This feeling is considered petty, pitiful, low, even unhealthy. It’s hard to admit it. And yet it is an essential part of the love experience. We present to you a study of this passion, which is so often unjustly despised.
Today, jealousy is something almost forbidden. At best, it’s in bad taste. Those who talk about it always speak in the past tense. They were jealous, but now it’s gone. “When I started following the woman I loved, I kept asking myself, am I going crazy? — recalls 49-year-old Leonid. — One evening her phone on the table rang, and I saw that a very tender message appeared on it, signed with the name of a scoundrel, who, as I saw, was spinning around Marina at several social events. A cold rage seized me. That evening I demanded an explanation from her. She admitted that she flirted with him, but nothing more. My suspicions never left me. I have gone very far. As soon as she left the room, I looked through her messages, then hacked into the mailbox. Their romance continued. One Saturday morning she told me she was going to the hairdresser. I followed her in full confidence that she would go to her lover. The barbershop was closed. She turned back and I had to hide so she wouldn’t see me.» But the story didn’t end there. One evening, Leonid found a letter on the computer in which Marina made an appointment with the same man. When she returned, he demanded that she never meet his rival again. “She looked scared. The next day, when I went to her mail, I saw that she canceled the date. This story was over, and with it, Leonid assures, and with his jealousy.
- What do you unconsciously expect from life together?
Saving Passion
In most cases, outbursts of jealousy are neither delusional nor hallucinatory. Rather, on the contrary, it is a clarification of consciousness, a sign of the penetration of reality into a love obscuration. A random letter, telephone conversation or text message suddenly awakens doubt, breaks the illusion that we are the only object of a partner’s desire. “Jealousy shows the failure of the belief that we are loved just like that,” explains psychoanalyst Roland Gori. — It makes us doubt that we can be everything for a partner, as he is everything for us. This is a saving feeling because it protects against narcissism. And although sometimes it happens in a paranoid way, but jealousy shifts the focus of attention to a partner whom love attraction does not take into account too much. It dispels the fantasy that two can become one. It reminds us of the existence of other people. In contrast to vanity and complacency, it brings to light doubts, vulnerability, hurts pride. That is why jealousy does not have the best reputation, it is considered shameful and even «obscene», notes the writer Julia Siss: it breaks the illusions of modern man, «bloated with pride, in a word — arrogant.»
However, the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was not mistaken in believing that jealousy is inevitable, since it is inherent in human nature: «Do not believe lovers who say that they do not suffer from jealousy»1. They have simply repressed it, and this repression makes it «all the more important» for our unconscious life. Olga, 43, recounts the disastrous consequences of this repression: “Whenever a man came up to me at a party, my ex-husband froze. On the way home, he scolded and reproached me, and at home he attacked me like a hungry man. But he never admitted that he was jealous, although it was clear how he was suffering. I think he himself did not quite understand what was happening to him, although he was very smart.
- Infernal Circle of Jealousy
Erotic Rage
Julia Siss calls this all-consuming jealousy «erotic rage» and recalls that in ancient Greece it was considered «a noble passion worthy of gods, warriors and queens»2. What do we demand from a jealous person? Calmness, self-control. But love and peace are incompatible. And attempts to ignore it are futile. “Suppressing jealousy in yourself, you will not be able to cope with it, since jealousy is a symptom, not a cause,” notes Ilya Latypov, a Gestalt therapist. «It’s like suppressing a fever instead of treating an illness.»
“Jealousy shifts the focus of attention to a partner, it dispels the fantasy that two can become one”
When a voice that excites us becomes velvety for someone else, the pain is so great that if it is not calmed, it can come to breaking dishes. It is better to whisper in the ear of your beloved: “Yes, I am jealous, please do not look back at all the women passing along the street. It hurts me.»
35-year-old Oksana admits that she is worried if she does not feel any jealousy: “I ask myself if I really love. I need to make sure that the man I desire is worthy of desire: when I feel that beautiful, spectacular women are looking at him, I am overwhelmed with rage and lust at the same time. Her current partner, in her opinion, is too faithful to her and absorbed in his work. She does not feel attracted or desired by other women and complains that their relationship has become too insipid.
- Jealousy for a partner’s past
Relationship with three members
“Jealousy is inseparable from desire. We need a partner to show us what attracts him,” confirms Roland Gori. Do we ourselves choose the object of our desire? Often we are attracted to the one who causes desire in others. And then the third is invisibly present in the relationship. Jealousy is the stronger, the closer the opponent is to us externally or in character. In addition, we often attribute to him or her virtues and qualities that we ourselves, in our opinion, are deprived of.
“Not having a special beauty, I could guess that they preferred another to me … and when it first became obvious to me that I had lost, I fell into despair. I bit the sheets in which I wrapped myself, sobbing, ”writes Catherine Millet in the novel Jealousy3. And although she, a free woman, the author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., openly maintained an extramarital relationship with the writer and photographer Jacques Henric, this did not lessen her suffering when she discovered that he had had adventures: “In my fantasies, I stopped to be the center of love pleasures, remaining only a spectator. The abyss has opened up: it is not the only object of the beloved’s desire. Desire is just a moment. It overshadows lovers, but does not remain in place, even where there is love. “There is something dizzying about it when we notice that the other person is, as Proust wrote, “a house … full of jewels”4. But knowing that love is the desire of desire, we can again become desirable for another. And this will weaken and sublimate the pain of jealousy.
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1 Z. Freud «Introduction to Psychoanalysis» (ABC, 2009).
2 J. Siss, M. Detien «The Daily Life of the Greek Gods» (Young Guard, 2003).
3 K. Millet «Jealousy» (Limbus-Press, 2011).
4 M. Proust «Under the canopy of girls in bloom» (Alpha book, 2014).