How do you feel when your partner is secretly chatting with other people on social apps or his eyes are always darting to other people or going out for dinner with another person of the opposite sex but purposely hiding it from you?
You may have a million creatures running through your mind, but still keep a smile on your face. Because if you get green-eyed, you might even be told to be petty-minded. One thing that many people say when they get green-eyed is "Then go find him or her, how nice he or she is!"
Being green-eyed is a hard experience because whether you express it to the other person or not, the damage has actually been done.
Why Is It So Hard to Admit You're Jealous?
In intimate relationships, romantic jealousy, which we commonly refer to as 'being green-eyed', is defined as an emotional response after one's intimacy is threatened by a real or imaginary love rival. Jealousy is a painful emotion, and one that most people don't want to admit that they are experiencing.
We just don't want to admit 'I'm jealous of someone else'!
Because admitting jealousy means that you realise that your partner is attracted to someone else, and that he or she has acted on that attraction, and that you're angry and concerned, but you can't stop it from happening!
After realising this, you may feel a mix of nasty emotions running through you: anger, insecurity, doubt, hatred, etc. But just as we rigidly do not want to admit that we are jealous, we also refuse to experience these jealousy-induced emotions.
An "I don't care" and feigned numbness can block out all the good and bad emotions. When we want to feel emotions, all we hear is "XX doesn't believe in tears" and "you are so pretentious". Our culture today is simply intolerant of emotions, and many people believe that talking about them is a taboo in itself. But jealousy is such a normal emotion that if you're going to experience love, you're almost certainly going to feel it.
Signs of Jealousy
The following are typical signs of jealousy:
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Fear of losing one's lover
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Lack of trust
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Anger at real or imagined rival: never believe that there is such a thing as a female confidant or a male confidant, and that approaching him or her is not a sign of goodwill;
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The need to control a loved one: checking in at all times;
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The need to control a loved one: checking in on him or her at all times.
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Surveillance: looking at the other person's Moments, clicking into the rival's Weibo to cyberstalk him or her. Everyone understands this kind of thing;
When you notice the above signs in your own intimate relationship, then it may indicate that one of the sides is jealous. Unlike envy, jealousy always involves a third party. Envy is 'you have something I want that I don't have' and the emotion is limited to the two of us. Jealousy, on the other hand, is 'an emotion I feel towards someone else because I care about my partner'.
Is There Any Benefit to Jealousy?
In a way, jealousy in intimate relationships is a healthy emotion that has some evolutionary significance. Evolutionary psychologists see jealousy as a behaviour that protects your partner from being stolen by others. For example, the act of surrounding your partner with your arms at a party, which is akin to 'asserting sovereignty', is known as 'mate-retention behaviours' (MRBs).
Neal, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, has shown that when one partner engages in mate-retention behaviours, the level of commitment to a relationship increases for both partners.
According to Neal, jealousy is essential in an intimate relationship. If you've never been jealous in a relationship, it probably means you don't care that much about the other person.
When your partner glances obliquely at who you're tweeting with, the fact that he or she is a little bit jealous may make you feel reassured and even a little bit joyful. You feel reassured because you sense that he or she cares about you.
At the same time, jealousy is a warning light, and when it comes on, it reminds you that it's time to take a look at your relationship. A relationship that tends to plateau often causes two people to slowly lose sight of its existence.
According to Scheinkman, a counsellor who specialises as a marriage therapist, 'old married couples' are often in a sleepwalking state, where both sides are walking around the relationship normally without communicating or even realising that the other person exists, until a third party comes along to break the silence. 'It's funny that many people never pay attention to their partner until he or she is targeted by someone else'.
If Jealousy Is Beneficial, Why Would It Destroy Relationships?
It's not the emotion of jealousy itself that matters, but how we respond to it. 'Mate-retention behaviors' is a broad term, and excessive snooping, manipulating and controlling behaviours may reduce relationship satisfaction.
The key here is to recognise whether the jealousy you feel is reactive or suspicious. If you notice that your partner is acting strangely with a certain ex and then act to prevent it from continuing, then it shows that you are being perceptive and your jealousy is a reactive emotion in the face of a real situation;
But if it's just suspicion, it's considered to be "always overthinking", and sceptical jealousy is likely to make you double-check your relationship, which could eventually lead to a real breakdown in your relationship. For example, some people habitually go through their partner's mobile phones and computers, which can make them feel untrusted and unprivate, whereas the sceptically jealous person thinks that he or she is trying to "protect the relationship from intrusion".
Jealousy Makes Us More Like Love Rivals?
Do you imitate your love rivals? Don't be in a hurry to let out an unsavory "How could I!"
Behavioural experiments by psychologist Slotter have proven that not only do we not attack our love rivals, but we even tend to make ourselves more like them. People may secretly believe that their partner is attracted to someone else because the lover has qualities we don't have, from hairstyles, to styles of dress, to personalities. We may unconsciously change ourselves to mimic our love rivals in order to keep our partner.
Jealousy allows us to change ourselves for our mate, and we can't say with certainty that this is a good or bad thing. No matter good or bad, and whether you admit it or not, it does happen. Maybe changing yourself will recapture your mate's attention, and maybe you'll have a new trait from now on.
But change comes in degrees, and people still need to draw the bottomline. If you are constantly changing yourself, even losing yourself, because of jealousy, or to keep your partner, then it's time to look at whether there are other deeper problems in your relationship with the other person, and jealousy may just be an appearance.
Gender Differences: Are Women More Likely to Be Jealous?
Research has found that men and women develop jealousy in intimate relationships with roughly the same frequency and intensity, but that men's jealousy is more threatening: in Western countries, 50-70 per cent of murdered adult women are killed by their husbands, boyfriends or ex-boyfriends, while only 3 per cent of murdered men die at the hands of their female partners.
Men and women also tend to be triggered into jealousy by different factors. For men, physical betrayal is more intolerable, while emotional cheating causes more distress for women.
Evolutionary psychologists attribute this to the different aspects of insecurity that men and women face in their relationships: men are more worried about sexual betrayal, as they are concerned that all the resources and care they have invested in them are going to the kid next door; women should ensure that their partners are emotionally invested in their children and have adequate resources to raise their offspring.
Reality Is Bloody Hard, But We Need to Face It
Being in an uncertain relationship all the time is indeed a stressful thing, and you can never be 100% sure that you won't lose your partner. But it's a true reality and we need to recognise and accept it.
"We all need to deal with the distress that comes with this love itself." Counsellor Scheinkman says: "It's true that my partner loves me very much, but if someone who is very attractive to him appears, THERE IS ALWAYS A POSSIBILITY. It's a reality we all need to face."
This uncertainty can keep us from becoming complacent, and likewise remind ourselves that no one person can truly own another person completely. We live our lives expecting nothing more than to make connections with other people and do everything we can to make those connections deeper and longer.
Taming the Beast: How to Properly Handle Jealousy?
In the film The Seven Deadly Sins, John, the hero, kills people who represent the other five original sins, and he himself is one of the original sins: jealousy. John is jealous of the policeman who has a beautiful and virtuous wife and a good married life. So he kills the policeman's wife and cuts off her head and sends it to the policeman.
Jealousy can be a healthy little emotion, but it can also be a fierce beast. It is a simultaneously constructive and destructive force, and how to use it to enhance intimate relationships is something we should all learn.
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Negotiate "jealousy boundaries" with your partner.
Negotiating with your partner and setting boundaries and rules together can help us find a balance between security and personal freedom in a relationship, where we are committed to our partner without losing our independence.
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Stop blaming and shaming
According to counsellor Scheinkman, when one partner in an intimate relationship starts to develop jealousy, both partners get caught up in a cycle of heated accusations and defensive defences.
If this cycle is to be broken, the accusing side needs to stop blaming and the defending side needs to abandon shame. In this way, both sides will retreat from operational state to their original wounded state, showing vulnerability, and this is the side for which the counsellor can work.
