A while back, one of the women of DaveWorld posted a message about some difficulties she was having coming to some degree of comfort with the fact that her lover continued to see an old girlfriend on what seems to be an innocently friendly basis.

Her difficulty has preoccupied me. "Obsessed" might not be too strong a word. For if you believe, as I do, that human beings are designed to love many, and not just one, person, in their lives, then the problem of romantic jealousy becomes by far the highest hurdle we must clear.

I've laid awake for hours at night, thinking myself to sleep, contemplating this whole issue of jealousy in our relationships, how and why it comes about, and what we can and should do about it. My mind keeps flicking back to it with the doggedness of a tongue ceaselessly probing the ragged gap of a missing tooth, and I'm afraid that it will continue to do so until such time as I finish this. I needs must formulate my own brainworm medicine. Physician, heal thyself.

Without further ado...

(Now, as my own relationship track record is purty maculate, I do not presume to offer advice, but I will mention a few things that seem to be true for me. YMMV.)

The Genesis of Jealousy

While this is a trivial observation, jealousy derives directly from our feelings of the inability to obtain, or insecurity of continued possession of, that thing or person of which we are jealous. It is a function of insecurity.

Most people are not jealous of something that they can easily obtain, something that is readily in their grasp. A student making straight A's is very unlikely to be jealous of other students that also do so.

Most people are not jealous of affection of love showered upon, or returned by, their blood children, by and to other friends and family, for the simple reason that it is our experience that the love and affection that our children feel for us is undiluted by the love and affection they feel for others.

When a stranger stops a man in the grocery store to admire his baby, and says, "What a beautiful little girl! I'd love to take her home with me!" he feels happy and complimented. The very same words directed to his wife would be bit less welcome, at least in most cases.

For when we choose to love in a sexual manner, as a result of our origins in a sexually competitive species, it's not that simple, is it? We are ever mindful of the process of seductive selection, and know well that the same forces of attraction that brought the one we love into the relationship can prove to be the ones that draw the loved back out of it. The "ties that bind" are nowhere near as strong as the chains of the parent-child relationship, so, logically, we are less inclined to trust our emotional lives to them.

The Original Sin - Anti-Love

Jealousy, not hate, is, I think, the fundamental destructive emotion in the human heart, and the polar opposite of love. The symptom, and not the disease, hate rises up from the wellspring of jealousy.

This, like many basic human truths, is reflected in some religious texts. Some Xian traditions describe Lucifer's sin of rebellion as arising from jealousy of the fact that God had created a new type of soulful entity, man, to share in Creation. Cain slew Abel, jealous over the acceptance of Abel's offerings. The Olympian gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon often displayed this human emotion.

The same theme abounds in ancient secular works - as one example from hundreds, in Aeschylus, with the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, and on through the ages to the latest made for TV movie. Greed, theft, murder, almost all of the things that most people define as sin have as their root cause jealousy of something or someone possessed by someone else. So universal is the experience of jealousy that man has found it necessary to even paint his gods with this tarred brush.

Divine Jealousy

In what is to me one of the most incredible lines in the Bible, the First Commandment is translated to describe God as naming himself a "jealous" God.

There could scarcely be a more blasphemous insult to the Creator.

Man takes the liberty of attributing to the Creator one of the meanest and most vile of human emotions, as if the Being capable of creating all that we experience could possibly be so sinfully anthropomorphic - a textbook case of man creating God in his own flawed image. Here, the authors of the Bible rival, if not trump, the Greco-Roman tradition. For all of their failings and rivalries, the deities of the pantheon certainly did not demand to be worshiped exclusively.

I think it important to note that this belief that gave rise to the then revolutionary Judeo-Xian doctrine of monotheism as manifested in the One True Faith - the doctrine of intolerance that is the fountain from where the bin Ladens, the Inquisitors, and the Falwells of history have all alike chosen to wet their vicious whistles.

Jealousy as ThoughtCrime

"If a man is considered guilty for what goes on in his mind, then send me to the electric chair for all my future crimes." Prince - "Electric Chair"

It is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid feeling jealousy at some point in time. Like anger, selfishness, or any other negative emotion, it is a part of life. This often leads to feelings of recrimination, with a subsequent lowering of self-esteem.

It should not. There is no sin without some behavior to attach to it. Now, some followers of some religions will try to state otherwise. ("As a man thinketh...", and "If a man looks upon a woman with adultery in his heart...") But it's my contention that if I merely contemplate sin, even though it be most heinous sin, but never perform any act to make that sin a reality, I harm no one. There can be no offense, no sin, without some tangible action detectable by an impartial external observer. With apologies to both the Apostle and Mr. Orwell, there is no thoughtcrime.

This leads to a most important point for me; if I feel anger, lust, rage, whatever, but do not act on that feeling or impulse, then I am not bad for feeling that impulse. Quite the contrary. I am virtuous for rejecting the urge to act upon it. There is no virtue where there is no temptation, just as bravery is impossible with the presence of fear.

Those that feel the need to sweeten their ethics with a spoonful of that Good Ol' Time Religion before they can choke it down can always separate their feelings from their personas by thinking of those feelings as external temptation by the Angel of Insufficient Light, rather than ordinary human urges arising in their perfectly human nature, and capable of being ruled by ordinary human powers of rationality and will, without some divine aid. :-)

The Emotion of Anti-Love

Jealousy is the emotion of Anti-Love. I don't think it's possible to feel love and jealousy at the same moment. Part of this is because that when we feel jealousy, at least romantic jealousy, a significant part of that emotion is some degree of disappointment or anger at our loved one for feeling the attraction that we see them feel for the third person.

This anger is compounded by at least some degree of feelings of inadequacy on our own part, for not fulfilling all possible needs of our loved one. Why aren't we their be-all and end-all? Is there something wrong?

We end up angry both at ourselves and our lover, and thinking that each of us is in some way flawed and/or failing in the relationship, or even perhaps that we are in love with the wrong person, as we compare what we have with the Fiction, that is to say, the idealized image of the Perfect Love handed down to us in the Western Romantic traditions.

We all are indoctrinated with this Fiction nearly from birth, that we have the ideal relationship only to the extent that every single one of our needs, emotional, intellectual, and physical, are all met to the exact extent we require by a single individual, our lifelong love match. Curiously, the fact that this is patently impossible has not yet been able to cure our culture of this unrealistic vision.

This unfortunate dream leads to a dilemma. Faced with either forgoing having our needs met, or seeking to have them filled outside the relationship, which we are taught is a Bad Thing, we each try to simultaneously change the other in Pygmalion Projects to more accurately fit our idealized lover, rather than simply love them as they are. I have been more guilty of this, I think, than any other relationship sin.

Even more tragically, some of us decide that we should just "settle," that that's just the way life is, and that it is unrealistic to expect to be happy and fulfilled in our loving relationships. So we live our lives in a winter of discontent.

I assert that it is possible to have all of our needs filled by loving relationships with as many or few individuals as we require, in the manner of the worn socialist shibboleth - 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," provided, and this is the Big If, we can control our innate tendencies toward jealousy.

Tragically, this is a tall order.

While the human heart is capable of loving many more than most of us do, we live in a fairly dysfunctional society, in many aspects. It influences us most severely, in negative ways, so that we find it difficult, if not impossible, to live a life of Commitment without Containment.

Many of us can recognize, pay lip service to, the basic truth that we should allow our loved ones to enjoy love and affection from someone other than ourselves, but find ourselves unable to reconcile the rationality of our heads with the primal greed of our hearts. So, how do we deal with this emotional disconnect, this inability to feel as we might wish to? Oy, there's the rub.

When I was a younger man, first learning how to deal with the conflicting demands of what I had decided to be the response of a rational male, in the face of my lesser primal emotions of possessiveness, of wanting to monopolize the affections of a loved one, it was a tough task. Even today, I still, on very rare occasions, can feel those primal reptilian urges to keep my lover to myself. But they no longer affect me, so far as anyone could tell.

Happiness Through Denial

I absoutely refuse to allow jealousy to affect me, as a matter of a moral decision. I totally reject any jealous behavior in my life. I abjure it completely, deny it as being a legitimate part of my personality, and consider it only as some primeval survival of an ancient emotion that any truly civilized man has long left behind. I simply don't want to be that sort of man, in the way that other men might reject alcohol or abusing children.

Jealousy is an emotion unworthy of me.

As a consequence of my denying the external demonstration of the feeling, the underlying emotion withered away. Some may think that denial is a dishonest, or ultimately fruitless, method for coping with an unwanted emotion, but in my case, anyway, I truly believe it has worked well. To be sure, though, I was never a man afflicted with the gravest extremes of jealousy, at least after the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence, when all males are, I think, just about half-mad, at least concerning affairs of the heart.

It reminds me of Twain's story, "The Facts Concerning The Recent Carnival Of Crime In Connecticut" wherein he killed his Conscience, incorporated as a "shriveled, shabby dwarf," a "vile bit of human rubbish." But rather than ripping him limb from limb and burning the fragments, as Twain did, I simply starved that green-eyed demon down to the point where the Evile Little Fucker just up and died. He's deader than a dotcom.

Turning the Tables

Just to make sure, on those infrequent occasions where I might feel a twinge of covetousness, I go out of my way to behave in exactly the opposite manner, and try to turn jealousy back upon itself, as in a judo or akido defense move where the power of the attacker is turned back upon him. For it is in those times, when I feel vulnerable to jealousy, be it sexual jealousy, or simple envy of a friend's good fortune, that I think it most important to drive another stake in the Green-Eyed Monster's heart.

I have on several ocassions told CG, "Sweetheart, I want you to know that I want you to have all of the pleasure it's possible for a woman to possibly have in this life. There is no fantasy, no wicked secret desire crawling around in your brain that is off-limits, so far as I am concerned. There's nothing that two or more consenting adults want to do that is wrong. I'm here to be your companion along this journey. If you ever need to involve another person in our lives, on whatever level, be it as a friend, a sexually intimate friend, or even as another lover, that's fine with me. There's plenty of you to go around."

For all of my high-minded rhetoric and noble intentions, this also proves to be a somewhat selfish strategy. By giving your lover "permission in advance," so to speak, to love other people, it destroys any feelings of guilt, entrapment, or any other of the negative emotions they might feel. These emotions and temptations are felt from time to time by anyone in a conventional monogamous relationship. Feeling shame for having experienced such temptations, though we all do, people tend to conceal them from their partners. Anytime we have to edit our feelings from our loved one, to show only those facets of ourselves that we expect that our loved one will find acceptable, and conceal those that we fear will offend, true intimacy suffers.

Therefore, you can't "cheat" on me. There's no reason to dissemble or conceal from me any interest in another person. My response will always be, "Sweetheart, if that's what you wanna do, if it'll make you happy, or give you pleasure, then go for it."

It's a paradox - by giving your lover freedom, they tend to become happy in their primary, "alpha," relationship with you. The old saying, "If you love someone, set them free," holds true, though perhaps not in exactly the same way as most folks interpret the phrase. You should not set them free so that they can return to your captivity, but so that they can live free and happy.

The only women I've discovered that find this sort of arrangement unacceptable are those that, for whatever reason, primarily cultural conditioning, I believe, find a marked degree of jealousy as evidence of True Love. No such woman has any business considering me for a partner in the first place, so that hasn't happened very often.

I saw this sort of a neurotic attitude quite a bit while working in the nightclub business, particularly those places I worked that had predominantly Hispanic clientele. It was not unusual to see a pretty Tejana wife intentionally flirt with other men in order to provoke a reaction from her husband, and seem to enjoy his angry, "macho" reactions.

The Necessary Ingredient - Self-Esteem

There is some Bad News - to live a life free of jealousy requires a healthy self-esteem, one so healthy, in fact, as to be extremely rare in our culture. So healthy, in fact, as to border on arrogance, at least as measured through most people's eyes. Poor self-esteem, the psychologists, tell us, is a near-universal disease in our culture.

So, unfortunately, this way of living will not work for most people in our culture.

Tragically, there are a host of reasons that we suffer a pandemic of low self-esteem in our culture, so many, that I cannot here even mention them all. But I would be remiss to not mention one of the most damning, one that many do not recognize as having the extent of the deleterious effect that it does - the media.

The Distorted Mirror

Bombarded by media images of swimsuit models and men with washboard abs, surrounded with unrealistic ideals of what humans that have aims in life other than to spend their entire lives in a gym are supposed to look like, we feel inadequate in our personal appearances. We gaze into the Boob Tube, and try to measure ourselves in that Distorted Mirror.

Up until the last century, a reasonably pretty young lady, or handsome lad, might have been the prettiest man or woman anyone in a small town or rural area had ever seen. People did not travel as much, and certainly did not see the scores of beautiful people on the television and in the movies we do today. That lass or lad served as the standard of Beauty to which all were compared to. Of course, "normal" people came much closer to reaching these "small pond" acmes of attractiveness than they would today to the faces and bodies of the models, actors, and athletes we now see everyday, faces and bodies pulled from a global pool of Beautiful People.

Imagine, just a century ago, you might have been the most attractive person your loved one would ever see...

Nor is it just in the area of physical attraction that our modern means of communication can make us feel less than adequate - we are constantly exposed to the words and deeds of the Best of the Best of the human race. Pick up a paper and read the writing of a man more eloquent that we could ever hope to be, learn of the discoveries by scientists much smarter that we will ever be, read the tales of young men and women that have made fortunes at an early age, of heroes and leaders and folk of all manner of accomplishment.

We listen and watch the very best athletes, vocalists, actors and comedians the world has to offer, winners in the intense natural selection in their chosen fields, and cannot help but be affected, even if subconsciously, by the immense gulfs that separate their abilities from ours.

Anxiety, depression, hopelessness, anorexia, bulimia, obesity, drug and alcohol abuse are all effects of the unhappiness caused by our poor self-images. Another, less obvious, consequence is the popularity of tabloid TV shows such as Jerry Springer's. People can turn on the set and for once see people that are even more screwed up, ignorant, and inadequate than they see themselves to be. Tune in and one can be reassured that you are not, in fact, on the bottom rung of the ladder of human development.

But I digress, as I am wont to do...

The Armor of Arrogance

You'll never be fit to love one person, much less many, until you can learn to love yourself. Only then can you achieve the level of comfort and security it takes to be free from jealousy. I truly do not fear that were something to happen to my relationship with <a href="viastellarum.antville.org>CG, if she were to fall in love and decide she'd be happier with another man, for instance, that it would be the end of my chance for love and contentment. I'm intelligent, not too awful hard to look at, and I've always been able to make people laugh, and that's half the battle where romance is concerned. I love her enough to want her to be happy, and if she can be happier with someone else, somewhere else, then that's where I want her to be.

Can you tell I don't think that's likely to happen? :-) It's much more likely that that third person, man or woman, would just join our lives to become part of what we already have.

What if I'm wrong?

I'd be sad to lose her of course, but I don't sign on to that belief that there is only One True Love out there for each of us. If you are a loving, and a lovable person, you need never worry about being alone, but only about finding ways to spend time with all those that want to spend time with you.

I'll certainly not anguish about the possibility before it even happens. As the Bard said, a coward dies a thousand times, and the valiant only once. I don't have time for worry, and I don't have time for jealousy. I just have Time Enough for Love.

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Houston's public radio station, KPFT plays a good mix of local and national blues acts all day long on Sundays. My favorite show of them all is the "Blues Brunch" broadcast from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM local time. (CST)

One of the main reasons I like this show the best is the DJ, one Nuri Nuri. Nuri Nuri sounds like he must be from India, or Pakistan, or somewhere thereabouts, from his accent. He bills himself as "The Big Boss Man of the Blues," and to hear a guy that sounds almost exactly like Apu from the Simpsons talking blues history and performers in between the tracks is one of the delicious ironies of life here in Houston, which is a multi-cultural melting pot par excellence, stereotypes notwithstanding.

The best thing is, KPFT streams all the station's programming over the Net, so every single one of you can listen to this, and all the other blues shows, just by clicking right here.

Happy Listening!

UDDATE 10/30/2003: A hat tip to reader David Collins, who writes to infrom me that Nuri Nuri is actually from occupied Palestine, not from India or Pakistan. David also points out that Nuri Nuri is an accomplished bassist, jamming with local bands from time to time, and also manages the legendary James T-99 Nelson.

Thanks, David.

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