Jealousy – online partnership counselling

Jealousy destroys relationships

Jealousy is a truly toxic feeling, destroying relationships with time, if it occurs too often. But well measured, it can be the icing on your cake!

Jealousy can reassure partners of each other’s appreciation. Tied to the fear of losing the partner and appearing in a mild form, it can lend wings to love. Long-term relationships, keeping to well trodden paths, can benefit from the rejuvenating kick a little bit of (cautiously applied) jealousy can have…
Things look a lot different though, if somebody plagues a loved one with causeless jealousy and is so making his or her life hell.

Abnormal jealousy is usually rooted in a feeling of inferiority. Subconsciously, the jealous partner feels as if he or she is not fit to hold a candle to the beloved. For this reason, they will view other men or women as potential rivals and as a threat to the relationship. Please understand that severe cases of abnormal jealousy require a proper therapy and are not suitable for telephone or online counselling.

However, if jealousy occurs in less severe ways and is just a little annoying, there is a good chance that strengthening the client’s self confidence by our counselling will help to come to terms with it. Would you like to know more about the purpose jealousy had in our evolutionary process and how it still impacts us today? Then continue to read and I am sure you’re about to discover some very surprising and enlightening facts!

Nature invented jealousy to prevent infidelity

Let’s imagine that a man arrives 1 ½ hours late to a date with his girlfriend in a bar. Through the window he can already see that she is having a lively conversation with a man he doesn’t know. He is close to her; both are smiling and occasionally gazing deeply into each others eyes, with their bodies slightly touching. At once, this scenario will cause strong jealousy in the secret watcher and force him to act.

Jealousy is a quite normal facet of our human emotions and that’s why we can find it all over the world and in all cultures. Perhaps you didn’t know- and find it hard to believe- that this ugly feeling which is causing us nothing but trouble once played an important role in our evolutionary past!? Today, jealousy has lost its motivating character and has turned into something that is often causing the opposite of what was intended.

But in primeval times, jealousy urged us to act and kept both men and women from cheating. Both genders wished to have their partners only to themselves. So once a rival appeared and obscured our seventh heaven of love, acute jealousy made sure that we took action at once and chased the intruder from our territory – way too much was at stake.

If a male had conquered a precious female by investing lots of time and energy and then lost her to a competitor, our caveman was crushed. In addition to that, his loss was a horrible shame, which stained him as weak and a loser and so made it very hard to allure new females. Even worse, a cuckold man who didn’t know he was cheated upon might have ended up raising the offspring of another man, totally missing his own chance to reproduce! Understandably, this would be a sad Waterloo in terms of passing on one’s own genes ….which is nature’s priority. So it installed jealousy in each of us.

In the same way, a woman who was tied down with a small child was basically not able to provide for herself and the child, since the search for food was usually a dangerous undertaking, so how much more with a toddler in tow! No ancient human could risk losing the partner to another one too early.

In primeval times, men used several strategies to keep the possible cheating of females at bay:

•    Jealousy made him more aware of opportunities where she could cheat.
•    Jealousy made him urge her not to meet other men.
•    Jealousy caused him to improve his appearance and behaviour towards her.
•    Jealousy caused him to attack a rival and to get rid of him.

In primeval times, these were more or less successful methods to prevent cheating and to cope with rivals. And of course our ancestors weren’t always able to keep their women from going rogue.

But already an average success will set forth an evolutionary adaptation process within us; and so, this toxic feeling jealousy, which lets our adrenalin kick in and forces us to act on the spot developed over millions of years and eventually became a default mode.
It is remarkable to see, that our ancestors obviously viewed a partner as their possession and defended him or her with all possible means.

Jealousy can bring you death

In early history, „might made right” between rivals and so intimidation and violence served their purpose.

Unfortunately, the modern man is still wired quite like the primeval man and once he’s jealous, he often reacts in a Stone Age manner and causes the tragedies we hear about in the news.

To this day, men threaten and bully women into submission; either, to keep them in a relationship, or, to force them into societal and religious norms. If women want to leave, men often threaten to kill them. After committing a crime of passion, men frequently argue that they could not accept her leaving and simply lost control over themselves.

Such statements reveal just to which extent the intellect is being shut down by jealousy and how our primitive reptile brain then takes over – much at the expense of the victims and their families, but also to the perpetrator’s disadvantage. At the latest, when faced with the consequences in a court of law, he would give anything to undo the damage.

Crimes of passion demonstrate quite well how strategies that work fine in a primeval setting will backfire badly for a modern man, above all in the USA: He will end up on death row. . .

Please let me stress the point that it is no excuse for aggressive male behaviour to argue that jealousy is a genetic disposition and so can’t be helped. What we need to do is instead acknowledge the reality of our biological inheritance and at the same time do our best to resolutely counter an evolutionary weak spot in otherwise “cultivated” human beings.

Now, how do women experience jealousy?

Fortunately, women don’t usually react as violently as men, and tend to pose a much smaller risk for the safety of others.

Jealousy is different for her

Of course, primeval women suffered from jealousy just as much as men did. They worried about him cheating and feared he would leave them alone with small kids, then ending up stuck in miserable conditions with tragic consequences for their survival.

Women often suffer much more when a man falls in love with another woman, in other words, that he doesn’t only have a physical intermezzo with her, but a mental and emotional bond as well. It is also understandable, because an emotional bond makes a break up much more likely than just a fleeting sexual adventure.

Men, however, react much harder to sexual infidelity, due to the risk of not being the biological father of children he is investing much of his energy in. Since men have a higher potential for violence than women, far more women are being victimized by the violence of a jealous man than men by the violence of a jealous woman.

The strategies women are using against the infidelity of men are usually an attempt to turn the tables on them: They want to provoke his jealousy, so that he feels urged to defend his possession and territory. And so women will usually make efforts to look stunning, so that he can’t help but notice, and will expose, mock and ridicule a rival’s flaws.

Male strategies against jealousy that go hand in hand with archaic violence are not only ineffective, but also highly counterproductive. Modern relationships are usually based on romantic love and can’t breathe in chains. Limiting a partner’s freedom will usually backfire badly.

By showing strong jealousy a man will destroy his partner’s love – not only due to causing her anger and resentment, but because he will make himself appear smaller in her eyes and will so shift the power to her side in the long run.

Nowadays, since a man can’t insist on the archaic „might is right” anymore, he tends to make a fool of himself  if he reveals his jealousy too much.

If a woman is to respect a man in the long run, he cannot afford to react in primeval ways or to get upset about small issues.