Graduation Date
Spring 2019
Document Type
Thesis
Program
Master of Arts degree with a major in Sociology
Committee Chair Name
Michihiro Clark Sugata
Committee Chair Affiliation
HSU Faculty or Staff
Second Committee Member Name
Mary E. Virnoche
Second Committee Member Affiliation
HSU Faculty or Staff
Keywords
Monogamy, Consensual non monogamy, Jealousy, Intimacy, Polyamory, Open relationship, Love, Sociology of emotions
Subject Categories
Sociology
Abstract
Consensual non-monogamy (CNM) is an umbrella term for any agreed-upon sexual or emotional non-exclusive relationship. This study looks at the challenges experienced by people practicing CNM in Humboldt County. I interviewed 12 people with insight into what it is like to live and love in multi-partnered relationships. The results suggest that jealousy, communication, and vulnerability were required to successfully navigate CNM and reimagine intimacy. Reimagining intimacy was contingent on rewriting the feeling rules associated with jealousy and all the underlying emotions that tend to be intricately woven into jealousy. These feelings are fear of abandonment, fear of inadequacy, anger, resentment, and sorrow. CNM discourse, polyamorous theory specifically, has developed a set of alternative feeling rules that have recrafted a different emotion world that situates jealousy as neither unbearable nor inevitable. Rather, my participants aimed to replace jealousy with compersion, a term coined by consensual non-monogamists used to describe the opposite of jealousy. The findings of this study speaks not only to CNM relational configurations, but to the complexity and nuances of opening up to others on a deeper, more vulnerable level.
Citation Style
ASA
Recommended Citation
Torres, Isaac W., "Consensual non monogamy in Humboldt County: An exploration of jealousy, intimacy, and emergent relational ideologies" (2019). Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects. 291.
https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/etd/291