If I can't have you no one will
On possessiveness, polyamory, and cancelling your ex
“I might kill my ex, not the best idea
His new girlfriend’s next, how’d I get here?
I might kill my ex, I still love him though
Rather be in jail than alone” — SZA
My abusive ex partner used to fly into a rage. The house would be quiet and then all of a sudden I would hear a song playing in another room. It was a song by a rapper I’d had sex with before dating my partner. I’d told my partner about this in the early stages of our relationship, before he’d started getting violent. At the time, he seemed to welcome these disclosures about my past, and shared stories of his own too. But as the relationship progressed and got more serious, once we moved in together and I bailed him out of jail, becoming his surety, he started going into rages about my sexual history. I would hear the song playing and my entire body would tense as I waited for the next sound: the couch being flipped, a chair being thrown across the room, or simply his enraged voice screaming “you fucking slut.”
My ex partner, like many domestic abusers, was extremely sexually possessive. He was extremely angry about my sexual history and also paranoid that I was trying to receive sexual attention from men even though we were in a monogamous relationship. He wanted to possess me entirely, and the idea that he couldn’t, that I could escape his grasp somehow, filled him with rage. Even after the relationship ended, he stalked me on and off for eight years. He believed that I belonged to him, and that it was my responsibility to be a “good woman,” and exist for him alone.
It is well known that sexual possessiveness is a common theme in intimate partner violence. We know that misogynist men who abuse their wives and girlfriends are often obsessed with their partners’ sexual histories. We know that coercive control and stalking, particularly as an attempt to prevent the partners or ex partners from having an independent sexuality, is standard. We know that these men often invade their partner’s or ex partner’s privacy, surveil their behaviour, make suspicious accusations about relationships (especially relationships with men), and demand total ownership of the partner’s sexuality, even after the relationship has ended. We know that these men often think of themselves as victimized by their partner’s sexuality and perceived (imagined) sexual transgressions. They often say things like “I don’t want to do this. You make me do this.” They imagine themselves as helplessly victimized by partners who refuse to do the right thing and simply be “theirs.”
Misogynist entitlement to women’s sexuality is a specific phenomenon, but sexual possessiveness and the abusive behaviours that arise from it, are not exclusive to men. Because we have a cultural tendency to imagine abusers as an essentially different “type” of person who is somehow inherently bad, we blunt our capacity to look for and notice abusive tendencies within ourselves. We also have an extreme cultural blindspot about women’s capacity for perpetration.
I know I have felt sexual and romantic possessiveness. I know I have felt a deep, intense, internal proclamation of “mine” about partners. I know that I have felt entitled to tell partners what to do because I felt unable to handle the emotions that certain behaviours provoked in me. I know that sometimes, I have been totally out of line. In fact, if we look closely at behaviours associated with anxious preoccupied attachment strategies (strategies which are more common in women) we will find a lot of behaviour related to possessiveness, surveillance, and control: making demands, making suspicious accusations, attempting to control who the partner can see, when, and for how long, casting the partner’s sexuality as “harmful,” violating the partner’s privacy, surveilling who they are interacting with online, making the partner responsible for their own emotional reactions, blowing up, bulldozing over boundaries, and continuing to seek contact after the partner has said no.
Compulsory mononormativity teaches us that sexual and romantic possessiveness are normal and even healthy. Lots of straight people do not think it is weird to have a problem with their partners being friends with members of the “opposite” sex. Lots of monogamous people of all genders have an issue with their partners remaining friends with exes. We have endless media that tells us it is normal and acceptable to go through our partners’ phones, email accounts, and computers (a massive and abusive invasion of privacy). A generation of people grew up thinking it is normal to keep a close eye on their partners’ social media behaviour, looking closely at connections that might include a sexual attraction. Because misogyny is so extreme and violent, and because so many men do not treat their partners well, women have felt entitled to these controlling and invasive behaviours, and have not felt called to look closely at their own sexual and romantic possessiveness.
