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I was responding in another thread on this topic, and I've given this one more than a little thought over the years.

Almost every BS at some point has been called "jealous" as both an attack on them and as a defensive maneuver by the WS. Jealousy *can* be a problem if it is unfounded, just like any feeling that you are having that isn't due to the appropriate external triggers to elicit that response. Being depressed is a problem, being dissapointed with failure is normal. You get the picture.

I don't know where or how it happened, but society has decided that being jealous is bad. Full stop. That all jealousy is of the unfounded variety rooted in personal insecurities.

I don't think it is. If you are in a monogamous relationship with a person, they are supposed to give their intimate energy to you and you exclusively. If they ARE giving it to someone else you SHOULD be jealous. You should be jealous and angry. You shouldn't be made to feel bad or ashamed of your jealousy. You shouldn't be made to feel that you are less than because you don't want your spouse showering other people with their attention.

If she ever brought it up again, I would say something closer to, "Yes I'm jealous. And I'm right to be."

Jealousy isn't bad. It's a natural protective mechanism of a monogamous, loving relationship.

Not being jealous is the problem if you want monogamy. It fine to be the cool spouse, or feel compersion if you are into open relationships. But I think jealousy is a litmus test of monogamous tendencies.

Yes, I get jealous. No, it's not a problem.

Jealousy *can* be a problem if it is unfounded, just like any feeling that you are having that isn't due to the appropriate external triggers to elicit that response.

Great topic, Fine. This idea of emotions being tied to appropriate external realities was a key lesson to me in recovering from a prolonged period of depression decades ago. Our emotions allow us to internally experience the external world. They are vitally important, but need to be tethered to reality or all kinds of bad things can happen. And I fully agree on your take on jealousy in particular.

I’ll have a go at this.

Rousseau (who Voltaire outed publicly as scoundrel, but a brilliant one) spoke of the ‘social contract’ in politics. It has to do with giving over some degree of personal autonomy to the State to participate in the benefits of a civil society.

The US jurist Oliver Wendell-Holmes famously enunciated the Harm Principle - "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

Turning to marriage. It seems to me that you can’t bring everything to the relationship all at once. So commitment and both personal and corporate memory are needed by both parties, with some sharing and checking in about those understandings.

I think that need is undermined by avoidant traits (I’ve added that as an aside thinking of your wife’s situation InkHulk).

For example, I have just got back from a week away running a trial in another city. Got back last night. It’s part of what I need to do and how I support my family. I checked in every night with my wife. Obviously I could not be physically present but the commitment and promises hold things together just fine for a while even where you can’t be present. And I in turn am fortunate my wife wil pick up my share of the childcare and domestic tasks whilst I am gone.

Where there is that to and fro trust, and right now that is back again,I don’t feel jealous much. My wife can go away and do much as she likes if that is there. Where it is not present, it is like a line from the WB Yeats poem ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’.

Cheating, out of hand flirting, sketchiness in general, repeated selfish behaviour, cut at the heart of that virtuous circle. It breaks the social contract, even if that contract extends no further than our nuclear family. And jealousy is one of the consequences.

Bad or good ish at times, to a small degree, I think jealousy can mostly be avoided by prioritizing healthy respect.

Personally, I have no stomach for those who play with jealousy to stoke desire, or that kind of thing. It just comes off as tawdry to me.

So my husband has never actually accused me of being jealous before, but please don't take this as me trying to invalidate your argument. I actually agree wholeheartedly. Not all jealousy is a bad thing. Reactive jealousy is normal and can be totally healthy and warranted in certain circumstances. Jealousy is an indicator that something or someone is important to us and we do not wish to lose them. In that sense, failing to feel jealous in the face of the right stimuli would probably signal issues in the relationship.

Despite having never called me jealous, my husband has suggested that I'm "overreacting" previously, when pointing out things that I felt were inappropriate or made me feel uncomfortable (ie. jealous). I see this as being essentially the same thing as what you're describing. Its a way of dismissing your (potentially valid) concerns by focusing on the offendee's reaction rather than on the offender's behaviour.

I don't think anyone would ever accuse me of being anything less than assertive , however I actually spent a fair bit of energy before and during my husband's affair wanting to be seen as being "the cool girl" when it came to same-sex friendships. What I mean by that is that I wanted to come across as easygoing and unbothered, anything other than jealous. With age, and maturity, experience, and hindsight, I realize how foolish that was. The "cool girl" trope does not serve women. It serves the type of man that would rather fuck around or have inappropriate friendships, than be with someone who calls them on their bullshit.

I'll admit that the cultural dynamic is slightly different when you swap genders (the "cool guy" so to speak), but my conclusion is the same. Of course there are men (and certainly women) who have used "jealousy" as a cover for abusive or controlling behaviour, but not all jealousy is abusive or controlling. I think that the expectation that a guy should never be jealous or that all male jealousy is bad or wrong, only serves a spouse who isn't prepared to exercise healthy boundaries.

I also kind of think that in most (healthy) cases, a WS's argument about jealousy being unfounded goes to hell after infidelity.

I think jealousy can mostly be avoided by prioritizing healthy respect.

I agree. Jealousy can be avoided through showing appropriate devotion.

What I'm getting at a little bit here, is that many of us have had our valid and appropriate feelings weaponized against us through societal norms. It puts another tool in the WS's toolbox of lies that is particularly harmful. I know it's all part of the gaslighting, lies, and deception that go along with the package of being betrayed. It's also frustrating on the face of it, that if you go to your partner and say, "This makes me uncomfortable." The can turn around, and in many cases get support from others saying, "You're just being insecure and jealous". This sort of goes along with that blanket naive and implicit trust you have before being betrayed. It's this expectation. "If you don't trust them, you shouldn't be with them, if you do, don't worry about it". But that's the thing right. You do trust them, and even though you are jealous a bit, you leave them be, but then it turns out your feelings were right all along. It turns out just trusting your partner is dumb, and listening to your gut is good.

Obviously, rebranding jealousy into a reasonable emotion at some larger level is not something I'm going to be able to do. But at least personally, I can own the emotion and take away the power of that accusation.

Hey folks, so i'm gonna chime in for a moment on this topic. Ain't no kid. 63 now and reasonably happily married to the same woman for going on 39 years.

Jealousy can cover many spectrums from feelins over being ignored over hobbies to to inappropriate actions between our mate and another. When we sometimes get up in hobbies and such, we can unwittingly devalue our partners feelings in not sharing more with them. Jealousy can be useful and productive to allow us to say or do something to break the cycle. When its directly involving our partners, then this is where some is good. Even crucial for the relationship. Too much and it strangles a relationship. We wouldn't feel the jealousy if we didn't love and care for our partners. However putting an ass whooping on someone just for whistling as our partner walks by...well, not good. I learned this lesson in high school. I was very jealous when it came to a girl I dated for 4 years. It destroyed a beautiful thing. Years later when I met and then married my wife, I did tell her I was an extremely jealous person, but its my problem and not hers. I worked hard on this and matured. There are times when instead of sitting and being together and just cuddling or participating in viewing a show together, we can isolate and binge into our phones or game consoles. This is time we guard jealously. Or we show a pet more attention than our partners, or drop everything to help a friend but do nothing for our partners. Not only does Jealousy rear its ugly head but resentments mount. Also there is retro-active Jealousy, which can be extremely unhealthy and ruiness in a relationship.

Some can be good for the right reasons.

[This message edited by Dagrump at 3:05 AM, Saturday, May 27th]

What I'm getting at a little bit here, is that many of us have had our valid and appropriate feelings weaponized against us through societal norms.

Call me exhibit A. My wife’s hobby with POSOM was out of character, time consuming, and when I attended one time I felt something off. I actually picked out another guy in the area and told her I felt uncomfortable about him, and in our relationship that was a pretty big thing to say.

(This is the one time I met POSOM, ever so briefly, the cockroach kept his distance.)

Without any real evidence or solid concern, the societal message about being an overbearing, controlling, jealous husband outweighed all this for me. After D-day I was talking to my wife’s sister and she was assuring me that she knew nothing about it but that she too thought the hobby was very odd and I told her that I’d accepted it and hadn’t wanted to run afoul of exactly the lines being discussed here. And for the most part, I self censored.

From an online dictionary:

mental uneasiness from suspicion or fear of rivalry, unfaithfulness, etc., as in love or aims.

vigilance in maintaining or guarding something.

The first is a big problem. The 2nd isn't. Both are definitions given for the same word.

The problem with the 1st def is, IMO, that it places the problem on the wrong person. If I'm fearful of a rival, that's my problem, which I can deal with in multiple ways. I can work on myself and stop fearing rivals and decide to stay in or quit the relationship. I can use my energy in getting the other person to stop seeing the rival. One way is effective; one way depends on another person doing one's bidding.

'Vigilence' implies, to me, that I keep control of myself. If I experience ... a disturbance in the relationship's force, I raise the issue and deal with the disturbance, knowing that the resolution can come from a wide range of possibilities.

Does that make sense? I hope I'm clear on this, but my mind is really focused on the Giro D'Italia. Today's the next to last day, and it will be decisive. It's a time trial up a mountain, and there's less than a minute separating the top 3 riders. And I have to go to Shabbat services while the race is going on. Perhaps that's TMI.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 3:19 PM, Saturday, May 27th]

I'm going to take the discussion in a slightly different direction. My EXWW was an extremely jealous person early on in our M, though it settled slightly as the decades passed. She would get upset if there were scantily clad women on TV. (Insert eye roll here). I've spent many years trying to understand her position, as it was completely foreign to me. I was and am not the slightest bit jealous.

After 30 years ruminating on the subject, I've come to this simple conclusion. It was a combination of self esteem and projection. You see, my W had very low self esteem, and used the attention of men to validate herself. That attention became her drug of choice and she needed to be the prettiest woman in the room. If she wasn't, she would engage in sexy behaviour to refocus the attention on herself. This, of course, did not go unnoticed by other partners and she had few female friends.

Now, her disposition naturally led to her cheating, in our M, but more importantly in her previous relationship. I was young and stupid and believed people who say they have changed, actually do.

So here is the rub. Because she was a deeply needy person who was inclined to constantly seek external validation, she assumed that everyone else was as well. Hence the jealousy. Me, on the other hand, did not even let the idea of cheating enter my mind. It just wasn't in my wheelhouse. I self validated and had never been unfaithful in my life, so I just assumed everyone else was like me. It was classic projection on my part as well.

Even after everything that has happened in my life, I would not consider myself a jealous person. My boundaries are rock solid, but I now realize that I might not be as typical as I might have originally thought. More importantly, the boundaries on what I will or will not suffer from others are solid. I've come tobrealize that I cannot control anything but how I react to any given situation.

So here is the rub. Because she was a deeply needy person who was inclined to constantly seek external validation, she assumed that everyone else was as well. Hence the jealousy. Me, on the other hand, did not even let the idea of cheating enter my mind. It just wasn't in my wheelhouse. I self validated and had never been unfaithful in my life, so I just assumed everyone else was like me. It was classic projection on my part as well.

Risking the ban hammer for having a Christian perspective, I would merely add that the God of the Bible describes himself as a "Jealous God". I once remember Oprah Winfrey say when she read that, she dismissed the God of the Bible, believing a "good god" could never be jealous.

@This0is0Fine, you were exactly correct in your OP. SOME jealously is in fact good, and righteous. My wife vowed before God to only give her intimate/sexual affections to me. If she gave that to another, I would be righteously angry. Similarly, God is righteously angry when we worship created things instead of him. Such a reaction is not a flaw or any kind of insecurity. It’s about where affections are rightly owed due to voluntary promise/oath/vow.