We grow up hearing from our parents and grandparents (or other guardians) things like, "look both ways before you cross the street", "wear your helmet when you ride your bike", "don't talk to strangers", "always wash your hands". They're good advice to keep yourself safe - away from various harms and ailments. It's part of that whole paternal/maternal instinct or something.

Ok, so she's not entirely new, but she's fairly so. Anna at Open Fidelity has a lot of interesting things to say about non-monogamy. She does make a distinction between what she is terming open fidelity and polyamory. I suppose it's a similar distinction between, say, slipstream and magic realism. (That's my literary reference for the month; both of those are similar types of fiction - look them up; you'll learn something).

The woman from Herriot-Watt sent me some more questions. Here are my answers.

Can I ask do you feel the factors which trigger jealousy in your relationships, have changed over time?

I think that there is a big misconception when it comes to feelings of jealousy/envy/inadequacy when it comes to polyamorous relationships.

Many people I have spoken with assume that we either a) don’t have those feelings at all because the people in the relationship don’t mean that much to each other or b) have them all the time, which leads to a “revelation moment” where everyone drops out of the relationship pissed and angry, never to speak with each other again.

Last year, Nyla and I had a woman from LSU call us for an interview regarding non-traditional relationships. We spoke a lot about our newly open marriage, jealousy, intimacy, and a number of other things. It was a good discussion, and I should be getting the transcripts from that interview here in the next few days, which will be nice to read in light of this new bit of information. One of the big issues in a non-traditional, non-monogamous relationship is jealousy.