Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures (3 page)

In the case of some gay couples, for example, as a result of' societal and familial pressures, one member of the couple may find it difficult to acknowledge openly their relationship, which decreases the other partner's sense of security and thus increases the predisposition for jealousy. Sharon and Mary are an example.

Mary is a tall, slender, attractive, and elegantly dressed manager in a big public relations firm. Her lover, Sharon, is chubby and less attractive, and works as a lawyer in a small law firm. Mary does not want people in her firm to know she is gay. She feels this will seriously jeopardize her chances of being promoted. So she flirts with men she works with and makes sure she always has a man accompanying her to various social events in the firm. This causes great jealousy in Sharon.

One could argue, of* course, that Sharon would have felt the same jealousy if she were married to an attractive and elegant man who didn't take her to company functions and that Mary's flirtations are even less of a threat because Sharon knows she is not attracted to men. Nonetheless, the humiliation caused by having to keep their relationship secret, the feeling of being left out, and the threat that Mary may have a relationship with a man (to make sure people didn't think she was gay) were very difficult for Sharon and caused tremendous jealousy.

Jealousy and Envy

In defining jealousy, it's important to distinguish it from envy. Despite the frequent confusion between the two terms in everyday use, jealousy and envy are very different psychologically.2 Envy involves two people. The envious person wants something that belongs to the other person and doesn't want the other person to have it. The object of envy can be the other person's mate, a good relationship, a desirable trait such as beauty or intelligence, a possession, success, or popularity. Jealousy, on the other hand, involves three people. The jealous person responds to a threat to a valued relationship posed by a third person. This is true even when the third person exists only in the imagination of the jealous person. Lionel Kreeger summarizes these differences by saying that whereas jealousy has a triadic basis, being concerned mainly with love and fear of loss, envy is contained within a diadic relationship and represents deeply entrenched destructive impulses aimed at the removal or spoiling of desirable qualities in the other (Kreeger, 1992). Envy and jealousy have been described as being keyed to two basic conditions of human existence. Envy is connected with not having, while jealousy is connected with having (Anderson, 1987).

Gerrod Parrott and Richard Smith conducted two experiments to distinguish the experiences of-envy and jealousy. In the first experiment subjects recalled a personal experience of either envy or jealousy. In the second experiment subjects read one of a set of stories in which circumstances producing envy and jealousy were manipulated. The results of both studies revealed qualitative differences between the two emotions. Envy was characterized by inferiority, longing, resentment, and disapproval of the emotion. Jealousy was characterized by fear of loss, distrust, anxiety, and anger (Parrott & Smith, 1993).

People tend to mistake envy for jealousy, but not the other way around. Would you tell your husband that seeing him with his old girlfriend makes you envious or jealous? Would you say that you are jealous, or envious, of a friend who has just inherited a large amount of money? Most people would describe themselves in both cases as jealous, although what they actually feel in the second case is envy.'

This transposition often occurs because envy tends to have a more negative connotation than jealousy; envy is perceived as less mitigated by love than is jealousy (Joseph, 1986). While jealousy is a response to a threat to a love relationship, envy is an expression of hostility toward a perceived superior and a desire not only to possess the advantage, but in extreme cases to destroy the superior. Leonard Shengold (1994) suggests that envy develops early in life and is characterized by "destructive primal hatred." With age, it becomes modified in intensity and its primal murderous quality lessens. In cases of pathological envy there is a regression to the original primal envy. The person with such pathological "malignant" envy feels with delusional intensity that what the envied one has is not only urgently needed, but has been stolen from them.

If jealousy and envy are so distinct, why do people confuse them so often? Part of the reason lies in the fact that the jealous response includes, in many cases, a component of envy. A man who is jealous because his wife is having an affair with his best friend, for example, is likely to feel envious of his friend's success with his wife. It has been suggested that part of the reason is that envy, which begins earlier in psychic development, with maturation becomes partly transformed into jealousy (Shengold, 1994).

Jealousy and envy indeed seem to originate in different stages of our psychological development. Jealousy originates primarily in emotional experiences children have during the Oedipal stage, when they are about two to three years old. (This point will be elaborated in chapter three, during the discussion of the unconscious roots of jealousy.) Envy, on the other hand, originates much earlier, in the first months of a child's life.

According to Freud, during the Oedipal stage children experience the first stirrings of sexuality. Their sexual urge is directed toward the closest person of the opposite sex. In the case of a boy, that means his mother; in the case of a girl, her father. The boy wants Mother to himself. Unfortunately he has a very powerful competitor: Father. The competitor is bigger and stronger and has other advantages too, so the boy "loses" the contest. Through a similar process, the girl "loses" Father to Mother. When the child becomes an adult, whenever a third person presents a threat to a valued romantic relationship, the old painful wound is reopened and experienced as jealousy (Freud, 1922/1955).

Envy, according to child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, develops during the period from birth through the first year of life, in response to the baby's helplessness and dependence on Mother. "From the beginning of life, the infant turns to Mother for all his needs," Klein writes. "The mother's breast, toward which all the infant's desires are directed, is instinctively felt to be the source not only of nourishment but also of life. An element of frustration, however, is bound to enter into the infant's earliest relation to Mother, because even a happy feeding situation cannot altogether replace the prenatal unity with the mother." The frustration and helplessness the hungry baby experiences are the roots of envy. The baby "envies" Mother for her power to nurse him or deprive him of nourishment. In his angry frustration, he wants to devour the source of his nourishment and her power-the breast (Klein, 1986, pp. 211-229).

Even if we don't accept Klein's idea that the baby "envies" his mother's power to feed him, we can still accept her idea that the early bond with Mother contains the fundamental elements of the baby's future relationship to the world. When the bond is loving and satisfying, the baby will develop a basic sense of security and trust toward people. When the bond is unloving and unsatisfying, deep-seated insecurity and envy will develop and the baby will grow up to be an envious adult. Whenever envy is triggered in such an adult, it reopens the early childhood wounds with all their destructive power.

Klein believes that jealousy is based on envy, but is different from it nonetheless. Her distinction between the two is similar to the one presented earlier: "Envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable-the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it." Jealousy, on the other hand, involves the person's relationship to at least two other people, and "is mainly concerned with love which the individual feels is his due and which has been taken away, or is in danger of being taken" (p. 212).

Envy, as Klein and Shengold describe it, is an earlier, more primitive, and more destructive emotion than jealousy. It is different from the jealous desire to protect the relationship or get the beloved back. When there is a component of envy in a jealousy situation, it is expressed in an impulse to destroy the person who has the advantage-either the rival or the beloved, who has the power to make one happy and chooses not to.

Normal anti Abnormal Jealousy

After defining romantic jealousy and distinguishing it from envy, another important distinction needs to be made, that between normal and abnormal jealousy. An analysis of abnormal jealousy leads to some of the most extreme forms that jealousy can take and some of its more dramatic consequences.

Jealousy has produced pain, drama, and tragedy throughout history. A wide range of hostile, bitter, and painful events have been attributed to jealousy: murder, aggression, hatred, lowered selfesteem, depression, suicide and suicide attempts, domestic violence, destruction of romantic relationships, marital problems, and divorce.` A nationwide survey of marriage counselors indicates that jealousy is a problem in one-third of all couples coming for marital therapy (White & Devine, 1991).

People who experienced intense jealousy describe it as an extremely painful, "crazy" experience. A woman in one of my jealousy workshops said that jealousy was the most painful thing she had ever experienced:

I tried everything in an attempt to control it, but nothing, nothing worked. Now the only thing left for me is lobotomy. And believe me, I am tempted. I don't think l can live with this much pain any longer.

Even when people who experience extreme jealousy have enough self-control not to resort to actual acts of violence, they often fantasize about such acts. A woman who saw her ex-husband with his wife, who used to be her best friend, recalls:

One day, as I was parking my car, I saw them in his new sports car parked right in front of me. It was a car he never let me drive but was now letting her use. Everything went white with rage in front of my eyes. I sat there trying to get hold of myself. I imagined myself putting my car in gear, accelerating, pushing my foot all the way down on the gas pedal and slamming into them at full speed, full force. I could feel the impact of the crash in my body, and hear the sound of metal and glass crashing.... I don't know what force helped me control the urge to destroy everything.

Most people have faced jealousy at some point in their lives, even if they don't consider it a problem." Anyone who has experienced intense jealousy is well aware of its power and potential destructiveness. This helps explain people's great fascination with stories about the wild things some people are driven to do out of jealousy. One such story involves a middle-aged woman whose husband left her for it younger woman. With the help of "a friend, the outraged wife kidnapped her rival at gun-point, shaved her head, stripped her naked, cover(,(] her with tar and feathers, and released her at the city dump. I read the story in the newspaper and subsequently heard it repeated over and over again, with great delight, by women who identified with the revenge of the deposed wife.

We tend to show more understanding toward people who commit "hot-blooded" crimes motivated by jealousy than we do toward people who commit "cold-blooded" crimes motivated by greed. We feel a certain identification with the betrayed lover who "had his revenge," who (fared do something most of us can only imagine as a fitting revenge for an unfaithful lover or a rival.'

Even the law in some countries treats "crimes of'passion" with relative leniency. In a famous case that happened some years ago in Italy, a man who suspected his wife of infidelity bought a gun and drove all the way from Rome, where he lived, to Milan, where he had reason to suspect that his wife was spending time with her lover. He arrived in Milan, caught his wife and her lover together in bed, shot them both dead, and was tried and found not guilty on grounds of temporary insanity.

Is jealousy a form of madness? Getting back to the examples presented at the beginning of this chapter, one can ask, Is a man who is sitting in the bushes on a rainy night, spying on a woman, sane? What about a woman who kicks a man in the groin, or one who covers another woman with tar and feathers? What about a man who kills two people in a jealous rage?

Jealousy, as these examples show, lies somewhere in the gray area between sanity and madness. Some reactions to it are so natural that a person who doesn't show them seems in some way "not normal." Think, for example, about a man whose wife has just informed him that she has fallen in love with another man, and who says in response, "How wonderful for you, darling."

Other reactions seem so excessive that one doesn't need to be an expert to know that they are pathological. An example is the man who is so suspicious of his loving and faithful wife that he constantly spies on her, makes surprise visits, listens in on her phone conversations, checks her underpants for stains, records the mileage in her car for unexplained trips, and, despite her repeatedly proven fidelity, continues to suspect her and suffer from tremendous jealousy.

While the responses of these two husbands seem completely different from each other, there is an important similarity between them. Both are very inappropriate. In one case the husband is not responding to a real threat to his marriage: His wife might leave him for the other man. In the other, the husband is responding with jealousy when there's no real threat. Indeed, both cases are considered pathological. The first is an example of "pathological tolerance," the second an example of "pathological jealousy."7

For most people, even if jealousy produces tremendous pain and distress, it remains an inner experience that does not cross the boundary to violent action. The woman I described earlier, whose estranged husband started dating her best friend shortly after their separation, said: