Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Never give one lover cause to feel threatened by another's place in your Ufe or heart. In this society, we are constantly being made to feel that we are in competition with one another, so we feel threatened by others. Healthy non-monogamy should disprove this conditioning, not reinforce it. Make it clear, in actions as well as words, that your relationship with each person (lover or not!) depends only on itself, not on the way it compares with other relationships. Hopefully, you're not cruising for the perfect wife or husband or trophy lover, picking up and discarding people as you hunt down the ultimate commodity on the partner market; instead, you're cultivating life-long, adaptable relationships with individuals you love and treat with respect, in which you enjoy yourselves consensually and maybe even support one another's life projects." Lovers, in such a scenario, should have no more cause to fear or be jealous of one another than friends do?indeed, one good reason to be non-monogamous is to foster in your love affairs the qualities that make your friendships work, or, better, to blur the hnes between the two. All the same, since you grew up in this society, there are going be situations in which one or both of you feel jealous. There are many things you can do to address this when you feel it yourself. First, try to separate and identify your different feelings, so you know what you're reacting to or acting on. The most prevalent cause of jealousy is insecurity: to be in any successful relationship, non-monogamous or not, you need to be grounded, you need to feel good about yourself and have a sense of your own worth and attractiveness. In this sense, leading a Ufe that helps you respect yourself is practically a prerequisite for any intimacy with others. At the same time, you should be able to ask your lover for reassurance whenever you need it?don't be timid about this: if your lover loves you, he or she Vidll want to let you know, and it's a lot better to speak up when you need it than to restrain yourself from "putting pressure" on him or her, only to explode or implode later on. To return to the subject of self-confidence, loving yoiorself will make it a lot easier to beheve other people's reassurances.

Insecurity can manifest itself in projection: it may be easy to imagine that your lover's other lover, or crush, or potential crush, is absolutely perfect. Try to get some perspective; it may well be that you spend more time thinking about the other lover than your lover does. No one's perfect, anyway, not even the Other Woman; and, being in a non-monogamous relationship, you have less to fear than you would in a monogamous couple: your lover can experiment with others and enjoy being vidth them without having to feel that he or she should leave you. Outside the couple paradigm, no one can steal a lover from you?the extent to which you're good for a person determines how much he or she will stay with you. If you have a longstanding or strong love, no fling or flirtation can endanger it.

Insecurity may not be the only fliing you're feeling, either. You might also feel judgmental of your lover?you might be disappointed in her or him for being attracted to someone you deem unworthy, or you might feel protective for similar reasons. Either way, you have to trust your lover to know what's good for himself or herself?there's no way around that. Your partner probably can sense what he or she needs much better than you can, and the decision is not yours to make, anyway.

Jealousy can also proceed from feelings of competitiveness with other lovers, especially members of the same sex?these are fostered in this society, and often serve to isolate us from potential comrades. Again, hopefully you trust that whomever your lover trusts is worthy of respect; remember, whatever really is good for your lover is, in some sense at least, good for you. Being able to see your lover's lovers as friends or at least allies can be revolutionary, in a society that would have us turn against each other over romance.

It might also be that your jealousy is caused by instabilities or incongruences in the relationship itself, which may need to be addressed. Jealousy isn't always a merely irrational, destructive feeling; often, it can be a usefiil barometer with which to gauge what is going on within and between people.

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