It may seem surprising that jealousy is a distant fourth in the poly-related reasons that open relationships end. This is at least partly because the first three causes usually destroy a lot of poly relationships long before jealousy does. Being a polyamorist in a relationship with a monogamist, being in a relationship with someone who wants an incompatible poly model, having inadequate time and energy management skills, or taking on too many partners all cause such intense unhappiness and dissatisfaction that these relationships often collapse fairly quickly. It is possible that if those relationships lasted longer, jealousy might ultimately lead to their demise.
It is important to recognize that jealousy is present in all four of these doomed scenarios. However, in the first three, jealousy is a symptom, not the cause of the breakup, whereas in the fourth scenario, jealousy is the key reason that the relationship ends.
For instance, if you make the mistake of falling in love with a confirmed monogamist, they are probably going to be insanely jealous, because in their universe sexual and romantic exclusivity is as necessary as oxygen. A monogamist is likely to have frequent and dramatic bouts of jealousy, because the fact that their partner has another lover makes them feel fundamentally unloved, disrespected, and endangered. However, their jealousy is a symptom of the underlying incompatibility—their need for monogamy, and their partner’s need for multiple sexual relationships. This mismatch of sexual and relationship orientations is the real cause of the problem, and the jealousy only shines a spotlight on that impossible divide.
To their credit, many monogamists have invested a lot of time and energy in trying to learn to manage their jealousy through classes, reading books, learning techniques, and going to counseling or support groups. This personal growth and learning of new skills can be very helpful in understanding jealousy, and reducing the pain of being with a partner who has additional sexual relationships. They may manage to reduce their jealousy enough to make an open relationship tolerable for months or even years. However, this will never solve the central dilemma of the relationship. Ultimately, the relationship will usually end, not because of jealousy, but due to the incompatible needs of a monogamist and a polyamorist.
And in the second scenario, if you pick partners who want a different model of polyamory than you, at least one partner is certain to experience intense jealousy. A partner may become very jealous because they are not getting what they believe they need and deserve to have in a relationship. That sense of entitlement is based on the structure of their preferred poly model, making them convinced that the other partner or partners are getting more than they are, or are getting something that they believe belongs to them. Anyone who wants more time, attention, commitment, or relationship status than their partner can provide will naturally become intensely jealous because they are experiencing a scarcity of the relationship resources that are central to their happiness.
This is most pronounced in the primary/secondary model, when a secondary partner who wants a primary relationship feels angry and hurt by the limits of the secondary relationship and the seeming unfairness of those arbitrary constraints. The combination of feelings of deprivation and injustice are the two key ingredients to creating jealous rage and despair in that secondary partner. However, their jealousy is only a symptom of the glaring incompatibility between the existing primary/secondary model and the secondary partner’s need for a primary relationship. The primary/secondary model is mutually exclusive with the multiple primary partners’ model desired by this secondary partner. The secondary partner will aggressively advocate for a primary relationship, demanding equality with their lover’s primary partner. Their lover (and the primary partner) will struggle to hold their boundaries and force the relationship to remain secondary. This constant tension and power struggle will eventually exhaust everyone in this relationship constellation, and usually no amount of compromise will satisfy everyone. This impossible gap between what the secondary partner wants and what their partner can give them will inevitably cause the demise of this relationship.
And if you have poor time and energy management skills, or if you get involved in more relationships than you can realistically sustain, your partners may also become jealous because they are not getting enough attention. They may be starving for love and affection and feel neglected, which is a surefire recipe for creating jealousy. Each partner may mistakenly believe that the other partner or partners are getting more time, attention, and status than they are. They may envy the other partners and covet what they believe they have.
For instance, Clarissa envied her partner Jason’s wife, Selena, because she had all the “privileges” Clarissa craved: living with him, sharing finances, and being close to his family. She coveted Selena’s status of being legally married to Jason and being recognized publicly as his wife. However, Selena experienced frequent and intense bouts of jealousy because Jason spent two nights a week with Clarissa and at least two nights a week with his other casual lovers. He was so distracted and tired from all these extra-marital adventures that when he was home he just wanted to play video games or fall asleep on the couch watching TV. Selena envied Clarissa having romantic dates with Jason, going out to dinner, going out dancing, and she suspected that they were constantly having wild sex while he was always too tired for sex when he was home with her. She felt totally abandoned and alone, and longed for the kind of exciting love affair that she imagined Clarissa had with Jason. Both Clarissa and Selena believed that the other was getting a much better deal, and that created very painful jealousy for both of them.
However, the real cause of the problem was that Jason did not really have enough time and energy to make these relationships work, and he did not take the necessary steps to give each of his partners the attention they needed. So when Selena finally filed for divorce, it was because she was feeling so starved for Jason’s time and love, not because of jealousy. She had become convinced that he was unwilling or unable to prioritize her needs and spend quality time with her. Again, jealousy was a symptom of the dysfunction in the relationship, and not the actual cause of the divorce.
In the first three types of poly breakups, jealousy is a symptom of the dysfunction, but not the cause of the relationship’s demise. In this fourth set of scenarios, jealousy is the root cause of the breakup. This assumes that each person is a reasonably healthy relationship partner, and behaving pretty well, but even so, at least one partner is still experiencing intense jealousy, which causes the relationship to collapse.
In other words, you can be doing everything “right” and still have a jealousy problem. You have picked partners who are non-monogamous by orientation. You have chosen partners who want the same model of polyamory that you do. You have excellent time and energy management skills, and you are pretty much consistently delivering the amount of time, attention, and commitment you have promised each partner. However, despite your best efforts to be a poly poster child and relationship role model, jealousy remains so unbearable that one of your relationships collapses.
When jealousy destroys a polyamorous relationship, one or more of three factors are to blame. First, people are generally not very good at cooperatively sharing any resource, never mind sharing their lover or spouse’s affections. Second, most cultures train people to believe they are entitled to their partner’s sexual and romantic fidelity, and they are expected to feel outraged, betrayed, and mistreated if their partner has other partners. As a result, most people have internalized that programming and it can be very tough to override. Third, most people have at least some amount of insecurity, self-esteem issues, fear of abandonment, and some lingering doubts about their desirability as a spouse and sexual partner. After all, who among us is such a perfect mental health role model that we are totally confident about ourselves and wholly convinced that we are a fantastic life partner and lover? Any of these three factors is likely to generate intense jealousy. Frequently, all three conspire to create such a toxic mix of anxiety, anger, and despair that the relationship will fall apart. Celina called this “the three-headed dog from hell that ruined my life.”
She and her partner, Aidan, were part of a radical political collective that rented a house together. She and Aidan were very much in love, and they had opened their relationship to other lovers after two years of what she called unintentional monogamy. “We were just so into each other that we weren’t interested in anyone else for the first few years,” she says. They both wanted the multiple primary partners model. Neither of them enjoyed casual sex, and since they were anarchists, they opposed hierarchical concepts and abhorred the idea of anyone being called secondary. Aidan fell in love with Marta, another woman who was part of their collective household, and Celina became very involved in a serious relationship with Paz, a political comrade who lived nearby. For several months they were both so enamored with their respective new lovers that they did not experience very much jealousy.
However, Celina says, “There was trouble in poly paradise. Marta was very attractive and was well-respected in the community for starting worker-owned cooperative businesses. One day she was interviewed on TV about a new co-op, the interview went viral on the internet, and suddenly she was famous and important! I started to compare myself to her and felt really inferior and insecure. I became so needy for reassurance that Aidan was sick of me asking him if he loved me, and my demanding that he promise not to leave me. He just kept telling me how ridiculous my fears were, and of course that made me feel even worse.
“I made the mistake of telling my mother about the situation on the phone, and she immediately started in with anti-poly rhetoric about how I was in an abusive relationship and I should get out immediately. All through my childhood, my father had cheated on her and that eventually caused their divorce. My mom was insanely jealous and would catch him in affairs and go totally ballistic. She had indoctrinated me all my life that a man should be faithful and that no woman should put up with a man sleeping with another woman. I knew that what she was saying was her truth and not mine, but in my very vulnerable state, that old programming kicked in, and my jealousy went off the charts. I tried to get a grip, but then my mom told my sister and she called me, saying, ‘It’s every woman for herself! That bitch is trying to steal your man! He belongs to you, so go claim him!’ I bought into those fears that being cooperative and sharing your lover is being a damn fool, and I became possessive and controlling. This alienated Aidan even more. Paz tried to be loving and supportive, but he got fed up because I was such a mess, freaking out and ranting about Aiden all the time. Paz eventually got tired of this drama and broke up with me, so I demanded that Aidan break up with Marta. That was the last straw; he broke up with me instead.”
In a state of shock over losing both of her relationships, Celina started seeing a therapist who shared her radical political views and who had expertise in open relationships. Over time, she was able to see how she and Aidan had been trying to do something that was very challenging, and for which they had no training or experience to guide them. She says, “Believing in cooperation and sharing resources is so foreign to the competitive and dog-eat-dog model we have been taught in the Western world. And sharing your beloved with another partner is even more far-fetched and there is no support for it in society. And I did not realize that my family had really indoctrinated me with that monogamous relationship model so completely. And with Marta suddenly being a social media star, all my own feelings of inadequacy really kicked in and made me feel like a loser, and I just started acting so crazy that no wonder both my partners dumped me!”
While Celina’s experience was especially painful and dramatic, it is, unfortunately, not unusual for all three of these factors to feed on each other and destroy a relationship. If only one component is affecting the relationship, it may do a lot of damage, but with time and effort, often the relationship can survive. If two of them or all three are activated, it is often fatal to the relationship. Each of these three will be discussed separately, but most of the time at least two or more phenomena coexist, and combine to drag down everyone in their path.
Homo sapiens as a species tend to be territorial and extremely possessive of resources of all kinds, including relationships. It’s probably one of the larger understatements in history to say that humans are not good at sharing. We clearly have a terrible track record when it comes to sharing resources, whether they are land, housing, food, water, fuel, minerals, labor, money, weapons, political or decision-making power, or any other resource. Real or imagined competition for resources is a key reason humans perpetually engage in warfare. Humans always seem to believe that we don’t have enough. We may experience a real scarcity of resources, or believe someone has more than we do, something better than we do, or something that we feel we deserve and must have. This worldview fosters a culture of jealousy and encourages us to fiercely guard any and all resources that we already have, and to try to procure those that we don’t yet possess.
Millions of people around the world do suffer from scarcity, lacking access to adequate food, potable water, health care, education, and housing. Deprivation of the necessities of survival naturally creates intense competition for resources. However, in the so-called “developed” nations of North America and Europe, many of us have ample resources, particularly compared to people in the global south. However, we are so frightened of not having enough, or of losing something we have, that we tend to hoard what we have and not share our surplus.
Humans seem especially unskilled at sharing a spouse or lover with another partner. A very primal experience of envy, jealousy, and/or coveting is provoked by that need to own and possess everything, including a partner. Some people have argued that political systems such as capitalism are partly to blame, as they emphasize and reward individualism, selfishness, and greed, instead of cooperation, community building, and working for the greater good. Our political and economic system is built on creating a fear of scarcity, and encourages each person to try to accumulate wealth and power for themselves, teaching us that this is the only path to physical safety, economic security, and abundant resources. The entire advertising industry, for example, exists solely to convince us that we absolutely must buy lots of products in order to be happy, regardless of the actual usefulness or necessity of those products.
Some evolutionary biologists, such as David Buss, have done extensive research on jealousy. They have concluded that jealousy is hardwired in humans, because in our ancient past, it had a survival benefit. Dr. Buss is convinced that over millions of years of evolution, people who were jealous engaged in “mate guarding,” a range of possessive and surveilling behaviors that prevented their partners from having sex and procreating with anyone else. These jealous people were more likely to successfully reproduce and pass on their genes, including a predisposition towards intense jealousy. Because people who were not jealous were not as hypervigilant, the more jealous people were able to “poach” their mates and ultimately have more offspring. This makes it more likely that jealous people will pass on this tendency to their children, and this has caused humans to become more jealous over millennia, rather than less.
Dr. Buss and other scientists have theorized that this possible biological component could help explain why jealousy can be so intense and so seemingly irrational. They cite many instances where jealousy has led to battery and murder of a suspected or actual unfaithful partner, speculating that these extreme and violent reactions cannot be explained by psychological factors alone. More research may add to our understanding of the horrific consequences of jealousy. And it may be impossible to separate the complex interplay of nature and nurture in the development of jealousy, as most cultures explicitly encourage and condone jealous attitudes and behaviors.
The second reason jealousy destroys so many relationships is that we are practically indoctrinated from birth, by a coercively monogamous culture, to feel entitled to our partner’s sexual and romantic fidelity. We are encouraged to experience jealousy about our partner’s real or perceived attraction towards anyone else, and our socialization trains us to respond with anxiety, anger, and even violence.
The expectation of jealousy seems to be so deeply ingrained that many people are incredulous if anyone exhibits an absence of jealousy. Polyamorous people have reported being told that if they don’t feel jealous, they must not love their partner, or they obviously don’t care about the relationship. Janet explains, “I spent years struggling with my jealousy and getting therapy and reading everything I could find on how to manage and overcome jealousy in an open relationship. I finally got a handle on it after a lot of hard work and lots of horrible pain! I began to feel confident that when my partner was out on dates with his other lover, I could enjoy having the time to myself or going out with friends or family. But everyone kept saying things like, ‘Aren’t you upset? You seem so indifferent that Jim is out with his girlfriend,’ and, ‘What’s wrong with you, why aren’t you angry about this?’ or, ‘Wow, you should be pissed off!’ and made me feel like I was a bad wife for being okay with it.” Ken had a similar experience. “I should never have told my male friends that my life partner, Holly, had another boyfriend,” he says. “Every time I saw them, they would give me a hard time about how I was a doormat for ‘letting her get away with that’ and that she was really mistreating me and I shouldn’t tolerate it. One of them kept saying that since I didn’t mind her being with another man, I obviously didn’t care about her. Another friend, who is a psychologist, kept saying I was just in denial about my feelings! The fact is, I did have a lot of jealousy in the beginning, and would get very anxious when she was on a date. But now I feel very secure about our relationship, and she has been very proactive about helping me feel safe and loved. I know she is not going to leave me, and her other relationship has not changed anything about our relationship, so I don’t need to be jealous anymore. She has been seeing him for several years, and it really doesn’t feel any different now when she goes out with him than if she is out with her girlfriends.”
Ralph Hupka, a cross-cultural psychologist, has undertaken extensive studies of jealousy in a wide variety of cultures around the world. He found that people in all cultures experience jealousy, whether Indigenous cultures in remote villages or others in small towns or big cities, whether rich or poor, regardless of race or religion, and in Western countries as well as in developing nations. He concludes that jealousy appears to be a universal emotion worldwide. However, his research identified fascinating differences in the experience and manifestations of jealousy depending on cultural expectations. Some cultures encourage jealousy and condone jealous behavior much more than others, and some cultures expect jealousy in some situations and not others. And some cultures acknowledge, validate, and normalize feelings of jealousy, but seriously frown on “acting out” jealous behaviors.
Anthropologist Leanna Wolfe has done extensive research on jealousy in polygamous cultures in West Africa. In rural villages in some African nations, polygamy is common, and men often have two or more wives. Dr. Wolfe found that while each wife is expected to experience some jealousy towards her husband’s other wives, the culture encourages her to develop a friendly and cooperative relationship with her co-wives. Interestingly, jealous feelings and behavior are less likely to be provoked by the husband’s sexual and romantic relationships with the other wives. Instead, jealousy is almost always a response to a husband failing to provide adequate resources to each wife and her children. For instance, if he gives one wife more livestock, more land, or a better house than another wife, the wife with fewer resources is expected to be jealous and demand equal support. Or if another wife’s children are favored over her children, she would become jealous and demand that her children be given equal status and resources. Dr. Wolfe notes another factor that seems to be crucial in reducing jealousy: The co-wives work together farming, taking care of children, and preparing meals. They are an important support system for each other. This is especially true if one wife is ill or injured, or is pregnant and cannot do as much of the heavy work, in which case the other wives carry her workload.
Hupka found that in certain cultures, jealous behaviors are expected and condoned only to “save face” when someone is publicly humiliated by a partner’s extra-marital affairs. For instance, he found that in some Asian cultures, many middle class and affluent men have a female lover outside of their marriage. He says that most wives will assume that the husband has a girlfriend, whom he is likely to be supporting financially. Most wives accept this arrangement, as long as the husband keeps the other relationship private from their community, and does not spend too much money supporting her. If he is careless and the truth comes out, this creates a public relations problem for the wife, as she feels publicly disgraced and her status is lowered in the community and with her family. In this situation, she is expected to be angry and jealous, and only under these circumstances is it socially acceptable for her to divorce him.
In Japan, according to some research, many gay and bisexual men still marry women, but have concurrent long-term relationships with men. According to scholars Sachiko Ishino and Naeko Wakabayashi, these arrangements are accepted by the wives with little jealousy, as long as the same-sex relationship is kept private, the marriage produces children, and the husband financially supports his family. The wife is only expected to become jealous and act out that jealousy if the same-sex relationship becomes public and causes a scandal, which may mar her reputation and lower the whole family’s social status.
The research done by many scholars and anthropologists indicates that these nuanced attitudes and behaviors around jealousy are largely learned, due to the cues and cultural norms in each society. However, there are big differences in which situations and circumstances provoke the most jealousy, and whether (and in what ways) jealousy is expressed.
The third way that jealousy destroys relationships is through our own internal insecurities and doubts about our value as a person, and our desirability as a relationship partner. Whether we like to admit it or not, most of us have self-esteem issues, fear of abandonment, and some lingering doubts about our worthiness as a spouse and sexual partner. Very few people have stellar emotional health and feel totally confident and wholly convinced of being an ideal life partner and lover. And most people have been cruelly dumped by at least one previous partner, leaving some nasty wounds in our self-esteem and feeding our fears that it could happen again in a current relationship.
In an open relationship where your partner has other partners, this can lead to a primal experience of jealousy when we compare ourselves to another partner and believe that we come up lacking. For example, Das says, “Well of course I was just sure that Ali would leave me for this new guy, Gerald! After all, he has a bigger IQ, a bigger bank account, a bigger motorcycle, and a bigger dick than me!” Ali tried to remind Das that he was committed to their relationship and was not impressed with any of the things Das thought were so persuasive. “When have I ever cared about money or someone being a brilliant genius? And I don’t even like motorcycles, I’m not riding on his goddamn motorcycle! And you have a very active imagination, dude. What makes you think he has a big dick? You’ve never even seen it!”
Das felt Ali might be impressed with Gerald being a scientist and having a PhD from Harvard, or because he could afford a fancy custom-made motorcycle, but Ali reminded him about all the times they had both made fun of his pretentious coworkers who bragged about their Ivy League degrees, and their expensive vacations skiing in the Alps. “Oh yeah, I forgot!” said Das, “You always text me a ‘pompous-ass alert’ when one of them is starting in pontificating about something they just bought or something they have done that they think is so important!”
Ginny had similar fears about her husband’s girlfriend, Lynne. Ginny was shy and quiet, and had a steady job as an accountant. She feared that she would seem dull and dreary in comparison to Lynne, who was a voice actor and ran her own business managing other actors who did voice work for TV and radio commercials. Ginny had always felt inferior to other women, whom she felt were more vivacious, charming, and socially at ease. Ginny was always nervous around people and felt she didn’t have much to add to conversations. “Why would he stay with me when he could have this exciting woman who was so self-confident and the life of the party?” She angrily confronted her husband, saying, “I bet you would rather spend all your time with her since she’s so fun and fascinating.” Her husband was shocked, and reminded her that he liked stability and calm in his home life, and that he felt very safe and happy with her. He explained that while he loved dating Lynne, “I enjoy her in small doses, and being around that frenetic energy and constant social whirl just wears me out and becomes very irritating pretty quickly. I love spending most of my time with you, and seeing her once in a while.” It was very reassuring for Ginny to hear that her husband appreciated her good qualities and was not eager to throw her overboard for Lynne.
Brianna says, “It took me years to realize that my partner was not going to leave me for someone else. I was so busy imagining worst-case scenarios that it probably took me 10 years to notice that Roy had dated five other women during that decade and had never shown any signs of leaving me for any of them. It finally dawned on me that yes, from a completely objective standpoint, each of those women was prettier and sexier than me, and each of them was clearly smarter and more talented than me, and for all I know they all gave better blow jobs than I do. But duh!! He did not leave me and he’s not going to. The fact is that even though these women were ‘better’ than me in so many ways, he loved me for who I was and he wanted to be with me.” She had to chuckle when her therapist pointed out that most people do not make long-term decisions about relationships based on a simple checklist of how smart, rich, or good-looking a partner is. Choosing to stay in or leave a relationship is based on a very complex combination of history, investment, attachment, chemistry, companionship, loyalty, and personality. As the therapist put it, “People don’t choose a spouse like buying a house, where you might buy a small, inexpensive, starter house and then later, trade up to a bigger, more expensive house. Love and relationships don’t really work that way.”
Brianna says, “I just assumed that any reasonable person would throw me under the bus if someone better came along, but I realized that it’s not that simple, because relationships are not strictly transactional.” She had been living in fear because, “I knew that no matter how fabulous you are, there will always be someone more attractive than you are, in some way, shape, or form. So I just had to get over myself!”
Sylvia had a similar reaction. She had panic attacks and had to take Ativan when her wife, Rita, went out on dates with other women. Because Rita always seemed to pick much younger, very attractive women for secondary partners, Sylvia was convinced that Rita was auditioning her replacement. She knew she was in trouble when she had so much anxiety that she ended up in the emergency room with heart palpitations. She took a meditation class, and started meditating every day. She went to a therapy group for people struggling with anxiety, and learned some cognitive behavioral techniques to manage her anxiety. She started going to a queer women’s poly group to talk with other women about how they handled their jealousy. To explain to the other women in the group just why she got so upset, she showed them photos of the other women her wife had been dating. Sylvia was quite surprised at the reactions of the other women in the group. Instead of being sympathetic and comforting her, one woman said, “Wow, she’s so hot! Your wife must be pretty amazing to be dating her!” Another responded, “Yeah, Rita must really be a catch, you must be so proud to be with her!” A third one said, “And you obviously are really great if she married you.” Sylvia suddenly realized that her wife’s ability to attract these gorgeous young women was something to admire and respect. All along she had felt that this meant she was inferior and inadequate as a partner. Now she was able to grasp that it actually reflected quite favorably on her, that such an incredible woman had chosen her as her life partner. “Suddenly I started to feel special and lucky to be with Rita, rather than the pathetic loser I had been convinced I was,” she says.
Many polyamorous people believe that jealousy is a normal, natural response that serves a valid purpose. It is provoked when we feel threatened with loss of something precious to us, and alerts us to pay attention to our relationships, to make sure they are safe and sound. Like a smoke alarm that may go off when you just burn the toast, jealousy may sometimes be an overreaction. When the alarm goes off, it makes you pay attention and check that the house is not on fire, and if it is just burned toast, you can relax. However, if the house is on fire, or your relationship is in danger, you can take whatever steps are needed to put out the fire, salvage what you can, and possibly rebuild, or to strengthen your relationship and see if the damage to it can be repaired.
In an open relationship, it is important to recognize that any new outside relationship is a potential threat to the survival of your relationship. A new relationship is not a threat per se, but any new relationship has the potential to disrupt, destabilize, or destroy your relationship. Anyone who has been in an open relationship, or been around polyamorous people for any length of time, has seen situations where a new relationship did, in fact, destroy an existing relationship. So it is foolhardy to make believe that this could never happen to you. Instead, make jealousy your protective ally, and pay attention to jealous feelings, as they can encourage you to closely look at what is going on in your relationship, and continue to assess whether there is cause for concern, or whether you can turn down the jealousy alarm.
While everyone has some insecurities and fears, there are many people who have more intense anxiety, low self-esteem, and abandonment issues, which are guaranteed to generate jealousy. In particular, people who have anxiety and a poor self-image are not ideal candidates for open relationships, because it will require a lot of hard work to improve their self-esteem and reduce their fears. Even people with no anxiety and great self-esteem experience a fair amount of fear and insecurity in a polyamorous relationship, because it is so challenging to sexually or romantically share our partner. And maybe this is not such a bad thing. Polyamory pioneer Deborah Anapol says in Polyamory in the 21st Century, “Do you really want anyone who is so securely arrogant as to be immune to jealousy?” She suggests that for someone to experience no jealousy at all, they must be convinced that they are so perfect that no one else could possibly threaten their primacy. Maybe it makes sense to be humble enough to realize that we can’t really be certain that no outside partner could ever tempt a partner to displace us.
However, most people have the opposite problem. The vast majority of people already have some lingering doubts about their worthiness and desirability. And for those who already experience high anxiety in life in general, it can be much harder to feel safe and loved in a poly relationship. So they will have to work much harder to overcome their fears of abandonment and their negative beliefs about themselves.
In interviewing poly people about their experiences, I found that many people stressed the importance of investing in learning jealousy management skills. Many also reiterated how helpful it had been for them to examine and deconstruct some of their core beliefs about relationships that had created insecurities and jealousy. For others, the most important task was to have counseling to improve their self-esteem and learn skills to better manage their anxiety when a poly situation triggered intense emotions. While it may seem oversimplified, this is the take home message: The stronger and more comfortable you are with yourself, and the more confident you feel in your own value as a person and a partner, the less jealousy you will experience, and it will be more manageable when it does inevitably occur.