Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures (25 page)

While Stan, Goldie, and Neil did something that most people never do-respond to a jealousy crisis with violence-they are "normal" enough for their crimes not to be blamed on such things as mental illness, drugs, alcohol, an abusive childhood, or poverty. One of the most noteworthy things they all had in common, besides a predisposition toward jealousy and a jealousy-related crisis, was a gun. They are people who, if it weren't for the crimes they committed, could have been seen as successful members of society. For the people I will present next, violence was not a one-time event, but a way of life.

Mikc

Mike, a 30-year-old man, is serving a life sentence for rape and murder. lie describes the events that led to his crime:

I met Rosemary after getting out of a very painful relationship with Pat. I was extremely jealous of Pat. I could get killing mad about her. I didn't want people to even look at her.

The worst jealousy I ever felt was when I came back after ten days, and I found out she got married. I knew the guy. She told me he was just a friend.... I know her, she was up to no good. I was never comfortable with her seeing other men. There was lots of insecurity on my part. If I had married Pat, I would have ended in prison much sooner.

While Mike wasn't in love with Rosemary the way he had been with Pat, he still became very emotionally dependent on her:

Rosemary was there, and it helped in terms of Pat. I got married at 17. She was 21. 1 thought I couldn't live without her. I was dependent on her emotionally. I felt she really cared about me.

Mike was totally unprepared for what he found out:

Rosemary and I were living with Ann who was a friend of Rosemary before our marriage and after that too. It was comfortable for all of us. We were happy together. When I found out that Rosemary and Ann were lovers, I was really shocked. I just got into the car and split. I felt that she'd rejected me. I felt abandoned. I couldn't handle it.

Abandonment is a core issue for Mike:

I felt abandoned by my mother. I don't remember my father. Ile committed suicide when I was 3 years old. He shot himself because of another woman. No one ever talked about him. I was the only child for a long time. But it was difficult for my mother-being single and a black woman-to make a living. When I was 6 she started dating. Until then we were together. I got very jealous. I attacked the men she was dating. I would steal from them. I would curse them. I tried to beat one of them up, but he moved out of the way, and I fell down the stairs. I still have a scar.... When I was 8 she took me to nay grandmother who used to beat me up regularly

At the time of his father's death, Mike was in his Oedipal stage, experiencing the first stirrings of sexual feelings and in love with his mother. Most boys have to compete with their father for their mother's love. Mike didn't need to do that. Mother was his. They were together, and close He was her only one-a young boy's heaven. Things changed when his mother started dating. Suddenly he had competition for her love. Mike responded with tremendous jealousy.

He expressed his jealousy in violence-not toward himself, the way his father did, but toward his competitors for Mother's love. His violence caused the ultimate rejection: Mike was sent away to live with his abusive grandmother. These childhood experiences had a profound impact on his predisposition toward jealousy. As an adult, Mike attempted to excuse his mother's betrayal, but the little hurt boy in him still felt terribly abandoned. Mike sees the feelings of abandonment as the root cause of his jealousy:

I have the gravest fear of abandonment. This is probably why I am so jealous. Mom, Pop, Coot [a friendl-in one way or another I lost all of them. Even the pets. Somebody poisoned my clucks, my dog was given away, another was taken. They gave my dolls to a cousin la girl]. Everything I ever cared about, I ended up losing. When I love, I expect total fidelity. I know I don't handle infi- clelity very well, and I say it up front. A close, intimate relationship has to be monogamous. If not, it's like a betrayal to me. I could never be with someone who is open to have casual sex with others. That would hurt me too much. I couldn't live with that. 10 me sex isn't casual. If there's no emotional involvement, to nic it's nothing.

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? A man who has a fear of abandonment and a problem with jealousy makes sure the women he gets involved with don't make him feel abandoned and don't trigger his jealousy. Why is it, though, that Mike chose to fall in love with Pat, a woman he knew was "up to no good," a woman who caused him to feel insecure, and eventually abandoned him in a most cruel and inconsiderate way? Why is it that Pat triggered more jealousy in Mike than did Rosemary, his wife? ("I wasn't threatened by Rosemary's relationship with Ann, but could get killing mad about Pat.") The reason is that Pat fit Mike's negative romantic image better.

As noted earlier, romantic images develop early in life and are particularly powerful because of it. They are based on the significant features-positive and, even more so, negative-of the people who were most influential in our early childhood. For most people, these are the parents. We internalize the image of the people who taught us the meaning of love by the way they gave us love, or withheld it from us. As adults, we look for a person who fits that internalized image. When we meet such a person, we project our internalized romantic image onto him or her and experience it a5 falling in love.

Why do men like Mike, Stan, and Neil, who fear rejection and abandonment, choose to fall in love with women who reject and abandon them? The reason is that the women they choose represent a painful part of their romantic image, and thus provide them with an opportunity to heal a childhood injury. The relationship may seem like a living hell-and in extreme cases may trigger violence-but it actually represents a hope to master a childhood trauma.7

Mike fell in love with Pat because he knew she wouldn't make him number one just as he wasn't number one for his mother. If Pat had returned his love, it would have helped heal his childhood wound. Unfortunately for Mike, she did not.

Mike cared less about Rosemary, yet got a sense of security from her love. When she too betrayed him, he was devastated. Just then he thought he was failing in his work too. He knew he was going to destroy everything, the way he had as a child.

My supervisor at work came and mentioned something about me being moved. I felt like a failure. I was very angry. That morning I put my gun in my lunch-box. IMike is an electronics technician and was sent out to customers' homes to make repairs.] I knew I was going to kill someone. When I got into the house and saw it was a woman, I decided to rape her too.

She was very brave. I admired her. At a certain point I had second thoughts about killing her. But I knew I had to kill someone. I wanted to get it over with.

It was a cold-blooded murder. In a world where he felt he had lost everything, the only power Mike had left was the power to destroy.

Jealousy as a Trigger of Murder

Mike is black, Stan is white. Mike belonged to a lower socioeconomic class than Stan. Yet there were several important similarities that brought them both to prison with a life sentence.

For both, control was extremely important. The reason, as their childhood histories suggest, is that as children they felt powerless to get the love and recognition they so desperately wanted. Despite their need for control, both actually felt insecure and inferior (none of Stan's successes helped change that). They frequently felt isolated and lonely. This made them emotionally dependent on the women they finally allowed themselves to fall in love with, and thus very susceptible to jealousy.

When the women they depended on to give their life a sense of meaning were leaving them for someone else, the feelings of pain and despair were overwhelming. Violence was their way to gain back some sense of control. When nothing was left to lose, the only thing left to do was to destroy everything. In Stan's case, that meant killing Kathy, in Mike's case-killing anyone. In both cases, the impulse to destroy represented the component of envy in the jealousy situation.

Chuck's crimes were rape and robbery. Yet the events that led to his crimes resemble those in Mike's story in many ways.

Chuck

Chuck, a short, husky man, grew up in the South. lie was the oldest of six children born to a religious Baptist family. When he married, Chuck expected his wife to be faithful. The reason, as he readily admits, is that he is "a very jealous man" and has been jealous throughout his life. When his wife had an illicit affair with another man, Chuck became "violently jealous":

I tried to push the picture of the two of them together from my head, I wanted to erase the picture from my mind, but I couldn't do it. I was very upset. I would ask her questions.... I wanted to know all the details. I started making threats of'what I would do to her. Once I punched her.

His violent outbursts of jealousy were the cause of their subsequent separation:

After that, everything went downhill. I made up my mind that the marriage wouldn't work. I got very depressed. I let the house and everything else go. I went back to the military But I still loved her.

After the separation, things started falling apart in other areas of Chuck's life:

After my wife and I split, I got into trouble for using dope and going AWOL, and had to leave the army. I had given up on the hope of getting back with my wife. I was living with my grandfather. It was a low period in my life. Nothing was going right. I tried to commit suicide, but the gun wouldn't fire. I didn't want to do anything with anybody. I just gave up on life.

It was at this time that Chuck started breaking into houses:

I started burglarizing. When I went in I didn't know someone was there. I came in through the window at 1:00 A.M. A woman was asteep in the bedroom. I got scared and tried to escape quietly. All of a sudden she woke up. When she saw me she had such a terrified look that I changed my mind. I raped her. I felt in control I knew I could do to her anything I wanted.I stayed there the whole night raping her again and again and again. With her pants on, and with her pants off, in the bedroom and in the bathroom, in every position I could think of. I'm not trying to justify my crime, but it wasn't like I tried to hurt her. 1 told her I didn't want to hurt her. I was there for eight hours. We talked a lot. In the next burglaries I was already hoping someone would be there. It went on for three or four months. I was convicted of two rapes, but there were actually five. I contacted the first rape victim, and the phone was tapped. I called her to tell her that I was sorry. I felt I loved her. I felt she understood me.

It may be worth noting that during the time of those rapes, Chuck (like many of' the other rapists I talked to) actually had a girlfriend. Clearly, it wasn't sex alone he was after, but something else, something he had lost when he discovered his wife's affair-a sense of control, especially over a woman:

I didn't have much control over the relationship with my wife. The lack of control was particularly painful in terms of jealousy. During the rape I had complete control. Having total control was one of the most important things in the rape. I definitely don't want to go back to it, but if those feelings are still there when I get out, I'm afraid of my jealousy and my need for control.

Like Mike, Chuck is black and comes from a low-income background. Like Mike, he was emotionally dependent on his wife, and extremely susceptible to jealousy.

For Chuck, as for the others, the pain over losing a love relationship was exacerbated by problems in other spheres of life: Chuck got into trouble in the army, Stan got into trouble in school, and Mike was convinced he was about to lose his job.

For each of them, the relationship that was lost promised to heal some painful childhood wounds that in all three cases were related to problematic relationships with their fathers. Chuck had never lived with his father; Stan had a distant, critical, demanding father; Mike's father committed suicide when he was 3. At the beginning, the relationship seemed to heal these childhood wounds. Consequently, when the relationship ended, the loss was devastating.

Why is it that Chuck robbed and raped a series of random victims in response to his jealousy, Mike murdered and raped another chance victim, and Neil killed the interloper, while Goldie and Stan killed or attempted to kill their lovers? Despite differences in their personalities and backgrounds, the most significant reason seems to be the cruel and humiliating way Goldie and Stan were told the relationship was over. In Stan's case, Kathy hit him in the face and told him to get away from her and her family. In (",Oldie's case, Nathan responded to her despair with irritation, ridicule, and total insensitivity. Once again we see that the way a jealousy crisis is handled determines whether it will escalate to violence.8

Three Rapists

Besides Chuck, several other rapists I spoke with committed their crimes as a result of jealousy. I will describe three of them. All three men were white, blue-collar workers in their twenties. Ed had alcoholic parents, started college, but left after one year, and until his arrest worked as a carpenter. Ken grew up Baptist and worked in construction until his arrest. Al, a Mormon, had a father who married six times, had nineteen brothers and sisters, and worked as a driver until his arrest. All three men described themselves as "very jealous," and the events preceding the rap(, started with a betrayal by a woman they loved.