Understanding and Managing Jealousy

Jealousy is one of the most powerful and potentially destructive human emotions. When we feel jealous, we say that we are sick with it. Jealousy is the emotion that can make us feel like we’ve been punched in the stomach and had the wind knocked out of us without warning. It can feel like a form of madness, a temporary insanity.

WHAT IS JEALOUSY?

Jealousy occurs in a close relationship when one person fears losing the other to a rival. Close relationships are important to our self-esteem, so losing a loved partner is very threatening. It’s accompanied by all sorts of terrible feelings, including fear, anger and humiliation.

The primary characteristics of jealousy include:

• Fear of losing an important person to an attractive other
• Lack of trust; Suspicion or anger about betrayal
• Humiliation; Low self-esteem and sadness over loss
• Uncertainty and loneliness
• Need to control a loved one

French psychiatrist Marcianne Blevis, author of Jealousy: True Stories of Love‘s Favorite Decoy says, “All human emotions exist to help us figure out who we are in the world, and jealousy is no exception. It is a resource we call on when we feel at risk, when our sense of self is put in jeopardy. When we are jealous, we are in fact in the grip of an identity crisis. From the rival emanates an aura of magical attributes that he or she possesses and we don’t. Yet we are the ones who assign those attributes to the rival; what they really represent is something unrealized in ourselves.

“The formula for jealousy is an insecure person times an insecure relationship“, says psychologist Steven Stosny. “But it’s insecure people who tend to destabilize relationships and make them insecure. More often than not, feelings of jealousy flare with such intensity that they burn a hole in the brain, obliterating rational thought and setting off behaviors that create a self-fulfilling prophecy by pushing away the very person one desires, or needs, the most. Ironic that an impulse that arises from love can so easily destroy it.”

A HISTORY OF JEALOUSY

Jealousy evolved when primates became capable of long-term love and monogamous attachments. Its purpose is to help maintain intimate relationships. It’s a “built-in infidelity detection system.”

University of Texas psychologist David Buss argues in The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex, that men and women experience jealousy differently, and that it’s the threat of sexual infidelity that most stirs jealousy in men. “The burden of manhood is uncertainty of paternity; jealousy serves to keep a mate from straying, upping a man’s confidence that he is the genetic father of his partner’s children. Jealousy arose to keep him from the reproductive dead-end of investing his finite resources in raising some other man’s children. Women respond most to the possible loss of love to a rival female, a way of protecting a partner’s needed commitment to home and kids. And perhaps in the small bands in which humans lived for most of evolutionary history, jealousy was effective in keeping a mate from straying.”

Today, however, relationship bonds are not necessarily lifelong. Though we’re still  programmed to experience jealousy, it may no longer be an effective tool for maintaining intimacy. Historically, jealousy was considered a socially appropriate response to infidelity, but now jealous behavior is often perceived as pathological.

JEALOUSY AS A MEASURE OF COMMITMENT

Jealousy can promote intimacy in relationships, especially in the early stages, before trust has a chance to develop, because it correlates with caring. “The paradox of jealousy is that we all want some of it,” says Stosny. “It’s a measure of commitment. In small doses it’s an expression of caring. Jealousy is like a way of testing whether it’s safe to invest more emotion. It’s safe when a person cares enough to be uncomfortable. If your partner doesn’t respond, then it’s not safe.”

“The surprise is how easy it is to trip the male jealousy switch. A lot of times men aren’t even aware of the emotional manipulation,” says Buss. If a woman perceives that the man is less committed than she is, she will often try to provoke jealousy in him so that he finds her more desirable.

WHO IS PRONE TO JEALOUSY?

To some extent, all men are prone to jealousy. Jealousy can be useful in obtaining reassurance and eliminating doubt. But it is painful to experience, and many men will eliminate the source of it rather than endure it. Alvin La Victoria, in 5 Things That Your Boyfriend Won’t Tell You, points out that men worry that their guy friends will want you:

“We want our friends to like you… but not love you. In guy world the approval of our friends is very important so it makes sense that we want our friends to like you. But what we don’t want is for them to covet you. When we hook up with a very hot girl and our buddies ogle her it is a real turn off. This is why so many really pretty girls find themselves single. We just can’t handle the thought of losing you to one of our friends because if that happens we lose our girl, one of our boys and a big chunk of our egos. So if our friends like you and think you’re cool that’s great but if they wish they could have you that’s bad. Unfortunately this is totally out of your control.”

In WHAT MEN WANT:  Three Professional Single Men Reveal to Women What it Takes to Make a Man Yours, authors Gerstman, Pizzo, and Seldes claim that a man will dump a woman who makes him feel the pain of jealousy:

“Men are extremely jealous, so trying to inflame his jealousy will always backfire.  If he is jealous, he is struggling with the thought that he thinks there is someone out there who can make his gf happier and treat her better than he can.  This is his greatest fear:  he is not man enough to make the woman he loves happy.  A man will drop a woman rather than suffer this kind of torture.”

Buss points out that jealousy often occurs when there is a discrepancy between the “mate value” of two partners—one partner is more attractive than the other. “Some men luck into a woman who is higher in mate value than they are,” reports Buss. “And on some level such a man has some realization that he is not going to be able to replace her with someone of equivalent value. So he is on jealousy hyperalert.”

WHEN JEALOUSY IS HARMFUL

Jealousy is often the motivation behind psychological, verbal and physical abuse. Normal jealousy is a response to a real threat to a relationship, but much jealousy is delusional. Our partner can become irrationally jealous even when there is no real threat. Innocent social interactions loom as evidence of betrayal, and the threatened partner soon creates a prison of distrust and anger within the relationship.

The tendency towards destructive jealousy is correlated with various factors:

Insecurity

• Destructive jealousy is usually triggered by insecurity about our prospects.
• Someone who thinks he’ll never find another partner as good as the current one will obviously go to great lengths to keep the one he’s got. People with a poor sense of self are more prone to the deep hurt and fury that precede angry outbursts.

Childhood Baggage

• Jealousy is often rooted in the lack of parental attention and affection early in life, undermining the capacity for trust. When we fall in love, we experience a rush of positive feelings and unconditional acceptance. Our normal vulnerabilities and insecurities disappear for a while. When something happens to threaten that love, however, as it inevitably will, we experience those fears with brute strength.

Personality

• Buss has found that jealousy is negatively correlated to agreeableness, the tendency to be cooperative and compassionate, rather than suspicious and antagonistic. Like all the major personality factors, agreeableness is influenced by heredity and environment, including early experience, in roughly equal proportions.

HOW TO HANDLE JEALOUSY

Jealousy fears are deep rooted and can be very difficult to eliminate. The fear of abandonment sets off alarms that induce emotional panic. Your openness or friendliness, your style of dress, your relationships with other members of the opposite sex are not the reason that your boyfriend feels jealous. If his jealousy is not destructive, but more an attempt to be reassured by you, there are ways that you can provide that once you understand what he is really feeling.

• Acknowledge that you understand that you are upsetting him.
• Ask him specifically what behaviors he finds most threatening. If you’re a flirt, it seems reasonable that you tone it down if you want him to feel secure. If he seems uncomfortable that you are becoming BFFs with his guy friends, step back a little. Give it more time. You shouldn’t have to change your personality, but if you care about someone who is feeling threatened, there are probably ways that you can shore up his confidence. Take it one bit at a time. If you go from Queen of the Scene to Mother Superior overnight, it’s not going to work.
• Tell him in a kind and loving way how his reactions make you feel. Help him understand the potentially negative consequences of his mistrust.
• One of the worst things about jealousy is that it’s a Catch 22: We feel unlovable when we’re jealous, and we’re jealous because we feel unlovable. Reinforce and reward the lovable things about him. Dwell on what is positive and special in your relationship.

It’s important to be aware, however, that jealousy is a red flag. You need to be vigilant about whether it’s the benign variety that helps us test our value early in a relationship, or whether something more destructive is brewing. If you find that you are unable to reassure your partner, and that an irrational fear of betrayal becomes a constant in your relationship, you are in over your head. The damage was done long ago and cannot be undone by you.

Sources:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/jealousy

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200607/jealousy-voice-possessiveness-past

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200402/advice-his-jealous-heart

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200906/jealousy-loves-destroyer

http://www.ichatdate.com/college-dating/1016/5-things-that-your-boyfriend-wont-tell-you

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1. The Sweetness of Surrender (His)
2. 5 Ways to Get More Control of Your Relationships
3. The Girls’ Kickass Guide to Getting Over a Breakup
4. 20 Reasons You Don’t Have a Boyfriend
5. Are You Dating a Narcissist?

Tags: attachment, BFF, boyfriend, boys, college, commitment, control, date, dating, David Buss, ego, fall in love, feelings, flirt, friend, girl, girls, guy, intimacy, jealousy, love, male, open, power, reassurance, relationship, relationships, security, self-esteem, sex, trust, women