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In the past month, there have been a slew of articles in popular publications about polyamory. Published this year, More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage by Molly Roden Winter explores the author’s experience with opening her marriage and has garnered much press attention. On Christmas day, the New Yorker ran a piece titled, “How Did Polyamory Become so Popular?”, discussing Roden Winter’s book and polyamory’s movement into mainstream culture. Soon after, New York Magazine’s The Cut ran “A Practical Guide to Polyamory: How to open things up, for the curious couple.” The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about the increase of nonmonogamy-seeking dating app users. Even the New York Times Modern Love column featured a piece last month on a nonmonogamous woman’s experience with a long-term, off-again-on-again partner.
Amidst all of this coverage, I wanted to discuss a side of polyamory that, while less sexy than a ménage à trois, should be of equal interest to monogamous, nonmonogamous, and poly-curious couples alike—romantic jealousy. Romantic jealousy has long played an important role in our conception of romantic love, and it tends to stand out in monogamous couples’ minds as one of the biggest barriers to open relationships, but why is this? The following discussion explores traditional views of romantic love, the factors that have supported the public’s growing interest in nonmonogamy, and what we can learn from how practitioners of ethical nonmonogamy approach romantic jealousy. While a poly lifestyle is not for everyone, the lessons it teaches us about the necessity of romantic jealousy, autonomy in our emotional lives, and how to care for our partners are ones every relationship can benefit from.
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“He Who Is Not Jealous Is Not In Love”
St. Augustine is credited with saying, “He who is not jealous is not in love.” Philosophical accounts of jealousy have traditionally defined jealousy as a unique desire for the exclusive or preeminent possession of some good or object. While envy involves a simple desire for an object possessed by another individual, jealousy is a compound emotion involving the desire for the sole possession of that thing, and therefore jealousy also involves a desire to take that object away from the person possessing it.
Envy and jealousy themselves are not inherently bad, as they can alert us to a desire that we did not know we had and encourage us to work towards obtaining the things we want in life. Yet, jealousy and envy become problematic when we assume that jealousy or envy is a natural and necessary part of our romantic experiences. This view causes us to be more sympathetic towards jealousy-motivated violence, as well as more self-righteous in our experiences of the emotion. Importantly, the idea that ‘he who is not jealous is not in love’ situates jealousy as a necessary part of our romantic experiences, claiming that we must desire the exclusive or preeminent possession of our partner’s romantic affection in order to truly love them.
This idea that jealousy is a necessary part of romantic love is therefore inextricably intertwined with the belief that romantic love is, or at least ought to be, exclusive (i.e. only between two individuals). While most people are likely to agree that it is possible to be romantically attracted to more than one person at a time, many monogamists tend to believe that we are only capable of “really” loving one person at a time, either because desiring to be only with one person is a requisite of true love or because logistical constraints such as time, money, or attention mean that the best and most fulfilling forms of love are necessarily exclusive.
These two ideas—that jealousy is a necessary part of romantic love and that romantic love is/ought to be exclusive—are intimately connected with another, possibly more pernicious idea: the belief that jealousy is a positive indicator of romantic love. This view has been championed by proponents of evolutionary psychology like David Buss, who argues that “love and jealousy are intertwined passions… [t]hey depend on each other and feed on each other.” He argues that jealousy plays an important evolutionary role in human partnerships, namely, ensuring that both partners are invested in the right sorts of ways in the relationship. He explains that men and women have inherently different experiences of romantic jealousy, with men being more likely to experience jealousy over sexual infidelity while women are more likely to experience it over emotional infidelity. This, Buss argues, is because sexual and emotional exclusivity serve a particular evolutionary function for each gender, respectively. A female partner’s sexual fidelity ensures that the offspring men raise will be their own while a male partner’s emotional fidelity ensures for women that their partners stick around and invest resources in raising their shared offspring.
However, this evolutionary view of romantic jealousy has been called into question. In one study of bisexual, queer, and heterosexual individuals, researchers found that these gendered differences existed only among heterosexuals. Bisexual men and bisexual women evaluated sexual infidelity as equally as jealousy-inducing as one another, as did gay men and lesbian women. While it could be argued that queer experiences of jealousy differ because they are not subject to the same evolutionary pressures as heterosexuals, it seems more likely that gendered experiences of jealousy are simply shaped by cultural rather than biological forces. Because the queer community has been historically excluded from participating in culturally dominant frameworks of romantic love, they have had greater opportunity to redefine for themselves what it means to love romantically. In contrast, heterosexual couples have historically been confined to these frameworks, told that personal success equates to a happy, monogamous marriage and the successful creation of a nuclear family.
But, as evidenced by the frenzy of media coverage around polyamory, more and more heterosexual people have begun to question this traditional view of romantic love. According to a 2023 Pew Research survey, 51% of American adults under the age of 30 believe open marriages are “acceptable” while 20% of all adults have experimented with some form of nonmonogamy. This is likely due, at least in part, to shifting economic and social circumstances that make achieving the benchmarks of success of previous generations—buying a property, settling down, and having children—seem either undesirable or unachievable.
Rising costs of living and shifts towards urbanization and globalization have meant that for several generations, more and more young adults have been settling away from their extended families. At first, the nuclear family was a respite from this, providing adults with a social unit they could rely on. But with divorce rates peaking at 50% in the 1980s, more and more millennials became disillusioned with the traditional script. This disillusionment has only grown amongst Gen Z as student loan debt, rising property prices, and high cost of living make the nuclear family an unachievable dream for many. These challenges have created a vacuum in which the lack of a clear path forward has presented younger generations with the opportunity to reimagine the possibilities of what their romantic arrangements can and should look like.
Lessons from Polyamory: Cultivating Compersion
Platonic relationships have tended to be supplanted by romantic relationships, in part, due to modern Western society’s emphasis on romantic partnership as essential to individual success and happiness, as well as on the nuclear family as the fundamental building block of society. Most of us have been raised to believe, either consciously or subconsciously, that while friendship is nice, truly successful and happy people are in committed, child-bearing, monogamous partnerships and that developing these sorts of relationships should be prioritized.
But what distinguishes romantic love from platonic love? This is an interesting question and one for which individuals’ responses vary. For many polyamorous couples, their friendships are just as important to them as their romantic partnerships (this may also be true for many heterosexual couples, although it tends not to be the case). Oftentimes, the line between friend and romantic partner is blurred. How do you describe your feelings for someone who you talk to frequently, consider a close friend, and whom you might have sex with a couple of times a year but is not your romantic partner? Actually, there are many possible terms, but what is philosophically interesting about this question is that it reveals that much of the language we take for granted surrounding romantic love is not as set in stone as we might think it is. For one person, being “friends” with someone might exclude the possibility of sleeping with that person or having romantic feelings for them (“Oh, him? We’re just friends.”) For someone else, the term “friends” might encompass a whole range of possibilities from purely platonic attachment, to sexual attraction, to some combination of both.
Those who practice nonmonogamy have a range of terms to describe the nature of their relationships to others and their expectations of their partners. While it is unlikely that monogamous couples will have much use for a term like metamour, which describes a partner of your partner whom you do not have a romantic or sexual relationship with, monogamous couples can still benefit from talking about their understandings of terminology around romance. For example, what does it mean to be “dating”? Does it mean that you are “exclusive” with one another? Does exclusivity apply only to sexual activity, or would flirting with someone else be a violation of this?
Monogamous couples can also benefit from some of the concepts invented by the polyamorous community. One of the most powerful examples of this is the concept of compersion, or the feeling of taking pleasure in your partner’s shared romantic or sexual experience with someone else. This term is generally thought of as the opposite of jealousy, but actually, the experiences of jealousy and compersion go hand in hand. Nonmonogamists will be the first to tell you that they are not immune to jealousy. What separates those who are successful at opening their relationship and those who are not, is their ability to work through jealousy and ultimately enable themselves to experience compersion in some form.
This process of cultivating compersion is one that many of us already do. When a friend takes a much-deserved vacation, we might feel a twinge of envy or jealousy but we tend to still be happy for our friend, vicariously enjoying their experience through their Instagram stories. When our partner has a night out with their friends, we might feel a bit jealous that they got to go out while we were home watching the kids, but we can also share in their pleasure and be happy for the role we played in enabling that experience for them.
In these instances, we both recognize our own lack and take pleasure in our partner’s pleasure, or non-lack. The renowned philosopher bell hooks writes that love should be viewed as an act of will in which we strive to hold our partner’s needs in equal importance to our own. While common language tends to make love out as something spontaneous, magical, and beyond our control (we “fall” in love, similar to how we might slip on a banana peel), this practice of compersion helps remind us that love is actually an ongoing action which we continuously enact through our decisions. We choose to love our partners and in doing so, undertake a project of balancing one another’s needs even when they are in conflict.
Even if we already take pleasure in our partner’s happiness, having the term “compersion” becomes a useful tool in more trying circumstances. When our partner’s needs or desires are in conflict with our own, or we find ourselves experiencing jealousy, willing ourselves to try and find a bit of compersion moves us closer to realizing this type of love. In practice, this may not always be a smooth process. A partner choosing to spend time with their friends over us might sting, but cultivating compersion requires that we interrogate why this is the case. Does it sting because this is the third night in a row they have done this and our emotional needs are not being met? Does it sting because we subconsciously believe that our partner should want to spend every night with us? Or is it because we are envious of their close friendships and wish that we had close friends of our own to call on?
The project of cultivating compersion requires that we interrogate where these feelings originate from because it is only by understanding what forms our own sense of well-being and what disrupts it that we can relay this to our partners and jointly create a romantic context in which we feel safe enough to practice compersion. We are only capable of sharing in the joy our partners experience without us if we feel safe and confident in the relationship. But, in order to feel safe and confident, we have to speak up when we do not feel this way. We need to understand the origins of our insecurities so that we can talk openly about them with our partners. In some cases, these insecurities may be well-founded and our partner may need to alter their behavior to support our mutual wellbeing. In others, we may only need affirmation that our insecurities are not well founded to enable us to overcome our fears and be more supportive of our partner’s overall well-being.
While determining that our insecurities are not well founded does not necessarily dispel them, it sets us on the path of overcoming them. Recognizing that our jealousy may not be serving our or our partner’s well-being does not save us the emotion, but it does enable us to begin to replace that emotional experience with a more positive one. When we find ourselves feeling jealous of our partner’s time with their friends, we can remind ourselves of the happiness it brings them and take a little joy in that.
Compersion for the Monogamous
Importantly, we should not seek to completely eliminate jealousy. Jealousy and envy can alert us to the fact that a particular need or agreement in a relationship is not being met. Yet, uncritically taking for granted that jealousy is an inherent component of romantic love limits the possibilities of our romantic lives and prevents us from experiencing the full range of possible joys romantic love offers. In contrast, compersion subverts the traditional romantic jealousy paradigm by discouraging us from passively interpreting our experiences of romantic jealousy as a simple by-product of romantic love. When we strive to take pleasure in the experiences our partners share with others, we come closer to holding our partner’s well-being in equal consideration with our own. By requiring us to interrogate our emotional responses to better understand whether our feelings of envy or jealousy are well-founded or stemming from a place of unfounded insecurity, the practice of cultivating compersion pushes us towards more expansive and fulfilling romantic lives.
Of course, interrogating the source of our negative feelings is a daunting endeavor. Practicing compersion requires leaving the safety of traditional modes of relating to others. Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh write that “the bridge of illusion must be destroyed before a real bridge can be constructed.” We may feel safer experiencing jealousy than cultivating compersion because it enables us to remain in the position of the victim—we are the ones being wronged and our partners owe us redress. However, this sort of thinking fails to interrogate the source of this emotion. By refusing to look closer at why we feel the way we do, we prevent ourselves from holding our partner’s needs in equal weight to our own.
For nonmonogamous couples, compersion might mean overcoming feelings of sexual inadequacy and taking pleasure in your partner sharing sexual experiences with others, realizing that their desire to sleep with others does not entail dissatisfaction with your own sex life. For monogamous couples, it might be as simple as reminding yourself to celebrate the fact that your partner has a close group of friends rather than being envious or hurt when they sometimes choose to spend time with them over you. Ultimately, when we find ourselves experiencing negative emotions, the only way out is through them. Actively cultivating compersion is just one means of fostering emotional growth, and while the circumstances in which you cultivate it will vary depending on the nature of your romantic arrangements, this practice ultimately empowers us to take a more active role in our emotional lives, hold our partners’ needs in equal standing to our own, and expand the possibilities of our experiences of romantic love.
From the Archives
Failed experiments in sex and marriage: Sophia Connell
Connell’s discussion of Dora Russell’s sexual ethics and her difficult relationship with Bertrand Russell illuminates Dora’s revolutionary commitment to both motherhood and female sexual autonomy.
Further Reading:
How Did Polyamory Become so Popular?
This article explores how the ‘free love’ movement of the 1960s has developed into a lifestyle for the affluent, challenging us to think about what “free love” might really mean in modern society.
What I’m Listening to:
Japanese Jazz has become one of my favorite things to listen to while I read or work. It is more cacophonous and upbeat than lo-fi beats but still ambient enough not to distract.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
