Freedom, yes, but …

Love confronts us with a paradox: we want the other person to choose freely, yet we hope that this freedom will lead them to choose us. We long for security and, at the same time, for desire that remains alive and is not forced. Yet these two wishes can pull in different directions.

Alternative forms of relationship make this tension particularly visible. They promise freedom, while also triggering great fear in many people. As soon as a relationship opens up, an unsettling question arises: what if the person I love actually turns towards someone else? Perhaps this person will become more desirable, more exciting, easier, newer. Perhaps an infatuation will emerge, bringing with it the fear that what has existed between us will lose its significance.

Over the past few months, I have spent time with two books that, at first glance, could hardly be more different: The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy, and The Evolution of Desire by David Buss. I am less concerned with the question of which relationship model is the “right” one. Rather, I am interested in the inner divergence between how we think about love and what we experience emotionally, which I repeatedly notice in conversations with people I know and in my psychotherapeutic work with couples and individuals.

I would like to begin this article with a question that particularly interests me as I explore love, jealousy and freer forms of relationship:

Why does it hurt so much, and why does it feel threatening, when the person we love desires someone else?

At first glance, the answer seems simple: because we are afraid of losing this person.

But when I look more closely, it seems more complicated. Sometimes, after all, we are not losing anything. The person who matters so much to us continues to love us. They are still there. The relationship continues. Perhaps nothing at all has changed in the actual bond between us.

And yet the mere thought that this person desires someone else can trigger something within us that feels almost existential.

Suddenly, there is competition. Another person steps onto our inner stage.

This third person can become a mirror of our own insecurities. Their appearance can shake our sense of having a unique place in the desire of the person we are connected to. Jealousy then touches not only on the fear of losing the relationship, but also on how we relate to ourselves: if you desire someone else, what does that say about my value to you?

Almost involuntarily, comparison begins: is this person more beautiful? More exciting? More socially connected? More sexually interesting? Do they have more resources? What makes this person desirable? What do they have that I do not?

The evolution of jealousy

From Buss’s perspective, a feeling as deeply rooted as jealousy may have offered an evolutionary advantage in our developmental history. In his book The Evolution of Desire, Buss proposes that humans have developed both short-term and long-term relationship and mating strategies. Long-term pair bonds may have been advantageous particularly because of the exceptionally demanding needs of human children.

He understands jealousy as an evolved response, widespread among humans, to a threat to a significant relationship. This refers to a species-specific human capacity to respond with jealousy to the possible loss of a relationship or attachment. In his theory, men faced the problem of paternity uncertainty: a female partner’s sexual infidelity could lead men to invest resources in a child who was not genetically their own. For women, meanwhile, it could pose a threat if a long-term partner directed time, attention, resources and protection towards another person and their children.

If certain psychological mechanisms helped people deal with such challenges, they may have become part of our psychological architecture over generations. Some of our present-day reactions may therefore be echoes of very old evolutionary challenges.

Jealousy, then, is not exclusively an expression of personal attachment experiences and patterns, insecurity or fragile self-worth. It can also be understood as part of a very old, deeply human warning system.

When I recognise this, I can say: of course something within me is reacting. My brain does not know that we are living in 2026, and right now it is evaluating a possible threat to the bond. This makes the feeling understandable.

The evolutionary perspective can explain why pair bonding may be possible and attractive for humans, and why jealousy and the behaviours that follow from it may have evolved as mechanisms to protect this bond.

This understanding of monogamy is shaped by culture, law and history. Our culture often combines the wish for attachment, sexual exclusivity and lasting partnership into a single relationship ideal.

For this very reason, it can seem contradictory when someone longs for a stable bond while also experiencing romantic or sexual interest outside that relationship, even though this need not be a psychological contradiction.

What The Ethical Slut adds to this perspective

This is precisely where The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy becomes interesting to me.

While Buss primarily asks which psychological mechanisms might have developed under particular evolutionary conditions, The Ethical Slut asks a different question: what do we do with our feelings, wishes and relationships when we question the social assumption that love must fundamentally be exclusive?

Here, monogamy means a sexually and romantically exclusive couple relationship. Consensual non-monogamy encompasses various mutually agreed forms of relationship, such as open relationships and polyamory. In an open relationship, the agreement usually allows sexual contact outside the couple relationship; in polyamory, multiple loving relationships are possible with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

The book invites us not simply to take forms of relationship for granted, but to shape them consciously. It is about communication, consent, responsibility, honesty and taking our own feelings seriously without automatically deriving from them a claim over the person we are connected to.

This is crucial to my opening question. Choosing consensual non-monogamy does not automatically answer the emotional question of why we feel threatened when the person we are connected to actually desires someone else.

Rather, it shifts the responsibility. When exclusivity is no longer taken for granted as something guaranteed by the social norm, partners need to talk much more consciously about what security, commitment, freedom and loyalty mean to them.

Freedom then does not mean that everything has to be permitted. It means that the people involved can negotiate their relationships more consciously.

A synthesis of evolution and postmodernity

When I relate the perspectives of Buss, Easton and Hardy to what makes it so painful when desire is not directed towards me alone, it becomes clear that this is less about sexuality itself than about the fear of being replaceable.

Rationally, of course, we know that no one can be the only attractive or desirable person in the world. And yet love seems to call for a different kind of certainty. Not necessarily the reassurance: “There is no one else.” But rather the feeling: “What exists between us is meaningful and cannot simply be exchanged for something else.”

Perhaps this is where a more sustainable form of security lies. One that does not necessarily depend on the person we are connected to never desiring anyone else, but on our shared history, our intimacy and the particular way we encounter one another having a value of their own.

Uniqueness does not have to mean that desire is directed exclusively towards us. It can also mean being significant in a way that cannot simply be replaced.

And what do we do with jealousy now?

We can consciously choose generosity, freedom and trust, yet still find ourselves overwhelmed by jealousy, fear or the wish to hold on to the person we love. A painful tension emerges between how we want to be and what we actually feel.

This is exactly where the two books meet: for me, the value of the evolutionary perspective lies in its ability to make sense of why experiences of competition, loss and threatened attachment can develop an intensity that contradicts our conscious convictions. Easton and Hardy remind us that we do not simply have to accept these inner reactions as fate, but can shape relationships consciously.

Perhaps their interplay can be put like this: evolution gives us possible tendencies. Biography gives them a personal history. Our psyche gives them meaning. And awareness opens up some room for choosing how we respond.

The feeling of jealousy can initially be understood as an invitation to encounter ourselves. Interesting, there is jealousy. What is this feeling trying to tell me? Perhaps: I am afraid of losing you. Perhaps: I need more closeness, security or a clear agreement. Perhaps: I feel inadequate or undesirable. Or: one of my boundaries really is being crossed here.

Exploring jealousy with curiosity thus offers a particular opportunity for self-understanding. Allowing this feeling can initially make us very vulnerable: it brings us into contact with our insecurities, perceived inadequacies and deepest fears, such as the fear of not being enough, of not being desirable or of losing someone we love.

Yet this vulnerability also holds great potential for growth. By turning towards the feeling, I can accept myself with all my vulnerable sides in a highly intense moment. I practise not reacting immediately, but pausing and asking: what belongs to my personal history, to old wounds or to evolutionarily shaped patterns of reaction? What is actually happening in the present situation? And what need lies beneath the feeling?

This clarification creates distance between feeling and action. Jealousy need neither be suppressed nor acted upon immediately. It can be a signal that calls for understanding, communication and a conscious decision about what we need and which boundaries feel right for us.

One aspect seems particularly important to me: when jealousy is communicated without blame, it can become a moment of deep intimacy. By showing my fears, insecurities and needs honestly and vulnerably, I make a deeper encounter between people possible: I become visible and can be seen.

There is a significant dialectic in this showing of ourselves and being seen: by showing myself to another person, I also encounter myself in a new way. The other person can reflect something back to me that I might not be able to see on my own.

In this way, I can move closer to the other person and, at the same time, move closer to myself.