Making Jealousy Less Scary
Or: deconstructing negative emotions in a relationship as a result of a 3rd party; the affective (feeling), conative (impulse), and cognitive (reasoning) aspects of jealousy.
An artefact written from reflecting on my own experiences.
The affect(s) of Jealousy
The jealousy I’m talking about is an umbrella term. It encompasses a class of related symptoms of negative emotion which are encountered as a result of an external party’s influence over one’s relationship. Whenever one of these negative emotions is felt, I find that it can be very useful to search for a more specific way of naming this negative affect. By reflecting on one’s emotional state and framing the experience in the most specific language I can manage, I can start the process of untangling my emotional state and search for the root cause of this feeling.
Do I feel mistreated, threatened, vulnerable, insecure, frustrated, betrayed, impatient, or misrepresented? Am I feeling that I have miscommunicated? Do I feel that I have been misinterpreted or disrespected? Is it a feeling of shame, or insecurity, or a fear of the unknown? Do I feel ignored, or antagonised, or just not valued? Am I overwhelmed or confused?
The more I can pinpoint exactly what I’m feeling, the further I am on my way towards working out what the cause is, and what I can do about it.
Jealous affect is a symptom, not the problem. Instead of just trying to treat this symptom in isolation, I’m more interested in tracking down the cause. No emotional affect can be cast off as irrational before we’ve had the chance to rationalise it.
For me jealousy is not a wasted emotion. It not always invalid. It is often quite a useful emotion to experience. I just want to make sure I’m interpreting it it properly, so I can use it properly - to figure out what it’s telling me, and then to work out whether it’s something I need to act upon.
We live in a society that constructs scripts for how we are expected to interact with one another. Sometimes these scripts represent a good rule of thumb, but more often than not they require some serious interrogation in order to avoid the biased tidal forces of normativity. Society’s implicit relationship scripts govern our initial expectations, boundaries, and anticipations in a relationship; to deviate from these we must form our own agreements with one another in an explicit manner. When there is a mismatch in the understanding of such agreements (whether implicit and inherited from differing social context, or explicit but ambiguous), then there is increased potential to diverge from one another’s desired interaction, and for one party to obliviously violate another’s boundaries. This is the context in which much jealous affect becomes manifest.
Entitlement, for me, deserves its own attention. I feel that normative relationship scripts latch on to ideas of control and exclusivity, and without effective explicit agreements and perhaps effective defamiliarisation from some of society’s scripts, entitlement can be a significant form of conation which drives unwanted negative emotions. For me, loving someone is to trust them, and in so doing respecting their independence, their self-determination, and their autonomy. To want to have power or control over someone is not romantic to me, what is romantic is the enjoyment of a loved one’s enjoyment. To love is to be happy when a loved one is happy, and to encourage and share in that happiness, and be a part of that happiness, and to trust that the foundational love in your relationship is itself trustworthy, for without this trust - what is your love? A mutually loving relationship is a mutually trusting relationship, and a healthy relationship is maintained with open channels of constant communication.
Unfortunately, we are socialised within a world of entitlement, along with a smorgasbord of similar normative forces that we may not agree with. Sometimes it can be confusing - and tricky - to untangle the feelings coming from valid concerns in your relationship’s dynamics from those that are simply the impulsive behavioural relics of social constructs that you have tried so hard to consciously reject.
A Cognitive Framework for Making Jealousy Less Scary
When I’m coming to terms with an emotion, framing is everything. So in order to cognitively process a negative relationship feeling, I tend to filter it through a process of identifying the specific core set of feelings, tracing those feelings back to the times I experienced them, and then categorising those experiences into the following framework:
Category A: Impulses which stem from problematic or rejected social scripts.
Here we’ve run into a situation where a relationship event has dug up an entitled, or similarly unwanted feeling caused by the implicit scripts of the social context mismatching my own value system. This is an opportunity for reflecting upon, learning about, and understanding my values. I’ve identified an expectation that I had, which I didn’t even want to have. I try to turn this from an icky feeling into a conversational prompt, a bonding opportunity with a partner, and a way of aligning one another to a common set of values for our relationship. It’s also often a great time to work out how to explicitly agree upon your approach towards the implicit social phenomenon which you have just identified.
"I've noticed I'm feeling weird and confused whenever you hang out with other boys, but not other girls. I'd really love to not care, as I think this is totally uncool and really problematic. Can you help me with some reassurance and care so that I can get over this?"
Category B: A potential boundary, or an ambiguous expectation has been identified in your relationship.
Before it is customised, a relationship is built firstly upon its social context, which is experienced differently by every individual. As such this implicit set of expectations for a relationship is going to have varying interpretations, and will inevitably mismatch from time to time. For me this is an opportunity to set some explicit agreements for how I am going to manage my own relationship. Sometimes this will be due to one party suddenly identifying a boundary or value which they feel they may need to instill within the relationship, or perhaps it’s a differing understanding of the implicit expectations, and our ambitions need to be re-aligned together. Either way, it’s another bonding opportunity; to build trust by talking about our relationship and to establish a clearer understanding of each other’s preferences, hopes, and desires.
"I've realised that I'm not comfortable with how you stay out late a lot with others and I don’t get to see you as much as I’d like to, can we chat about how we can fix it?"
Category C: An explicit boundary has been violated, or an agreement broken.
This is when you’ve talked about it, you thought that it was all clear, but a situation has arisen where it’s still all gone wrong. Maybe it was a miscommunication, and we just need to talk it through again. Maybe they thought they could get away with it; we then need to re-work our trust expectations. Maybe they were being spiteful, and when the emotions have settled it’ll be apologies all round.
"We agreed that we wouldn't hang out with Scientologists! You're seeing a Scientologist!
This is the scariest cause of jealousy for me, but also the rarest. It’s also the first one the anxious parts of my mind latch on to when a jealous feeling comes along. Thus, much of this framework is to try to redirect and ground those feelings into the other two categories. I find it’s also the simplest to understand as it’s usually quite clear what has happened. I also feel there is no need for it to result in conflict, and rather than arguing about perceived intent, talking through the impact of the offending actions on your feelings is a better place to start and will often have the situation resolved amicably, and quite quickly.
Perhaps you might be feeling lonely when you're home alone, having bad luck finding others to spend time with. Meanwhile your partner(s)’ having a great time. In these sorts of situations I tend to concentrate on vicariously enjoying how much fun the people I care about are having, and then I'm enjoying that they're enjoying themselves, and I can turn this into a positive emotion; I can take pleasure in it. The more trusting your relationship, the more you let go of entitlement, and the more you continually check in and talk about all your feelings, the easier this is to do. I love to talk about my worries and feelings, even the irrational ones, it all helps us to have a clearer idea of how each other ticks.
I take the time to work out how I’d like to see myself act when I’m feeling strong, full of positive energy, and inspired. By taking this energy and turning it into my own set of simple guidelines, I have stored this energy for when I might need it later; it is something to stick to when times get rough. My hope is that in writing this, others may be inspired to do the same.
