Have you ever dated someone who hasn’t gone through what you have, whose life seems much more fluid than yours, and thought, at first: Wow. How nice. How nice that this is easy for you. How nice that you assume things will work out. How nice that you move through the world without having to calculate quite as much. How nice.
And then, a few weeks later, something else starts seeping in.
Woow. How fucking nice, huh.
It always seems to start the same way for me: at first, their levity is intoxicating. The levity their privilege brings is something I can rest in and, to be completely honest, benefit from.
And then something small begins to bother me, like a stone in my shoe that I can feel with every step.
First, I do what I do best: I gaslight myselves. I keep walking. I tell myselves that maybe this person was sent to me by the universe to show me another way of living. Look, Care, this could be you, too. How lucky I must be to love someone whose life offers me a glimpse of what ease could look like.
And then slowly, over time, I understand what this ease truly means.
It’s like looking at a garment that is so beautiful from the outside, then turning it inside out and suddenly seeing all the seams holding that beauty together. You realize that what looked effortless was never effortless at all. There was an entire architecture underneath making that beauty possible. And when your eyes finally land on the tiny label that reminds you that the “beauty” of this piece is stitched together on the other side of the world, by underpaid hands belonging to people who look like you, that’s when rage begins to seep in.
There is a difference between looking at someone and thinking, I want what you have, and looking at someone and knowing:
I cannot access what you have in the same way you can. I think this is the difference between envy and jealousy.
Because sometimes you know, deep down, that no amount of healing, hard work, luck, manifestation, secure communication, or nervous-system regulation will give you access to the same life. What looks like ease from the outside is being held together by seams a system doesn’t want us to see: class, race, citizenship, family wealth, housing security, desirability, health, education, being born in the right neighborhood at the right time, inheritance, the simple expectation that someone will catch you if you fall, the presumption of innocence, fragility, vulnerability, the luxury of unquestioned humanity.
Racial capitalism is just as good at creating “natural” categories as it is at hiding the cost of their creation. Racial capitalism hasn’t created difference, but it certainly has created scarcity based on those differences: unequal access to safety, ease, housing, money, desirability, mobility, healthcare, time, rest, possibility. And then it asks us to enter relationships with one another and pretend none of this follows us through the door. Worse, it tells us that we cheapen love when we raise the question of our unequal material conditions. Jealousy has no place in love. I believe what is truer than this is: love makes no room for domination.
This is the beef I have with compersion.
Or, more so, the pressure to feel it without ever mentioning why compersion is sometimes impossible to access in a body.
Compersion—the positive emotional state of feeling joy or happiness in response to another person’s happiness—is often presented as the enlightened alternative to jealousy. Look how happy I am that my partner is happy! Look how expansive our love is because they’re happy! Look how little ownership I feel over their happiness! It’s all theirs!
Beautiful, in theory.
What I know in my bones is that compersion is much easier to access when some part of you believes there is enough, when their abundance does not reveal your deprivation, when what they are receiving exists, somehow, within the realm of possibility for you too.
Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes jealousy isn’t scarcity thinking. Sometimes there is just… scarcity.
Whether it is secure housing, jobs that preserve your dignity and pay you enough to live well, or the things we hate to believe are subject to material and political conditions outside of our control: access to love, desirability, ease, pleasure, fun, time, space. Space to think about yourself, space to be bored, space to create.
I am not interested in blanketing jealousy with compersion. I know it more than anyone else: there is everything in a body. In a body, there is also cruelty, hatred, fear, and jealousy.
Jealousy is how we survive domination.
I want us to have real conversations about what racial capitalism has normalized and the truths it has made us believe are too unsexy to talk about, so that we keep it afloat.
When we don’t talk about our material lives in our romantic relationships, we individualize a feeling whose roots are more political and material than we are comfortable believing. We ask the most marginalized person in the relationship to carry the burden of oppression and domination alone. We individualize shame, but shame is too often a collective wound carried alone.
I hear you if, reading my words, all you can think is: but jealousy isn’t the answer. Our partners are not the problem. Systems are. You’re right. So what’s a gurl gotta do?
Can I tell you a story about jealousy?
I have been the recipient of jealousy, recently more so because I am not struggling financially anymore. I have secure housing. I can pay my bills with much more ease, and most importantly, I love what pays me. The jealousy came from people who look like me. It was heartbreaking, but if I had only responded from the place of entitlement that racial capitalism teaches us to respond from, I would have missed the antidote that can make it obsolete: compassion.
The reason why I can have compassion for jealousy is not because I am extraordinary.
It is because I am quite a jealous bitch myselves!
The jealousy I’ve felt came through a partner who, despite being queer too, has straight-passing advantage.
I could and did (!) fall into the first part of the healing that jealousy requires, which is splitting.
Splitting is what we do when we feel terrified and uncertain. The more anxiety and fear we feel, the more likely we are to want to split the world into clean categories, into good and evil, and guess which side we’re always on?
I am the good queer and they’re just a sellout. They look like the disgusting STRAIGHTS! BOOOO!!!!
With enough time and space (only possible because of money!), I sat with it long enough to ask the only question that needed my full attention:
If this structural advantage is such a problem for you, Care, then why are you with them?
Because, last time I checked, nobody forced me to be with them!
This is the first step when you fall into splitting after feeling jealous: ask yourself an honest question. But the question cannot be asked with contempt. It has to be asked with genuine curiosity, because curiosity is the opposite of trauma (and trauma splits).
And the reasons, for me, are plenty. Of course, there are personal ones, like: I really like them. And most importantly, I like myselves around them. Bla, bla, bla.
But the one that is harder to sit with, the one I am ashamed with admitting and believing in, the one I came here to tell you about, is the following:
Most people who look like me and with whom I’d want to build chosen families struggle so much with basic things like housing security, physical and mental health, and work that dating is often an afterthought.
But it doesn’t end there. Not only does oppression affect us materially, through the time and energy we can allocate to dating, it affects us spiritually. Structural disadvantage isn’t only something that happens around the body; it also becomes something the body believes about itself.
Discrimination doesn’t only make it materially harder to belong. Over time, it can make it spiritually harder to believe that you belong anywhere at all. The body doesn’t necessarily know how to translate: I live inside a system that distributes safety, desirability, protection, and possibility unevenly.
That translation, over time, becomes much more intimate; it becomes embodied:
I am not protected. I am not wanted. I am not loved.
And over time, it becomes: I am unlovable.
That is one of the cruelest things trauma can do. It can take something that was done to you and make it feel like information about you. And then, even when love finally arrives, the body that spent years learning not to expect it may not know what to do with it.
What I am trying to say is that it is much harder to build stable relationships with people who look like me, because surviving being denied love can make receiving love feel impossible. I believe the reason is that while love asks the tissues to soften around what is arriving, trauma taught them that hardening was how we survived what came before.
I know this to be true in my tissues because I really struggle to receive love myselves.
This is why holding jealousy is so important. Jealousy, because it is how we survive domination, is an honest place of grief. Grief is the most honest feeling of all.
The grief that found me is that while I’d love to date people who look like me, a lot of people who look like me do not have the material, financial, and spiritual capacity to date. At least where I live.
I’ve also been quite mistreated by people who look like me, because we know domination intimately!
This doesn’t mean that I will never ever date people who look like me. At least I really hope so! It just means that love, just like education, money, or health, is a resource that is not accessible freely to everyone equally. The older I get, the harder it is to meet Black and Brown trans folks who are as privileged as I am now. That has an impact on our love lives. Claiming the opposite would be a lie.
We are not equal. Life is truly unfair. And when we stop acting like it is—including in our romantic relationships—when we stop the gaslighting, life doesn’t automatically become more just, but we can breathe a little deeper in it.
No amount of hard work or manifestation will allow me to enjoy the privileges that white folks do. No amount of hard work or luck will allow me to enjoy the privileges that straight and cis people do.
No amount of hard work or nervous-system regulation will give dark-skinned Black people the privileges I have. No amount of hard work or luck will give disabled folks the privileges I have.
So, if someone you love is going through jealousy, don’t leave them alone in it. Instead of asking them to “heal more”, start with honest questions like:
What is this jealousy saying about our place in the world?
This question is really important because when we refuse to hold jealousy in its political complexity, what we often refuse is to practice activee solidarity.
True solidarity means holding the weight of abolition together, even when it means looking at the ways in which our differences—not earned, but designed—could put us at odds inside loving relationships.
Ok, here is the exercise to excavate jealousy.
JEALOUSY EXCAVATION
1. NOTICE THE SPLIT
Notice the binary thinking: they have everything /I have nothing. They are lovable/I am unlovable. Their life is easy/mine is impossible. Don’t fix, just notice!
2. GET CURIOUS WITHOUT CORRECTING YOURSELVES
Ask 1 genuine question about jealousy from genuine curiosity without trying to make yourself more reasonable, grateful, evolved, or ‘politically correct’. Curiosity is the opposite of trauma. No condescending tone allowed here!
What exactly hurts about watching them have this? What is this reminding me not having?
3. LET THE JEALOUSY BECOME GRIEF
What are you scared of never receiving? of never being?
Don’t reassure the jealous part. Witness it. Witnessing is sacred work.
4. SEPARATE THE WOUND FROM THE MATERIAL REALITY
Is my body predicting scarcity, or am I actually encountering scarcity?
What part of this belongs to my history? What part belongs to the conditions of my life? What is structurally easier for them to access than it is for me?
Sometimes jealousy isn’t scarcity thinking. Sometimes there is just… scarcity.
And also, sometimes, we prefer to cling to ideas of scarcity because the despair that lack brings is easier to face than the reality that abundance is real but absent from our lives.
5. LET GRIEF REACH THE SHORE OF YOUR SKIN
Don’t rush grief toward gratitude, compersion, forgiveness, or a ‘lesson’. Let yourself know what you have lost, what you never received, and what may genuinely not be available to you.
6. ASK WHAT THE JEALOUSY IS PROTECTING
Once the grief has had somewhere to landd:
what does my jealousy reveal that I care about? What does it tell me I want? What does it refuse to let me stop longing for? What needs tending now? (probably you dear one!)
7. GIVE THE JEALOUSY ITS REAL NAME
Maybe it was never simply jealousy. Maybe it is grief, the rage of oppression, the exhaustion underneath survival, maybe it is the fear of facing that we’ve been hiding from trying for too long, maybe it is the fear of being vulnerable…
Stay ungovernable,
Care
Thank you. Reading this article came at the exact right time and has given me a lot to unpack. Oof.
Finally someone has put down the constant agony I feel in relationships. Being a disabled single mother has positioned me in this place where every single person I date has more freedom, more security, more access and resources than I do. I struggle to accept I’m loved when they don’t actively seek to lift the burden of so much responsibility, pain, and disadvantage. Without their effort to equalize the relationship I’m left to ripen and rot in my resentment.
I can’t imagine being in the opposite situation, having the resources and not moving mountains for my lover to have some space to breathe??
I love this practice, accessing the grief under it all is so difficult. It’s easier to be angry and bitter but that poisons the love that’s so precious to me