Only you have the power to eradicate envy by living the life you want. And even if you can’t, no one else deserves your resentment for the way they choose to live their life. Ultimately, envy and resentment hurt you more than anyone else.
7
Webcam
We’re going to go over it until you get it. Sex is important to you. You might not be highly sexual, you might be more turned on by brains than brawn (you’re a sapiosexual, you know; look that word up), but sexual expression is nevertheless one of your fundamental needs — and one you’d been squashing until you met Morten. Squashing stuff, as we know, isn’t great. Like Pandora’s box, the more you squash it in, the more it risks bursting out in an, ahem, rather uncontrollable fashion. Just reading this makes me laugh because I know you hardly recognised the woman you were being in front of the camera.
Of course, I know this is difficult for you to admit. Not only did you live in a household where the adults were celibate for most of your childhood, but the diminished sexual attraction between you and your husband was also difficult to compare with this, a new lover. The polyamorists said not to compare. But living with your husband, the difference in desire was difficult to miss. And what happened then? Well…you felt guilty. But you didn’t need to feel guilty about two differing levels of attraction. Being attracted to another man was not “wrong.” Just awkward.
So let me take this opportunity to tell you a little something about the way guilt works for you.
You think you feel guilt because of something you’ve done in the past. But funnily enough, it’s kind of the other way round. You feel guilty about what you’ve done, but only because you are afraid you are going to do it again. As long as you feel guilty, you probably won’t do it. But as soon as you think you’ve felt guilty enough — like you’ve paid for your mistake — bam! You’ll go and do it again. This may be a result of the way people have used guilt to manipulate you in the past and also due to your religious upbringing. So stop with the guilt. You can better acknowledge that you made a mistake without feeling guilty about it. And being attracted to another man is not a mistake. So do you see how useless guilt is for you? How unproductive it is? How it diminishes your life experience? It stops you from actually owning your mistakes.
Whilst you felt guilty about the comparison between your new lover and your husband, it was too painful for you to face up to what the difference might actually mean. That was dishonest. And destructive. Even at this point, you knew that you felt far more sexual attraction to your new lover than you had ever felt to your husband. But you couldn’t admit it.
“Surely guilt is a very natural human emotion?” you ask. “You can’t blame me for feeling guilt. Everyone feels it.”
Absolutely! I do not blame you. Blaming you for your feelings only serves to make you feel persecuted. What I’m doing is asking you to face up to what you want in life and admit it honestly without shame or guilt. It takes time. But you’ll get there — in about five years.
When you drop guilt from your life, you will finally admit what you want out of life.
In your life, you use guilt as a currency that you pay with until one day you think you’ve paid enough to do again whatever it was you felt guilty about. It stops you from changing the underlying causes of your behaviour and living the life you want.
8
The Meeting
Shame was a big deal in your life. It stemmed from a fear of judgement. Your fears weren’t unfounded; people did judge you. But what you hadn’t realised is that living with shame had held you back for years. Your childhood was peppered with religious influences, and shame — the internalised judgements of others — was one of the many destructive tools used to make you “behave.” Yet by suppressing yourself and your true desires, by hiding from yourself, you managed to become the very person others would judge so severely. (If only they knew everything you’ve done now!)
But some things could not be hidden in your new world of honesty. Your former promiscuity, for one. It might surprise you to know that, nowadays, embracing your unparalleled ability to connect with others (and it is a great ability) combined with better self-esteem means you are far choosier in your partners. This is neither a good nor a bad thing. Because whilst your promiscuity happened to be destructive to you, it was nothing to be ashamed of. Promiscuity in general is nothing to be ashamed of. Trust me: I am you, after all.
So you tried to be honest, but soon realised that being honest meant you had to face up to who you were, with all that entailed. How terrible for you! How difficult it was to finally look in the mirror and see all that you had done, all that society would judge you for. Especially British society (luckily, you weren’t born in another area of the world where the repercussions might have been even greater).
Among the many things Elena brought to the table was a difference in attitude about sex. Sex was good as far as she was concerned. The fact that you’d slept with a lot of men meant — for her — that you were sexually adventurous. Nothing more.
But you blamed her, didn’t you? For making you feel awkward, embarrassed and ashamed. For exposing your vulnerability. If only you’d realised that the more you hid from yourself, the more vulnerable you would feel. The disgust for yourself that she exposed was redirected toward her, and that’s not cool. But remember what we said: no shame. You made a mistake. So what? Are you not — like everyone else — human?
I love you. With all your experiences. With all your superpowers and with all your abundant humanity. I love you and it’s not your fault. But it is your responsibility. Shame will hinder your ability to make healthy decisions, because shame is extremely damaging to your self-esteem. The more ashamed you feel, the more disgust you will feel for yourself, and the more you will make destructive choices.
No matter what you think you’ve done, lose the shame. It’s the product of internalizing other people’s judgement. It does no one any favours, least of all you.
9
Reconciling Fantasy and Reality
Ooh, this is a big one. Only nine chapters in, and you’ve covered your choice of partner, denial, judgement, envy, shame and guilt. And here is the biggest: your fear of rejection.
If I could pinpoint one overriding reason for relationship difficulties, whether monogamous or polyamorous, it would be a lack of self-esteem. So many people suffer from it. It’s very difficult to maintain good self-esteem when the whole world tells you that you are not worthy unless you achieve the standards set out by our society: a good education, a successful career, financial security and a long-term relationship. Hopefully by now you’ll be able to identify that many of the problems we’ve talked about so far are caused or magnified by your own lack of self-esteem.
But when you see those who have good self-esteem called selfish, and then rejected on that basis, it’s no surprise that you — with your fear of rejection — thought it was safer to remain worthless. Yes, you really did. You chose it, despite your three degrees, successful financial career and marriage. You’d crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s…but it still wasn’t enough. It still wasn’t safe to have high self-esteem in a world that seems to despise it.
Ironically, it’s only because so many people have low self-esteem that we all manage to get along pretty well. Because those of us with low self-esteem are — for the most part — careful with one another. We choose our words, hide our true opinions. And if we meet someone who isn’t careful with us, and who cannot or chooses not to gauge the impacts of their actions, they don’t remain in our circle for long.
This was your first encounter with the outside world, a place where even the choices you made that had nothing to do with anyone else offended them. You, the people pleaser, you, the adoptee who’d lived your whole life in fear of rejection, were in one instant crippled by insecurity.
The b
est course of action here — if you could have realised it — would have been to work on your own sense of self-worth. But there was no way to realise that, no way to prepare ahead. And as your partners had no idea what fear of rejection truly felt like, they were no help. You mustn’t blame them any more than you should blame yourself.
I can tell you now that the path you were about to follow, including the indirect influence of your partners, was the best thing for you. But before breakthrough comes breakdown. I am only thankful that you came out the other side.
If you feel rejection for your choices, the answer is not to choose something “more acceptable.” The answer is to work enough on your self-esteem until you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that your choices are the right ones for you. If you need to change them, you must be the one to decide that for yourself.
10
Alone Time
I have read a lot lately about celebrity suicide: gifted people who lose all hope. When there is nothing left, no hope, the alternative of killing yourself comes into play. You are so lucky, because with all that was about to happen, many people might have lost hope. You will consider suicide at one point, but thankfully decide against it. Because beneath all that difficulty and conflict, you believed something positive was in your future.
Morten gave you that hope, or at least allowed you to see that there were different alternatives from the ones you had thought of, even if it was originally the discovery of polyamory that had instilled the idea of “limitless possibilities” in your head.
Practice makes perfect, and this holds true of hope. Practising hope means you can carry on even when the world seems to be crashing around you. Maybe a miracle will happen. It will be, at the very least, another lesson. And that might be the same thing.
Until that moment, you hadn’t been sure if you wanted children. You weren’t sure how it would work out if you were also the breadwinner of the family. After all of your childhood experiences, you felt that you, above all people, needed to be an active, present and caring mother — to prove to yourself that you could parent differently. But you needed the right partner to do it with. It’s a beautiful love story. But there’s something else. Something deeper.
After that weekend, you started to idolise Morten. Sure, all that nice oxytocin and dopamine helped. The problem is that the mind likes to polarize people, events and stories. Morten became the “goodie” and Gilles became the “baddie.” Morten was the prince who rescued you, and Gilles was the person who had trapped you. In your own head, Morten was the future and Gilles…well, he was the past. You hadn’t realised that? No, I didn’t think you had.
The risk when we have unfulfilled dreams and unrecognised needs is that we look for people who can satisfy them. Those who represent the “greener side” of the grass. The negatives about such people become more negative, and the positives become more positive. Morten could do no wrong. Likewise, Gilles could do no right, and like many prophecies, yours eventually came true. It was not just because of you, of course, but remember this: without you, there would be no relationship. You are each one hundred percent responsible for your relationship.
But I’m not here to teach you what could have been, because what-ifs don’t help us now. I am here to reveal to you that you cast roles for your two partners intentionally, if not consciously. You got exactly what you wanted through your emotional responses and your unconscious encouragement of their behaviours. Yet you could not have done that alone, since every person has agency in their lives (even if this lesson is not for them, it is universal in its application). So in this case, what you intended was that Gilles should be a disappointment to you so that you could justify your growing love for Morten and your increasing dissatisfaction with Gilles. And so it came to pass. That’s a lesson you didn’t expect, now, isn’t it?
You have an extraordinary power to unconsciously influence others to manifest whatever it is you intend. And you won’t always like it, nor will you even always know what you intend.
11
Spiky
And now for a polyamory-specific lesson. It’s odd, you know, how there are so few in a book that focuses on a relationship style that people think must be the cause of problems. But polyamory is rarely the cause of the problems — the people practicing it are.
Yet some structures are more prone to dysfunction than others. For example, the quad. The quad doesn’t always have to be two couples, but it usually is. This type of quad, as Elisabeth Sheff mentions in her fifteen-year study The Polyamorists Next Door — yes, you’ve read all the books now! — is unusually prone to dysfunction (and even abuse). Why? Because it’s a case of two couples with “couple privilege” clashing.
Couple privilege: The presumption that socially sanctioned pair-bond relationships involving only two people (such as marriage, long-term boyfriend / girlfriend, or other forms of conventional intimate / life partnerships) are inherently more important, “real” and valid than other types of intimate, romantic or sexual relationships.
~ Solopoly.net
Remember when Gilles broke your agreement about condoms? Whom did you blame? That’s right: Elena. Your natural instinct was not to blame your husband, because you put your marriage on a higher pedestal than his relationship with Elena. Who came to rescue Elena when you blamed her? Her husband, who put his marriage on a higher pedestal than his relationship with you. Who came to your rescue when Morten attacked you? Your husband, who put your marriage on a higher pedestal than his relationship with Elena. Each party was injured, and all of you were caught in a rather horrible Catch-22.
The obvious answer might be to just get rid of couple privilege. Except that you can’t, because couple privilege, like any other privilege, is deeply ingrained in our system. We glorify marriage as the ultimate state of togetherness. We are taught to protect it at almost any cost. You can choose not to buy into it, however; you can — as they say — “check your privilege.” You can’t eradicate the privilege, but you can eradicate your beliefs and actions that are rooted in couple privilege.
Within your relationship were numerous examples of unchecked couple privilege that resulted in the secondary partners being mistreated. You were mistreated, Morten was mistreated, Elena was mistreated and Gilles was mistreated. You were each the secondary partner of someone.
Couple privilege tends to instill a belief that the longevity of the relationship is what you value most, to the exclusion of your objectivity about the fair treatment of all the people involved with you and your partners. You had no idea that what you were doing was protecting your relationship — you thought you were protecting your spouse. Your husband didn’t need your loyalty or protection; he was not a child. But in buying into your couple privilege, not only did you mistreat others, you treated your husband like a child. And in doing so, you set the wheels in motion for a spiral of destruction.
I know — it had been a long time coming.
All people have the right to be treated with compassion and care, regardless of the type of relationship they are in or the longevity of their relationship.
12
An Alternative Christmas
Did you feel that? That release of pressure? Do you know why that happened? That’s called the power of honesty. I might have mentioned before how important honesty is to you. More so, I think, than to many others. Some people can live happily and cheat. Who are those people? Not you, at any rate. You might even say that this is why polyamory suits you so well. Since you are able to attract and connect with many people, and since you do not deal well with dishonesty, polyamory and you fit together. You can be open about the life you want to live.
There were certain things back then that made it hard for you to be honest. All that fear of rejection, for one. All that societal shaming, for another. It might be surprising for you to learn this, becaus
e after all in your childhood you lied your ass off, but you now cannot live happily without honesty.
Let me tell you a little bit about lying. You might think it will protect you from further repercussions, exposure…you might even feel that it is a necessary evil. That it will get you in with the “in-crowd” — even though it never did, did it? You might even feel that a certain level of lying is acceptable and laudable. But more than the disillusionment and disappointment that lying creates when it is discovered, lying creates more stress for you. Yes, you.
There’s something called “cognitive dissonance.” You will discover what it is when you are thirty-nine. Funny it took you that long to find a name for something you’ve been living with most of your life. Cognitive dissonance is when the picture you see of the outside world or the events you describe don’t match up with your internal reality. It creates a splintered world, two parallel universes that your mind is forever trying to reconcile. All lying does this, even white lies. As your mind tries to reconcile two disparate realities, you experience stress.
Stress is a killer: all that adrenaline and cortisol rushing round your system, preventing other bodily functions from working properly, putting you in a constant state of anxiety. Some people can deal with stress remarkably well. Others just think they do. You, who have been lied to all your life, cannot. Stress also prevents your mind from making decisions in your long-term best interest, because all you want to do is escape the situation your lies have created. That means flight…which eventually happened.
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