Poly recently did a questionnaire for work, you know the sort, where you answer a lot of questions and then they correlate the results and return a summary about aspects of your personality. She always likes to answer these questionnaires as honestly as possible and the response she got “blew her away”.
Reading from the results she says “I’m prone to flashes of insight, but I need a partner to help me work backwards, to make the flash real” (which would make me the partner), she continues “I don’t like surprises” to whit she looks over the top of the paper and says “no shit!”.
There was more in her results that talked about how she was concerned with the “right thing to do” and she relates how John would say to her “you make me think and direct me towards the right thing”. It mentioned how she would be quick to action if someone doesn’t live up to her responsibilities, continuing to read “What tips the world out of balance is you hate people lying or even telling half-truths”, to which Poly could only agree with a long squeaky aaaaaaaaahhhh of irritation. The inability to lie explains why a cheaters life would never have worked for her, and also why she struggled so much with the James saga (remember the party, Poly struggled to even head nod along to James’ lie about how they knew each other and led to her never contacting him again or even responding to a few tests he has since sent). “What pisses me off is people who don’t follow through on their commitments. It bugs the heck out of me!!!”
Which scares me a little bit, because this blog is a commitment I made, so going from her comments I’ve taken, this has be a bit worried. I’ve been trying to keep a few week ahead in order to take the pressure off, but I’m falling behind. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to discuss, and it would be easy for me to say that I’ve been really busy, or I could argue that not many people are reading it anyway, but these are just excuses. Truth is that I am challenged by it all, and it’s the comparison between her life and my life that is at the heart of this challenge.
To put it more simply, I’m jealous as fuck!
Well not jealous, it’s more like “envious”, which is just one of the many facets of jealousy. And that is what has interested me more than anything else. That for me, with no sex in my life at all, I am called to do all this internal work on desire, loss, longing and lust. And for Poly, who has more sex than hot meals, there is also the very same call to do her internal work.
We often talk about the “monos” out there who have what appear to have a “normal” life, with a “normal” relationship. Poly said the other day “comparing my life to the people I went to private fucking school with, they all have kids, and are all married to bankers, and they all have perfect Instagram and Facebook profiles showing a perfect life that isn’t fucking real, I don’t believe any of it, because I know it’s all bullshit.” She mentions how if you were compare her life on paper, with all the failed relationships and a failed business, then “I’d be a failure”.
However this insta-face we present to the world is a great big fucking lie. Poly states categorically “I’d be a failure, but I’m happier than I’ve ever been, and maybe that’s how you should judge it.”
Yes some couples are still happy after 10 years together, but they seem to be the exception that more and more only serves to prove the rule. People just seem to get bored with the same person. And they won’t talk about it whilst they are in it, but they will once the relationship is over.
Basically people will often lie to themselves because to tell the truth is to start on the pathway that is doing your internal work.
People in stagnant relationships may end up being beaten down by the crushing monotony of monogamy, or they will end up straying, and then get caught, which causes hurt and betrayal and jealousy and …yadda yadda yadda.
You know the story, you’ve seen it yourselves so many times in your group of friends and in pop culture more broadly. We all know that it happens, and it happens a lot.
But it’s not just about the pretend norms out there. This is a spectrum.
From the happily normative you go through to the cheaters who lie to their partner but continue to be partnered and therefore are also lying to themselves. Then you have the recently divorced thru to the gloriously independent, who are also probably lying themselves. Then there are the flakes and the fakes who play the field, trying to have as much meaningless sex as possible but struggling to understand this commitment thing. “Fear of commitment you say? Nah, nothing to be afraid of, just don’t do it”. And then you get to the open relationships, the polyamorous the kinky, the BDSM and people who think fifty shades of grey is an instruction manual.
But regardless of where you are, the same existential threat seems to be present and instead of doing the internal work that needs to be done, it’s easier to escape into our little fantasy world of unrelenting unhappiness.
OR,
You could be honest with yourself.
This is the sledgehammer of consciousness growth that our relationships become.
Whether you are a hetero-mono-normative banker’s wife with photos that prove your life is perfect because everyone is always smiling, you still need to face that shadow and do the internal work.
Or, if you are like some of the people that Poly talks about who get to have lots of sex, but struggle with relationship and connection, you still need to do your internal work.
Or, you might be starting out on the Polyamorous journey like Poly and finding your way through all these questions, there will still, and always will be this internal work.
Of even, if you are like me, anhedonic and with a complete abstinence of physical intimacy, you still need to do the inner work.
My delay in this blog is because I’ve learnt that I cannot run from this work, I can only surrender to the way of it.
So here is the point:
One of the keys to doing this internal work is understanding jealousy.