Jealousy and Envy

Jealousy and envy are sisters. One relates to the potential loss of things you are attached to, and the other relates to a desire for things that someone else has.

Robert Heinlein rather unkindly said that “A competent and self confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”

That sentence rings truer when ‘jealousy’ is replaced with ‘envy’.

I can imagine a person who is well adjusted, fearing the loss of a dearly loved partner, experiencing jealousy as a natural human emotion.

The symptoms of neurotic insecurity are related to how one reacts to the emotion of jealousy. Does it control you, or do you control it? Do you own it, or blame someone else?

I don’t believe in not having emotions. If Robert was right, the only way to be free of neurotic insecurities would be to be attached to nothing except yourself. The trailer park solution.

And just for the record, one of the clearest symptoms of neurotic insecurities is someone who purposefully, whether consciously or otherwise, works to make someone else envious or jealous.

Neurotic insecurities are like a disease that can only be lived with if the pain is transferred to others. And this is only possible if the other person is also neurotically insecure.

In order to address these issues, envy is the easier to target first. Self confidence earned through achievement and understanding can help attenuate all feelings related to envy.

Jealousy is much harder. Owning the feelings of jealousy and not using them against others requires self confidence and great control.

But jealousy cannot be completely removed unless love is also excised. That is, I don’t think there is a magic bullet for removing jealousy without practicing detachment. Detachment is like an adult emotional dummy spit. Sorry Siddhartha, but you were off the mark.

The harder but more rewarding road is accepting jealousy as a price for love. And then not fearing it and not hiding from it. True ‘detachment’ is accepting what you have now, but also being prepared to lose it in the future.

It sounds unfair and irrational, doesn’t it? Sort of like emotional quantum theory.* It’s one of those things that we can’t imagine but just have to accept as true. And once having done so, a few unexpected pieces will fall into place.

* – I was asked to explain this more thoroughly. I thought, what’s the point of wisdom that isn’t obscure? After all, the obscurity is there to force the grasshoppers to think about it rather than to read and forget.

Oh well, to be clear; if in fact you do have anything in a relationship that is worth being jealous about, solving that problem through jealous behavior will likely put your relationship into a state of irreparable dysfunction as a result of the underlying emotional and functional dishonesty that will inevitably follow.

You are better off either walking or sucking it up. But in each case you have to make it clear as to why you are doing what you are doing, and also what you are feeling. The point is that you can feel jealous without expressing the learned and destructive jealous behavior. This approach has the added benefit of not blowing up the 99% of situations where the jealous behaviour is mostly unjustified; much of what people get jealous about is unworthy of the fear of loss.

If you walk then don’t look back – this can’t be a threat. If you stay and the issue goes away then your emotional honesty will allow the relationship to recover properly so long as it is reciprocated.

Underlying this principle is the concept that the quality of a relationship is destroyed by unshared thoughts, feelings and actions. Even the ones that hurt should be shared otherwise partners start building up little corners that aren’t in the relationship. The accumulated little corners can eat away at the soul of a partnership like a cancer.