Let Jealousy Fuel Your Sex
By: Renee Chen
Tags: Relationships, Sexuality, Life, Self, Psychology

On Jealousy & Romance

Personally, jealousy has always been an interesting emotion for me to explore, and it’s the one that has taught me the most about myself. I’ve experienced both sides of jealousy, as the purveyor and as the receiver. I’ve used jealousy as a tool to gauge interest in the opposite sex, especially in the early days of dating. I’ve been the jealous, possessive girlfriend who forbade her boyfriend from having a MySpace account or to have any friends of the opposite sex. I proceeded to then date someone who put my jealousy and possessiveness to shame, by throwing out everything in my wardrobe that was form-fitting and semi-revealing, and prohibiting me from having any friends, regardless of gender.

Needless to say, neither of those relationships were healthy. My self-esteem was at an all-time low, and I held the illusory belief that the amount of love one felt mirrored the amount of jealousy he or she felt. So when my ex-boyfriend got upset about my wearing a short skirt, it sent my dopamine receptors into a frenzy because I interpreted his reaction as a signal of love.

Some might say that jealousy is an intrinsic part of romantic love, and this is true to the extent that most of us may not achieve the kind of enlightened, unconditional love we aspire towards. But even so, jealousy has less to do with the love we feel for our partners, and more to do with the love, or lack thereof, we feel for ourselves. At least, that’s the lesson I came out of those two relationships with. Jealousy has its roots in fear, the fear of losing what we have — to an other — and desire, the desire to protect what we have with all of our might.

In romantic love, “I” gradually becomes “we” as identities overlap and merge, some couples more than others. Our lovers become an extension of us and us them. We, often unknowingly, place our self-worth into the arms of our lovers, looking to them for words of affirmation and criticism, losing some of our “selves” in the process.

“When we put all of our hopes in one person, our dependence sores,” writes Esther Perel.

While most of us do not give up total control of our emotions and sense of self-worth to our lovers, we give up more than we think. When much of our identity and self-worth is dependent on another person, it’s no surprise that we experience a sort of identity crisis when our lover isn’t there to reassure us of our worth. This becomes even more pronounced when “an other” enters the picture — because our sense of worth is so fixated upon what our partner thinks of and feels towards us, the threat of him or her liking “an other” more than us becomes too much to bear. It would mean this other is better and more valuable than we are.

“We feel most threatened where we feel least secure,” Perel writes, and when we don’t have a sense of security in ourself nor in our relationship, this other becomes a gargantuan threat, reminding us of just how much we have to lose.

As my self-worth and self-love grew, the intensity of jealousy I experienced and felt in any given moment diminished and became easier to contain. I’m now somewhere towards the middle of that jealousy spectrum. Whereas in the past, the strength of it would have driven me to act out and behave in a deleterious way, I can now identify the emotion as it arises, acknowledge the fear of loss and desire to hold on, and yield to its quiet call of introspection.