Why jealousy is necessary in relationships

If you can resist the urge to smash the china, feeling jealous can actually bring couples closer together. After all, there's nothing like a rival, even an imagined one, to make your own partner look more appealing

Katie didn't see herself as the jealous type. Why should she be? The New York City writer was smart and attractive, and she was dating Sandy, a man 23 years her senior. "He saw me as this young, pretty thing," she says. "I felt very confident in our roles."
But as their intimacy deepened, Katie grew more anxious. She didn't understand why Sandy still had pictures of his ex-girlfriend on his hard drive. She became worried if he went out with his friends without her.
After a lot of fighting - and a broken engagement - the couple decided to have an open relationship. That only accelerated the drama, with both partners acting on their feelings of jealousy. Sandy broke into Katie's apartment and stole her laptop while she was on a date. She retaliated by sneaking into his apartment and, seeing his computer displaying a dating site and messages with several women, proceeded to break a few bowls and ransack his closet. But as she hurled dress shirts and slacks onto the floor, Katie had a moment of clarity: her jealousy had turned her into someone she didn't know. "We had both reached our lows, so we realised something had to change," she says.
Jealousy is a painful emotion, and most of us hate to admit that we ever feel it. To be romantically jealous is to recognise that your partner might feel attraction to someone else, that he or she might act on that feeling, and that you might be powerless to stop it. This awareness can trigger a cocktail of emotions so noxious - rage, insecurity, self-doubt, embarrassment - that many people prefer to deny its existence.
"This is a culture that does not tolerate the emotion," says Esther Perel, a therapist and author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. "The majority of people don't have a conversation about jealousy, because the feeling itself is taboo."
That's unfortunate, Perel says because, while jealousy can be dangerous in its extreme forms, the feeling is completely normal. "It's a universal human emotion, one of many that is part of the multilayered experience of love."
What's more, it can actually be a catalyst to improving relationships. If we could just learn to listen to it, we could improve our romantic lives - and save some china.

The Purpose of Jealousy
Jealousy is usually defined as the emotional reaction to a threat to one's relationship from a real or imagined romantic rival. It differs from envy in that it always involves a third party. "Envy is 'I want what you have'. Jealousy is 'I have something that I think you want, that I think you're coming after'," says Erica Slotter, a professor of psychology at Villanova University.
One reason it's painful to admit to feeling jealousy is that it could indicate a power imbalance in a relationship, says David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex. "It's a signal that your partner is higher in mate value or that you are generally threatened or fearful that your partner might leave," he says, "so people intentionally try to suppress the expression of jealousy."
In its most extreme form, Buss says, jealousy can be exceedingly damaging - it's the leading driver of homicide of romantic partners, particularly of wives, girlfriends, and exes. It can also compel people to attempt to control their partners in unhealthy ways - incessantly monitoring their whereabouts, cutting them off from friends and family, or trying to undermine their self-esteem and convince them that no one else would have them.
But jealousy also has a purpose: evolutionary psychologists see it as a mechanism that helps people ward off mate-poaching. "When there is a threat and people become jealous, that jealousy motivates them to engage in behaviours that interfere with the partner going somewhere else," says Edward Lemay, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland.
Such actions - putting your arm around a spouse at a party, befriending a partner's cute co-worker - are called mate-retention behaviours, and a recent study by Lemay and Angela Neal, a professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster, indicates that such gestures can be quite effective in reeling partners back in. In the study, heterosexual couples kept daily diaries reporting whether they had felt tempted by another potential romantic or sexual partner, whether they thought their partner had felt tempted, and how committed they felt to their relationship. The researchers found that participants detected partners' temptation quite accurately: "You aren't getting away with checking people out and your partner not noticing," Neal says.
Not surprisingly, the team found that people were more likely to engage in mate-guarding on days they thought their partners' eyes were roving. But they also found that participants reported greater levels of commitment to their relationship after a partner took mate-guarding actions.
The findings, Neal believes, indicate that a little jealousy can benefit a relationship. "Too much can potentially have bad implications. But in some respects, jealousy is a positive thing," she says. "If your relationship is without jealousy, that might be an indication that your partner doesn't care about you very much."
It can be annoying to have a partner glance at your phone to see whom you've been texting - but it can also be reassuring and even a little exciting to know that he's worried, especially if your relationship is relatively new. It might even compel you to put the phone down and tell him how nice he looks.

A Wake-Up Call
Neal and Lemay's study mostly involved younger couples in new relationships - situations where jealousy is most likely to occur, as partners suss out their levels of commitment. In long-term relationships, jealousy tends to die down over time, but when it arises, it would be wise for any couple to view it as a wake-up call - not a fire, but a flare.
"It can be a sign that something is not quite right," says Michele Scheinkman, a couples therapist in New York City. "A couple may be together for many years when, suddenly, something happens that needs attention."
Longtime couples, Scheinkman suggests, can begin sleepwalking through a relationship. Then one day, boom! The wife starts working out with a buff personal trainer. The husband hits it off with a cute divorced mom at school pickup. And their spouses remember: Oh, yeah. Other people think my partner is hot. I think my partner is hot, too. I'd better start showing it.
"It's very interesting how many people pay no attention to their partner until someone else comes along," Perel says.
If jealousy is healthy or even beneficial, why does it wreak havoc in so many relationships? The problem is not the feeling but how we act on it. Neal and Lemay's study didn't distinguish between mate-retaining behaviours, but Lemay says they are far from equal: steps like excessive snooping, manipulation, and controlling undermine satisfaction.

If You Can Join Them, You Can Beat Them
Surprisingly, jealousy can motivate you not to attack perceived romantic rivals but to become more like them. In a study Slotter conducted, participants read a list of attributes - artistic, athletic - and indicated which described themselves and which did not. Later, they returned to the lab and listened to or imagined a scenario in which their partner either flirted with or rebuffed a romantic rival. Each participant then viewed a personality profile of the fictitious rival, which had been drafted to include the specific characteristics he or she had previously said were not true of him or herself.
After being exposed to the flirting scenario, participants were more likely to change their self-identification to match the rival's. For example, a man who did not identify as athletic in the initial session would be more likely to do so after hearing the scenario in which his partner had flirted with a romantic rival who was a jock. But those exposed to the rebuffing scenario did not make such a switch, leading Slotter to conclude that partner behaviour drove the change in self-perception.
Slotter says it's unclear whether the impulse to change one's self-perception to please a mate is positive or negative, though it appears to work, at least to a point. "Being athletic isn't necessarily a bad thing. It could be functional insofar as keeping the partner's attention on you, and perhaps promoting new, positive characteristics within yourself."
But there is probably a line one should not cross. "If you are chronically feeling so insecure that you are changing yourself a lot," Slotter adds, "it could make you confused about what your actual identity is. Beyond that, any relationship in which you are experiencing a high frequency of jealousy is probably a relationship that has other issues."
A partner's personality type is one crucial underlying issue. A study conducted by Robert Rydell, a psychology professor at Indiana University, explored the roots of "suspicious jealousy" - jealousy that has no apparent trigger, other than, say, seeing a Keira Knightley film - and found that people who displayed suspicious jealousy had higher levels of insecurity and anxiety, and lower self-esteem. An early traumatic experience can also predispose a person to hypervigilance in their later relationships, Buss says.

Virtual Reality, Real Jealousy
Learning to handle jealousy can be especially beneficial because it's so easy for a partner, intentionally or not, to induce the feeling in us. Just how easy? A virtual-reality experiment conducted at the University of Arizona offers some insights.
Ten couples participated in an exercise in the virtual-reality platform Second Life. The couples were physically separated into different cubicles but were together in a virtual coffee shop. After about two minutes, an avatar controlled by a member of the research team started speaking only with the opposite-sex partner, while totally ignoring the same-sex partner, and did so for six minutes. Though the confederate didn't overtly flirt, the exercise often evoked strong expressions of jealousy - and higher cortisol levels - in the non-targeted partners, "more so than we expected, honestly," says Mary-Frances O'Connor, the professor of psychology who oversaw the study.
Through their avatars, many participants employed the same mate-guarding behaviours seen in real life, such as physically standing between the partner and the rival, and challenging the interloper: "She's with me, pal, and I'm standing right here," one said. "There was some swearing," O'Connor says.
The responses embodied "reactive jealousy", a feeling stimulated by an actual event, like discovering a string of flirty texts between your wife and her college boyfriend. "Reactive jealousy says, 'I'm going to prevent this. I'm going to intervene when I see early signs'," says research psychologist Mark Attridge, a consultant on workplace mental health.
In the real world, the challenge is determining whether your feelings of jealousy are suspicious or reactive. In other words, are you paranoid or perceptive?

Red Alert! Red Alert!
Asa Leveaux was seized with feelings of jealousy whenever he saw his then-wife hanging out with her "work husband" at family picnics and other outings. But she denied that anything romantic was happening between the two of them. "If I brought it up, she'd say, 'You don't need to be like that. You're making things up'," he says. "I was jealous all the time, but I didn't have the language to talk about it."
Leveaux was wrong about that coworker; it was a purely platonic relationship. But he was right that his wife was cheating - it was just with someone else. "My attention
was toward the person I could see," he says, "but there was something behind all the closed doors and curtains that I hadn't considered."
While his marriage was damaged beyond repair, Leveaux, who is currently unattached, says the experience taught him to respect his jealousy rather than suppress it. Now, if seeing a friend or a date flirting with someone else causes him pangs, he will recognise that he may be falling for that person - and let her know. "I use jealousy as an emotional buzzer, a red alert: 'You may be ready for something more'," he says.
He has also learned to respect jealousy in his partners. Leveaux, who runs a training and development agency in Oklahoma City, often speaks in public, and he recalls a time a girlfriend became upset with the way he bantered with audience members. A long, open conversation followed in which he listened to her concerns and explained that he was just receiving well-wishers. She accepted this, but he also agreed to dial it back. "I didn't change who I was essentially as a person," he says, "but I didn't squeeze every person with the intensity that I had before. I just created a boundary."

Reaching a Balance
Jealousy can be an electric force in a relationship, either productive or destructive. To benefit from the signals embedded in the feeling, Scheinkman says, it's important to set some boundaries, and the specifics don't matter as long as both parties are comfortable with them. "I'd want to help a couple find a balance of security and freedom, commitment and independence," she says.
HOW MALE:FEMALE 'JEALOUSY' DIFFERS
Although research indicates that men and women experience jealousy with roughly equal frequency and intensity, there are important distinctions. Male jealousy can be significantly more dangerous: in Western countries, 50 to 70 per cent of adult women who are murdered are killed by a husband, boyfriend, or ex, while only 3 per cent of murdered men die at the hands of a female partner or ex.
Men and women also tend to be provoked by different triggers. For men, the prospect of physical betrayal is usually more upsetting, while women are more likely to be disturbed by emotional infidelity. Evolutionary psychologists attribute this to the distinct relationship insecurities men and women face. Men worry more about sexual betrayal because it might lead to devoting care and resources to children who aren't theirs, while women have an interest in ensuring that their mate is emotionally invested enough to stick around and help raise their children.

TAMING THE JEALOUS BEAST
When one partner begins to feel jealousy, it can launch a cycle of accusation and defence. Breaking free requires both partners to shed blame and shame, so they can move from defensiveness to vulnerability, couples therapist Michele Scheinkman says.
It starts with admitting to feeling jealous, and then articulating the emotions underpinning it - your love for your partner, your fear of losing him or her. This approach is far more productive than hurling accusations or forbidding a partner from ever seeing an opposite-sex childhood friend. "Saying 'I'm so jealous' is very different from 'You're an ass'," Scheinkman says. "The feeling is the same, but when you can speak from a position of vulnerability, you have a much better chance of working through it."
It's also important for couples to assess what may be missing from their relationship - and what may be causing their eyes to rove. Therapist Esther Perel often suggests that clients write a note to their partner explaining that they "miss" the person, and that perhaps they haven't been present enough in the relationship themselves. "Then you begin to say, 'I'm jealous because I see how other people are drawn to you,' or 'I see the effect you have on others and how much charm you have, and how little effort you put out when you are with me. I want you to talk to me the way you talk to your business partner or your client'."
- Psychology Today