The Green-eyed Monster causes much woe, but the absence of this ugly serpent argues the presence of a corpse whose name is Eros.
—Minna Antrim
Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?
A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.
—Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
Euripides, Ovid, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, Flaubert, Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, Austen, the Brontës, Atwood—countless literary giants have delved into the subject of infidelity. And the stories keep on coming, continuously supplied by new pens. At the center of many of these works lies one of the most complex emotions, jealousy—“that sickening combination of possessiveness, suspicion, rage, and humiliation [that] can overtake your mind and threaten your very core as you contemplate your rival,”1 as evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher describes it. Indeed, the canon of literature, along with theater, opera, music, and film, would be almost decimated were it to shed infidelity and its haunting companion, jealousy. The pages and stages of the masters are filled with characters contorted by this most excruciating and high-risk emotion.
And yet, when infidelity finds its way into the therapist’s office, particularly here in the United States, suddenly jealousy is nowhere to be found. My colleagues, Brazilian couples therapists Michele Scheinkman and Denise Werneck, highlight this interesting gap: “The literature on infidelity deals with the impact of betrayals and affairs in terms of the trauma of revelation and discovery, confession, decisions about the third party, forgiveness, and repair—all matters related to a concrete situation of betrayal in the here and now. However, it does not deal with jealousy. The word is absent from the tables of contents and indices in the most widely read infidelity books.”2
Scheinkman and Werneck are particularly attuned to cultural differences in the interpretation of jealousy. They write, “Recognized all over the world as a motivation for crimes of passion, jealousy is construed in some cultures as a destructive force that needs to be contained, while in others it is conceived as a companion of love and gatekeeper of monogamy, essential for the protection of a couple’s union.”3
My own experience working in the United States and around the world confirms Scheinkman and Werneck’s observations. In Latin America, the term “jealousy” is bound to appear in the first breath. “In our culture, jealousy is the gut issue,” a woman in Buenos Aires told me. “We want to know, does he still love me? What does she have that I don’t?”
“What about the lying?” I asked. She laughed dismissively. “We’ve been lying since the Spanish arrived!”
Such cultures tend to emphasize the loss of love and the desertion of eros over the deception. Hence, jealousy is, in the words of Italian historian and philosopher Giulia Sissa, an “erotic rage.”4 In Rome, twenty-nine-year-old Ciro has an expression of grim satisfaction when he tells me his plan to shorten his girlfriend’s night with her hot lover by slashing her tires. “At least now I don’t have to imagine her in his arms; I just see them waiting for the tow truck in the rain.”
In the United States, however, and other Anglo-Saxon cultures (which tend to be Protestant), people are remarkably silent on the subject of this perennial malady of love. Instead, they want to talk about betrayal, violated trust, and lying. Jealousy is denied in order to protect the victim’s moral superiority. We take pride in being above such a petty sentiment that reeks of dependency and weakness. “Me, jealous? Never! I’m just angry!” Stuart, whom I meet on a flight from Chicago, admits that it irked him to see his girlfriend flirting with some guy, in plain sight. “But I would never let her know that I felt jealous,” he says. “I don’t want her to think that she has that much power over me.” FYI, what Stuart doesn’t realize is that we may try to hide our jealous feelings, but the one who inspires them always knows—and sometimes even enjoys stoking the embers into maddening flames.
Jealousy wasn’t always disavowed. Sociologist Gordon Clanton surveyed popular American magazine articles on the topic over a forty-five-year period. Until the 1970s, it was generally seen as a natural emotion intrinsic to love. Advice on the topic, not surprisingly, was exclusively directed to women, who were encouraged to control it (in themselves) and avoid provoking it (in their husbands). After 1970, jealousy fell out of favor, and became increasingly viewed as an inappropriate remnant of an old marriage model in which ownership was central (for men) and dependency inevitable (for women).5 In the new age of free choice and egalitarianism, jealousy lost legitimacy and became something to be ashamed of. “If I have freely chosen you as the one, forsaking all others, and you have freely chosen me, I shouldn’t need to feel possessive.”
As Sissa points out in her refreshing book on the subject, jealousy has a built-in paradox—we need to love in order to be jealous, but if we love, we should not be jealous. And still, we are. Everybody speaks ill of jealousy. Therefore, we experience it as an “inadmissible passion.” We are not only forbidden to admit we are jealous, we are not allowed to feel jealous. These days, Sissa warns us, jealousy is politically incorrect.6
While our societal rebalancing around jealousy was part of an important shift beyond patriarchal privilege, perhaps it has gone too far. Our cultural ideals are sometimes too impatient with our human insecurities. They may fail to account for the vulnerability inherent in love and for the heart’s need to defend itself. When we put all of our hopes in one person, our dependence soars. Every couple lives in the shadow of the third, whether they admit it or not, and in some sense, it is the lurking presence of potential others that consolidates their bond. In his book Monogamy, Adam Phillips writes, “Two’s company, but three’s a couple.”7 Knowing this, I am more sympathetic toward the intransigent feelings that modern lovers seek to suppress.
Jealousy is riddled with contradictions. As captured by the incisive pen of Roland Barthes, the jealous one “suffer[s] four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.” 8
And furthermore, while we hesitate to admit our own jealousy, we may worry if our partners are free of jealousy. “He that is not jealous is not in love,” says an old Latin proverb, and when it comes to other people, we tend to agree with him, even if we do not apply the same logic to ourselves. I’m reminded of the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when Paul Newman’s Butch takes his buddy Sundance’s girl, Etta Place (Katharine Ross), for a bicycle ride one morning. He drops her off at her place, and they embrace. Sundance (Robert Redford) appears on the porch and inquires, “What are you doing?” “Stealing your woman,” Butch replies. “Take her,” says Redford in his trademark deadpan style. I remember watching this scene as a young girl, and while everyone seemed to enjoy this brotherly display of trust, I found myself wondering, Would she have felt more loved if he had put up more resistance?
Polly reached out to me across the Atlantic. Convinced of her husband Nigel’s unfailing morality for almost three decades, she had been stunned to discover that even he could succumb to a midlife tonic, in the form of a young woman named Clarissa. “I would have staked my life on his fidelity!” she told me. But this proud father of four didn’t see himself as having an affair—he was in love and was seriously considering leaving Polly for a new life. To his great chagrin, his dark-eyed mistress decided he came with too much baggage, preferring to travel lighter. Nigel was crestfallen but also a little relieved. He decided to return home and end what he now terms his “temporary insanity.”
In my first session with this British couple on the verge of turning fifty, I learn more about the other woman than I learn about them. Polly can’t stop talking about her.
“I wish I could get that woman out of my head,” she tells me. “But I keep having flashbacks of the scenes he described in his emails to her. I want him to tell her it was just a foolish physical infatuation. I imagine her feeling smug about what they shared, convinced that it was more meaningful than his connection with me. I think he should set the record straight—that he loves me and doesn’t love her. Maybe that would free me from the trauma.” I hear her pain, but in her demands I also hear the unmistakable voice of jealousy.
Polly feels exposed when I point this out. She doesn’t deny it, but clearly she is churning inside. The jealous person knows that she is not a sympathetic character and that her torment is likely to invite more criticism than compassion. Consequently, what Proust called “the demon that cannot be exorcised” has simply gone in search of a socially acceptable vocabulary.9 “Trauma,” “intrusive thoughts,” “flashbacks,” “obsessiveness,” “vigilance,” and “attachment injury” are the modern vocabulary for betrayed love. This PTSD framework legitimizes our romantic affliction, but it also denudes it of its romantic essence.
I reassure Polly that her jealousy is a natural response, not something to be ashamed of. To acknowledge jealousy is to admit love, competition, and comparison—all of which expose vulnerability. And even more so when you expose yourself to the one who hurt you.
The green-eyed monster taunts us at our most defenseless and puts us directly in touch with our insecurities, our fear of loss, and our lack of self-worth. This is not delusional or pathological jealousy (sometimes called the black-eyed monster), where unfounded suspicion is fed more by childhood trauma than by any current cause. It is the type of jealousy that is intrinsic to love and therefore to infidelity. Contained within this simple word are a host of intense feelings and reactions, which can run the spectrum from mourning, self-doubt, and humiliation to possessiveness and rivalry, arousal and excitement, vindictiveness and vengeance, and all the way to violence.
I ask Polly to tell me more about how she feels. “Sometimes it’s like I’m the consolation prize,” she concedes. A woman of her time, she wants more. “I need her to know that he came back because he loves me, not out of guilt or duty or because she dumped him.”
Here we are, caught in the quandary of possessiveness. The desire to own and control is at once an intrinsic part of the hunger in love and also a perversion of love. On the one hand, we want to compel our partners to come back to us. But we don’t want them to come back just out of obligation; we want to feel chosen. And we know that love that is deprived of its freedom and willing surrender is not love. Yet it is scary to make space for that freedom.
If I had seen Polly and Nigel just a few years earlier, I too might have tilted my attention toward trauma and betrayal and failed to absorb the liturgy of jealous love. I am grateful to the work of Scheinkman for shedding new light on this exiled emotion and for reminding me that, after all, infidelity is not just about broken contracts, it is about broken hearts.
Given the cultural zeitgeist, it’s important to acknowledge the centrality of love in today’s narrative of infidelity, and jealousy is a doorway into this conversation. Of course, jealousy can sometimes go too far—consuming and undermining us, and in extreme cases, leading to aggression or even blows. But in other cases, it may in fact be the last glowing ember of eros in an otherwise burned-out relationship—and therefore, it is also the means of relighting the fire.
“Jealousy is the shadow of love,” writes Ayala Malach Pines in Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures, because it affirms to us that we value our partner and our relationship.10 By introducing this idea in a session, I remind couples like Polly and Nigel that an affair is not only a breach of contract; it is also an experience of thwarted love.
Sissa describes jealousy as “an honest feeling” because it cannot disguise itself. “It courageously carries its suffering and it has the humble dignity of being able to recognize its vulnerability,” she writes.11 Interestingly, when we trace the origins of the term, they lead us back to the Greek word zelos, which means zeal. I like this concept because then I can give people something to fight for, rather than staying in the grip of victimization.
Many couples welcome this reframe—they would rather see themselves as protagonists in a forlorn love story than as parties in a failed institution. The breach-of-contract script—“you’re my husband and you owe me loyalty”—no longer cuts it in the age of personal happiness. The “I love you and I want you back” script is risky, but it carries emotional and erotic energy and dignifies the hurt.
“Sometimes when we make love, I imagine I am her—a voluptuous thirty-five-year-old Spanish bartender with big boobs and an accent.” Once Polly gets over her initial hesitation, she speaks freely about her jealous imagination. “We are naked behind the counter after closing, in the bushes in the park, in the moonlit ocean late at night. It’s exciting. I always wanted him to do those things with me—to want me so much he had to risk getting caught. Now I feel like they stole my fantasy. Is it fucked up that his affair turns me on? Afterward I feel humiliated. But I can’t stop thinking about her.”
She tells me she wants Nigel to make love to her as he did to Clarissa. “I want to know how she felt,” she says. But I wonder, is that really it? I tell Polly, “It seems to me that you’d like to know if he can feel with you the way he felt with her.”
I inquire about how their sex life has been since the unraveling of the affair. Somewhat embarrassed, Polly tells me, “Our sex has been the most erotic we have ever had—frantic, ardent, and urgent.”
Many couples I see are ashamed to admit the intense erotic charge that sometimes follows the discovery of an affair. “How can I lust for someone who betrayed my trust? I’m so mad at you, but I want you to hold me.” And yet, the need to connect physically with the one who just abandoned us is surprisingly common.
Eros does not conform to our rationalizations. In The Erotic Mind, sexologist Jack Morin identifies the “Four Cornerstones of Eroticism.” Longing—the desire for what is not present—is number one.*12 Hence we can understand why the fear of loss triggered by infidelity can rekindle flames that have in some cases been dormant for years. Moreover, for some, like Polly, obsessively imagining the lovers’ entwined bodies is itself an unexpected aphrodisiac. Jealousy has been known to work wonders. Nigel dropped a steamy novella in the middle of their relationship, and it acted as a sexual infusion. His confession that it was more than just a fling also cranked up Polly’s arousal. Jealousy is indeed an erotic wrath, and her survival-of-the-fittest combat readiness is not just a symptom of trauma, it is a declaration of love. In Polly’s case, I intuit that it may prove central to the resurrection of her marriage.
Of course, infidelity is not always a turn-on—frequently, it’s quite the opposite. The jealous heart is insatiable with questions. And the more we mine for each sexual detail, the more it can confirm the unfavorable comparisons. In Mike Nichols’s 2004 movie Closer, Larry (Clive Owen) interrogates his wife, Anna (Julia Roberts), after learning about her affair with Dan (Jude Law). “Did you do it here?” he demands. “When? Did you come? How many times? How? Who was where?”
He follows her around the apartment as she puts on her coat, his crescendo of increasingly explicit queries building as her answers drive him to greater rage. Finally, on the doorstep, she turns to face him. “We do everything that people who have sex do!”
He’s not satisfied. “Do you enjoy sucking him off? Do you like his cock? Do you like him coming in your face? What does it taste like?”
Exasperated, she yells back at him, “It tastes like you, but sweeter!”
His ire deflates into bitter sarcasm. “That’s the spirit. Now fuck off and die.” As François de La Rochefoucauld writes, “Jealousy feeds on doubts, and as soon as doubt turns into certainty it becomes a frenzy or ceases to exist.”13
It’s not just men who want the physical details. I’ve heard jealous women compare themselves to their rivals in terms every bit as graphic as men do. Her double Ds; my average breasts. Her multiple orgasms; my inconsistent ones. Her squirting; my need for lubricant. Her generous blow jobs; my distaste for the smell. We’ve all heard Alanis Morissette belt out the unforgettable line “Is she perverted like me?/Would she go down on you in a theater?”
People often ask, What is the difference between envy and jealousy? A definition I have found helpful is that envy relates to something you want but do not have, whereas jealousy relates to something you have but are afraid of losing. Therefore, envy is a tango between two people, yet the dance of jealousy requires three. Envy and jealousy are close cousins and often become intertwined.
My friend Morgan, an accomplished, smart, fifty-something journalist, found it hard to separate her jealousy of her husband Ethan’s lover, Cleo, from her envy of what they were sharing. At first Ethan merely confessed to his affair. Then Morgan discovered his electronic archive of bliss. “How did I cope? I retreated into an alternate reality of obsession,” she recalls. If she couldn’t have Ethan, at least she could spy on his love affair from across the digital street. In “an orgy of masochism,” she pored over his paramour’s Instagram feed and her website.
“Cleo was the very portrait of an earth goddess. The shine of adoration in her eyes; her taut bod; that knowing smile—so natural, so youthful, and so seductive. This perfection of all creation was an independent filmmaker. A yogini. A champion of progressive causes. An adventurer. A wearer of toe rings. A most playful sprite with the kind of bright inner happiness that effervesces from deep within and elucidates everyone around her.” Each layer of idealization was shadowed by a layer of self-abnegation. “If the lesson of it all was that I wasn’t enough as a woman, at least I could live vicariously through this superwoman. How many times did I hear the oceanic conversations they must have had? I died and went to heaven a thousand times on his imagined behalf.”
When I ask her why she focuses more on Cleo than on Ethan’s betrayal, she says, “It’s not so much that he transgressed as that he transcended. I was surpassed by his new and improved lover. Each captioned photo seared another layer of evidence in my fevered mind that he’d found the great love of his life and I was fucked. That’s why terms like ‘betrayal’ or ‘transgression’ miss the point for me: They’re loaded with all the condemnation to avenge me as a victim, but they dodge how I felt at the blurry edge of self, inadequate to sustain fascination.” The violence of Morgan’s self-inflicted pain is born of the poisonous alchemy of envy and jealousy. Beneath her fixation lurk shame and self-doubt. In further self-flagellation, she imagines Ethan and Cleo talking about her as “the dark succubus whose clutches he thankfully escaped.”
How naked we feel when we imagine our partner talking about us with the lover—exposing our private world, our secrets, our weaknesses. We obsess: “What did he say about me?” “Did she make herself out to be a victim of an unhappy marriage?” “Did he slander me, in order to come out looking good?” We can’t control the partner who leaves us, and even less so, the stories they choose to tell about us.
Looking back on a full year of mourning, like a widow, Morgan tells me, “The images and sensations played over and over like a crypt of dreams. At first they commandeered my thoughts every instant. With time, this stretched to every thirty seconds. Eventually I could make it through a full minute, then hours, then days. Do you know what it’s like not to have freedom of thought?”
Morgan’s eloquent description of the loss of her sovereign self calls to mind the voice of French author Annie Ernaux. In her novel L’occupation, she describes a state of being utterly consumed by the other woman. She compares jealousy to being an occupied territory—where one’s entire being is invaded by a person one may never have met. “I was, in both senses of the word, occupied . . . on one side there was the suffering; on the other, my thoughts, incapable of focusing on anything else than the fact and the analysis of this suffering.”14
Morgan found solace in the support of her friends, in books, and in movies. Feeling like she was “addicted,” she wanted to know how others loosened the grip of the snake. She needed to know she wasn’t crazy. And she wasn’t. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, who has done fMRI studies of the brain in love, tells us that romantic love literally is an addiction, lighting up the same areas of the brain as cocaine or nicotine. And when a lover has been rejected, the addiction remains—those same areas of the brain continue to light up when they look at images of their partner. Weaning oneself off of obsessive thinking about a lost love, she concludes, is akin to breaking a dependency on drugs.15 Lovers have always known this, and the metaphor has captured our imaginations long before we had fMRI machines.
Besides these activated biological circuits, Morgan was also caught in the psychological circuitry of early childhood losses. She was reliving multiple abandonments, some of which occurred even before she could remember, yet her body “kept the score,” as psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk puts it. Injured love sits on top of other injured loves. Like a ricochet effect across time, one breach in the present can trigger the resonance of all the breaches of the past.
Over time, Morgan recalls, “the neurons started to cool” and she “outgrew the madness.” Two years later, Ethan popped up in her inbox asking for a second chance. And her survival instinct said no. “I’d invested too much effort in rebuilding myself from the wreckage. But one question I have yet to answer: What will it take to trust again?”
For Morgan, the competition with her rival took her to the brink of self-annihilation. She needed to break the grip of the other woman to reclaim her self-confidence. For Polly, however, the competition was arousing. Seeing Nigel coveted by another woman yanked her out of her marital torpor and reinstated him once again as an object of sexual desire and herself as a woman in pursuit. There is nothing like the eroticized gaze of the third to challenge our domesticated perceptions of each other.
A year after the unraveling, I have the opportunity to check in with Polly and Nigel. They tell me they are doing well. Nigel has expressed sincere remorse and has been fully committed to the reconstruction of their relationship. There’s only one sore point. Polly still can’t stop thinking about “that woman.”
She tells me that she has been seeing a local therapist who has diagnosed her with PTSD. She has been working on her intrusive thoughts with mindfulness, breathing exercises, and long gazing sessions with Nigel to restore bonding and trust. “I am hoping that as I feel safer, I won’t have these thoughts anymore.”
“Of course you would feel tremendous relief if that particular slate were wiped clean,” I say to her. But remembering my earlier conversations with Polly, I propose another way of looking at this. “Why lose the thoughts? They seem perfectly natural. And besides, they appear to have done you a lot of good!” She looks less like a trauma victim than a woman invigorated by love and jealousy. “Allow me to suggest that ‘that woman’ has been quite a source of inspiration. You are glowing—more alive, more engaged, more physically active, and more sexually adventurous—and all to the good of your relationship.”
Nigel looks at me with trepidation, not sure how Polly is going to take this. But she smiles. I have often found that for couples in this situation, it can be a relief to finally step out of the helpless narrative of trauma and back into good old drama—the perennial story of fractured love. It’s actually a more empowering stance, more human than pathological.
Emboldened by Polly’s smile of recognition, I smile in return. An idea occurs to me—one that is unconventional, to say the least, but might just give Polly the kind of relief she is seeking. “Let’s take this a step further,” I tell them. “Maybe, instead of banishing Clarissa, you should memorialize her. Imagine building an altar to this woman to express your gratitude for all the good she did for you. And every morning, before you leave the house, take a moment to bow and give thanks for your most improbable benefactor.”
I have no way of knowing if this rather subversive suggestion will free Polly from her predicament. But I know what I am after: giving her back her power. In clinical parlance, this kind of homeopathic intervention is called prescribing the symptom. Since symptoms are involuntary, we can’t erase them, but if we prescribe them, we can take control. In addition, staging a ritual gives new meaning to an old suffering. And the twist here is that the perpetrator becomes the liberator. A brief check-in with Polly some months later confirms that the playfulness did the trick. Clearly, this kind of approach is not for everyone. But I have seen it work more often than I ever expected.
No conversation about jealousy can bypass the ongoing debate between nature and nurture. Is jealousy hardwired, forged deep in the recesses of our evolutionary past? Or is it a learned response, a socialized construct born of outdated ideas about monogamy? This argument is at the forefront of most contemporary discourse on the topic.
Evolutionary psychologists recognize the universality of jealousy in all societies. They posit that it must be an innate feeling, genetically programmed, “an exquisitely tailored adaptive mechanism that served the interests of our ancestors well and likely continues to serve our interests today,” in the words of researcher David Buss.16
Developmental psychologists tell us that jealousy appears early in a baby’s life, at around eighteen months, but long after joy, sadness, anger, or fear. Why so late? Like shame and guilt, it is a feeling that requires a level of cognitive development that can acknowledge a self and an other.
Another major point of contention in the jealousy debate is gender. The classic map has men anchoring it in the risk of uncertainty about paternity, and women, in the loss of commitment and resources needed to care for children. Hence, popular theory holds that women’s jealousy is primarily emotional, whereas men’s is sexual. Interestingly, the research shows the reverse among homosexuals: lesbian women tend to express more sexual jealousy than gay men, and gay men cop to more emotional jealousy than lesbians. Arguably, this reversal highlights that we feel most threatened where we feel least secure.
In the past few years, I’ve met many people determined to explode conventional ideas and attitudes about jealousy, particularly among those who practice consensual nonmonogamy. Some take Polly’s experience to a new level, intentionally using jealousy as an erotic enhancer. Others work hard to transcend it altogether. Many of those who identify as polyamorous claim that they’ve developed a new emotional response called compersion—a feeling of happiness at seeing one’s partner enjoy sexual contact with someone else. In their commitment to plural love, they actively work to overcome jealousy, seeing it as part and parcel of the possessive relationship paradigm they are trying to best.
“Sometimes when I see her with one of her other girlfriends, I do feel jealous,” Anna told me. “But I remind myself that these are my feelings and it’s up to me to deal with them. I don’t blame her for inciting them, nor do I give myself license to act on them in a way that restricts her freedom. I know she’s careful not to intentionally trigger those responses in me, and I do the same for her, but we’re not responsible for each other’s feelings.” That’s not the kind of attitude I typically hear from more traditional couples, who tend to expect each other to prevent the unwanted stirrings from ever arising. That being said, however, I’ve met plenty of nonmonogamous couples who struggle with intense bouts of jealousy.
It remains to be seen whether we can—or should—evolve beyond this all-too-human trait. Certainly, jealousy that is rooted in patriarchal notions of possession could use some reexamination. And relationships in which couples seek to claim ownership of each other’s every thought can often be strengthened through loosening the grip. But before we consign the jealous heart to the pages of history, let us also listen for the whispers of eros. In a world where so many long-term relationships suffer much more from monotony and habituation than from unsettling feelings like jealousy, this erotic wrath may serve a purpose, if we are willing to bear the attendant vulnerability.