Because jealousy is accompanied by a sense of inadequacy, it is hard to bear, says Stosny, and most people convert the discomfort into anger, which they regulate by trying to control a partner—distrusting them, going through their belongings and cell phone call logs, making accusations, behaviors more likely to drive a partner away. "The trick is you have to control jealousy within yourself. You have to do something that will make you feel more lovable, because basically you feel unlovable when you're jealous."
That, observes French psychiatrist Marcianne Blevis, is the heart of jealousy. For Blevis, who has spent years in the trenches with patients, jealousy is not the guardian of love but more typically its destroyer. It arises in relationships whenever we feel "erased" by a partner's lack of attention. She insists it is a signal—not to blame the partner for attention to someone else, which is what we usually do, but to look inside oneself. There, she contends, we will find the source of insecurity that instantly makes the rival seem so superior to us. What's at stake in jealousy, she argues, is nothing less than survival of the sense of self.
Just What Are We Doubting?
"We assume that jealousy is a necessary evil, the collateral damage of love," says Blevis, author of Jealousy: True Stories of Love's Favorite Decoy. "'Jealousy lives upon doubts,' said the 18th century moralist Francois de la Rochefoucauld. But what exactly are we doubting? 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."
Invariably, however, we misdirect our attention. Blevis explains: The target of jealousy, the one who has provoked our jealousy, shatters our self-regard. 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. "It signals our wish to be better than ourselves, to reconfigure who we are." Blevis cites the case of a patient who had not dared to pursue the career of her dreams—becoming a doctor. But her boyfriend left her for a woman more accomplished than she. "She came to realize that her jealousy of her rival masked her craving for the part of herself she had ignored. She lost the boyfriend, but she went back to school."
It's a mistake to assume that jealousy always involves love, argues Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, a philosopher who heads Israel's University of Haifa. "A man who despises his wife may nevertheless become jealous when someone else looks covetously at her. Here the central feature is losing to a rival." In this case, he insists, jealousy is more germane to the personal characteristic of selfishness than to love.
People indeed use jealousy as a signal—to try to control their partner. But that only makes the relationship worse. "They substitute power for value," says Stosny. "They feel a loss of personal value and rather than do something that will make them feel more valuable, they do something that will make them feel more powerful." But the more that people try to soothe their own emotions by controlling a partner, the more powerless they are destined to feel—because, observes Stosny, "you're dependent on your partner's whims to feel OK." And that's a setup for anger.
Our brains don't titrate jealousy, releasing just enough to penetrate our self-awareness. Jealousy lands with brutal force, lending itself far too readily to obsession and delusion. "It makes you think the same thing over and over," says Stosny, "and the more you do that, the less reality-testing you do. Emotions all have an illusion of certainty, and jealousy makes you certain of your perception of the world." Buss contends that the tendency to deception that is a hallmark of jealousy is built into the brain. "We have evolved cognitive biases designed to overestimate the likelihood of costly things happening. So we make all kinds of errors in judgment—erroneous inferences, erroneous suspicions. But our brains are designed that way to avoid the more costly error of being exposed to a mate poacher."
A Measure of Commitment
However much jealousy encourages an outsize response, a little bit is good for relationships, especially in the early stages, before trust has a chance to develop. "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. Jealousy is a fear of losing something you perceive you have—the affection, the fidelity of another person. The threat of losing it is a test of how much you value it."
Although the perceptions that accompany jealousy may be distorted, the pain it gives rise to is real. The neural circuitry that underlies our psychological response to such complex social events as being accepted or rejected is the same circuitry that underlies the simplest physical pains and pleasures. Experiencing envy, which is a first cousin to jealousy and similarly gives rise to feelings of inferiority and resentment, activates pain-related neural circuits in the brain, neuroimaging studies show.
Tags:
anger,
apples to apples,
business situations,
coincidence,
desire,
disappointment,
giving feedback,
lunch,
negative connotations,
negative criticism,
negative feedback,
negative feelings,
odds,
patience,
pronoun,
specifics,
synonyms,
willingness
