. Could someone who has describe what it feels like? Is it a primitive emotion, or a combination of things like the following?
“My partner is having a great time with a new person. I’m worried they like the new person more than me, which would be bad solely because then I’d get to spent less time with them.”
“I feel insecure about myself. The fact that my partner wants to date someone else too suggests that I’m not good enough for them.”
“Since my partner and I are in a monogomous relationship, we have an implicit contract that we won’t kiss other people. Despite that, my partner kissed someone last night and hid that fact from me. That is bad because it’s a betrayal of trust and because they knew that that kiss would endanger our relationship and went for it anyways. Though if we hadn’t had this implicit contract, the kiss wouldn’t have been a big deal.”
Anyways, yeah, if you have a strong negative emotional reaction to your partner having a good time with other people, maybe don’t do polyamory. Sorry that you were told otherwise.
Roughly: jealousy is an emotional primitive and the feelings you’re describing here are sums of jealousy(+other things.) I of course can’t know what’s in your head, but if you’re anything at all like me and you have had these feelings before, I suspect that you do experience jealousy, but are inserting arguments to project all feelings that involve it into a non-jealous subspace.
(Maybe addendum: I find it very easy to apply reasoning to my emotions, but very hard to causally intervene this way. Descriptions of the sort you provide here, something like ‘[emotion] feels like [fact, extrapolation of consequences, judgment of the expected intervention that fact will have on my goals]’, are exactly backwards to me. In my case this is a thought pattern that I’ve only ever used when I’m failing to admit that my idealized, goal-directed, reasoning self is not my realized self. I expect that this is not true for you, but is probably true for most people, and it’s possible that this difference in experiencing emotion is a driver of the dynamics described in OP.)
The thing about jealousy is that its basis is an entirely reasonable fear: fear that you’re going to be abandoned, or at least lose a share of the resources (time, attention, money, sex, child-raising help, etc) you were getting/expecting from your partner.
It is possible to have a situation where there are little-or-no grounds for fear. For example “he loves and wants both of us, he’s very happy with the two of us, he’s not going to add anyone else or leave either of us, and I’m happier with a half share of his attention, plus some of her attention, than I would be with some other guy all to myself”. But a throuple is a more complicated situation than a couple, it has more moving parts, there are thus more ways for it going wrong, and there are more people who need to be reassured. Larger polycules are even more complicated.
I have never felt any of those three examples, I constructed them as things that might get glossed to jealousy if jealousy were a fuzzy category rather than an emotional primitive. They all bottom out at a different emotion because they’re based on the premise that jealousy isn’t primitive, and the reasoning is there to explain why you might call that other thing “jealousy”.
If jealousy really is a primitive, I have definitely never felt it.
Very fair! That’s a difficult mindset to conceptualize for me, but having positive testimony like this is useful and informative.
And here, despite having heard the word “jealousy”, I remained baffled why people thought monogamy was a good idea because I couldn’t quite imagine it being a primitive emotion nor strong enough to actually matter.
The typical mind fallacy is strong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
Does jealousy have a physical correlate? That is, if you imagine being really jealous can you track what changes in how your body feels, like how anger raises your heart rate and tenses your muscles?
Yes, it definitely does have a physical correlate!
Well go on? What effects on what parts of the body?
To me, it feels like my heart is being crushed in an ice-cold Iron Maiden while my limbs are being simultaneously pulled off.
At least at the levels of jealousy I’ve experienced in the poly world—times someone you are deeply in love with is actively courting someone else and you are supposed to “do nothing about it”.
I mean, they are pretty generic effects of increased sympathetic nervous system activity. Among other things:
Increased heartrate
Shallower breathing
Sweating
Increased muscle tension
Nausea
I experience jealousy, though not in a romantic context, and I don’t feel like it is a primitive emotion but rather, always caused by another concern like the ones listed.