A Typology of Insecurities in Non-monogamy

Because “jealousy” and “envy” aren’t all there is.

Three ducks in flight. Photo by Roger Chapman on Unsplash

“Envy is wanting what someone else has; jealousy is the fear of losing what you have.”

It’s a pretty commonly accepted truism within the polyamorous world; you can find examples of envy and jealousy being contrasted that way here, here, and here. And though in theory nonmonogamous people should welcome the discussion of any challenging feelings that rise up in our relationships, as a group we tend to find the soft, easily-reassured form of jealousy to be far more sympathetic than something that can look a lot more feral or unfair.

It is obvious why polyamorous communities feel the need to distinguish between healthy, expressible, easily remedied forms of jealousy and toxic, controlling, unfixable envy, ie the ‘bad’ kind of jealousy we are quick to disavow.

“What do you do about jealousy?” is one of the most common and annoying questions that the non-monogamous get asked from people outside our community. The fact that jealousy happens and cannot always be fixed is a problem that we are expected to answer for, a bug in our relationship structures, whereas monogamous people get to see jealousy as a feature that helps preserve relationships.

The monogamous majority is forever judging non-monogamous relationships according to monogamous ideals —  presuming that relationships that last a long time are always better, more successful relationships than ones that are brief, for example, or believing that there is always one relationship that is the most meaningful one, usually because it looks the most like a monogamous, straight relationship. (Because it involves the sharing of property, for instance, or because two partners are married).

Hell, even the fact that jealousy is the primary concern that monogamous people have about non-monogamy comes from patriarchal capitalism’ framing of a partner as property, and the resulting view that maintaining access to that property as the most vital thing. Patriarchal capitalism values the solidity of a romantic bond — because it is easier for women to be exploited as unpaid house-keepers and child-rearers that way, and because it prevents individuals from building deeper networks of community.

These priorities are deeply seated within the culture, and so most people still believe a meaningful relationship must involve an enduring commitment, and the “working through” of all tough feelings and incompatibilities so the relationship can be maintained.

But sometimes, a relationship being dead is better. And it is inevitable that over the course of a long time knowing somebody, they will continue to evolve as a person, and dynamics between them and others will change.

It’s very hard for the monogamous to get such things.

In general, we non-monogamous people feel a pressure to defend ourselves against monogamous people’s worst stereotypes. We insist up and down that our relationships are always ethical — while no one ever has to insist that their monogamy is ethical (this is why I will never use the term “ENM). We act as if our capacity for care is limitless, and that love is the only reason we pursue multiple bonds, as if there is anything wrong with lacking an interest in romance or only wanting sex. And because monogamous people are so obsessed with asking us if we get jealous, we insist up and down that we really don’t, not all that much, seriously, and even if we do, jealousy is not really a big deal.

Be jealous. Make demands. Want more.

The truth is less respectable. There are non-monogamous people who do get fumingly envious. Some jealousies cannot be fixed by putting more quality time on the polycule’s shared Google calendar. And some of the biggest sources of tension in our relationships aren’t even “jealousy” or “envy” at all.

When I look at my relationships and those of my non-monogamous peers, jealousy and envy are rarely the predominate problems. In fact, the really challenging emotions that tend to actually get in the way of relating to one another tends to be stuff that our monogamous critics wouldn’t even think to bring up — feelings like not wanting to be as close with your metamour as your partner wants you to be, for example, or worrying that every person you’re dating is mad at you for not giving them enough time.

These are some of the real, day-to-day anxieties of being in multiple relationships — problems that I think are more easily summarized as forms of insecurity than they are types of jealousy. We need to be able to talk about them just as frequently as we talk and philosophize and process about jealousy itself, because they affect how we behave and build our connections.

And so, with the aim of lubricating some of those conversations, I offer this list of common insecurities in non-monogamy:

Fear of *seeming* jealous.

Because non-mongamous people face relentless judgement and questioning about the presence of jealousy in our relationships, we tend to self-police ourselves out of expressing anything that could even sound like jealousy — such as neutral curiosity about a partner’s other partners or their activities, interest in what is on a partner’s schedule, and more.

“I end up worried that I’m not performing the right degree of unconcern when my partners are flirting with people or interacting with other partners and I’m there,” says one anonymous Tumblr user. “The only thing I’m ever really covering up is my really strong nosyness about what’s going on.” But by covering up their neutral curiosity, they miss a chance to get excited about flirty new connections with their partner.

This can prevent us from ever making requests of our partners — we might never bring up that we crave more time, more sex, or to enjoy a specific experience with a partner. I have argued that we should all collectively get more comfortable making “jealous” requests of our partners to prevent these frustrations from fermenting.

When we become too obsessed with avoiding even the appearance of emotional “sin”, we wind up creating artificial walls, until it genuinely gets hard for partners to know how much we like them or that we’d like to get closer. If you can’t compliment the photo of a partner and their sweetie on the mantle, if you dive out of the line of sight the second they open their phone or laptop, if you feel afraid to even ask them what their plans are for the day, then you may be far too insecure about how your feelings look, which is always a barrier to genuine relationship development.

“Everybody is trying to be the bodhisattva of polyamory” is how one non-monogamous Tumblr user explained this phenomenon to me. But not everybody wants to be dating an enlightened being without desire. Sometimes, we like partners being curious about us and our other relationships — and, shockingly, we may even want them to be jealous sometimes too.

Insecurity that a partners *isn’t* jealous.

“I’m poly and gotta say the most interesting and perplexing jealousy-adjacent insecurity I’ve ever encountered was I once had a partner who’d get angry at me for not being jealous enough,” one anonymous Tumblr user tells me. When their partner would go on dates, Anon would simply wish them well and not be bothered by it. But this inspired months of anger in their partner, who finally revealed that they wanted to feel “wanted enough for their partner to be possessive of them.”

For some people, witnessing some degree jealousy in their partners is hot, or it makes them feel prioritized, and the absence of jealousy may make them feel less important.

Some non-monogamous people who do experience jealousy also feel emotionally inferior to their less-jealous partners. In this case, it’s not the jealousy itself that is the problem — it’s the perceived disparity in jealous feelings, and the ‘jealous’ partner’s insecurity that they must be “worse at non-monogamy” because they’re not bathed in feel-good compersion chemicals all the time. This insecurity can prevent a person from ever speaking about their jealousies, or cause them to feel guilty and inadequate as a partner.

Insecurity because a partner is monogamous.

Sometimes, non-monogamous and monogamous people get together, or one person within a monogamous relationship decides they want to pursue relationships with others, while their partner does not. When this happens, the non-mongamous partner may fear that they are hurting their monogamous partner, that they’re too sexually needy, too easily bored, that they’re selfish, or any number of other common anti-non-monogamy stereotypes.

“[My monogamous partner] feels super insecure about me sleeping with other people but knows it’s important to me, so he avoids the issue,” writes one Anon. “Then I feel guilty about engaging in the sex and kink I want because I feel like I’m hurting him. Neither of us want this to be a breaking point but I’m scared that it will be, and it’s halted any further progression in our relationship. Insecurity is a haunted hall of funhouse mirrors.”

Even when a monogamous person is not bothered by their partner’s non-monogamy, it is quite common for the non-monogamous person to feel uncomfortable going after what they want. They may not trust their partner to be honest about their hurt feelings, or they may simply think it looks and sounds bad for them to go out and get a ton of sex while their loved one does not.

These feelings can get in the way of honest communication between both partners about their desires and limits, and can often lead the non-monogamous person to spiral in shame. It is hard to build a caring relationship when you believe you’re fundamentally broken or unworthy of love, as many non-monogamous people have been made to.

Feeling less worthy than a partner’s other partners.

Relationship insecurity doesn’t always look like a gaping maw of demand; sometimes it looks like turning away from a partner and rarely initiating contact or asking anything of them, because you’re so certain their other partners matter ‘more.’

I sometimes like to say that I am only competitive when I think that I am going to win. I have a self-protectiveness that I desperately need to overcome that has taught me to check out of tough situations before I am rejected, and I tend to assume everybody already sees the worst in me. And so, when I start dating a person who already has serious partners, I get mortified by the prospect of “getting in the way.” It’s not really ‘jealousy’ that I usually feel —my anxious spirals sound more like I’m not as fun, I’m not as cute, I’m boring, I’m bringing nothing to the table, I will just see myself out.

This kind of insecurity, when listened to, can prevent a person from contacting their partners proactively, expressing care and affection, or articulating what they want. It can also create a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you behave in a distant, emotionally withdrawn way for fear of being “too much,” your partner(s) will typically assume that you’re not very interested in them! Emotional avoidance breeds avoidance, unvoiced doubt more doubt. Since monogamous culture teaches us that close relationships are a competition to possess someone, it’s easy for conflicted non-monogamous people with low self-worth to feel that we don’t even deserve to play.

Insecurity about your how you compare to other partners.

It is fairly common for a non-monogamous person to draw unflattering comparisons between themselves and a partner’s other partners. Part of this is because monogamous and heterosexual dating norms train us to believe that each person has a singular “ideal” partner — and that anyone who doesn’t measure up to that ideal must not really be a ‘real’ partner. Of course, these presumed ideals tend to reflect society’s existing biases — anti-Blackness, fatphobia, transmisogyny, and so on.

Cee is a Black, fat nonbinary woman who says she feels uneasy because her girlfriend’s two other partners are lighter-skinned and thin. “The whole world sees me as lesser, and if I have a problem with my partner or my metamours, I have to look out that they’re not treating me the same way.” In the past, she’s had to leave relationships where she was treated as less of a priority compared to non-Black partners.

This is unfortunately a common dynamic within many polyamorous spaces, which tend to skew very white.

The cover to Kevin Patterson’s book Love’s Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities.

Tim is a white trans guy whose greatest relationship insecurity come from how much he has in common with his metamours. His partner Mark is married to a trans man, and all of Mark’s other partners are trans masculine too. “If I think too much about it I feel angry, fetishized, reduced to having a pussy,” Tim says.

Non-monogamous people can also feel insecure over perceived differences in sexual experience, relationship experience, class privilege, skill level, ability level, identity, shared history, or any other number of factors. When we feel that our differences mark us as ‘lesser’ than our metamours, or more disposable, we may choose to pull away, avoid voicing concerns within the relationship, become understandably bitter, or develop conflicts with our partners or metamours. And if we recognize an ongoing pattern of being mistreated by multiple partners along such lines, we may (quite understandably) find it hard to trust anyone moving forward.

Score-keeping.

In our desperation to prove to the monogamous world that our relationships are mutually beneficial and ‘fair,’ we non-monogamous people can get too fixated on there being a perfect balance of sexual and romantic activities between partners. If one partner goes on a date, they might feel uneasy until their partner has a date to ‘match’ them. And if one partner gets far more sexual attention than other, it can cause a massive dust-up of hurt feelings.

“I have this fear (which I recognize as silly and kind of incelish, but alas) of comparing myself to my girlfriend over who gets more bitches essentially,” writes Tumblr user Lapsko, “making the possibility of multiple relationships a test where I need to prove that I’m actually attractive and didn’t just get lucky that one time.”

Really overt acts of score-keeping seem to pop up the most in couples that were originally monogamous and later opened their relationships up. This makes sense; they’re coming into non-monogamy with all the baggage of a monogamous relationship structure. But wherever it manifests, it can lead to controlling or inauthentic behaviors — partners being dating or fucking at someone, not because it feels good but to maintain their “score”.

But there is no perfect fairness in any relationship, be it close or open. How we feel, how we spend our time, who we are and how others relate to us, what we talk about and understand, it can never be completely balanced — hell it is not even objectively measurable. To deny this is to erase the unique magic of every connection we form, and every moment we ever get to share with somebody we care for.

Fear your partners are disappointed with you.

I’ve sometimes joked that “I’m polysaturated,” means “everybody’s already mad at me.”

And indeed, balancing the requests and calendars of multiple partners against your own desires can be quite the challenging feat. Beyond the logistical challenges, there’s often the insecurity that as a non-monogamous person, you are failing to measure up as a fair-minded-enough partner — that you’re showing a preference, letting your “New Relationship Energy” leak out, don’t have enough time to give everyone what they need, or are being selfish.

This insecurity often looks a lot like score-keeping, but it’s less about an obsession with keeping everything perfectly balanced and more about a creeping fear of getting in trouble with one’s partners, and an approach to dating that is about avoiding conflict rather than proactively creating the dynamics and shared moments that you want.

Non-monogamous people afflicted by this insecurity may give out tons of reassurances to partners who haven’t asked for it, and run themselves ragged from date to date to date until they burn out. They may find it difficult to tell partners no, even when two partners “need” their support at the same exact time, and may struggle to articulate what they need for themselves. Their relationships may present a source of stress in their life or be unable to evolve because they are so afraid of throwing off the equilibrium. Rather than going with the flow, this type of insecure non-monogamous person may try to force themselves and their relationships into order.

Insecurity about your relationship type being undervalued.

Non-monogamy can teach us that every relationship is a unique meeting of interpersonal energy, incapable of being simply categorized and ranked — if we can absorb that message. But there’s a lot of external pressure to see our connections through a monogamous, amatanormative lens — ranking long-term partnership as more important than something newer, and discounting the connections that are non-sexual, non-romantic, or between friends.

“My most valued and stable connection is with my best friend,” writes one aromantic relationship anarchist. “Even though there hasn’t ever been indication that I’m less important to her than her girlfriend, I still feel insecure over the idea that a best friend SHOULD be less important than a monogamous girlfriend. I feel like I’m being unreasonable by not accepting my place as secondary in like a hierarchy, even though I don’t want that and she doesn’t want that either.”

This insecure belief — that friendship matters less than romance — can prevent people from connecting as closely with their actual dearest ones. They may be afraid to lean on their friends in times of illness or crisis, because they think a partner is supposed to be their primary support. If there is any tension between themselves and a dear friend’s partner, they may assume the partner pulls rank. Unless deliberately addressed, non-romantic partners may be left out of important legal processes such as the drafting of wills or the sharing of health insurance.

Very few intimacies or social privileges are afforded to ‘friends’ in a highly socially isolated, patriarchal culture where the couple reigns supreme — and so non-monogamous people who do not prioritize romantic bonds can feel deeply undervalued and alone, no matter how deeply their buddies/queerplatonic partners/whatever else’s care for them.

Insecurity that a partner means more to you than you mean to them.

Recently, my friend Lola was crestfallen to learn that her longtime friend and new boyfriend, Andre, was not interested in ever having a primary partner. With all of their history and the intensity of their connection, she’d hoped that Andre would one day want to share a life and nest together.

“I feel pathetic about it and like I’m still alone,” Lola told me. “I really need a long-term partner I can lean on.”

It’s not unusual for two non-monogamous people to have different wants for their relationships, or to have somewhat different feelings for one another, with painful results. If a person is searching for a long-term partner but falls in love with a happily solo-poly slut, they may feel that their love is wrong, or that they cannot be together. Or if one member of a couple has far more partners than another, the less-attached partner may worry that there is something wrong with the fact that they think about and pine for their partner more often.

Feelings like this can cause non-monogamous people to create artificial distance or mistrust the attachment they have with a partner who seems less ‘available,’ or simply less obsessed. And in many cases this is completely needless. Different people attach and feel differently — even within a monogamous relationship, how often two people think about one another won’t match. So long as nobody is being taken advantage of, it isn’t an issue — love is a joy to give, longing and attraction are pleasurable to experience, and there is nothing ‘pathetic’ about luxuriating in it.

Some of us are relationship-OCDing, hard-core BPDers with Favorite Person fixations that last for a lifetime. This doesn’t mean we have some toxic tendency that needs to be changed, or that our partners’ are cold-hearted and failing us. It’s just a difference — one that non-monogamy is uniquely positioned to accommodate. Us hard-core emotionally needy lovergxrls can multiple people to dote on.

The cover for Overthinking About You, a great book by Allison Raskin about relationship OCD.

Fear that a partner wants to ‘escalate’ the relationship.

Polyamorous people frequently critique the relationship escalator, the unspoken, culturally assumed progression of heterosexual romantic relationships. The relationship escalator pushes people forward — from talking to hooking up to cohabitation to marriage — so coercively and subtly that many non-monogamous people also fear getting swept up by it. It can cause them to mistrust gestures of care and affection from their partners.

Arin is a solo-poly person who has been pushed up the relationship escalator by partners before. “My ex would do things like invite themselves along for hang-outs with my friends, and get angry that I wasn’t interested in a holiday trip to their parents’. I was almost forced into a dynamic I didn’t want.”

Now they find it hard to trust it when a partner tells the I love you, or offers them gifts — even though these gestures do not have to mean any kind of commitment or escalation, it can be hard to tell if a partner is entering into their non-monogamous relationship with a tired old heterosexual script.

Non-monogamous people who crave independence may feel ashamed of themselves for not desiring a more committed, escalated relationship. They may also feel too guilty or afraid of abandonment to reject their partners’ escalating requests. Like Arin, they may grow suspicious of gestures of care that they genuinely enjoy, because of what those gestures could symbolize to somebody who is escalating but not talking about it. All of these factors can make honestly negotiating boundaries within a non-monogamous relationship into a minefield.

Anxiety that your partners don’t get along.

Some non-monogamous people crave “kitchen table polyamory” — a relationship structure where all a person’s partners and metamours get along well enough that they could easily share a pizza or play a board game. If all partners aren’t on board with this idea, or if a conflict rises up between some metamours, it can cause serious insecurity explosions.

“What makes me insecure and frustrated is the delicate dynamic of ‘where do I step in’ when my primary and our other partner are having communication issues..,” says an anonymous Tumblr user. “Sometimes I get nervous/hesitant to do my own thing or go out on my own, in case I come home and I can tell my primary partner and other partner have had a bad night together…”

If they aren’t careful, a hinge partner can find themselves slipping into the role of mediator when their partners do not get along, at the expense of advocating for themselves. And when a non-monogamous person feels very anxious about conflict between their partners, they may respond by triangulating information behind partners’ backs, emotionally censoring partners, or pressuring metamours into having more contact than they’d like.

A dear friend of mine got stuck in a poly dynamic like this — their partner would create artificial scenarios that would force all of their partners into contact, such as volunteering my friend to help a metamour through a crisis, even when the metamour hadn’t asked for my friend’s help. Though the sunny, fuzzy image of loved ones gathered around a communal table may sound dreamy, some people just don’t get along with one another and do not want to. This is only a problem if we believe that our non-monogamy must be frictionless and that nobody is ever allowed the dignity of being a selfish bitch.

Just regular old attachment insecurity.

Not all problems within a non-monogamous relationship are caused by non-monogamy. In fact, most of them aren’t!

We non-mongamous folks are so used to processing our way around jealousy, negotiating novel and ever-changing relationship dynamics, and justifying our decision to be non-monogamous to a scandalized monogamous public that it simply may not occur to us that our relationship dynamic might simply be challenging because our partner is unreliable, inconsiderate, or cruel — not because of anything we’ve failed to do as thoughtful non-monogamous people. If someone treats you shittily, you will feel bad, regardless of the relationship structure.

Thoughts on Jessica Fern’s Polysecure

Modern-day attachment research teaches us that every single relationship has its own attachment style, which reflects how well the parties involved show up for each other. Insecure forms of attachment, then, are not a personality type, nor are they set in childhood — they are a pattern of feelings and behaviors that come in our relationship to a specific person. And so, we might look anxious in a relationship where our partner is constantly threatening to reject us, or turn avoidant if a partner is constantly expecting us to perform happiness for them, and not giving us any privacy.

If a partner routinely rejects us, undermines our feelings, refuses to discuss conflicts, never shares about their own emotions, disappears on us, or lashes out, then our insecure feelings might just be an accurate barometer that the relationship sucks — and no polyamory workbook can fix that.

Three birds perched on a branch. Photo by Anupa Uthsara on Unsplash

Nearly all of the insecurities I’ve outlined here can first be addressed with communication. Worried your partner likes another partner more than you? Ask for reassurance! Afraid that you might be texting too much? Find out! Partner is pressuring you to get more “serious”? Tell them what you are not comfortable with! Worried that your partner treats you differently because you are newer/less romantically inclined/less privileged than your metamours? Bring the unfairnesses that you’ve noticed up!

Of course, communication will only actually work if all parties genuinely want to understand one another, and are willing to admit fault and make concessions. If you partner has zero track record of ever hearing you out or apologizing for their actions, if the power in the relationship is stacked against you and they have no interest in rectifying that, if they really do not care about you, then even the most thoughtfully-written message in the world will still fail to move them. You cannot control another person’s actions or feelings. They must choose to care.

And this brings us back to the limitations of ‘jealousy’ and ‘envy’ as a framework for understanding relationship problems. Not everything that goes wrong in a polyamorous or NM structure comes down to a partner having irrational feelings that they need to process or soothe. Quite often, we feel insecure in our relationships because those relationships actually are insecure.

If we haven’t been given enough information to know where we stand, if we have less social power than our partners, if we have no idea what our partners genuinely want, if we are not given direct answers to questions, if we are mistreated or used or taken for granted, then our attachment systems will recognize that we are on shaky ground, and we will instinctively act in ways designed to protect us.

In these cases, the problem at hand isn’t really envy, jealousy, or even insecurity of any kind. Those feelings are just signals that our needs are not being met. And if that is the case, the only solution is to take action to address that unmet need — which may involve working to change the nature of a relationship, but just as often may mean investing more deeply in bonds to other people, or leaving a bad relationship altogether. Thankfully, non-monogamy makes it possible for our relationships to continually evolve — and when practiced intentionally, it can help us accept that loss, change, and revision are both beautiful and inevitable.