Input:
 Prompt: Write a chapter about dealing with jealousy in nontraditional relationships. Begin by discussing the common misconception that jealousy is a natural or unavoidable part of relationships, and explain why this is not necessarily the case. Then, provide advice on how to overcome jealousy, including strategies for self-care and communication. Share personal stories or anecdotes to illustrate your points.

Start by acknowledging that many people view jealousy as a natural and inevitable part of relationships, but argue that this is not necessarily the case. Point out that jealousy is often rooted in insecurity, fear of rejection, or other emotions that can be addressed and healed.

Provide advice on how to overcome jealousy, starting with self-care. Encourage readers to take care of themselves physically, emotionally, and mentally when they are feeling jealous, and suggest activities such as exercise, journaling, or talking to a trusted friend.

Emphasize the importance of communication in dealing with jealousy. Suggest that readers talk openly and honestly with their partners about their feelings, and provide tips on how to do this effectively, such as using "I" statements and avoiding blame or accusations.

Share personal stories or anecdotes to illustrate your points. Provide examples of times when you or someone you know has successfully dealt with jealousy, and explain what worked in those situations.

End the chapter by emphasizing that overcoming jealousy is a process that takes time and effort, but that it is worth it for the sake of healthy and fulfilling relationships. Encourage readers to be patient with themselves and with their partners as they work through their feelings.

Response:
# 15

# ROADMAPS THROUGH JEALOUSY

> Let jealousy be your teacher. Jealousy can lead you to the very places where you most need healing. It can be your guide into your own dark side and show you the way to total self-realization. Jealousy can teach you how to live in peace with yourself and with the whole world if you let it.
>
> —DEBORAH ANAPOL, _Love without Limits_

For many people, the biggest obstacle to free love is the emotion we call jealousy.

Jealousy feels really rotten, and most of us will go to great lengths to avoid feeling it. However, your authors believe that most people take the destructive power of jealousy way too much for granted, that they give their jealousy far more power than it deserves. After many years of living free and dealing successfully with jealousy, we tend to forget that we live in a culture that considers it acceptable to divorce or even murder a sexually explorative partner who has committed the unthinkable crime of arousing jealousy in us.

Let us point out that monogamy is not a cure for jealousy. We have all had experiences of being ferociously jealous of work that keeps our partner away or distracted, of our lover's decision to cruise the Internet instead of our bodies, or of Monday (and Tuesday and Wednesday) Night Football. Jealousy is not exclusive to sluts—it's an emotion we all have to deal with.

"Let us point out that monogamy is not a cure for jealousy."

Many people believe that sexual territoriality is a natural part of individual and social evolution. More recent theories suggest that it may date from about eight thousand years ago, when humans shifted from being hunting and gathering nomads to landed farmers, making the long-term control of land, families, and all the means of production much more important. If you believe that jealousy is natural rather than a social construct, it's easy to use it as justification to go berserk and stop being a sane, responsible, and ethical human being.

Your authors don't think it matters whether jealousy derives from nature or nurture or both. What matters is that we know from experience that we can change it.

Here is a story from Dossie's life about the struggle to cope with jealousy:

> My lover is late coming home. I hope she is all right—this morning she left in tears. Last night we both cried until very late. I hope she will not be too angry with me, or then again, her anger might be easier to bear than her pain. Last night I thought my heart would break from feeling her pain.
>
> And it's my fault, my choice, my responsibility. I am asking my lover to go through the fire for reasons most of the rest of the world consider frivolous if not downright reprehensible. I cannot, will not, be monogamous.
>
> More than four decades ago, I left my daughter's violent father, fighting my way out the door, bruised and pregnant, promising I would call my parents for money, lying. After I escaped Joe, he threatened murder—one time he set fires around the house he thought we were still in. After I left, I decided he was right—I am a slut, I want to be a slut, I will never promise monogamy again. I will never be a piece of property again, no matter how valuable that property is considered. Joe made a feminist of me—a feminist slut.
>
> My lover is back. She brought me a flower. She still doesn't want a hug. She feels her house has been invaded by alien energy. I was very careful to clean up, all is very tidy, dinner is ready, appeasement and placation, I'll do anything not to feel so awful.
>
> Why did I insist on doing this? My coauthor and I have been patiently waiting to resume this part of our relationship when my newfound and most beloved partner was ready. She has already conquered the terrors of group sex—tomorrow we will have another couple over for dinner and my birthday spanking, which she herself arranged with no egging on from me. Within the last year she has had more new sexual experiences than she'd had in the previous forty-eight years and has taken to it all like a duck to water.
>
> Except her lover having a date with one other person. She hates feeling left out and resents that we are doing it in our home this time, not neutral territory. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I make a lot of mistakes.
>
> My friends and lovers have welcomed her into the family with open arms. Lovers often form kinship networks from their sexual connections, and customs, even sort of a culture, have begun to emerge. And so it is customary, in my brand-new culture, for one's lovers to welcome a new lover, not as competition but as an addition to the community. But this is not her culture.
>
> My lover is ready to talk now. She is seriously pissed. She resents me for every miserable terrified thought she has had today, she is furious that I would subject her to the unprotected experience of her own feelings, and that's not what she said, that's my interpretation. And that's not what I said either—this was no time to get uppity about clean boundaries and the importance of owning your own feelings. I listened. This time I listened, without interrupting, trying only to let her know that I love her, I feel her pain, I am here for her. She is furious with me, and I am not giving myself permission to defend myself, and I hurt.
>
> This story has no tidy ending—we talked for hours, or maybe I listened, and I heard how difficult it was for her, how she felt invaded, how she feared that my other lover would not like her, how she felt attacked by her and me both, how very much she feared I was abandoning her. We came to no pat little answers that make good stories for books—we just poured out anguish, and went to sleep exhausted, and went on loving each other and working on this issue as best we could.

It's been twenty years since Dossie wrote this story, and she is no longer with this lover. The relationship ended for many reasons, none of them particularly about jealousy. We are including this story because we think it's important that our readers know that even accomplished sluts struggle with pain, miscommunication, mismatched desires, anger, and, yes, jealousy.

What Is Jealousy?

We cannot ask this question too often. What is jealousy to you? Does jealousy really exist, and is it what we think it is? When we choose to confront the feeling of jealousy rather than run away from it, we can see more clearly what jealousy truly is for each of us. Jealousy is not a single emotion. It can show up as grief or rage, hatred or self-loathing— _jealousy_ is an umbrella word that covers the wide range of emotions we might feel when our partners make sexual connection with somebody else.

Jealousy may be an expression of insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, or feeling left out, not good enough, inadequate, or awful. Your jealousy may be based in territoriality or in competitiveness or in some other emotion that's clamoring to be heard under the jealous racket in your brain. Sometimes it may show up as blind screaming rage—and being blind makes it very difficult to see.

Dossie, when she first started thinking about and challenging her jealousy, felt an almost intolerable sense of insecurity, along the lines of, "Nobody will ever love me because something is wrong with me and I'm unlovable." She discovered this about herself in the early years of feminism, so it fit perfectly with her feminist explorations to go to work on her self-esteem and build a foundation of security that didn't need to be granted by another person and that no one else could take away. You can probably figure out how valuable a lesson this was and how many more uses she has found for feeling secure within herself. Thank you, jealousy—without this lesson she wouldn't be confident enough to be writing this book.

If you experience your jealousy as insensate rage, then you might want to learn about how other people are dealing successfully with anger. You could read something about anger, to discover how other people are thinking about it and working with it. Perhaps you can take a course in anger management. Maybe you can come to terms with your anger. Maybe you can get to a place where you and your lovers need never fear your anger again. Wouldn't that be worth working on?

Many people find forms of jealousy in themselves that are actually pretty easy to deal with—nagging doubts, bits of nervousness about performance or body image. Others find themselves falling into a whirlpool of terror or grief, difficult even to look at, much less to tease apart into separate feelings like fear of abandonment or loss or rejection. Why do we sometimes feel this way? Dossie the therapist has a theory about this, based not only on her own experience but also that of many clients she has worked with on these issues.

Jealousy is often the mask worn by the most difficult inner conflict you have going on right now, a conflict that's crying out to be resolved and you don't even know it. Because it's rooted so deeply, it can be incredibly difficult to stay conscious when jealousy peeks over the horizon: we twist and turn and writhe in our attempts not to feel it. This is when your emotions are most likely to bring you to grief—when you believe that you need to avoid feeling them at any cost.

One way to not feel a feeling is to project it onto your partner. Projection is a psychological defense that involves trying to move a painful feeling outside yourself by running your emotional movie on someone else, as if that person were a screen for your fears and fantasies. It may be that this is the only real definition of jealousy: it's the experience of projecting one's uncomfortable feelings onto one's partner.

But here's some good news. If you recognize yourself in any of this, then some part of you has decided that you are strong enough to acknowledge the underlying emotion, and that means you're in an excellent position to do some healing right now. Use your jealousy as a signpost: "Work on this feeling!" Take a class, join a group, find a good therapist, start practicing meditation—go to work on yourself. You could get a whole lot of bang for your buck if you do the work that's presenting itself now: heal old wounds, open up new possibilities, gain health and freedom from fear…and somewhere in there, almost as a bonus, you get to grasp your sexual freedom as well.

Sometimes what we perceive as jealousy is actually something else. Think through the details of how jealousy works in you. What bothers you the most? Is it that you _don't_ want your partner to do those things with someone else or that you _do_ want your partner to do them with you? Jealousy might actually be envy, and envy is often very easy to fix: why not make a date with your lover to do what you have just discovered you are missing?

Sometimes jealousy is rooted in feelings of grief and loss, which can be harder to interpret. We have been taught by our culture that when our partner has sex with another, we have lost something. Not to sound dumb, but we are confused. When our partners come home from hot dates, often they are excited and turned on and have some new ideas they would like to try out at home. We fail to see what we lose in this situation.

Or the sense of loss you feel might be the loss of an ideal, a picture you have been holding in your head of what a perfect relationship might look like. It may be helpful to remember that all relationships change through time: people's needs and desires shift according to age and circumstance, and the most successful long-term relationships are the ones with enough flexibility to redefine themselves over and over again through the years.

Occasionally, our discomfort means that we are becoming aware on an intuitive level that our partner is moving away from us. That does happen. The fact that supposedly monogamous people everywhere often leave one partner for what they perceive as greener grass with another is not much consolation when it happens to you.

We watched a friend of ours go through feelings of deep grief and loss when they perceived that their partner's lover was trying to abscond with their partner. In this case, their pain threw a spotlight on some dishonesty and manipulation on the part of the third party and gave the partner the strength to break off from the outside lover and to find other lovers who had greater respect for their primary bond. On the other hand, this scenario might just as easily have ended in a breakup; we'll talk more about breakups, and dealing with them ethically with care for your own and your partner's feelings, in chapter 22, "The Ebb and Flow of Relationships."

Jealousy might also be associated with feelings of competitiveness and wanting to be number one. There's a reason there is no Olympics of sex: sexual achievement is not measurable. We cannot rank each and every one of us on some hierarchical ladder of who is or is not the most desirable or the better fuck. If you find out about something that you would like to add to your own repertoire, you can certainly learn to do it without wasting time trashing yourself for not already having known how.

Fear of being sexually inadequate can add up to a very deep and secret wound. But allow us to reassure you that eventually, when you succeed in establishing the lifestyle you are dreaming about, you will be so familiar with so many different individuals' ways of expressing sexuality that you will no longer have to wonder how your sexuality compares to another's; you'll know from direct experience. Great lovers are made, not born. You can learn from your lovers, and your lovers' lovers, and your lovers' lovers' lovers, to be the sexual superstar you would like to be.

EXERCISE: HOW DO YOU EXPERIENCE JEALOUSY?

Set aside some time for introspection. Remember some times when you felt jealous, and write about how that felt. You may find your mind preoccupied with thoughts about what those other people were doing. It may take a little patience to go back to your own feelings: rage, grief, despair, desperation, anxiety; feelings of being lost, ugly, lonely, worthless; whatever other feelings are particular to how you experience jealousy. We are often tempted to accuse ourselves about horrid feelings, as if we needed some sort of proper justification for feeling lousy. Try having some compassion for yourself when you feel so bad.

What is your story about jealousy? Do you believe it or not? How do you see yourself when you feel jealous?

Unlearning Jealousy

Changing the way you experience a feeling takes time, so expect a gradual process, learning as you go, by trial and error. And there will be trials, and you will make errors.

Start by giving yourself permission to learn. Allow yourself to not know what you don't know, to be ignorant: Buddhists call this "beginner's mind." You must allow yourself to make mistakes; you have no choice. So reassure yourself: there is no graceful way to unlearn jealousy. It's like learning to skate—you have to fall down and make a fool of yourself a few times before you become as graceful as a swan.

The challenge comes in learning to establish within yourself a strong foundation of safety in your relationship that is not dependent on sexual exclusivity. This difficult work is part of the larger question of how to grasp your personal power and learn to understand and love yourself without another person to validate you. You become free to give and receive validation, not from need or obligation, but from love and caring. We suggest most strongly that you put some effort into learning to validate yourself: you're worth it.

Many people find that as they develop their polyamorous families, they actually get validation from lots and lots of people and thus become less dependent on one partner's approval. Their needs and their sources of nourishment get spread out over a wider territory.

Disempowering Your Jealousy

Jealousy is not a cancer that you can cut out. It is a part of you, a way that you express fear and hurt. What you can do is change the way you experience jealousy and learn to deal with it as you learn to deal with any emotion: work with it until it becomes, not overwhelming and not exactly pleasant, but tolerable—a warm summer shower rather than a typhoon.

One woman we talked to had some very good ideas about what you can do about jealousy:

> I notice that jealousy comes and goes, depending on how good I feel about myself. When I'm not taking care of getting what I want, it's easy to get jealous and think that someone else is getting what I am not. I need to remember that it's my job to get my needs met. I feel the jealousy, but I'm not willing to act on it, so it mostly goes away.

Once you have made a commitment to refuse to act on your jealousy, you become free to start reducing the amount of power you let it have over you. One way to do this is simply by allowing yourself to feel it. Just feel it. It will hurt, and you will feel frightened and confused, but if you sit still and listen to yourself with compassion and support for the scared child inside, the first thing you will learn is that the experience of jealousy is survivable.

A large part of our difficulties with jealousy comes from our attempts to avoid feeling a scary or painful emotion. Perhaps long ago when we were children, truly powerless in the world and with a very limited set of tools for dealing with our emotions, we felt something scary and told ourselves, "I will never feel this again; it's too awful. I'll die. I'll kill myself." So we stick the feeling, and the event that inspired it, into something like a pot, and we put the lid on good and tight. As the years go by, whenever something comes along that reminds us of what's in the pot, that rattles the lid a little, we push down on that lid—we may not even remember why. And the pressure builds and builds, not so much from what's in the pot as from our frantic struggles to keep the lid on.

When we grow up and we need to take the lid off so that we can deal with our emotional reality as an adult, it can feel terrifying. But surprisingly, often when we actually look at what's in our pot and feel it, it's much more manageable than we had feared. You can indeed open your pots, look at what's bubbling away in there, and then put the lid back on. Your old defenses will continue to work just fine when you want them to.

We have heard sluts accuse each other of being jealous as if it were a crime: "You're jealous, aren't you? Don't try to deny it!" It is particularly important that you own your jealousy, to yourself and to your intimates. If you try to pretend that you are not jealous when you are, others may believe you and see no need to support or protect you—because you're fine, right? Or they may conclude that you are failing to take responsibility for your own emotions. When you deny your jealousy to yourself, you take from yourself the opportunity to be compassionate with yourself, to offer yourself support and comfort.

Let us remember that _feeling_ jealousy (or any other emotion) is not a crime. Only actions can be a crime. Feelings are feelings, and they're there whether you acknowledge them or not. But when you shove the feelings back into the pot, they may try devious routes to bring themselves to your attention, manifesting themselves as intensely irrational anger, unreasonable behavior, crushing anxiety over anything at all, temper tantrums, crying fits, or even physical illness. "Acting out" means doing things you don't understand, driven by emotions you have refused to be aware of, in ways you may regret later.

Sometimes acting out takes the form of making ultimatums about what your partners may and may not do or, worse, trying to enforce retroactive "agreements" by getting all righteously indignant about how anybody could have figured out that it wasn't okay to take Bob to the movie _you_ wanted to see, and aren't they inconsiderate and rotten? You cannot deal constructively with jealousy by making other people wrong. Foisting your feelings off on your partners is a dead-end strategy: it just plain won't work. Jealousy is an emotion that arises inside you; no person and no behavior can "make" you jealous. Like it or not, the only person who can make that jealousy hurt less or go away is you.

"Acting out' means doing things you don't understand, driven by emotions you have refused to be aware of, in ways you may regret later."

Sometimes when a lover is jealous and in pain, we may find it easier to feel angry and push that person away than to stay close, staying in empathy, listening, and caring. When we blame this person for being jealous, what we're really saying is that we can't stand to listen to how much our beloved hurts when we're on the way out the door to play with someone else. This seeming indifference is a crummy way to avoid dealing with our own guilt.

There are easier solutions. Feelings like to be listened to—other people's feelings and your own. Once you understand that you _are_ doing something constructive when you just listen, or ask someone else to just listen to you, you can get those troublesome feelings out in the open and learn to satisfy them. The idea is to be nice to your feelings, to welcome them as guests, until they feel finished and move on through. Remember, you don't have to fix anything: all you have to do is listen, to yourself or another, and understand that this hurts. Period.

Janet and a life partner had a difficult moment when she first told him that she was in love with one of her lovers:

> I'd been seeing this woman for a while and realized, much to my surprise, that my feelings toward her had gone beyond simple sexual friendship and into a deep romantic emotion that I identified as being in love. When I told my life partner about this, I think his first impulse was to feel threatened, insecure, and, yes, jealous. I could feel him getting close to exploding. It was hard for me not to try to fix things, to take back what I'd said about being in love or to simply leave the discussion altogether because I felt scared and guilty.
>
> But he stayed on course, allowing the feelings to present themselves, but not allowing them to drive him into acting angry or defensive. He asked me some questions about what exactly this meant to us, and I was able to explain that I wasn't planning to leave him, that my love for her was in no way a threat to my love for him, that she and I weren't expecting to become primary partners—that, really, nothing had changed except my own emotions and the words I was using to describe them. We went on to revisit this discussion from time to time, especially when our busy schedules permitted me to spend some extra time with my lover.
>
> She and I drifted apart fairly easily later on as we moved on to other things in our lives…and, for that matter, so did he and I, less easily. But all three of us who were involved in that particular triangle can look back with pride at the way we gave each other the space and respect we needed to process a change that at first felt terribly threatening to us all.

You can feel jealousy without acting on it. Flying into a rage and breaking all the crockery, or calling your lover's lover and hanging up every fifteen minutes during your first sleepless night, or picking a fight with whoever's handy won't help you feel better. All these are things that people do to _not_ feel jealous, to _not_ feel scared and small. Anger can help us feel powerful when we use it to push vulnerable feelings away, but it won't actually make us stronger or safer.

When you hold still with your jealousy, you will find that it is possible to feel something difficult without doing anything you don't choose to do. You will have taken your second step at disempowering your jealousy. You've told your jealousy that you will not allow it to drive you to do anything that might destroy your loving relationships.

Khalil Gibran wrote something truly profound about the nature of pain: "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding."

Whitewater Rafting

So there you are, shell cracked, with waves of pain washing over you. What do you do? Get as comfortable as you can and see how you can learn to ride those waves instead of drowning under them. Gather up the courage to feel what you're feeling. Explore your feelings, nourish them, treasure them—they are the most essential part of you.

Be good to yourself and remember that the most important part of love is not loving someone's beauty and strength and virtue. The real test of love is when someone sees our weaknesses, our stupidities, and our smallnesses, and still loves us. This unconditional love is what we want from our lovers, and we should expect no less from ourselves.

Remember, as you look at yourself, to look kindly, and also remember that you are not balancing a checkbook: anything you see that you don't like, or that you want to change, is not a debit that you subtract from your virtues. When you learn to reflect on your strengths, it becomes easier to look at your weaknesses with acceptance and compassion. Keep your virtues at their full value and cherish them.

Start by setting yourself the task of getting through a short period of time with your jealousy, like an evening or an afternoon when your partner may be off with another. Make a pact with yourself that you will stay with your feelings, whatever they may be, for this brief time. If a whole evening or night seems like too long, start with five or ten minutes, then arrange to distract yourself with a video or whatever.

It Might Be Easier Than You Thought

One of the possible, and indeed common, outcomes will be that your partner will go off on a date with another and you will feel just fine. Surprise! Your anticipation may have been a lot worse than the actual event. Experienced sluts often find that they feel jealous only now and then. When they do experience jealousy, they examine those specific experiences to see what they can learn about themselves and then brainstorm strategies to make that particular sort of event safer and easier.

One couple we talked to is working to maintain their relationship in a difficult situation: one of them is out of town most of the time on business, and thus much of their activity with other partners takes place under circumstances that prevent them from reconnecting physically afterward. One of their agreements is that they talk on the phone every single night, regardless of where they are or how busy they are. Often, their conversations take place after one of them has spent time connecting with an outside partner. One of them notes their experience during these conversations:

> He allows my feelings. I don't hesitate to say anything I want; in fact, he encourages me to. I've found that just being allowed to say these things, to talk about my jealousy and sadness, somehow defuses them. They lose a lot of their power because they meet no resistance from him; he just listens to them and lets them be.

Feel Your Feelings

Painful feelings, even the most intense of them, have a tendency to run their course if you let them, so an initial strategy is to make yourself as comfortable as possible and wait. Find your jealous feelings—hurt or anger or whatever—and let them flow through you, like a river. Your mind may be racing with nasty thoughts, anger, or blame, focusing on some detail that you're absolutely certain those other people did wrong, believing that someone is taking advantage of you or riding roughshod over your naked emotions, and obsessing over it. You hurt a lot, so surely it must be somebody's fault! But sometimes there is great pain, and there is no villain. Allow us to reassure you: we all go through this. Don't die of shame, just let these thoughts run on through.

Make a commitment to take care of yourself in a kind way. Feelings, once uncovered, can be better understood by befriending them. It is useful to have scripts and strategies for self-exploration. Journal writing can be a good way to vent feelings and learn about yourself at the same time. It is okay to cover pages of your journal with "FUCK FUCK FUCK I HATE THIS!" in bright red ink; if this feels good to you, we recommend you get an extra-large journal. Try writing down your stream of consciousness, which means whatever you find in your head whether or not it makes sense, and see what you get. Treasures, jewels of self-knowledge, are often found here.

"Make a commitment to take care of yourself in a kind way."

You can get a big drawing pad and a set of oil pastels, which are crayons for grown-ups. These big crayons encourage expression with bright colors and discourage getting hung up on details. Sometimes you will draw and get squiggles, and that's great; the smallest thing you can accomplish will help you hold still for a while and rant in color. Other times, you may surprise yourself with a drawing that is profoundly meaningful to you.

Some people like to express their feelings with their bodies and might like to run or work out at the gym or clean the kitchen or dig in the garden. Safety note: if your feelings like intense physical expression, you will need to keep a piece of your mind alert; you're heavily adrenalized and feel stronger than you actually are, so give a little attention to what you can do without injury.

Try finding music that fits your mood, angry or sad or frantic, and dance your feelings out. It can also be very satisfying to get a cheap plastic tennis racket and beat up your couch: Kneel in front of the couch, raise the racket above your head, and bring it down with all your strength. Keep your eyes open, imagine anything on the couch that you are angry at except yourself, and yell, loudly, how you feel.

When you express yourself, you get to know yourself better and work out some of the most intense stress constructively. At the least, you could wind up with a clean kitchen.

Try focusing on the feelings in your body: where do you feel these emotions, in your throat, chest, gut? Turning your attention to the physical sensations can intensify them and might bring up tears, but they will move on through if you allow yourself to feel them on the physical level. If rage comes welling up, you can pound on a pillow. If you start to cry, let it flow, remembering the sense of relief that comes after expressing intense emotion in tears.

Sometimes you will try out a way of venting your anger and find that it makes you feel worse. Make yourself a soothing cup of tea and don't do that again—it's not your way.

Some people have trouble doing this because they've been taught that it's wrong to feel sorry for yourself. You're allowed to feel bad for anyone else you know, so why shouldn't you take some time to feel bad for yourself? This is hard and you're struggling, so be kind to yourself.

New neurological studies show something really interesting: fear cannot coexist with gratitude. So if you're feeling scared or insecure, try remembering three things you're grateful for and see if anything shifts.

EXERCISE: REASSURANCE

Here's an exercise you can do with your partner to learn how to take care of each other even when times are hard.

Make a list of ten things your partner could do that would reassure you.

Avoid abstractions—focus on behaviors, not emotions. "Love me more" is an emotion and thus hard to act on; how will you know that your partner loves you more? "Bring me a rose" is a behavior that anybody with a dollar can perform. Write your list in private, your partner can do the same, and then you can get together and look at each other's lists.

This assignment may be more complicated than it sounds. Many questions may come up in your mind: How could I ask for that? Shouldn't my partner already know? If I have to ask for it, does it really count? If my partner loved me, wouldn't this be happening already?

If you're having thoughts like these, imagine what it might feel like to be asked for reassurance by your partner. Wouldn't it feel good to know how you could help? We can't read each other's minds, but we do care, and we can help once we know how.

Who's to Blame?

As you get skilled at finding and expressing your feelings, you can try a more challenging task: see if you can write about or talk to your friend about your feelings without blaming anybody—not your lover, not your lover's lover, and especially not yourself. This exercise is not easy: you will be surprised how readily we all slip into that blaming mode, but it is very, very worthwhile to learn to have your feelings without foisting them on someone else.

It also helps to pay attention to how we attribute intention. "You're just doing this because you want to make me mad"—how often do you suppose that's actually true? We just about never make anybody mad on purpose; the results are usually unpleasant. It's easy to invent other people's intentions for them to try to make sense of what you're feeling…but it can be very hard for them to speak their truth if someone's accusing them of intentions they never had.

Only when we're all willing to own our emotions, and let our lovers and friends own theirs, does anyone have the power to change and grow.

When You Are the Third Party

All these ideas about taking good care of yourself apply whether you are single or partnered, but those of us who live alone have to make special preparations to avoid becoming isolated with our feelings. (We've written about this at much more length in chapter 21, "The Single Slut.") You need to reach out to close friends or perhaps get to a support group or munch in your area. Make agreements with friends to listen to each other's feelings. Don't forget to plan time for serious communication with the partner in question. Being single, or other than a live-in partner, does not mean you will never feel jealousy or any other difficult feelings.

When we are dating but not living together, we may have trouble making time for serious discussions of our feelings, our differences, or, for that matter, how we each understand and appreciate the relationship we are having. To make time, many people place a special value on actually sleeping together: the sharing of coffee, the slow awakening, and even ordinary old breakfast. If each time you connect with your sweetie is intended to be hot and heavy sex, it can be hard to make space for simple conversation, talking about feelings, hearing feelings, getting to know and appreciate each other, getting connected. If you don't sleep together, try getting together for lunch or brunch at some other time, or make a date to hike in the country or on a beach, or visit a botanical garden or a museum.

Baby Yourself

When your emotions are overwhelming and chaotic, it can help to ask yourself whether there is anything you could do that would help you feel just one tiny bit safer. Let go of the big picture: maybe it's too big to figure the whole thing out right now. Take a few deep breaths, consciously relax some muscles, listen to soothing music. Try wrapping yourself in a soft blanket. It may not seem like much, but once you manage to do anything that improves your lot even the littlest bit, you are moving in the right direction to build some confidence that you can learn to deal with your jealousy.

Give yourself permission to take good care of yourself while you learn to work through hard feelings. Treat it like the flu: nurture yourself. What are the things you find comforting? Give them to yourself: hot chocolate, warm towels after a long soak, a long session with your most beloved movie or computer game, your favorite teddy bear? Effective self-nurturing often happens on the level of body awareness, so nice physical experiences—massages, hot baths, skin lotion, flannel pajamas—can give a sense of comfort and security even when your mind is anxious and your thoughts are a mess. Give yourself permission to take the best possible care of yourself.

When you anticipate feeling jealous, make plans to occupy your time. It may be too much to ask that you always have a hot date at exactly the same time as your lover: most people's schedules are too complicated. So what do you do when your partner's date comes down with the flu? Do you cancel your date? The people you make these dates with might be counting on you, the time they have with you might be important to them. Third parties have a right to some predictability in their lives, too.

But even if you can't round up a hot date for yourself, you can probably find a friend to watch a movie with, talk obsessively (with due attention to confidentiality, of course), eat cookies, chew your fingernails, do whatever works. We do not recommend drinking and drugging, as getting high might very well increase the intensity of your disturbance and disinhibit you enough that you might forget your commitment to experience your jealousy without acting on it. A certain amount of escapism is fine, but if you anesthetize yourself so that you feel nothing at all, you will lose the opportunity to develop skills at dealing with the feelings you're having.

Acquiring these skills takes practice, like meditating or learning to skate. At first you feel stupid and wonder why you're doing it, and it doesn't work very well. But if you practice taking good care of yourself, after a while your view of the world changes a little, and it becomes a much more friendly and welcoming place, because you've created it that way.

EXERCISE: FIFTEEN WAYS TO BE KIND TO YOURSELF

Write a list of fifteen easy things you can do to be kind to yourself: for instance, "Go to the store and buy myself a flower" or "Soak my feet in hot water and give them a rub." Sometimes it helps to ask yourself: "What could I do to feel a little bit safer or better or taken care of?" Put the items on your list on index cards. The next time you feel upset and could use a kindness, pull a card and do what it says.

Tough It Out

When no better plan is available, there is nothing wrong with gritting your teeth, biting the bullet, and hanging in there until it's over. Dossie remembers her first challenge after she decided to never be monogamous again:

> I had been casually dating a young man and had told him at great length that I was not available for partnering and had no intention of ever being monogamous again. He came over to visit at my home when my best friend was there, we all got a little stoned, and he came on to her. She liked him and didn't know I was involved with him, so they started necking right in the middle of my living room. Eeeek! My thoughts went racing as I watched them, thinking: "Well, it's not like I want to marry him, and I don't think I feel like joining them, and I don't think my friend is bisexual anyway, so what do I do?" Miss Manners has said nothing on the appropriate etiquette for this situation. For a while I sat frozen, to tell the truth, and finally I thought to myself, "Okay, so there's no script, I'll have to make one up. What would I be doing if my friend and my new lover weren't rolling around on the floor with their braces locked?" I guessed I'd be taking notes from the tarot book I was reading, so I went upstairs and studied, gritting my teeth. Focusing on my notes gave me at least a little relief by occupying my mind. Eventually they left, and I got through a strange and lonely night, not feeling necessarily great, but at least proud of myself that I had survived. I felt not at all damaged, really okay. What I got a grip on was my own strength, so…funky as it was, this was my first successful run through jealousy.

Go for the Ick

Here's a good question to ask yourself as you seek to understand your jealousy: "What are the specific images that disturb me the most?" Chances are you are already imagining along these lines, so you're not likely to make yourself feel worse by thinking about the scary stuff on purpose.

Those disturbing images, the ones that really bother you, are not telling you what your partner is doing—you actually don't know what your partner is doing. When we don't know what's going on, few of us are able to just say, "I don't know" and stop thinking about it. We fill in the blanks and, to do that, we make something up. What you see when you fill in the blanks has nothing to do with reality: it is your fear. So now you know what you are afraid of and know nothing about what is really happening.

Our minds, like nature, abhor a vacuum. We get nervous. Think of the last time you were waiting for someone to return a call or a family member was significantly late coming home. Did you call the highway patrol, send out frantic texts, imagine terrible possibilities? Maybe you can make an agreement to call each other before you leave a lover's house for the trip home, just to help prevent this kind of worry.

One powerful way to come to terms with your fears is to acknowledge them: "Yes, I'm afraid of that." Reality is almost always less terrifying than fiction, so you can counter your fears with reality testing.

Pay attention also to your imaginings that are less dangerous, less anxiety-ridden. You may be surprised to find that imagining your lover in the midst of sex with someone else is less scary than you thought it would be, or maybe images of kissing bother you more than intercourse, or whatever. Try writing down your imaginings on index cards and then putting them in order from the most to the least scary.

Then you will know what parts scare you the most and what the safer-feeling parts are. Now you have something to turn your mind toward that will help you feel a little bit safer, which is your first step on the road to becoming nearly comfortable.

Remember the Good Stuff

Make a list of everything you value about your relationship and put it aside for a rainy day. Be an optimist, turn your mind to the positive end of things. Value what you have and what you get from your partner: the time, attention, and love, the good stuff that fills your cup. Avoid being the pessimist who focuses on what is not there, the energy that goes somewhere else. That energy is not subtracted from what you receive; relationships are not balanced like checkbooks. So when you are feeling deprived, remember all the good stuff you get from your partnership.

EXERCISE: TREASURES

Make a list of ten or more reasons why your partner is lucky to have you. Put the list in your pocket and carry it around with you for a few days.

Make a list of ten or more reasons why you are lucky to have this partner.

Maybe you and this partner could both make lists and share them.

Sharing

You and your partners need to practice talking about jealousy. A couple we know tell us that they have developed a convention in their relationship that each can ask the other for what they call a "jelly moment." In your jelly moment, you get to say what's bothering you. Perhaps you feel scared and jealous, nervous about saying goodbye for the weekend, small and silly, and your knees are feeling like, well, jelly. Your partner's commitment is to listen, sympathize, and validate. That's the response: not "Okay, I'll cancel my date with Blanche," but "Aw, honey, I'm sorry you feel bad. I love you, and I'll be back soon."

When we tell our partners that we feel jealous, we are making ourselves vulnerable in a very profound way. When our partners respond with respect, listen to us, validate our feelings, and support and reassure us, we feel better taken care of than we would have if no difficulty had arisen in the first place. So we strongly recommend that you and your partners give each other the profoundly bonding experience of sharing your vulnerabilities. We are all human, we are all vulnerable, and we all need validation.

"When we tell our partners that we feel jealous, we are making ourselves vulnerable in a very profound way."

Your strategies for surviving periods of jealousy will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life, and you will use what you learn about yourself from this practice over and over. All of the techniques listed above are applicable to other difficult events, like job interviews and writing your resume. Now you have a repertoire of ways to deal with bouts of jealousy; these tools will also help you handle other painful emotions that may come your way. So when you get this far, congratulate yourself. Celebrate your successes: Write "I am a genius" two dozen times with lots of bright colors. Buy yourself something nifty. You've done a lot of hard work and you deserve a reward.

A Spiritual Path?

When you grow beyond your jealousy by doing the healing that your jealousy is calling on you to do, you're also stepping out of old paradigms and familiar assumptions into the unknown, which is scary. Working to change your emotions requires that you open up, be willing to feel, flinching when necessary, becoming more conscious. Isn't that what spirituality is, an opened and expanded consciousness?

Jealousy can become your path, not only to healing old wounds but also to **openheartedness** —opening your heart to your lovers and to yourself as you open your relationships to fit in all the love and sex and fulfillment that truly are available to you.

A final note about love: One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you're feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone and see what happens.

On Romance

One of the words people use to talk about their relationships is _romantic_. In Dossie's therapy practice, sometimes a client will shrug off a new connection, saying, "Oh, that's not a romantic relationship." It's not a word either of us uses much, so we set off to figure out what it means.

We asked a few friends. What we learned is that romance, to a lot of people, seems to have to do with the depth of emotion and commitment, and/or with plugging into a particular, idealized story. Romance, for many, seems to mean a particular kind of narrative rather than a kind of feeling. Think, for example, about the distinction that many people draw between "romantic" relationships and "sexual" relationships: in the former, there's an implied trajectory. We've all seen this story over and over in books and movies and television: boy meets girl (or boy meets boy or girl meets girl), there's a date, there's a second date, there's a third date in which sex is had, there are understandings and misunderstandings and gifts and funny/quirky moments, and then there's a wedding, at which each partner promises a lifetime of "cleaving unto."

We see nothing at all wrong with any of this, up until the very end. Very few of us ever got to read stories in which the happily-ever-after included three (or four or more) people. Even fewer ever considered the possibility that they might wish to do one kind of, er, cleaving with one person and another kind with another. Fewer yet learned that parting company and rediscovering one another as friends or coparents or loving exes can be part of the story of romance, too.

Because we all grew up surrounded by this story in everything from fairy tales to erotica, it sometimes creates expectations that can interfere with your goals as an ethical slut. The one-size-fits-all "romance" narrative can lead you to try to force all your relationships into it, whether or not that story is a good fit for you, the real, nonfictional person in front of you, and the relationship you could build together.

So if you're the kind of person who dreams of a single red rose and a walk on the beach at sunset, enjoy that lovely dream, and know that you can learn to dream it with different details, with different people, in as many ways as your imagination and libido can carry you.


Input:
 Prompt: Write a chapter on embracing conflict in relationships, focusing on the importance of shared vulnerability in building intimacy. Discuss the benefits of fighting fair and the concept of win-win solutions. Provide advice on how to communicate effectively during conflicts, including the use of I-messages and taking time-outs when needed.

Begin by discussing the importance of shared vulnerability in building intimacy, and how conflict can actually bring partners closer together. Explain that while many people try to avoid fighting in relationships, it is a natural and necessary part of growth and change.

Next, introduce the concept of fighting fair and the idea of win-win solutions. Emphasize that a good fight is one where both parties feel heard and respected, and where solutions are decided on by agreement rather than force.

Provide advice on how to communicate effectively during conflicts, starting with the use of I-messages. Encourage readers to express their feelings using "I feel" statements rather than "you always" accusations, which can help to avoid defensiveness and promote understanding.

Suggest that taking time-outs can be helpful when emotions are running high, and provide guidance on how to do this effectively. Explain that time-outs should be used to calm down and gather thoughts, not as a way to avoid dealing with issues.

End the chapter by emphasizing the importance of abundance in relationships, and encourage readers to focus on creating a relationship ecology rich in warmth, affection, sex, and love.

Response:
# 16

# EMBRACING CONFLICT

Nothing builds intimacy like shared vulnerability. We'll never discount all the wonderful things that we get from sharing love—laughter and happiness and sex—but nothing deepens intimacy like the experiences we share when we feel flayed, with our skins off, scared and vulnerable, and our lovers are there with us, willing to share in the scary stuff. These are the times that bring us the closest together.

What's in It for You?

Some people find it surprising to learn that a slut can experience overwhelming insecurities, but the truth is that sluts are just as nervous as anyone else, and skills to allay our anxieties were not taught to us in our cradles.

Your own freedom might turn out to be a lot easier to accept than your partners'—or vice versa. Going out and staying home are separate functions, like eating and cooking, each with its own rewards, and each requires specific skills to accomplish.

"Nothing builds intimacy like shared vulnerability."

When problems arise, a good question to ask yourself is "What am I hoping to get out of this situation?" Why are you doing all this hard work to become a slut? The answer depends on your own individual situation, but for many of us, the payoff is our own freedom, and we have to learn to give freedom to our partners if we're going to get it for ourselves.

Giving and getting freedom means we also need to have some good ways to deal with the inevitable conflicts that will arise when strong emotions are at stake. There are lots of good ways. Start by checking in with yourself on what you already know about conflict. You already have very strong ideas about this; you learned them, literally, at your parents' knees, or perhaps while cringing in the corner.

Studying the scripts you had to live by in your childhood will explain a lot about how you react to anger and conflict today. As a child, you had no choices; you had to fit in, somehow, to your family's script. How did you keep yourself safe?

Was this never an issue? People who grew up in healthy families are often both easygoing and unafraid. The downside of growing up in an unusually healthy family is that it can be hard to understand why everybody else gets so scared.

Most people, though, learned to hide for their own safety or to fight back to protect themselves or to become small and pathetic so that people would take pity on them. If you have any of these responses to conflict—defensiveness, rage, withdrawal, weepiness, whatever—it is certain that you developed them for a good reason.

Once you understand how you learned your reflexes, more choices open up. Talk with your partners—what are their scripts? What's going on when A really wants to hear how B feels, only B is trying to get safe by hiding? Maybe you each have different skills you learned about dealing with conflict. Maybe you could learn new ones from each other.

Fighting Fair

Thinking about how intimate bonds are cemented by sharing vulnerable feelings brings us to perhaps the ultimate act of intimacy: fighting. Many people believe that fighting between partners is to be avoided at all costs, but most relationship therapists disagree. Fights between partners appear to be a universal experience: not many people actually enjoy them, but they seem to be necessary, a constructive element in the building of solid relationships and supporting growth and change, like the fires that make new growth possible in old forests.

There has to be a way to communicate anger in a long-term relationship, and there has to be a way to struggle with disagreements. First you may need to vent some anger, which will include finding a safe and constructive way to experience it and release some of it. You'll probably need to make agreements ahead of time about how to do this: Not at your partner? Not in front of the kids? Not behind the wheel? Not after getting high or drinking? Where is it safe for everybody for you to get really loud?

The problem, as we see it, is not to avoid fighting, but to learn to fight in ways that are not destructive—physically, morally, or emotionally. A good fight is very different from abuse. In a good clean fight, there is respect for safety and mutuality so that both people get to fully express their feelings and come out the other end stronger and closer than before: bonded by fire, as it were.

The concept of "fair fighting" was first expounded by Dr. George R. Bach in his wonderful book, _The Intimate Enemy: How to Fight Fair in Love and Marriage_. Published in 1968, the book is terribly outdated, but the material on communication and detailed descriptions of constructive ways to share your anger with a partner are priceless. You might also consider reading any of the books listed in Further Reading. Whatever book you choose, reading a book together with your partner will put you on the same page, with some of the same information, and get you talking about how you communicate about what's important to you.

Occasionally, you may decide to dismiss something that's bugging you because it seems too trivial. However, if that issue comes into your mind three times, it is obviously still bothering you. Perhaps you could start a conversation with, "There's a small thing that's been bothering me."

So, if feelings like to be heard, and anger is a feeling that can be very hard to hear, how can we vent anger without creating more trouble than we relieve?

Win-Win Solutions

A good fight starts with the understanding that for a fight to be successful, everyone has to win. If one person wins a fight and another loses, the problem that caused the fight has not been resolved: it is naive to imagine that just because you've "lost," you've given up your interest in whatever issue is at stake. When you feel overpowered, outgunned, or shouted down, you will be resentful, and the problem will go on being a problem. The only real way to win is to come to a solution where all parties concerned feel that they have won. So in a good clean fight, each person's feelings get heard and considered, and solutions are decided on by agreement, not rhetorical "might makes right."

We make a fight fair by agreeing on rules and limits and by respecting everyone's right to express their feelings and opinions, including our own. It is usually helpful to schedule a time to fight and make an agreement to do so; it does not promote constructive hostilities if we waylay our partner in the bathroom or on the way out the door to work. We need to schedule discussions at a time when we can give them our full attention.

Scheduling fights has the added advantage that you can prepare for them, organize your thoughts, and know you have a time when this particular issue will be dealt with. If you feel upset about the grocery bills on Tuesday and you know you have a date to fight about it on Thursday, it's pretty easy to put your stuff aside until then. Most people don't put their stuff aside very well when it seems that their issues will never get dealt with.

"Whaddaya mean, schedule a fight? Don't they just erupt, like volcanoes? And when we have a fight, we are not likely to obey any rules or respect any limits, right? Aren't we talking about intense emotional outbursts?" Well, yes, but we don't believe you can settle any issues when you are in an intense emotional state. When your feelings erupt, it is important to acknowledge them and pay attention. However awkwardly you may be expressing yourself, this is your truth; you obviously feel strongly about it, so it's an important truth.

Triggering

How is it that we sometimes get triggered into very strong emotions, particularly at times of intimate conflict? We all do it; it's not just you. Dossie recalls at nineteen having panic attacks that seemed to come out of nowhere—until one day she noticed that something had moved fast near her face. Her father had been prone to sudden bursts of temper accompanied by a hard slap across the face, and Dossie realized that whenever something moved suddenly near her face—even her lover—some part of her believed that she was about to get hit. Once she understood this, she became able to look around and see that nothing was threatening her in the present, and these panic attacks disappeared.

New research into brain functioning has given us a lot of very useful information about how triggering works on the physiological level. We have an organ called the amygdala that does the job of remembering situations associated with strong emotions, both pleasurable and terrifying, and setting us into action. The most familiar form of this phenomenon is its greatest extreme, the flashbacks experienced by abuse survivors and combat veterans.

The amygdala has a direct line to the pituitary gland and can set off our emergency response systems before our intellects can catch up. Adrenaline pours into our bloodstream, norepinephrine floods our synapses, our cells release all their sugars into our veins to give us energy to fight or to run away from tigers. Our entire system gets hijacked by chemical reactions, and everything instantly feels terribly, terribly urgent. Triggering is particularly common, and intense, in intimate arguments, where all of the old triggers we learned as children may get stimulated. To complicate matters, many of us have learned for one reason or another to suppress our feelings, so we are often triggered without even knowing what happened or why.

The first thing to recognize is that nothing can get resolved in this adrenalized state. The flight or fight responses to adrenaline give us tremendous energy to survive a crisis but not very much in the way of common sense.

But two things happen during this physiological stress response that we can learn to use. The first is that if we can occupy ourselves for fifteen or twenty minutes without restimulating the stress reflex, our physiology will return to normal and we will return to sanity. The process of taking a time-out to get calm again is described below.

Better yet, every time we succeed in spending that fifteen minutes taking care of ourselves in the kindest way we can muster, we actually physically heal our amygdalas—by growing more integrating fibers that deliver soothing neurotransmitters—and thus we increase our capacity to soothe ourselves in a crisis every time we manage it. So practice, practice, practice being kind to yourself.

Here's how to take a time-out when you or a partner gets triggered. Find a way to stop and separate. Then, find a nurturing way to take care of yourself for about fifteen minutes without retriggering your emergency system, until your adrenaline gets back to normal, and you feel relatively calm.

There are some agreements you will need to negotiate beforehand with each of your partners. First, everyone should understand that a time-out is absolutely not about whose fault this is. If what you're doing or talking about is what triggered the emergency overload, then both of you need to stop doing that to stop the adrenaline. Stopping can be difficult: someone is almost certain to feel abandoned, cut off, interrupted, or unheard. Remember, this is for fifteen minutes, not forever.

Since you will probably need to be at least in separate rooms for a few minutes, a prior discussion as to what room each of you might want to be in is a good idea. Where are your computers, your books, your reading chairs? If someone likes to listen to music or watch television, are headphones needed to provide quiet for the other? If someone needs to go outside, it's useful to agree on a phone call within twenty minutes to check in and make sure everybody's all right.

Some people like to agree on a safe word to call a time-out; maybe _time-out_ or perhaps _red_ or maybe something silly that might help defuse the anger.

If you have kids and they are home, who will be responsible for them? Children may get nervous or want reassurance when the adults fight, which is in no way wrong. But they might feel needy or clingy at a time when you'd rather be free to focus on your own needs.

Make an agreement to honor a time-out with silence. Trying to get in one more thought is likely to trigger another adrenaline release and prolong the problem.

You'll want to talk these things over with your partner to plan your initial practice time-out. Then look for an occasion to practice. Try calling a time-out over an issue that is only a little bit disturbing, just for practice.

When you feel your most familiar uncomfortable emotions flaring up and you recognize you're being triggered—perhaps at the level of irritation or frustration, perhaps rage or grief—call a time-out. Strong emotions often appear very fast and can be hard to predict, so as soon as you remember the option when you start being flooded with feelings, call a time-out.

Wrench yourselves out of the conversation and go to your agreed-upon places. Do whatever you've thought might be calming and not retriggering. Take a few deep breaths and remember to exhale thoroughly; reducing the carbon dioxide in your lungs will help the adrenaline subside. We like activities that occupy the mind—neither of your authors has much luck with meditating when we're feeling triggered; if you can do it, go for it, but don't put yourself down if you can't empty your mind right now. We tend to turn to a novel or magazine, surfing the Internet, solitaire, music, or maybe an old movie. Try to steer clear of things that create more adrenaline: be careful of "shoot-'em-up" games, online arguments, or music with violent lyrics. Some people do very well with dancing out anger to raging hip-hop, while others find it too stimulating. You will learn from experience what works for you.

You might want to write out your feelings, or draw them. The quality of the art is irrelevant; this is for you. One of your authors has journal sessions that start with frankly insane projections complete with terrible accusations and gradually grow into a remarkably **nonjudgmental** investigation of what she and her partner were fighting about, sometimes ending with new insights about what upset her so much.

After fifteen minutes, check in with yourself—are you feeling better? Your time-outs could take longer the first few times until you learn what works for you and gain some confidence in your process.

When you are ready to come back together, do something easy and comforting. Go for a walk in a park, get your favorite takeout, cook something together, watch a video in a companionable way. Make an appointment to resume the discussion that triggered the time-out.

The process of a time-out is seldom elegant, pretty, or even remotely resembling okay. We need to take time-outs when we are emotionally overwhelmed and definitely not at our best. Be ready to forgive each other for being human. Be ready to forgive yourself. The results are well worth it when you come back together ready for harmony and understanding.

I-Messages

Good communication begins with everybody talking about their feelings, long before they get to discussing the pros and cons of any solutions. Good communication is based on identifying our feelings, expressing them, and getting validation that our partner hears and understands what we are saying, whether or not they agree. Emotions are not opinions, they are facts—truths about what people are experiencing.

Try speaking in sentences that begin with "I feel." There is an enormous difference between "you are making me feel so bad" and "I feel so bad." The I-message is a pure statement of feeling, and there is no accusation in it. When your lovers don't feel attacked and don't need to feel defensive, they are free to listen to what you're actually saying. Conversely, if your sentence starts with "you," and especially with "you always," your partner may well perceive an attack and respond defensively.

"Emotions are not opinions, they are facts—truths about what people are experiencing."

The words "I feel" then need to be followed with an emotion—sad, mad, glad, angry—or a physical feeling like queasy, tense, wound-up, shaky. Messages that begin with "I feel that" more often express a belief than a feeling, as in "I feel that we should not be enjoying so much sex," or a covert you-message, like "I feel that you are crazy." We are often tempted to describe our emotions in words that end in "-ed," as in "I feel judged/attacked/betrayed." This is a covert you-message: "You are judging/attacking/betraying me."

Most of us resent it when another person tells us how we feel—whether or not they are correct, it is a violation of our boundaries when another person presumes to tell us what our inner truth is. Try asking a respectful question. "How are you feeling right now? I'm wondering if you're sad."

We can't ask our lovers to hold still while we sling accusations at them, using them as a target for our frustrations; that would be asking them to consent to being abused, and they would be right to resist. But we can ask them to listen to how we feel, because putting aside their own agendas for a few minutes and listening to our feelings is a doable task. To learn how to use I-messages, try talking about an issue that is current for you without ever using the word _you_ , and without talking about what anyone else is doing but only about your own feelings. This technique takes a little practice but is less difficult than it may seem at first.

When it's your turn to listen to how your lover feels, put yourself in listening mode. Remember, feelings like to be heard and validated, so don't analyze or try to explain things. Just listen, and you may be surprised to hear something you didn't know. You can learn how the world looks from someone else's shoes, you can appreciate that person's feelings, and you can validate that person's position and express understanding. Then the solutions can flow more freely and more naturally. There are no wrong solutions and no right ones—only the agreements that fit well with how we all feel.

EXERCISE: FEELINGS DYAD

The purpose of this exercise is to speak about your own feelings in such a way that your partner can hear you and to listen carefully to your partner's feelings. Each person gets three minutes to speak while the other listens.

Choose a time when you and your partner(s) can spend half an hour or forty-five minutes with no interruptions. Choose who will speak first and who will listen. Set a timer for three minutes.

Feelings like to be heard. So while you are listening, all you are going to say are things that indicate listening, like "Okay," "Yes," "I hear you," and "I understand."

Read about I-messages, earlier in this chapter. Remember that we can ask our beloveds to listen to us talk about our feelings and how we are doing. It's not fair to ask anyone to stand still and be a target for accusations and blame, so for this exercise, sentences beginning with "You" are out of bounds.

Both of you should try to maintain eye contact during this exercise.

Try this as a safe way to talk about jealousy; you can use it later to discuss any emotional situations. Here is a script you can follow:

Listener: "About jealousy, what would you like to tell me?"

Speaker: "When I look inside, I find…" (speaking as long as is comfortable).

Listener (throughout): "Yes." "I hear you." "Okay." "Uh-huh." (and so on).

Listener (when Speaker stops): "Is there anything else you'd like to tell me about that?"

Speaker (may continue, or say): "No. I'm through for now."

Listener: "Thank you."

Listeners will often find themselves full of ideas, suggestions, and so on, which they need to keep to themselves. Put your own ideas aside for these few minutes and pay attention to what it's like to just focus on listening. Because you may be full of responses to what you have heard, we suggest waiting a bit or doing something else before switching roles.

These are intimate conversations. Show your appreciation to your partner for being brave enough to talk about these struggles. Hugs work great.

Help Is Available

You don't have to do all this on your own—many wonderful books, classes, workshops, and other resources are available. It's a good idea to put aside some time and energy to learn about communication and to do it with the person you're trying to communicate with.

Many excellent weekend workshops focus on communication for couples; some churches offer weekend marriage retreats, and some medical centers offer classes for couples in communication and anger management. Workshops and classes are worth attending even if they don't specifically address sluttery. We've never known a couple who went to a communication or intimacy workshop and didn't gain some good new skills and insights from it. Some workshops exist specifically to work on issues arising from nonmonogamy. Don't hesitate to take these workshops, and remember that the facilitator has expertise in creating safe environments to explore highly charged issues. Many couples repeat these workshops when a new issue has arisen in their lives. We encourage you to take a class or a workshop; if money is a problem, some workshops offer discounted admission in exchange for help with logistics and physical tasks. Just knowing that others struggle with some of the same issues that you do can help.

Support, ideas, and information can also be found through in-person and online groups and tribes. See chapter 19, "Making Connection," for ideas on how to find these.

A more expensive but still excellent option is to do some sessions with a couples' counselor. In general, we recommend this as a second-level alternative, after you've already done some classes and workshops, unless you have privacy concerns that make classes and workshops difficult for you.

Screen any of these resources about whether they'll be accepting of your open relationship. Some old-fashioned psychologists, and the leaders of some workshops and retreats, may believe that your lust for many people is a symptom of psychological disturbance; you may not feel adequately supported in such a hostile environment. If you need help finding a sympathetic therapist or group, try asking your friends or checking "polyamory counselors [name of your location]" in your favorite search engine. Most therapists now have websites where they list their skills and experience and something about their philosophy: you can email them to ask what their experience is in working with relationships that are not monogamous.

We strongly recommend that you investigate these types of help sooner rather than later. Just about everyone can use an occasional communications skills tune-up, and if you wait until your relationship is in crisis, you'll face much harder work than if you'd been practicing your skills all along.

Time Is Your Friend

In some cultures it is customary to wait several minutes after a person speaks before responding: it is rude and disrespectful to fail to think about what the person has said, and to speak immediately would indicate that you have simply been waiting for the speaker to be quiet so that you can then attempt to change his or her mind. We recommend taking some time before responding to any serious communication, especially when it's important to the speaker. Often, when you deliberately slow down communication, you'll hear something new.

People frequently approach a disagreement as if it were urgent that it be resolved right away. They strive for a resolution within minutes of discovering that they don't agree about something—something that they have in fact never agreed on.

But you've probably been living with that disagreement for a long time, and a little while more is not going to make a lot of difference. Thus, consider this strategy: acknowledge the disagreement, give each of you a chance to state your feelings using the principles you've learned in this chapter, and then take two days to digest what you've learned.

When you return to discuss the disagreement, you will probably be in a much calmer mode. You may have a clearer understanding of what is important to you and an appreciation of what is important to your beloved and why. Thus you may find yourself in a much better state to negotiate a solution that might make everyone happy.

Or after two days, maybe it will have become so easy that you won't need a special script to come to an agreement. Remember, where emotions are concerned, time is your friend.

Writing It Out

Sometimes our feelings are so complicated that it seems impossible to deal with them in face-to-face conversation with our beloveds. Under such circumstances, you may want to write a thoughtful letter to let your honey know the entirety of your concerns in a measured way that can be absorbed and processed at their own pace. This correspondence isn't a substitute for actual conversation, but it can be a good precursor to it, a way to open up the discussion that may feel a bit safer.

It is vital, however, that you send this letter only after you've had time to think about it. The downside to correspondence is that it can't convey all the fine points of communication—facial expression, body language, touch. The upside is, or should be, that a letter can be composed carefully, without undue emotional overload. If you click "Send" or drop the envelope into the mailbox before you've had a chance to think about its contents, you're taking on all the downside without any of the upside.

Start by writing a letter you're not going to send, expressing all your feelings and concerns. Janet keeps letters like this in the "Drafts" folder of her email program; Dossie writes them in her word processing program and pastes them into an email later. Write out all your feelings, letting go of any worries about how your partner may respond so you can express yourself fully. Then close the file and go do something else. Come back and add stuff (or edit things out) for a couple of days, and then check what you've written, making sure you're owning your own stuff and using I-messages. We usually delete sentences that begin with the words, "You shithead." Later, when you can read the message and imagine your friend truly understanding whatever you are disturbed about, it's time to send it.

We hope we do not have to remind you that your blog or your social media page or your private email list of a few dozen very intimate friends is not the place to rehearse this private correspondence. Struggle with it yourself—or, if that seems impossible, perhaps you can run it past one trusted friend, someone who would be acceptable to your lovers too, to make sure you're saying what you're trying to say.

Dossie wrote such a letter recently to a lover of hers. She wrote the first draft at a time when she was terribly upset, on a Friday. She was busy over the weekend but managed to revisit her letter from time to time. By Monday, the issues were still there but, after some processing, seemed more manageable, so she called her friend on the phone and they talked…and resolved the issues quite easily and peacefully. The letter never got sent.

Owning What's Yours

When you are willing to own your distress, it becomes possible for your lover to comfort you, to offer you reassurance and love when things are hard. Even when you don't agree about how you are going to handle an issue, you can still exchange love and comfort. We recommend that everyone be open about asking for reassurance, love, hugs, comfort, and stuff like that. Many of us grew up in families where we were taught not to ask for what we needed and, if we did, were scorned as only wanting attention.

"When you are willing to own your distress, it becomes possible for your lover to comfort you."

So what's wrong with wanting attention? Isn't there plenty? Remember about starvation economies: Don't shortchange yourself. You do not have to be content with little dribs and drabs of comfort, attention, support, reassurance, and love. You get to have all you want. You and your intimates can set yourselves up to share lots and lots and lots and, in the process, learn how much more you have to share than you ever thought. So focus on abundance, and create a relationship ecology rich in the good things of life: warmth and affection and sex and love.