Freeing My Jealous Heart

When we are young, love is so chaotic and exciting. It’s mysterious and stirs our emotions in a torrent of swirls and tornados all over our body. That kind of love is what I grew up being told was lust and it was bad. For the teenager, love is full of pain and confusion. 

I’ll never forget my first love, C.H. He had long red hair, pale Irish skin with beautiful freckles, tall and funny. We both had birthdays in March and he played the guitar. I really wasn’t allowed to date, my dad didn’t think I was mature enough, and looking back on it I suppose I really wasn’t. 

We kept our relationship a secret for the most part and then my father found out and started calling the school upset about us dating. C.H.’s mother was a very nice woman that worked in the office and she didn’t take kindly to my father accusing her son of who knows what. 

Needless to say, we broke up. I was heartbroken about it, but couldn’t show it at home. I wrote him letters, obsessive letters, and then eventually he avoided me and I was known as the Crazy Girl. This early learning of how to express my love was, to say the least, not healthy. 

This unhealthy jealousy with my obsessive jealous “love” lasted longer than I care to admit.Through my first marriage and long into dating after my divorce. 

It wasn’t till I was asked to be in a polyamours relationship that I started to question how I loved. It was hard, knowing that this person I had feelings for was married to another woman, but she was also in our relationship as a friend, and later as a girlfriend. 

I realized that my jealous love was not because I wanted the partner to myself, it was because I never understood how to love my partner, and seeing others do it better was painful and embarrassing. I try to be all that my partner needs, and being in this relationship I realized I didn’t need that. However, I still questioned why I wasn’t enough. When we broke up I swore off polyamory, and also found myself missing it. 

I decided to do more testing of the waters, because as I learned talking to others in poly relationships, it’s all different. I’ve had multiple poly relationships, some not so good and others that formed lifetime friendships. In these poly relationships I learned everyday how liberating it is to love a person for who they are, not who they can be. I’m not asked to be someone else either; I’m never asked “what do you bring to the table?” 

Polyamory isn’t for everyone, but for me it was freeing to know that I can have the torrent of chaotic love for more than one person and my jealous heart understands the love I can and cannot give. 

~Candice C Carver