Red Flags is Novara Media’s advice column for anti-capitalists. Inspired by our columnist Sophie K Rosa’s book, Radical Intimacy, Red Flags explores how capitalism fucks up our intimate lives – not just our romantic relationships, but also our friendships, home lives, family ties, and experiences of death and dying – and what we can do about it. To submit a question to Sophie, email [email protected] or, if you’d like more anonymity, fill out this form.

Dear Sophie,

I am in a new partnership with someone wonderful and we have such a special connection that I’m so excited to explore together. They separated from their ex-partner of 6 years just over a year ago and they maintain a close relationship. When she comes up I can’t help but feel the pit in my stomach – the insecurity, fear, jealousy and confusion. I’ve never experienced a partnership ending and a new one emerging with an ex-partner that is as close as theirs and I feel like I’m going insane. I’m wondering if I’m too insecure/anxious to cope with this kind of dynamic even as I also think it’s beautiful and does so much to defy the models of partnerships, beginning and ending, that we have been given.

My desire for different ways of relating that leave space for the evolution of romantic love when a relationship ends is consuming me. I feel overcome by these feelings that heteronormative stories of monogamy and romantic love (particularly viewing love as a scarce thing that means love for another takes away from love for me) have such a tight grasp on me and I don’t know how to move through / let go of them so I can enjoy this new and beautiful partnership?

– Pit in My Stomach

Dear Pit In My Stomach,

What would love be without insanity? I’m not sure we can fall for someone with our feet firmly on the ground. I’m not sure we’d want to. On top of this ordinary and inevitable crazy-in-love, you are contending with what you experience as a threatening third party that challenges your deep-seated ideas about romantic love. Sometimes, when a scenario contravenes our psychically foundational ways of understanding the world, we can feel like we are losing our minds. Your partner maintaining a close relationship with their ex seems to be unmooring you.

You named the feelings that this not-quite-love-triangle brings up for you – insecurity, fear, jealousy and confusion – before immediately questioning whether this dynamic might be too much for you (or whether, indeed, you might be too much for the dynamic). What happens if you attempt to accept rather than problematise the existence of these feelings? They do, after all, exist. Maybe they need more space.

I wonder if you have told your partner you are feeling this way; doing so does not equate to policing their relationship with their ex. Hopefully, just sharing your experience will lessen its weight, and perhaps between you can identify things that could help you feel more secure, such as meeting their ex. Tell your partner what you are afraid of – see if their response soothes you. You might be surprised.

Have you and your partner spoken about what it means to each of you to be partners? For example, what aspects of life you might like to share together? What makes your relationship special? Are any facets of your relationship exclusive, meaning not shared with anyone else? Do you struggle with the idea of your partner being emotionally close to this particular ex, all exes, or anyone else at all?

Communicating that you are struggling with something in a relationship doesn’t automatically mean legislating for it. Certainly, we might experience a level of distress about a partner’s actions that entails requesting they change their behaviour: conscious monogamy might involve this. At the same time, close relationships tend to dig up buried distress such that not everything can be grounds for altered actions. Sometimes we just need to air our pain, have it heard, see what happens if it is met with love.

[I think you could add here something that makes clear that struggling with something doesn’t mean automatically legislating for it – eg “I feel comfortable with you being close to your ex” doesn’t mean they automatically shouldn’t – in fact it should be as much a prompt for you to reflect on why you feel like this, as a prompt for them to ensure you no longer do]

It seems that your feelings might be conflicting with your values, and even that you might have conflicting desires – all perfectly normal. What do you want to be led by? Does this feel possible? You write that you feel “overcome” and that heteronormative narratives have a “tight grasp” on you. Freedom might be daunting. Is it appealing, too?

Since reading her staggeringly sexy novel All Fours, I have been enjoying Miranda July’s Substack. Like the novel, her newsletter considers the relationship between unravelling and pleasure. How much of life as we know it can we undo in pursuit of agency and the enjoyment this might bring? July’s reflections here, to me, were a wise, welcome reminder:

“The fascism of our era will make you want to batten down the hatches, not rock the boat. But I think things generally turn out better when people trust the groundbreaking, progressive elements within themselves. There is much company on this route, whereas the more conservative path tends to become smaller and smaller until it is just you alone in a house taking care of an old man.”

Do you want to trust the groundbreaking, progressive elements within yourself? If so, you could attempt this in your current situation. Besides speaking with your partner, you might also explore your feelings further on your own.

You could sit and feel, and then think about, your feelings, and what they might be seeking from you; you could write to make sense of things; you could talk with a range of people who might offer perspectives that change yours, including a therapist you trust. Our feelings require close listening, from ourselves and/or others, if they are to shift or even transform.

You are wondering if you are “too insecure to cope with this dynamic”. I wonder what this would mean in practice. If you decided you were too insecure, would this mean never dating someone close with their ex? Never dating someone close to anyone else at all, even? It doesn’t seem like you would want this kind of life. For one, it would close a lot of doors – including to people who you might well want to love, and who might have a proven good track record of loving rather well.

Your partner’s relationship with their ex is causing you anxiety, yes – but there will always be thirds, in any dyad. As the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in Monogamy, “Two’s company, but three’s a couple.” I wager that your anxiety would find something else – another third – to preoccupy itself with, if not for this particular ex. Maybe a friend, job or activity that takes your partner away.

It is the fate of love to be threatened by separation. As Phillips writes: “Because everyone begins their life belonging to someone else – physically and emotionally inextricable from someone else – being separate, or having to share, leaves us in shock. For us, then, it is all or nothing; and so there is always potentially the feeling of being nothing that comes from not being all.”

Not being everything to your partner frightens you – love can be frightening. And whilst we may make agreements with partners in a probably illusory but sometimes helpful attempt to reduce fantasised threats (no friendships with exes, no sex with other people, no eating dinner with women apart from one’s wife), there’s no getting away from it: love is risky.

Perhaps our best bet is to make space for our fear and to see if, in time, it can transform. We might even, as the psychotherapist Esther Perel suggests, “invite the third”. After all, our partnerships will never be sustained in a vacuum. Thirds might be scary, but fear can also be the bedfellow of excitement, intrigue and the erotic. Even now, could this challenging dynamic have more to do with your attraction to your partner than you know?