Most of us have had a jealous partner once in our lives. We might even have been that jealous partner. We’ve all been there. The “green monster” is an ugly emotion. But it’s also perfectly natural.
Sometimes, it’s an unconscious and visceral response to a real-world scenario. Other times, we get in our heads and stew on uncomfortable thoughts for a little too long before they seem to grip us and throw us into the clutches of despair.
You may have had a significant other who insisted on going through your phone logs, text messages, or social media accounts—or you may have been that partner.
Jealousy takes place in a variety of different contexts. There’s professional jealousy, familial jealousy (that often takes place between two siblings), jealousy in friendships, and jealousy in every aspect of our lives that could be competitive.
As societies become more and more individualistic, and the decision-making responsibility becomes more of a burden we have to shoulder alone, we must understand why we experience jealousy and, importantly, how we can overcome it.
The Evolution of Jealousy
Jealousy has stuck with us through the long expanse of human evolution because it serves a useful purpose. Some societies even encourage jealousy.
You may have heard someone say, “I love it when he turns red with jealousy — that’s when I know he cares about me.” While it sounds crazy to some, this happens more often in cultures that value outward expressions of intense emotions.
Evolution built the scaffolding of complex emotions, like jealousy, and culture merely erects the facade we see. Jealousy is innate, and our culture characterizes the manifestation of it.
I think it’s important to internalize this concept: We evolved to experience jealousy.
Jealousy is perfectly natural.
Our Uncomfortable Natures
By accepting jealousy as a natural emotion that can teach us something about ourselves, we can eliminate the social stigma around jealousy.
Still, jealousy is unflattering. It’s an unattractive emotion that none of us want to feel. And it often doesn’t make intuitive sense.
Most people feel jealous of their peers. They’ll be gripped with jealousy when their neighbor makes a bit more money than they do but revere billionaires like Jeff Bezos.
This discrepancy teaches us something: jealousy is highly personal.
It evolved to help us navigate the complex world of human societies. Like other pain signals, jealousy evolved to warn us about potential dangers. But false alarms happen.
Now that we understand where jealousy comes from let’s dissect jealousy and analyze the individual components so we can better understand what we’re experiencing.
The 5 Reasons for Jealousy
Though there are a million nuanced reasons we might feel jealousy, all of them can be branched into five categories. Seth Meyers Psy.D. breaks them down for us and suggests we analyze our feelings of jealousy to understand better where they come from.
A sense of inadequacy: this happens when we feel less-than. We feel less attractive, less intelligent, or less interesting than someone else. A sense of inadequacy is a reflection of how we view ourselves. Sometimes it’s a helpful motivator that reminds us not to slack off.
Insecurity: insecurity is the sense of inadequacy turned outward. Psychologists often say anger is depression turned outward. Insecurity is feelings of inadequacy inverted. It happens when we perceive an external threat to our homeostatic worlds. When we feel our homes, relationships, reputations, or bodies are somehow in danger, real or imagined. We become insecure.
These two forms of jealousy are non-pathological. They tend to come and go in different contexts and situations. This is “healthy” jealousy.
Possessiveness & Entitlement: this happens when we view something or some feeling as being “ours,” which can be pathological or situational. Some people might not fear losing what they have, and they don’t feel insecure about themselves, but they see some behavior as transgressing their code of values.
Obsessiveness & Anxiety: when someone is obsessive or anxious, jealousy can be a manifestation of another pathological problem. Racing thoughts are a component. One minute, you’re thinking about dinner. The next minute you find yourself worried you might have a health issue, then you start obsessing about your partner leaving you for someone without health issues for two days straight.
Paranoia: this kind of jealousy happens to people with mental health disorders, addictions, and other emotional problems. Again, it’s pathological and part of a broader problem.
Three Dimensions of Jealousy
In the context of relationships, jealousy has three dimensions: emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. These are distinct processes.
Emotional jealousy is the upsurge of uncomfortable emotions we feel when we think our relationships are threatened. This happens when we see our romantic partners flirtatiously smile at a new friend.
Cognitive jealousy is the appraisal of threats and possibilities that something could go wrong without us knowing it. This is hypervigilence. It’s when we start to wonder about our partner’s possible liaisons and chances for infidelity.
Behavioral jealousy is a series of behaviors designed to protect our relationships from perceived threats. This might be going through your partner’s text messages or something as benign as “checking up on them” when you expect something suspicious is going on.
How to Handle Jealousy
We’ve dissected each component of jealousy, but we often experience a combination of the above. In his book Learned Mindfulness, Frank John Ninivaggi, M.D. powerfully describes the juxtaposition of characteristics that accompany jealousy.
Jealousy is the feeling of conscious deprivation, of being excluded from something desirable once believed possessed and enjoyed with sufficient satisfaction. Jealousy is the conscious feeling of being excluded and losing something. Fear, uncertainty, and ambivalence accompany this because the jealous person feels dismissed from participation in a once enjoyed social context. Jealousy feverishly seeks to maintain its dependent social bonds. Trying to hold on to what is ambivalently loved and at risk of being lost makes up jealousy-based possessiveness. Loss or the threat of loss in jealousy may be felt as sorrow, grief, sadness, bereavement, mourning, and clinical depression. If these feelings are not faced directly and worked through, a nonconscious retreat to feelings of persecution characteristic of envy may result. Alternatively, manic defenses may be stirred to deny and mask depressive feelings. Jealousy has features of manic excitement, rage, control, and domination. Jealousy often serves as a more ego-syntonic [compatible with your identity] defense against ego-dystonic [incompatible with your identity] envy.
Know Thy Self
Understanding jealousy means understanding why it’s happening and treating the root causes. Treating the symptoms and behaviors is also essential. It’s frustrating when people try to advise like, “Well, have you tried just not being jealous?”
It means understanding what we’re up against and addressing the real issues. Are we jealous because we fear our lovers leaving us? Is that fear realistic?
Getting over jealousy is going to take some deep introspection. You first need to tease out what’s real from what’s made up in your head. If you have an underlying mental health issue, that will need to be addressed.
Hey, no shame in getting healthy if that turns out to be the case.
Know Thy Relationship
We must get a realistic appraisal of our jealous feelings. Are they ordinary, everyday, healthy feelings of jealousy that humans evolved to have?
Or are they delusional, inconsistent with reality? Are our thoughts and feelings obsessive and constant? Or are they fleeting?
We must look ourselves in the mirror and commit not to be irrationally jealous. Resisting the urge to blame your partner or other people for your feelings comes with the territory.
Exposure therapy — exposing yourself to uncomfortable situations where you get jealous and analyzing your fears while controlling your behaviors — can do wonders for jealousy for a lot of people.
A Change of Heart
I can’t tell you how many men I’ve met were jealous (for no good reason) until they opened up their relationships and allowed their wives or girlfriends to start sleeping with other people.
It’s like they had a light bulb moment where they figured out, “Ah-ha, so there was nothing to be afraid of all along? You mean to tell me she still loves me, and we still have a relationship?”
In a counterintuitive twist of fate, they came to realize that what they were afraid of was the fear of something terrible happening. It wasn’t the thing so much as the fear of losing control of the thing. As I always say, when discussing open relationships and polyamory, it’s not the sex that bothers us with cheating. It’s the betrayal. It’s the lies. It’s the feeling of being left out— like we’re not good enough to be told the truth — like our partner needs to sneak around and hide things from us.
Getting Comfortable With the Unknown
Understanding that jealousy is often a fear of the unknown, a lack of control, or betrayal brings it into better light. It has nothing to do with our partner’s behavior and everything to do with our fear that we’ll lose control over a relationship we hold near and dear to our hearts.
Controlling the three dimensions of jealousy is necessary for success. It’s important to start with our behaviors and get those under control first and foremost. No snooping, no going through your partner’s phones or emails, none of that.
We have to get comfortable with not knowing everything and we must embrace the fact that with risk comes reward—you can’t control the world and you can’t control other people.
Practicing Radical Acceptance
Then we work on cognitive jealousy. We need to honestly assess our relationships’ strengths and weaknesses and take inventory of everything. That way, we can develop an accurate appraisal of the risk we incur by continuing our relationship (or starting a new one), and we can accept that risk. This is the hardest part.
Letting go of jealousy means letting go of the idea that relationships are things we own and that they must stay with us forever. In truth, most relationships (of all sorts) won’t be lifelong affairs for you. Maybe a handful will, but on a long enough time span, most people will fade out of your life. Enjoy who you have while you have them so you can stop worrying about losing them and immerse yourself in the present.
Last, we treat emotional jealousy. Once the other two dimensions have been addressed, it will be easier for us to let go of those emotions of fear. We’ve got our behaviors in check, we’ve come to understand that we don’t own anybody else, and we’ve practiced radical acceptance of the fact that all relationships come with risk. Now it’s time to realize how archaic these emotions are.
A major cure for the emotional dimension of jealousy is to fill your life with as many rewarding, positive things as possible. Have hobbies, a comfortable income, and aim for emotional and financial independence — strive to be your own person, someone who shares the life they’ve built for themselves (and continues to build) with someone else.
Jealousy exposes our emotional dependence on someone. When we learn to let go and stop clinging to the illusory comfort another person brings us, we can finally be free to live with that person without the threat of loss hanging over our heads.
Thanks for reading. I highly recommend the book Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. You can find it here on Amazon.
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