Monogamy: Partner Ownership

This post is a follow up from my previous post on monogamy

     Once I had changed my mind about relationship jealousy, I still had a lot of distance to cover before I changed my mind about monogamy entirely. Plenty of monogamous couples are far more mature than I was and live without jealousy, and yet remain monogamous. While working through my jealousy/insecurity was a step along the path, it was just one part of the process of coming to polyamory. Another idea entrenching monogamy as the only acceptable relationship style was what I am referring to as "partner ownership."

   

      Jealousy isn't the only thing that was enforcing monogamy in my life. It is a cultural norm that a person should expect any person they are romantically involved with to forego such a relationship with any other person. Even as I over came my insecurity that my partner may find someone else they like more than me and leave me for them, I still felt like they owed me their entire being or like they somehow belonged to me. I may not have directly or openly claimed to be in charge of them in anyway, but I expected to have some direction over their choices. If they did something without consulting me then it could be considered somehow a betrayal or reason for losing trust.

     And it wasn't just about expecting to direct (or help direct, I like to think I wasn't THAT overbearing, but maybe they would disagree) their life, but also about expecting to control their time on a more hour by hour scale. My expectations here went something like, "if you are dating me, I can expect that you spend however much time I feel is appropriate on me." This may not have been manifest in such clear terms in my mind, but expressed in expecting them to do things that they didn't enjoy with me for the sake of proving that they loved me. I'm not saying that it isn't a nice thing to do to give up some of your time to engage your partner in their hobbies, but coming from the other side, expecting or telling them they have to indicates that you require it of them. I have seen this in relationships where one person wants to do something and another wants to sit back and relax. I have seen the person who wants to relax try to guilt the person who wants to engage in some activity into just lounging around, despite the obvious antsiness of their partner. Relationship jealousy is one manifestation of insecurity, but another is trying to control everything around you for fear if you don't that everything you have will crumble.

     This is a particularly bad reaction to insecurity in regards to the people around you. Tightening your grip simultaneously pushes people away and makes you mistrust any evidence of their love that may exist. I started to recognize this in myself when my response to being told by someone that they love was to question them. My mind instantly went to, "Do you though?" I would be really surprised if I was the only person to experience this, but for myself I recognized it came from a sense of entitlement to love from partners. My train of thought going something like, "Of course you are saying that, you owe it to me. Of course you are continuing this relationship, you married me and now have no choice in the matter."

     That lack of choice in the matter is what made me realize I had done a terrible disservice to my partners under the guise of love. I held my partners' affections hostage under threat of destruction of whatever life we had built together. Even if it wasn't in open threat, spoken out loud as a warning, it is common knowledge that break-ups are horrible things. The more entangled your lives have grown, the more ability your partner has to take away the things you have spent your time building, including your reputation and other relationships. How many stories are told in gossip in the end of a relationship, spreading the things that one partner has done to hurt another? These things have a way of damaging the familial relationships that develop over time with each partners parents and friends, and often ending them entirely. Even if I never said them, I knew that being in a relationship, and especially a monogamous relationship meant that a partner had invested so many of their resources in me that their support system outside of myself (both financially and in drifting away from family and friends) meant that to leave me was a large hassle, and a large risk to a partners mental health and financial stability.

     The difficulty of disentangling two lives is often seen as a comforting safety in a relationship, i.e. my partner wont leave me on a whim, but is a double edged sword that means that my partner may stay in a relationship with me long after they no longer want to, out of fear and shear difficulty. For myself, I came to realize that not only was this a contributor to my insecurity and a builder of belief that my partner is only with me because they have to be, but also a logical inconsistency between my professed love for them and my restricting them from pursuing whatever course may make them happy.

     I think that without this element of logic, I wouldn't have fully realized how my relationship style contributed to my own personal unhappiness. I have written here first about effects my world view had on my life practically, but the decision to make a change didn't come from those negative effects. I am an incredibly stubborn person, and will live my life in the way I have decided despite whatever pain it my bring me. I will lose friends, I will repeatedly walk myself into a wall, if I belief that is the right thing to do based on my perception of the world. I spent most of my life as a strong deontologist, and though I recognize the practical benefits of consequentialism, and find it more and more relevant, the tendency to create rules and follow them to my self destruction has been well trained into my psyche. Sometimes the rule is more consciously defined than others, but this one didn't need to be. It was built off the culture that exists around monogamy in the world I grew up in, and was naturally adopted by myself.

     Several things drew my attention to the my own logical inconsistencies around it. The first was a TED talk I came across. Titled, "Why Happy Couples Cheat," it described the way our culture has changed the way it views relationships and monogamy in modernity, and how the purpose of relationships have changed. It is a great talk, and worth listening to, but the parts that stuck out for me was a description of how cheating in relationships often has little to do with a intrinsic fault in the way that two people connect, and the motivations that people have for secret relationships can be entirely relatable. The common refrain of those wronged in the act of cheating cited in the talk "You think I didn't want more? But I am not the one who did it!" marked for me the fact that even in being wronged people are able understand why someone would want to pursue relationships outside of their exclusive relationship. If not universal, it seems that most people can think of at least one reason why they would want to. There are some good reasons listed in the TED talk and I recommend it if you have some time to give it a listen. There are legitimate reasons why people are drawn towards cheating, even though the act of betraying ones partner is entirely reprehensible.

   

     As an example, I have had several close acquaintances who have, after marrying and having children, left a religion that abhors homosexuality. Having left that environment and feeling able to listen to their own feelings, they realized an attraction to members of their own gender. Having repressed such feelings so deeply that they are only able to discover it later in their life, already married and in committed relationships, they are in a position that a certain part of themselves has become off limits to explore. This without any knowledge that this would be the position they would be in upon entering the relationship. This would never excuse them cheating, but could make them somewhat resentful for the position they have found themselves. They may never act on that, but still feel like they have missed out on a part of life or themselves, having never had the chance to pursue relationships with a large portion of the population that they had previously forbidden for themselves.

     For myself, realizing that there could be these sorts of things that my partner may be foregoing out of respect and love for me, or out of the difficulty it would cause them were they to pursue it, or however it may feel in their mind, made me feel sad. I wouldn't want the threat of emotion and financial ruin to be the only reason a person was with me, and more importantly I realized I could no longer feel comfortable feeling like I was owed that. I saw the inconsistency of telling someone I love them and then getting in the way of something that was a part of them, or something they thought might make them happy. If I love someone for who they are, not for the fact they are willing to give up a part of themselves for me to be able to accept them.

     It took me a lot of time to work through my jealousy issues around letting go of owning my partner and their affections. However, noticing that I had been given power and ownership over her by our past view of how a relationship should be, I had no choice but to release that grip over my partner at the time of this realization. I did not want that grip to be the only reason she was with me, for my own security and for her happiness. I wanted my love for her to be a commitment to her happiness, and not do anything to get in the way of that.

     What does that look like for me? I told her the realization I had come to. I told her that I did not want to block her happiness, I didn't want to repress her in any way. If she wants to pursue relationships with other people, including sexual ones, I am happy for her. If she doesn't want to be with me, I will do my best to facilitate that transition, rather than be a barrier to it. I do not want to own her, or for our relationship to be a shackle around her legs. And the results have been incredibly freeing for the both of us.

     For her, she is able to know that I support her in meeting her needs and wants in life in the best way that seems suitable for her. For me I am able to be free from the questioning of whether or not she wants to spend time with me, because I know if she did not want to do so, she wouldn't. It is beautiful the way that letting go of the chains of ownership on my partner has done more to free me than any other pursuit of freedom I have tried. This change in my world view has also allowed me to feel closer in all of my relationships romantic and otherwise, in a way that I was previously preventing myself from doing. It feels good when updating your beliefs, which may seem theoretical or not immediately practically applicable lead to positive changes in your life. This one definitely has, but that isn't necessarily the point of getting rid of inconsistencies in your life. The point is striving towards self honesty and true integrity. Knowing what you believe and how you got there. For myself that is the goal, independent of whether or not that makes life easier or more pleasant.

Relevant References:

Philosophize This! episode about deontology vs consequentialist ethics

morethantwo.com 

More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory 

Note: You can listen to More Than Two with a free trial of Audible here! And it helps support the blog!

The Bayesian Conspiracy episode about polyamory. Basically, this is 3 people talking about the different ways they practice polyamory/non-monogamy.

Homosexuality

By Kjerish - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54180877

     I still remember the first time I met an openly gay person.

     I was 17 years old, riding a greyhound bus to Nashville to visit my best friend, who had just moved there. This was my first real venture into the world as a solo person, away from home and alone. It was an eventful journey, enough so that I remember more about the bus ride to Nashville than my time there. The bus left Salt Lake just ahead of a large snow storm that was moving eastward. In Rock Springs, Wyoming the bus driver broke their arm in attempting to put chains on the tires of the bus. Rock Springs isn't exactly a hub for greyhound and it was 8 hours until a replacement driver got us back on the road. This 8 hour delay extended a 1.5 day bus ride into a 2.5 day bus ride, as we were now in the thick of the storm as it rolled across the country. This gave large amounts of time to talk to fellow passengers. From Salt Lake to St Louis, I rode next to an older man who enjoyed conversation a bit more than I did. My memory is not particularly visual so I am unable to recall what he looked like, solely that I classified him as older. After more than a day of talking with this guy, I can still remember the moment when he revealed that he was gay. He was traveling from San Diego to Boston to visit someone, and I inquired as to how he was able to have that much free time. He replied that he was on disability (which given my privileged upbringing I had never really heard of) because he had AIDS, which he mentioned as being common among gay men like himself. I was mortified. I remember texting a friend, "He's Gay!!!" I did not even know how to process this information. In my mind I had just met someone who had casually admitted to being a step below a murderer. I was uncomfortable sitting near him moving forward, and looked for the first opportunity to put distance between us without seeming too incredibly rude.

     Flash forward to a time when I was a missionary in South Africa, which at the time probably had even less openly gay people than Utah. I remember the disgust I felt learning that someone I was teaching was gay. We burned all the records we had of teaching them in our desire to distance ourselves from the horror. Contrast this with the patience that I was able to put into working with a person who had admitted to repeatedly raping his daughter and then hiding the results with multiple abortions. At the time I was willing to give this person a chance to change their life, yet was insulted and disgusted that another had the audacity to sit and talk to me while being gay. Intellectually I know that I was a product of my culture in my horror, and in regularly using "gay" as the most insulting term I could think of, but it is hard to not feel ashamed of myself for not having the human decency to know better. Overcoming this visceral disgust and hate was a long and arduous journey. There are only a few things in my life that I have ever felt so strongly enough about.

     As much as I hate to admit it, this is one of the things I have changed my mind about that I don't feel like I can really take that much credit for. In things I have written about up to this point, my change of heart came after much effort to try to reevaluate my view. This is one that just pulled me along. I think I had felt too deeply about it that it had gone past all reason. In that way it was beyond my ability to critically examine, but took help from the outside to reach in and break down the hardness of my heart. There are  a few sources that I credit with softening my heart, so that when I did actually look at how I felt about this issue, I found that my mind had already changed on its own.

     First of all was the writing of Orson Scott Card. This may come as a surprise as age seems to have turned his views far more conservative than they once were, but the first gay character I ever read about was in his novel Songmaster. Ender's Game and the trilogy that follow it were the first real exploration of the importance of tolerance that I really understood. There could have been many others trying to reach me, but these novels really opened my mind to the importance of  recognizing when you are unable to understand an other's perspective and practicing patience and love in those instances, rather than lashing out. I learned about tolerance from the mistakes of Ender, and the way he spent the rest of his life trying to spread tolerance and understanding among humanity. I do not know of any other character from any other story who put as much effort into teaching people how little we may know about those around us, and how unable we are to judge them properly based on the little we do know. 

     Second is punk rock, and the music scene surrounding punk and ska in my area at the time. There are of course hateful elements of the punk genre, but Salt Lake at the time had a strong community built around unity. It wasn't necessarily that people at shows were talking about homosexuality specifically, but the emphasis on ending hate in all forms showed me what how to put tolerance into practice. I feel like I owe a great deal to examples of good people I met, and the art that they made. Music has been one of the few things that was been able to reach past the walls I put up against critical thinking and make me willing to consider points of view that were beyond my reach.

     Though changing my mind about the way LGBT people should be treated was something I fought anytime it came up consciously, the rising prominence in popular culture of the movement for equal rights brought plenty of time for my internal conflict between the ideals of equality and tolerance and my homophobia and belief that gay marriage should be illegal to be apparent. Not being the most self aware person at the time I lament that I am unable to point to the exact process of how I came to change my mind about these things I felt so strongly about. I do not think that it all hinged on one moment, but rather was a swelling up of conflict that had been suppressed for an extended period. However, if it was something that happened all at once, I certainly know what that moment was. It is one of the more clear memories of my life. May of 2013. At the time I was going to school at Utah State University and on the weekends I was delivering pizzas in Salt Lake 100 miles away. As such my wife, son Ezra, and I would stay with family on the weekends and one Sunday morning after a long night taking care of the nearly 1 year old Ezra, I put on some Stephen Colbert. The musical guest was Macklemore, and he performed his song "Same Love," and talked about the way that homophobia and misogyny were glorified in hip hop and the culture at large.

The moment from Macklemore that brought me to the realization of the need for change on my view

     I wish I knew why this was the moment that it finally clicked how much hate I held in my heart and how poorly it was justified. My son, Ezra, was so incredibly important to me that I built my whole life around him, and I remember the important thing in my mind being something along the lines of "Ezra can't grow up feeling this way, I can't be an example of discrimination and intolerance for something I do not understand." I knew I was in the wrong, and I realized I had to change my actions and opinions to match my actual values. I was not living up to my own ideals, and if I wasn't careful I would be leading my son down that same path of professing ones values as one thing, and then actively working against them. I needed to bring my word and my behavior together and live more authentically, even if it meant swimming against the current of culture.



     So in lieu of being able fully describe how I was able to change my mind on this topic, I will offer instead an apology. For all those who were unable to feel comfortable being themselves in a culture of repression that I contributed to, I am sorry. I know you were around me and unable to feel safe being out, and a part of that was due to the judgement I passed on you, and the hate that I propagated. Its far too little too late, but I am sorry for my part, for going with the flow and actively contributing to the flow. May we all work for a world for our children that doesn't make them feel ostracized for being who they are, gay or straight, black or white, religious or not. All I know how to do is move forward away from the pain I have caused, towards a place where all feel welcome and supported in their own skin. We can actually make a better world, and we can actually build our community to match our ideals and our values. I guess I just want to say, lets actually do it.

Unexplainable Occurrences

My Daughter, Florence, at the Ringing Rocks. This is a very unusual pile of rocks, which when struck ring in a metallic manner. The mechanism for which is currently unknown.

     One of the things I have changed my mind about that has had the biggest impact on my life is the way that I think about the unexplained strange things that happen in life. Some of these things might be more mundane, some cause people to structure their whole life around them. There are many such experiences in my life that I attributed to an all powerful being intervening on my behalf. There are many others that I ignored, or refused to admit even happened. The things I perceived as interventions from higher, intelligent powers, ranged from moments of inspiration in decision making, to unexplained healings and exorcisms. I could fill a page with just the things that I have sorted into this unexplained category from my life. I further sorted them into faith constructive and faith destructive miracles and then tried to minimize in my head the importance of the faith destructive while maximizing the importance of the faith constructive, but this is not the part I want to discuss today. This is about how my view of the whole category of supernatural phenomena.

     In my time as a religionist, I held the view that there were things that happened naturally, which were the realm of science, and things then that were unexplainable by science and thus supernatural. This sorting left a realm of mundane occurrences, explainable by mundane techniques, and a realm of mysterious occurrences that could not be explained by mundane techniques. Science could explain how a doctor could heal the sick, but when a faith healer did the healing it was beyond natural, and therefore out of the realm of what science could explain. These miracles or whatever term you like to use for anomalous events, then required some other system to reach explanations. They were, thereby, seen as support for religion in my life. Since science was unable to fathom their depths, religion and spirituality was required to tap into the world beyond. Here was a system that allowed for unusual occurrences. If the sun stopped rising and setting as science required it to, I could attribute the unusual phenomenon to the power of God and his willing the earth to cease its rotation. I was very grateful for the the freedom to kill my curiosity with this all encompassing explanation. This was a great system, I could avoid any questioning of my main religion which encompassed the realm of the unexplainable. The trouble came when I started examining my religion which ruled the realm of the explainable.

     After getting tired of my engineering major, I decided to give physics a try. This turned out to be an intimate examination of my understanding science. I started with essentially two curiosity stopping belief systems, which I used to prevent myself from ever having to be unsure. On the one had science was a black box mystery which provided answers about everyday sort of things, and on the other my religious system was a black box mystery that provided answers about unusual experiences. Since I had carefully protected the second system, throwing out any doubt that might try to assault it, and also spent a lot of time trying to understand it, it seemed like an appropriate time to get a better understanding of the first mystery answer box.

     Before spending time on understanding my "regular occurrence" religion, science felt like a list of answers to questions that other people had answered. It was merely a lookup table that could be checked to find answers to any question I might have about things that happen with some regular frequency. I have already written about how understanding the math and theory behind changed my mind about the age of the earth, but my education became a series of similar events. Slowly the magic fell away. It was a process that required many walks home from class with my head spinning as I wrapped my head around the implications. I felt like a child seeing the world for the first time. Having been warned, as I described before, against the power of science in creating apostasy I was prepared for a list of answers that might disagree with my other religion. Howsoever, what I was not prepared for, was the humility of science.

     When I started my education in physics, I saw no difference essentially between my two religions. I had spent years in deep study of my "religion of the unexplainable." When I searched for explanations from this answer box about the mysteries of these phenomena, I received answers. I received answer through both methods as mundane as reading and as mysterious as revelation. The answers were equally mysterious, and I wondered and worshiped at the mystery. When I searched from answers from my "religion of the explainable," it was a very similar experience. While I didn't realize I was treating these two things the same way, looking back it is pretty clear to me. The biggest shock of my examination of my "natural religion" was its admission of error. A magic answer box should never admit error if it is to be trusted! It took me a long long time and a lot of mental anguish to wrestle with this admission of guilt. Even worse than admitting error, it admitted uncertainty! This is an element of empirical research that had somehow been omitted in my understanding of science to this point in my life. I had held on to, and required certainty from both of my religions.

     Uncertainty is incredibly uncomfortable for me. I have become more comfortable with it over time, but I want there to be a well defined answer to any given question. I think this is a common view, and as a culture we have in our minds that if something is uncertain it is less valuable. My mistake was in assuming certainty was possible. In ignoring the super unlikely events that would make my whole world view nonsensical. An example from my religion of the explainable is the refutation of the Ptolemaic earth centered universe. All the regularly occurring phenomena were consistent with an earth centered view of the universe, and experiment regularly confirmed that sun and stars orbited the earth. This is of course a simplistic view of the history, but for a detailed consideration of this particular scenario I recommend Paul Feyerabends book, Against Method It took occurrences that were considered uncommon and perhaps even miraculous being incorporated into the theory to realize a shift was necessary.

     These unusual occurrences are often ignored for ease of communication, and this can make them appear nonexistent. For example, if you asked me how tall my office door is I would promptly get my tape measure to begin answering your question. I believe strongly in the old adage "measure twice, cut once" so I decide to make several measurements of the doorway. Say I measure it 10 times, writing down the measurement each time. I come up with a list of 10 numbers. The whole point of measuring 10 times is that I have assumed I may make some error, and I need further evidence in order to give you an answer. Say of my measurements, 9 of them are between 7 feet and 7 feet 1 inch but the one of them was 11 feet 6 inches. How do I answer your question? I collected data on the doorway, and it is not exactly straightforward. I have 9 answers that more or less agree, and 1 that does not. While there can be a number of ways to explain the 1 measurement, and why it might be ignored for the sake of our conversation about the doorway, the fact is that it still exists. I may tell you that the door is between 7 feet and 7 feet 1 inch, or I may tell you that 90% of the time it is so, while 10% of the time it appears to be much larger. I can chalk it up a mistake in writing down the measurement, or maybe I didnt notice I had 4 feet of tape laying on the floor. I could also assume that a supernatural occurrence where God, who is obviously at least 10 feet tall, needed to expand the doorway while he walked through, right at the time I measured. Whichever of these actions I take following the measurement change the real issue. Even if I through out the outlying measurement, the ones that more or less agree, still have a bit of uncertainty. The point of this example is that certainty is not something that is possible in considering phenomena, regularly occurring or unusual.

https://xkcd.com/1725/

     This realization, and the admittance in the answers given by the science, changed my mind about the requirement of another system, one to explain the unexplainable. The religion of the mundane was not running from these weird data points, but embraced them and used them to move forward. It did not want to hide them, but to put a big red flag on them so that they could be studied harder. This took it from the realm of a religion, to an honest endeavor to understand. This was the humility of science that I came to love. The honesty to say, this answer is uncertain, but when you try to check it out for yourself, this is how I got the answer I gave you. No matter how much I pushed into answers given by my religion of the unexplainable, it never became a technology. It never turned into a tool for creating new answers and verifying old ones, and once I found out that my religion of the explainable was doing everything in its power to not be a magic answer box I lost most of my interest in the unexplainable. My Scientism destroyed itself by the study of science giving tools for checking and verifying the answers given, while owning up to that which was unknown and uncertain. Meanwhile my religious answers remained as confusing and uncheckable, all while doubling down on the what I now view as absurd insistence on absolute certainty. Not only is that not an empowering tool for finding answers, its kind of boring. I lost my faith, not because I didn't believe its claims, but because I found that uncertainty is a part of the human understanding, and that science is far more messy than it might appear. If no one had told me beforehand that God sometimes walks through doorways, and he stretches them taller when he does, I would never have jumped to that conclusion on the one outlying data point. It may be true, but it seems a lot less likely than other more mundane explanations. I would be lying if I said that I believed it, and an extension of that simple example to various other phenomena such as faith healings or other miracles is the story of how I changed my mind about their importance.

     I found that removing both of my religions took away my ability to easily stop curiosity from forming in my mind. Curiosity is the great driver, which pushes inquiry forward both on a personal and societal scale, and I have removed two great obstacles to curiosity. I was grateful to them when I knew not of the drive curiosity can create, and the pleasure that can be derived from pursuing its leads. I loved the one for fear of damnation in an after life, and the other for fear of ridicule. However replacing the religion of science with the pursuit of curiosity in a scientific manner, I have avoided the damnation in mortality that I had clung on to so tightly for most of my life.

P.S. 

 Here is a bit of art relevant to today's subject. Song and video are both excellent. One of my favorites. 

Monogamy: Relationship Jealousy

     

 

    As I have tried to find subjects that my opinion on needs to change, there is a technique that has been particularly fruitful. That technique is to try to identify things that I assume to be unquestionably true. Ideas that are so ingrained in my head, or that are never challenged by my experiences in the world, that I assume they are the bedrock. Often these are things that I haven't given much thought to, and are therefore poorly justified. This has yielded many topics that under minor scrutiny I have found my belief in their foundational truth to be tenuous. It is often easy to find them because they might feel taboo or gross to even question. Things that might be taken to be "just wrong" or "just right" by society at large. These are things that often change once people actually start thinking about them. Gay marriage, interracial marriage, women's suffrage, etc. were all at one time extremely taboo subjects that only became clear once people got over the cultured feeling of disgust at the thought of women as equals to men or other respective uncomfortable ideas.

     This technique led me to a questioning of monogamy as a relationship style. This changing of opinion was massive and took place over long periods of time with periods of suppression of my feelings on the subject. The final change of opinion on the matter happened quite swiftly but it was preceded by years and years of slowly rotting foundation. The idea of monogamy was as a large structure propped up by myself, my religious values and my culture, with many different supports, some of which fell slowly over time, and some of which were removed quickly. Eventually enough had been removed that when my scrutiny to turned to the larger structure it was easy enough to see the trend and to change my mind about the subject as a whole. However, since this is a many faceted and complex journey, I have decided to talk about each of these subjects more or less individually, somewhat similar to the fashion that I experienced the change in myself. The first of these topics I would like to write about is one that I found caused me some of the most unnecessary pain in my thus far short life, relationship jealousy.

     I used to value jealousy in a relationship. I think I am not alone in this. There is a widespread support of jealousy as a healthy element of a relationship in popular culture. Nearly every song, movie or TV depiction of relationships point to jealousy as a signal of true care. Essentially the message is, "if your partner spends time with another person, you have got to show jealousy about that time not spent on you, or you are showing that you do not care about your partner." I took it for granted that if some a person was not jealous about their partner, it was a sign that they were no longer interested in continuing that relationship. I cultured jealousy within myself levels that made my partners uncomfortable and strangled the relationship. I did it in the name of love. How could I love them if I was not jealous?

     Even at the time I valued this jealousy, I noticed its negative effects. I tried to restrain myself from constant surveillance of my romantic partners' time and communications, that would be a rather overt negative effect, but there are many more subtle ways in which jealousy can hurt a relationship that we are trying to nurture. Jealousy is a symptom of insecurity, and my insecurity has caused plenty of damage to all sorts of relationships, romantic and otherwise. When I feel insecure/jealous I start doing things that sabotage my relationships. I assume that since a person could not possibly like me as much as I like them, I might as well not try. Its a sort of vicious circle where I might not invite a person to an activity because, due to my insecurity, I don't think they would want to be involved in an activity that involves me. This leads to a dampening on my relationship with that person, which in turn feeds into my insecurity, making the cycle begin again from an even more disconnected place. There are plenty of ways that jealousy in a relationship feels bad and hurts the relationship, but I tried to ignore them as much as possible. However, I am far too stubborn for the negative consequences of this belief in jealousy as a valuable asset to be enough to make me change my mind

     What did help me change my mind was learning that there were people who actually did live without jealousy as a relationship ideal. Jealousy as a valuable asset in a partner is really only present in the monogamous system of relationships. Monogamy is certainly the most common relationship style in the culture that surrounds me, but learning that there were other relationship styles that did not see jealousy as conducive to good relationships opened my mind to the fact I did not need jealousy. I don't mean to say that there is only one way to practice monogamy, and that way promotes jealousy, just that the way I understood it did. I had it so ingrained in my world view that I didn't see there even was another option. It took me actively scrutinizing the idea to realize that I could work on my insecurity, and that losing the symptom of jealousy would not only not be detrimental to my relationships but actually make them better. Changing my thought patterns was no easy task of course, but having realized the possibility, it was certainly less gargantuan. 

     Making this change of decision actually translate into a change in my life was a process of trying to understand exactly where my discomfort lied. I found that my jealousy was very vague and when I tried to find what exactly I felt jealous about, it was hard to nail down. This emphasized to me that I my jealousy was not fundamental, but was a symptom of insecurity. This was much more fundamental, and while difficult to overcome, it removed the pressure from the relationship and onto my self improvement journey. Internalizing the problem, recognizing that insecurity stems from within and is not on anybody else to fix, has allowed me to correct for it in my thought process. Just like any other systematic error or bias, recognizing its existence makes it much less powerful. When I have a thought that stems from insecurity, I can label it as such and give it less weight according. From here it is a much simpler problem. It requires effort, and training, but it is no longer some intractable issue with no solution. It becomes a matter of building the mental habit of correcting for that bias, just like any other recognized bias, and the benefits have definitely made such efforts valuable.

    I have seen the biggest change in my relationship with my wife of 6 years. My increased ability to manage my insecurity has allowed us to be far more open with each other. I no longer put the responsibility on her to police her communication with me or her actions for things that may create jealousy within me, but instead take responsibility for my own feelings. I do still occasionally feel jealousy, but acknowledging it as an error in thought, to be talked through as such, allows fixes to be implemented without judgement. Instead of "You did this thing, and it made me jealous," the discussion can be more "I have this feeling, can you help me see why I do not need to be insecure?"I no longer have to get in the way of the help I need by making there a "thing that has been done wrong" (and definitely not by me), but instead can ask for help in correcting my bias towards discounting my own value. It is incredible what more you can get when you treat a partner as a partner and not as an enemy.

Some resources I have found helpful on changing your mind, and on jealousy:

More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory

https://www.morethantwo.com/jealousy-insecurity.html

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i9/the_importance_of_saying_oops/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jz/the_meditation_on_curiosity/

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693884-how-not-to-be-wrong

Rationality: From AI to Zombies

How to Actually Change Your Mind

Comment from discussion I have recently made a lot of changes in my life, including embarking in polyamory. As part of that I have been writing a blog about things I have changed my mind about. I wanted to share the essay I wrote about relationship jealousy, and would love any feedback..