Jealousy, not something to cure
You can find a lot of advice about jealousy along these lines. Nearly all of it is like advice on how to look after your car. Jealousy may in fact be the essence of all love, and the fact we try to ‘cure’ it suggests again that we don’t really understand love. The essence of love because jealousy recognises that your partner is fundamentally unknowable to you, and even when they love you, they do so for their own reasons, not yours. Ironically, every tiny thing we introduce into a relationship to make it more special for us will make a jealous person suffer even more, because those special things will be things they can also imagine being offered to somebody else.
I don’t think the answer is to try to regulate jealousy, as in these sorts of articles. I think it’s to embrace it, reframe it, recognise that those feelings are pointing to why you loved this person in the first place, because they weren’t you and something about that difference attracted you. You won’t take them for granted, you’ll see them in new ways every day, and that their love for you is an endless reservoir of new things to learn and explore, and you need to be that for them too. A confronting implication of all of this is that if you’re not jealous in your relationship sometimes, it may actually be a more worrying sign. The opposite to what these articles and other advice suggest.
Comments
Post a Comment