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What Jealousy Is And How To Deal With It

By Adrian Nadler

[Relationships]

There’s more than one way to evict the green-eyed monster, but which is better for you? Adrian Nadler explains why we get jealous and what to do about it.

Learning how to deal with jealousy is a necessary part of all long-term relationships. An otherwise healthy bond between two compatible people can be destroyed by the suspicion and resentment arising from jealousy. What’s important to understand is that, like any emotion, it’s perfectly natural and it serves a purpose. Once you understand the origins of this emotion, you’ll be better equipped to identify its role in your life and to overcome it.

Primitive Predispositions

Jealousy is a powerful, primal emotion that is part of our reproductive strategy. Everybody’s familiar with the attitude “he or she is my property,” and instinctually we know that jealousy is territorial. This makes a lot of sense because sex and, subsequently, relationships, ensure that our own genes are carried on safely into the next generation. If another person enters into the picture, they threaten the stability of the relationship and any possible offspring.

These threats are interpreted by our brains as direct threats to our survival and this is why violence can sometimes arise from jealousy. If the offending party is killed, you survive and so do your genes. This is arguably more applicable to men, and that’s not the only way jealousy differs between genders. Because of the distinct roles males and females play in raising a child and creating a stable family, you could say that the father is a provider and the mother a nurturer, although in reality either sex combines both these roles and plenty more.

So for men, jealousy is the emotional threat registered by the real threat of being cuckolded. For women, it’s the fear of the man possibly leaving her to raise the child alone.

Planned Parenthood

Now, you might be thinking, “That doesn’t make any sense, because I’m not going to have any children.” In evolutionary psychology, our brains are seen as working essentially the same way they did before civilization and modern technology, at least in terms of survival and reproduction. Dating and relationships today may work very differently from how they did 10,000 years ago, but our brains haven’t adapted.

For instance, say you’re not seeing your girlfriend anymore and your mind knows that you aren’t together, but seeing another guy talking to her can still create the same kind of emotional response as a primitive man seeing another guy sniffing around his wife. This survival instinct can kick in even if you’re in an exclusive, long-term relationship.

Looking at relationships in the context of evolutionary psychology, the prototype is the monogamous one-man-one-woman pair bond because it is the best for the children. This can vary between cultures, but in ours, being single is advertised as equal or even preferable to marriage or long-term commitment. This makes us as far removed from the prototypical relationship as we’ve ever been.

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