This Friday, everyone will be wearing green for St. Patrick’s Day, but there is one sort of green that prevails in many relationships every day of the year. Jealousy, historically referred to as the green-eyed monster, is seen as both a terrible thing to have and an inevitability in relationships. Some see it as the way partners show that they care.

When my polyamorous friends and I first explain the nature of our relationships to people who are unfamiliar with polyamory, their first question is usually, “How do you not get jealous?” If we love our partners, wouldn’t we mind that some of their sexual and emotional needs are being fulfilled by someone else? My friends and I used to respond that we learned not to feel jealousy. Rather, we feel the opposite — we feel “compersion” — a poly-created word referring to the happiness we feel from seeing our partners happy.

The instant negation of jealousy by poly people in polyamorous relationships comes from one important factor — the idea that jealousy cannot be worked on. A relationship either has jealousy or it doesn’t, and if it does, one has to choose between ending the source of jealousy or ending the relationship. By denying its existence in our relationships, it suggests a form of stability, legitimizing the relationship.

But, I did feel jealousy.

I felt it with my long-distance partner no matter how hard I tried not to. This partner and I are very open with each other: who we’re dating, who we’re fucking, what the sex was like. Overall, I didn’t care about the dates he went on and the sex he had. I was happy to hear that he was getting out of his apartment and having a nice time because he’s prone to depression. And him, being significantly older than me, was happy to hear that I was experiencing new things.

But as soon as I found out about the “dynamite” sex he was having with one person in particular, jealousy reared its ugly head.

I tried to reason it out of myself. I knew the sex he and I had was amazing. We had met at Burning Man and spent many a night locked away fucking instead of venturing out to enjoy the pretty lights, costumes and other unadulterated expressions of creativity that make up the event. Yet, a feeling of being inadequate in comparison to this lover still prevailed.

While thinking about this inadequacy, I realized that I felt it after most, if not all, of my sexual interactions. No matter how hot the sex was, no matter how electric or how many rounds we went for, I always felt as if I wasn’t pleasing my partners enough. I would enjoy myself during, but would later worry that they lied about their satisfaction.

After a lot of self-reflection, I realized a lot of these insecurities stemmed from a conversation I had with the first man I had sex with. After hooking up a few times, he had asked me if I could squeeze tighter when he penetrated me. I squeezed as hard as I could, but he told me it wasn’t nearly as tight as the girl he dated in college. He didn’t bring it up again, but what he said burrowed into me. His phallus was of a considerable size, so if my vagina couldn’t please him, who could I please? My obsession with asking my partner how I feel while being fucked and doing kegels suddenly made more sense.

About a year after I realized this, a friend and I were exchanging intimate facts about ourselves as a form of flirting. While we were having lunch at House of Curries, the subject of our largest insecurity came up. I told him about mine, and a few minutes later he joked about my “big pussy.” I thought I was over it, but tears began to flow down my face as my chicken tikka masala was placed in front of me. While it hurt at the time, laughing about it has eased the pain. To this day, he still calls me “big pussy.” This joking overall has made me feel less insecure because it showed my insecurity for being the ridiculous thing it was, which I have found to be the key to being less jealous in my relationships, specifically my long-distance one. One cannot be jealous of another if they feel secure in their own position. Jealousy of another stems from a feeling of lacking oneself.

Kylie Sammons writes the Tuesday column on Sex. Contact her at [email protected].