Ask A Married Lady: Can I Have A Non-Monogamous Relationship Without Jealousy?

by A Married Lady

My partner and I have been together for five years. We moved in together about two years ago. Recently, we’ve started talking about trying an open relationship, just to see if it works for us. Neither of us plan on being monogamous forever, but so far monogamy has felt right. Everything feels very secure and open and honest, so now seems like a good time to see if non-monogamy might be right as well.

The thing is, at the very beginning of our relationship, I struggled a lot with jealousy. My partner was seeing a lot of other people when we first started hooking up and it was something we argued about pretty frequently. After we agreed to be exclusive, I would sometimes catch him talking to other girls he had been seeing, and he did cheat at least once that I know of early in the relationship.

We worked through it and are stronger for it, but my concern is that seeing other people — even in an honest, open, mutually respectful way — would bring up all those bad feelings all over again. I love him, and trust him, but I don’t know if I trust my own feelings. I don’t know if I’ll be able to logically separate what we’re doing now from the way I felt back then. Is there a way to avoid jealousy when it comes to open relationships?

To put it bluntly: no. But also: yes.

When my partner and I first started seeing other people, I had a lot of fears that strike me as somewhat irrational now. I thought maybe we were doing something that would CHANGE OUR LIVES FOREVER. Or maybe I would change forever and my partner would stay the same, or vice versa! Everything seemed very high stakes and dramatic.

My partner and I have been together for a pretty long time and our relationship has gone through a lot of different stages, as I’m sure yours has as well. When we first started seeing each other it was extremely casual, and then when things started getting serious, we actually did break up for like one minute because my partner wanted to see other people. That felt devastating at the time. I was sure I would never recover.

But that’s the thing about feelings: they mutate in unexpected ways over time. At the time I thought I was jealous of the other girl. I don’t know if that’s exactly what it was. I thought that if my partner wanted to see other people, then I couldn’t possibly be the most important person in his life anymore; I thought he had replaced me. That feeling has only to do with myself. The issue was that I didn’t feel a lot of security or trust in our relationship as it was at the time.

We put about three years between that episode and trying non-monagamy. That’s a significant amount of time, and a lot changed between us in that period. Five years is a pretty long time as well, and I would imagine there’s a lot that’s different between you and your partner since he cheated.

I’ve had people ask if I ever get jealous of my partner seeing other women. I just shrug and say no, because that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth, ever. The truth is there were days and weeks and months when everything was going so well I couldn’t believe we hadn’t been having an open relationship this whole time. The truth is sometimes I look at our relationship and think of all the ways this could all go terribly wrong.

There are two possibilities that could become reality at any time: this works great and is fun and light and easy, or I look at my partner and realize there’s something about him I’ll truly never know or be able to understand, because that’s the real risk with an open relationship: no matter how much you love someone, or trust someone, or know someone, you’ll never know what they’re like with another person. I don’t really believe in that whole “being in love changes you, man,” type shit, but I do know there’s something that happens when you commit to hanging out and fucking someone on the regular: you become a new version of yourself, not better or worse, just the result of that weird alchemy two people create when they spend time together.

So when your partner, who you love so much and who has had a profound influence on your personality and life, starts spending significant time with someone else — I know I was afraid that maybe he would become a better version of himself, maybe even a version that he liked better. And that’s not jealousy; that is, I think, fear of the unknown. You’re inviting something into your life that you simply cannot predict.

I don’t know if you’re afraid of jealousy, exactly, or if you’re afraid of change. To me, it sounds like you’re afraid of what you can’t possibly know until it happens. There are some factors here that I don’t know: if you’ve ever been in a non-monogamous relationship before, for example, or if this is something you were interested in or something your partner suggested, but those predictors can only tell you so much.

For me, I still remember waking up the morning after I’d first slept with someone who wasn’t my primary partner, and doing a kind of mental inventory: was I still the same? Did I feel the same? Did I think the same? And I was, and I did! The changes that came were slow and gradual, like all big internal or emotional changes. My primary partner and I have had our moments where we’ve fought and I can’t speak for him but I know I’ve definitely gotten weird and sad when I feel insecure or neglected. That’s the truth. I’ve just never felt those things more than I’ve felt total trust and love for my partner, and that’s only something I found out when we started seeing other people.

The main question I have for you — answering your question with another question, yikes — is whether you feel like you can talk to your partner, openly and honestly, about these potential bad feelings, should they arise. In my experience, you can’t reason through something that hasn’t happened yet, nor can you reason away a feeling. No open relationship is served by avoiding or replacing emotions.

But there’s also nothing about an open relationship that’s entirely dependent on you: your emotions and your trust issues don’t exist in a vacuum. They are related to how your partner behaves, the behavior of those you and your partner start seeing, your own histories and beliefs and experiences and all of that baggage that bounces around our brains and hearts. You have to do the work to balance your feelings against your partner’s, of course, but they have to do the same, and if you’re not sure they can support you the way you need to be supported then you’ll need to wait until you can be sure. You’re not alone in this, for better or worse.