Envy ≠ jealousy
Bridging the monogamist-polyamorous divide
I just had my one-year anniversary of a wonderful relationship with a wonderful person; she has made me exceptionally happy, and we are both quite pleased with the status of our partnership.1 Though she and I are very close, we have also agreed to maintain an open relationship: both of us are free to pursue sexual/romantic relationships outside of the two of us. Perhaps that will change in the future, but at time of last discussion we are both fine with, and indeed happy for, the other person making these kinds of connections. My thought is: human relationships are awesome and make people happy, so if my partner finds someone else that makes her happy, that’s great!
I’ve felt this way for a long time—long before actually committing to an open relationship—and so I used to be quite confused about romantic jealousy.
I could understand why people got upset about their partner “cheating on” them: if you agreed to monogamy, they broke that agreement and lied to you. Once I got to college and became a substantially busier person, I could even understand certain practical motivations for monogamy: the time you get to spend with your loved ones is sadly limited, and there are certain deep, mutually beneficial bonds that take a lot of invested time and energy to cultivate; a binding agreement to make each other the sole focus of romantic attention might be a very good practical solution for many couples.2
But it seemed to me that there were many monogamous people who would become quite upset at the very thought of their partner forming romantic or sexual bonds with another person. Even many single people, asked to consider the prospect of a polyamorous relationship, find it unsatisfying. And it seemed to me that “jealousy” was a primary reason for this. And I… just didn’t get it. Rationalist polyamorous blogger Ozy Brennan reports the same feeling:
Books about how to be polyamorous devote an enormous amount of page space to jealousy. Consider, for example, More Than Two, by Eve Rickert and the disgraced Franklin Veaux, devotes an entire chapter to jealousy … It even recommends a jealousy workbook for people who have so much jealousy they have to read a whole different book about it. … [But] I do not feel jealous when my partner has sex with someone else, which is why I am poly in the first place—just like monogamous people don’t feel trapped by monogamy, which is why they are monogamous in the first place. I think—based on my decade-plus of experience being poly—that this is the usual case.
“So… you people don’t get jealous?” Yes and no. Here I think it is helpful to distinguish two superficially similar concepts: jealousy and envy.3
Say Alice and Beth are in a relationship and agree to try polyamory. Alice could experience what we colloquially call “jealousy” in at least two ways:
Beth experiences greater romantic and sexual success outside of the relationship, making many wonderful connections and becoming happier, while Alice only attracts a handful of people. Alice feels upset because comparatively, she isn’t experiencing as many good things as Beth. The upset feeling is similar to how Alice used to feel when she was single and all her friends were in happy relationships; she feels like she is missing out. This is what philosophers call envy.
Alice and Beth have roughly equal degrees of romantic and sexual success outside of the relationship, and Alice feels this to be true. However, when Alice hears from Beth's sexual partner Claire about a wonderful time Beth and Claire had together, Alice gets upset. She feels that Beth, in some sense, belongs to her, and it upsets her when other people enjoy a romantic or sexual relationship with Beth. This is what philosophers mean by jealousy.
Ozy and I experience envy just like everybody else. When I was single and in a bad mood, I’d experience envy towards my friends in relationships. Ozy says they “do not specifically experience a form of romantic or sexual jealousy, distinct from the jealousy I experience about my friends having other friends, excursions to see Broadway shows that I can’t afford to go on, or the concept of Minecraft YouTube” (my emphasis). When Ozy says “jealousy,” it seems to map pretty neatly onto the philosophical definition of envy.
On the other hand, I don’t experience any jealousy in the proprietary sense when I hear my partner has another partner outside the relationship. I don’t feel betrayed, inadequate, or violated in any sense. If my partner started spending a lot of time going on elaborate dates with this third person, I might start to get envious: “wait, that sounds like fun, I want to do things like that!” But if I also got to have fun, elaborate dates with my partner, I wouldn’t be upset.
The closest thing I might feel to jealousy is a recognition that—in the limit—my partner’s time is a rival good. We don’t see each other every minute of every day, so it makes me happy to hear she’s making connections with other people when we’re off on our own. But we have certain regular times we are committed to seeing each other, and a general understanding that if one of us needs emotional support, the other will make it a high priority to be there for them. If my partner had so many other partners that it started to significantly cut into that time, I would start to feel upset. Sure, I could spend that time with other people, but my partner is so wonderful that she carries a lot of special value to me: I want to spend time with her, not just with anybody. Still, I don’t care in se about other people spending time with her, as long as they’re treating each other well!
Why do people experience jealousy? I’ve read a lot of Sapolsky, and at least in baboons, male jealousy is subject to a pretty simple evolutionary explanation: access to female reproduction is a rival good, so males have a vested interest in keeping everyone else away from their mates. More detail is needed, though: women also typically want monogamy and hate being cheated on. A cursory glance at the literature4 suggests that while males don’t have rival reproductive resources, in some species they do have other resources (like paternal investment) which they females are highly incentivized to monopolize for the safety of their offspring. If this is true for humans, this would suggest that males are more likely to be upset by sexual infidelity, and females more by emotional/commitment infidelity, and there’s some empirical support for this.
When some monogamous people sneer at polyamory and call it shallow, insecure, or inauthentic, I sometimes get the urge to snap back with the evo psych: you guys are the ones ruled by proprietary, sexually-stratified, cold-hearted genetic optimization! We are the ones who elevate love and human connection! But this response is also dumb. People just have different preferences for their relationships, and as a preference welfarist, I don’t think there are any wrong preferences in se. As long as you monogamists are happy, good for you! I just encourage both parties, and everybody in between, not to map their own emotions onto everybody else and assume the other side is suffering in silence.
Btw, I send the philosophy part (about our relationship, and about the envy/jealousy distinction) to her first and she signed off on it; we’re very much on the same page about these things.
Not that it’s the only solution, or that polyamorous partners couldn’t have bonds as deep as any monogamous partners; there’s quite a bit of psychological diversity.
See the SEP article on Envy for the philosophical literature on this subject, and the philosophers from whom I draw this terminology.
See for instance Buss, D. M., Larsen, R. J., Westen, D., & Semmelroth, J. (1992). Sex Differences in Jealousy: Evolution, Physiology, and Psychology. Psychological Science, 3(4), 251-256. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00038.x