ROMANTIC JEALOUSY, a

A common model of jealousy is that it's an individual trait on a spectrum, like height or extraversion. The implication is that people should match their relationship style to their jealousy level, restrictive if high and maybe polyamorous if low.

I often hear "glad poly works for you, but I'm just too jealous". An implicit assumption is that jealousy levels don't change over people's lives, even if it's something we learn from our parents when we're kids and not a biologically determined thing.

I used to believe this.

Now I think that romantic jealousy is more complex. First of all, it can be made up of different flavors:
1. Fear of losing your partner
2. Ego insecurity (if they flirt, I'm not good enough)
3. Narcissistic injury (others will say I'm not good enough)
4. Straight up envy

And jealousy isn't necessarily always good or always bad. If it's mostly about fear of losing your partner, the value of jealousy is determined by whether your partner is, in fact, going to leave you if they meet someone else. Jealousy can be correct or wrong, useful or useless.

Jealousy is always a function of both the person and the context. Someone can be jealous when they're insecure and their partner is flaky and uncommitted, and completely unjealous with a different person in a different relationship over their partner doing the same thing.

Regardless of whether you're thinking about polyamory or not, jealousy should start, not end, a conversation. What triggered your jealousy? What is it made of? Is it justified? What is it pointing to that's real and important, and what is it obfuscating?

As you question it, you will arrive at a version of jealousy that serves you better. And if it doesn't serve you, perhaps you will arrive at feeling much less of it (that's what happened to me). But there's no reason to treat it as something that's both immutable and opaque.