Even the most rational and logical person can feel overwhelmed by jealousy and hijacked by the anger, anxiety, and helplessness that it entails. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss recalls that when he was in college, he believed that if a girlfriend wished to have sex with other people, then he had no right to protest—he didn’t own her body. She should feel free to do whatever she wished to do. But when he got a girlfriend, he changed his mind.1 He is not alone. Almost everyone feels the same way.
Of all the emotions we can experience, jealousy is perhaps the most difficult one to deal with—and the most dangerous. Jealousy is passion directed against the threat of betrayal or the threat of abandonment. It’s anger at someone we view as an intruder or a competitor. It’s resentment at the person who we fear might abuse our trust. It is visceral, fundamental, and sometimes violent. We can feel overwhelmed, carried away, and controlled by jealousy. Our heart and mind get hijacked. And we feel lost in anxiety and helplessness.
Jealousy occurs when we fear that our special relationship is threatened. We fear that our partner or friend will lose interest in us and form a closer relationship with someone else. We feel threatened by their attention to this person. Jealousy does not occur in a vacuum—it is actually about three people. It is the third person who threatens our special relationship. We can be jealous of our lover, friends, family members, and coworkers. We can, if we are unfortunate, perceive threats from almost anyone who enters our social sphere. We fear that things may unravel rapidly and that we will be humiliated, marginalized, and abandoned.
We often confuse jealousy with envy. Envy occurs when we believe that someone has achieved an advantage over us—sometimes unfairly—and we resent their success because we think it reflects poorly on us. Their success is our failure. We are envious of people who compete in an area that we value: If it’s business, we envy someone who is making more money or who gets promoted instead of us. If it’s academics, we envy someone who gets a grant or publishes an article.
Envy is about comparison. Jealousy is about the threat to a relationship. Although jealousy and envy are different emotions, we often feel both of them about the same person because both are about our sense that we are in competition with others—and that we might lose.2 I will be focusing on jealousy in this book.
Jealousy is not a single emotion—it’s a mix of many powerful, confusing feelings, such as anger, anxiety, dread, confusion, excitement, helplessness, hopelessness, and sadness. In fact, someone in a romantic relationship can feel jealous about perceived infidelity while also feeling sexually aroused about the fantasy of that infidelity. We get so confused because we tend to believe that we should have only one feeling at a time. Plus, there’s love in the mix. The painful negative feelings can blend with our positive feelings of love. We want to feel just one way—either positive or negative—but we have both kinds of feelings, often coming in waves, often overwhelming us.
We say that we “feel” jealous, but our jealousy also involves a wide range of types of thoughts. We think, “He is interested in someone else” or “She will leave me” or “My partner should never find anyone else attractive.” We have thoughts about what we should know: “I need to know exactly what is going on.” And, if we don’t know what’s going on, we have thoughts about that: “What I don’t know will hurt me.”
We often take action on our jealousy by seeking reassurance and asking pointed questions. We might follow her, spy on him, read her email and text messages, seduce him, cajole her, check his GPS in the car, smell her perfume, go through his suitcase, ask other people what they know, and threaten our partner. We yell, interrogate, pout, withdraw. We cling or we avoid.
So jealousy is not “just a feeling.” It is a host of emotions, sensations, thoughts, behaviors, questions, and strategies to control the other person. Jealousy is driven by the insatiable desire to know for sure what is going on, which leads us to imagine all the terrible things that we do not know, but that could be true. We seek to know and control. And we often treat our thoughts, fantasies, and feelings as if they are the very reality that we fear. But feelings are not facts.
Simply having a jealous feeling or thought is not the main problem. The problems come with all the behaviors and control strategies that follow. It’s the response that gets us in trouble. A chain reaction of anxiety can unravel so quickly that we are completely surprised by what we are saying and doing. In other words, it’s one thing to feel jealous and it’s another thing to act on it. We will explore this in more detail later. First, for you to get more control over jealous reactions, it’s helpful to understand jealousy better, both your own and jealousy in general. Here’s the big picture.
Darwin’s great insight helped us realize that the history of all species is the struggle for survival.3 Our ancestors were threatened by starvation, attacks by strangers, murder by members of their own tribe or community, rape, and infanticide. Life was a struggle from birth. And the struggle was often against each other. We can think of many qualities that seem essential to human nature—attachment in infants, defense against threats, fear of heights, an infant’s fear of strangers, public speaking anxiety, forming strong attachments to a partner and our children—and recognize that each of them is found in many other species because each contributes to survival.
Survival is about winning against the competition. There is competition between siblings, colleagues, and sexual suitors. Jealousy is a primordial recognition of these threats. It is a strategy that evolved to protect us. But in our world today, it may destroy a marriage, drive away friends, and alienate brothers and sisters.
Does this mean jealousy is justified and that there is nothing we can do to control it? Absolutely not. Knowing that jealousy has roots in our evolution does not justify jealous rage, suspicion, or retaliation. We can be driven by fears and anxieties that were useful 100,000 years ago, but are now dysfunctional. What worked in the past may fail us today.
Understanding the evolutionary model can help us understand why the passion of jealousy is so powerful, so intensely emotional. But like our fears of heights, water, dogs, being in closed spaces, or walking in an open field, the fears that fuel jealousy have outlived their usefulness. The environment relevant to the evolutionary perspective is not our cities, suburbs, and towns in the twenty-first century. Evolution does not justify jealousy. It only helps us understand why it is so universal and powerful. We didn’t choose to have the brain that evolved with these fears.
In the long-gone days of our ancient ancestors, who were continually threatened, life was about survival, with survival of genes being most important. A person may have died in a fight, but if his genes survived, then he passed the evolutionary fitness test, as his traits continued into the next generation. Two things are essential for evolutionary fitness: procreation and the survival of offspring. Someone can procreate and have many babies, but if they all die, then fitness dies with them. If no one takes care of the babies, then the genes will not survive. This is where jealousy comes in.
Evolution helps us understand the passion and zeal behind jealousy: the blind rage that hijacks us so quickly that we are later astounded at our own feelings and actions; the terrifying fear that our partner will mate with someone else; the ways we can detect deception; the ability to deceive others. We are driven by instinctive passions that protected our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years—but these protections can defeat our current interests. There are two relevant evolutionary theories: parental investment theory and competition for limited resources. Let’s take a look at them.
This theory proposes that we are going to be more committed, in sharing resources and taking care of the young, if we have a high genetic investment in the other person’s survival.4 We are more likely to protect and support individuals who share genes, such as our biological children, siblings, and close relatives. We are less likely to protect and support biologically unrelated individuals.
In this way, jealousy is a protective strategy. If a man is uncertain of the paternity of his partner’s offspring, he may end up taking care of a stranger’s genes—thereby sacrificing the possibility of passing on his genes. Because a woman always knows that infants carry her genes, her jealousy is less determined by paternity or sexual behavior, and more influenced by her concern for the protection and resources that a male partner contributes. A woman will want to ensure that she receives protection and support from her male partner because this increases the survival of offspring. Both will defend against competitors. Males and females become jealous when their genetic investment is threatened.
Consistent with this theory, research shows that men are more likely to feel jealous over perceived sexual infidelity because it calls paternity into question. Women are more likely to experience jealousy when they perceive emotional closeness between a partner and another woman, because this suggests that resources and protection will be provided to someone else. While men and women can have both kinds of jealous feelings, men are more likely to express sexual jealousy while women are more likely to express attachment jealousy.5
If jealousy has an evolutionary basis, we should find it in other cultures. And we do. In fact, the gender difference—males being more concerned with sexual infidelity and females with emotional infidelity—has been found in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and China.6 At the same time, these evolutionary predispositions are affected by cultural differences. In cultures where honor is emphasized, jealousy is much stronger in males. We are all too familiar with “honor killings” in countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh. And the dishonor of infidelity can cause a woman who was raped to marry the rapist or be stoned to death.
The second evolutionary theory of jealousy stresses competition for resources. This helps us understand jealousy in infants and jealousy between siblings. Because siblings can be in competition with each other for food and protection from their parents, jealousy can arise—and often does. Infants can be jealous of attention that their mother directs toward another baby. In a study of six-month-old infants, researchers found that babies show signs of distress and attempt to attract the mother’s attention more when the mother interacts with another baby than when she plays with a nonhuman object.7 A real baby is more of a threat than an inanimate object.
Four-year-old Gary was both excited and apprehensive about his new sister, Phyllis. But as she grew, he felt there was a threat to his special relationship with Mom and Dad. He alternated between playing with Phyllis and grabbing things from her, and even began to regress to more babyish behavior.
Why would siblings be in competition with one another? Food resources were scarce during most of the evolution of our species. Siblings had to compete for food, attention, and protection. Some species overproduce offspring and, as a result, offspring can die from starvation. This overproduction of offspring might be viewed as a strategy to ensure that some of them survive. But it leads to competition among siblings, sometimes to the death. Pigs often produce more offspring in a litter than the number of teats available to feed them. Piglets that are not strong and competitive will die. Evolutionary theorists describe this tendency to overproduce offspring as “warehousing.” As grim as this may sound, it points to the fundamental nature of jealousy in a competitive world.
Sibling rivalry makes sense. Similarly, in a world of scarcity, being excluded from friendships and alliances could also be detrimental. If my prehistoric ancestors were marginalized by their peers in the tribe, then they were less likely to enjoy the benefits of a hunt. And they would have died from starvation. Which means that I wouldn’t be here.
Jealousy is common across species. When owners of pets described what they perceived as jealousy in their pets, the following rank was observed: dogs (81 percent), horses (79 percent), cats (66 percent), birds (67 percent), and rats (47 percent).8 Dogs express jealousy toward other dogs, and will growl, stalk, and place themselves between their human master and other dogs. I know that our two male cats—Danny and Frankie—started with a wonderful relationship when we got Frankie at four weeks of age. They played and slept together; they groomed each other. However, as Frankie grew to adulthood and became a large, alpha cat, he was quite jealous of any attention given to Danny, which was made clear through his aggressive behavior. Just as we humans are jealous, so are our pets. We share the two common evolutionary issues behind jealousy.
Stories of jealousy are older than the written word. Cain’s jealousy of Abel taints humanity’s beginnings in Genesis. It also marks the nature of the Judeo-Christian God’s relationship with his people, enshrined in the First Commandment and proclaimed in the book of Exodus, “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God.”9
Jealousy was central to Greek mythology and literature. The goddess Hera was jealous about the many other women who attracted the attention of her husband, Zeus. When Jason betrayed his wife, Medea, she murdered their children in revenge. Helen’s betrayal of her husband, Menelaus, sparked the Trojan War.
In medieval Europe, jealousy was viewed as a necessary, even positive, emotion that was linked to honor. The twelfth-century author Andreas Capellanus described the importance of intensity in love and jealousy in his book The Art of Courtly Love. He wrote: “Love cannot exist in the individual who cannot be jealous” and “Suspicion of the beloved generates jealousy and therefore intensifies love.”10 For the noble knight pursuing love, it was dishonorable not to fight when “provoked” to jealousy. In Shakespeare’s Othello, the malicious Iago tricks Othello into becoming jealous by casting doubt on the fidelity of his wife, Desdemona. Othello describes his jealousy—which leads him to murder his faithful wife—as the emotion “of one that loved not wisely, but too well.”11 While his actions were horrific, they were done out of love and honor. He is therefore the tragic hero of the play—not the villain.
In the nineteenth century, jealousy came to be increasingly viewed as interfering with domestic harmony. The Victorian period emphasized domestic tranquility and controlling powerful emotions. Jealousy was effectively banned, because it was considered disruptive to the harmony of the Victorian family.
Today, in America and throughout much of Western Europe, jealousy is something we are expected to be ashamed of and to hide. Surveys indicate that Americans are more likely than people in other Western cultures to believe that their jealousy is a sign that there is something wrong with them.12 In a sense, jealousy went underground. No longer a badge of love and honor, it has become a symbol of inability to trust, lack of self-control, neurosis, and shame. But it definitely has not gone away, neither in popular culture nor in our lives. Popular songs—like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Every Breath You Take,” “Hey Jealousy,” and “Jealous Guy”—show that we are never alone with this emotion. And today there are more venues for infidelity, contacting strangers, downloading pornography, or having a secret rendezvous online. Each of these “opportunities” can make some of us more insecure, creating an overwhelming sense of uncertainty. In the new millennium, we’re surrounded by insecurity-provoking media, from relentless messages about what our bodies should look like to totally unrealistic depictions of sex in pornography. It’s easier to “spy” on each other, but not easier to know the truth about each other. If we want to feed our jealousy, there’s plenty of fuel out there.
While we tend to think that jealousy happens most often in intimate relationships, it can also be a problem in any important relationships. Jealousy is often an issue in “reconstituted families,” in which children contend with divorced parents, stepparents, stepbrothers, and stepsisters. There are 100 million Americans in a stepfamily relationship and 35 percent of all married-couple households include stepchildren.13 There is even a website in the UK for stepparents who feel competitive with, or who resent, their stepchildren.14 When parents divorce and there is a new partner for Mom or Dad, children have feelings of betrayal, anger, anxiety, resentment—in a word, jealousy.
Kara was in her thirties and married when she learned that her divorced dad had a new partner he wanted her to meet. Like many adult children of divorced parents, this new part of the family dynamic triggered resentment: “How can he think I would want to meet her? He just dumped Mom. He lied to me about their marriage. How can I trust him?” She viewed her dad’s new partner as an unwelcome interloper—a poacher—who had torn the family apart. Kara felt that her special relationship with her father was over, that his new partner would replace her and her brother, and that she had to be loyal to her mother. All of this meant she had to hold on to her resentment for her dad.
Job security is continually in question, as it’s a rather rare thing to have. In 2012, the average tenure of a job was 4.2 years.15 As a consequence, there is a wide range of opportunities for jealousy: “Jake gets the better assignments.” “Donna was promoted—I should be too!” “Eric always goes out to lunch with our boss, and I’m never invited.” “Everyone seems to win the excellent-service award but me.” Status in a company dynamic can depend on whom the boss favors—and who gets included or excluded.
Marianne often felt that her colleagues excluded her: “They don’t ask me out. They do things without me.” She withdrew, even while complaining that the boss was not promoting her. This resentment and jealousy became a wedge between her and everyone else at work. Feeling excluded, she began to exclude herself. And things spiraled down.
Social media gives all of us opportunities to feel that we have been snubbed, rejected, or left to fend for ourselves because others seem to enjoy the friendships and relationships that we have always wanted for ourselves. We say to ourselves: “Why wasn’t I invited to that party?” “Is there a reason I wasn’t tagged?” “Her life is perfect, there’s so much missing from mine.” “If only I could afford to travel like he does.”
When Paul looked at Ron’s Facebook posts, he noticed that Ron was with Larry, Ken, and Nancy on a boat trip, enjoying themselves—without Paul. He burned with resentment and felt publicly humiliated, as he was reminded that he was left out once again.
There are a number of important points in this chapter that can help you understand that you are not alone. I offer this summary to bring the messages home.
You can now recognize that jealousy is part of human nature and that its power and passion may come from instinctive responses that hijack us. This is an important foundation for you to have as you consider your own struggles with jealousy. In the next chapter, you can evaluate your own jealousy and examine how it impacts your relationships. And in the following chapters, you can look at how jealousy is related to your history of relationships, your personality, and your beliefs. The more you understand jealousy and your experience of it, the better you will be able to cope with these feelings.