Jealousy: Healthy, or Relationship Cancer

Never in my life have I cheated on a girlfriend.  Never in my life have I given thought to cheating.  I've had thoughts while in relationships of "that girl is hot" of course, and perhaps wondered how she would be in bed, but never the thought "I would cheat on my girlfriend with her".  Yet in my longest relationship, 3 years long, I had to deal constantly with jealousy and possessiveness.  It was one of the biggest things caused our downfall.

I couldn't be a few minutes late getting home without questions of why, where was I, who was I with.  I couldn't go out with friends without her needing to come along, to make sure nothing happened and that I was going where I said I was.  If it were the modern era, she would demand I enable cell phone tracking so she could always check where I was.  She made me feel untrustworthy, and like if I didn't do these things I was trying to hide something, the whole "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" mentality.  It ate away at my self-esteem and self-confidence, made me feel unworthy of love.  If I couldn't be trusted, how could I be loved?  This ate me up, and took me years to recover from.  I suppose in some ways I'm still recovering.

I never asked anything like this of her.  I trusted her.  As far as I know I didn't have a reason not to.  As far as I know she never cheated on me.  If she wanted to go out with friends, I was perfectly okay with that.  She wanted to go to a club?  No problem.  As long as she was coming home to me at the end of the night, I didn't see a reason to have a problem.  She even had a problem with that mindset!  We argued about it constantly!  "If you cared about me you'd get jealous.  Obviously you don't care" was her battle cry.  My reply was "I trust you.  If I thought you would cheat on me, why would I date you??"  She would have girlfriends tell her how lucky she was to have a guy who didn't get jealous, and she would get mad at them for it!! 

I have since learned that her stance on jealousy is not unusual.  Some people will have you believe that to be jealous is the ultimate sign that you care for a person.  When I ask those same people how it is a sign that you care, their responses are "it's a sign that you love them" and "it makes a person feel desired".  These are not answers that show benefits of jealousy though, rather these are signs of the insecurity's of the person answering.  That THEY want the person to be jealous so that they can validate something they feel is missing from their own lives.  As Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, "Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another."  These are not valid reasons for the benefits of jealousy!

I am a man who does not believe in the "merits" of jealousy.  Jealousy is pointless, and nonsensical.  More importantly, I believe jealousy demonstrates a LACK of love, rather than being demonstrative of it as the "pro-jealous" people will have you believe.  I am a firm believer that "Love" and "Trust" must go hand in hand in a relationship.  You cannot have love in the context of a relationship without also having trust, and jealousy is the antithesis of trust.

When you're starting to get serious and "exclusive" (to pull a Saved by the Bell term out) with a person, one of the most important questions you should be asking yourself about them is:

"When the opportunity to cheat presents itself, what will they do?"

and yes, I did type "when" on purpose.  Don't kid yourself, the opportunity to cheat is always there.  If your significant other (SO) exists, they have opportunities to cheat on you.  If you have an SO that doesn't exist, then jealousy may not be your problem, and you might want to locate a nearby psychiatrist.  Just saying.

Some people do, of course, have more opportunity to cheat than others.  The more attractive your SO is, the more opportunity they will have.  The more they're away from home, the more opportunities they will have.  The more power/fame they have (or the higher up on the corporate ladder perhaps), the more opportunities.  I'm sure there are more examples, but you get the basic picture.  The beauty of the question I pose is that while all of these items will be factors, it ultimately doesn't change anything.  Either you believe the person will cheat, or you believe they will not.

I say "you believe" because at the end of the day, that person might still cheat on you when the opportunity comes up.  There are no guarantees.  A person you have absolute faith and trust in could cheat on you and break the trust.  It's all a crap shoot at the end of the day.  So why bother with the question at all?  Very simple.  If you believe somebody will cheat on you when the opportunity presents itself, there's a very good chance that person will cheat on you at some point.  Why put yourself through the torture?  Isn't it better to live your life and deal with things that happen when they happen, rather than wasting brain power and your health worrying about the things which MIGHT?  Plus you have the very distinct possibility of seeing what's NOT there!

What do I mean by that?  To quote Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, "O jealousy! thou magnifier of trifles."  Life is comprised of a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies.  If you think somebody is cheating, you're going to see signs that they are, whether or not they exist.  When they don't respond to a text message quickly you'll wonder "is he/she cheating on me?"  When they come home from work half an hour late "I bet he was banging some skank".  When you go to your SO's company Christmas party, you'll start looking at every person there thinking "is this the homewrecking bitch/bastard?".  You see where I'm going here.  Not healthy, not useful, and not productive.

This isn't to say you should ignore REAL signs when you see them.  A man coming home with lipstick on his shirt that's a color you would never wear.  A woman smelling of cologne that you would never wear.  Coming home from work early to find your wife with a cowboy hat on going reverse cowgirl with a guy underneath helping her bounce up and down while she screams "YEEEEEE HAWWWW!!!".  All signs that something might be going on.

Of course as we all know, the healthy reaction to those signs is to keep it to yourself that you know.  To sneak their phones away from them and read their text messages.  To sneak into their e-mail and look for messages.  To enable the GPS tracker on their phones without telling them and watch it constantly.  To put a keylogger on their computer to make sure they haven't created a secret e-mail account.  These are all healthy, beneficial, proper responses.

Wait, sorry, I had "healthy" and "unhealthy" mixed up in my mind for a minute.  The healthy response when you see a few real signs is to ask them.  Listen to them.  Watch their body language, especially their eyes.  They'll either tell you the truth or lie to you.  It's on you to decide which they did.  If they have reasonable explanations that you believe, then you have nothing to worry about.  If you don't believe their explanations, you need to think about ending it.  Trust is something that once it's broken, is extremely difficult to fix, assuming it can be fixed at all.  Of course if you believe any explanation for your wife going reverse cowgirl on a stranger, please set up an appointment with a local urologist for a vasectomy.  It's not in our species best interest for you to reproduce.  Of course, seeing what isn't there isn't the worst potential risk of being jealous.

The jealous person risks a different self-fulfilling prophecy: that their jealousy will push a person to unfaithfulness.  If your SO always feels that you're being unfaithful, why not just do it anyway?  What will it really change?  While this is certainly not a positive reaction to a jealous SO, it does happen.  As Gene Tierney says, "Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties".  If your SO doesn't ever cheat, then all you will do is drive him/her away from you, and the healthy response from them to your jealousy will be to end things with you because there becomes a tipping point where a person is just no longer worth it.  It's like picking up sand, the harder you squeeze your hand, the faster the sand escapes.

Heinlein says, “Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”  The risks of jealousy are many, including driving a great person away from you, possibly into the arms of another, not to mention the risks to your own health that come from the time spent worrying, getting angry, and holding resentment!  The rewards are almost non-existent, personally I can't think of any.  While everybody is free to make their own decisions, I'm going to stick with my policy of "If I'm dating you, it's because I trust you.  The minute I stop trusting you is the minute I end things with you".