WHAT IS JEALOUSY, AND WHY DO WE DREAD IT?
Jealousy has gotten surprisingly little attention from researchers, and most of the research that’s been done addresses the attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors associated with jealousy rather than with the neurophysiological correlates or the experiential nature of the emotion itself. Neuroimaging is only in the early stages of its investigation of jealousy. In a 2006 study reported in NeuroImage, Japanese neuroscientist Hidehiko Takahashi found some significant sex differences in the neural response to statements depicting sexual and emotional infidelity. In men, jealousy activates the amygdala and hypothalamus, regions rich in testosterone receptors and involved in sexual and aggressive behavior. In women, thoughts of emotional infidelity activate the posterior superior temporal sulcus, a region implicated in the detection of intention, deception, and trustworthiness as well as violation of social norms. Takahashi interpreted the greater activation elicited by emotional infidelity in females as evidence that they’re particularly sensitive to changes in a partner’s mind. Perhaps his findings account for the greater tendency of men to react to the sexual act itself rather than its emotional implications.
Most researchers agree that on a cognitive-behavioral level, sexual jealousy is a reaction to a partner’s real or imagined experience with a third party and that jealousy is most likely to occur in a person who is both dependent and insecure.3 My own clinical observation based on working with thousands of people struggling with jealousy is that jealousy most often arises when a person’s need for control is threatened. This may or may not coincide with dependency and low self-esteem.
What I find most fascinating about jealousy is the actual bodily sensations and internal thoughts and energetic events that create the experience of jealousy. People commonly describe jealous sensations as gut wrenching, churning, agitating, arousing, and overpoweringly unpleasant. While different people become jealous for different reasons and in differing circumstances, the actual physical feelings are remarkably consistent from person to person, although they may vary in intensity. Even a low level of jealousy is usually uncomfortable enough that most people will try to distract themselves or take some action to eliminate the perceived cause of their jealousy. Consequently, it is only in body-centered psychotherapy with a nonjudgmental therapist or in some kinds of spiritual practices, such as vipassana meditation or self-inquiry, that people are likely to explore the experience of jealousy without immediately trying to escape it. Early on, I realized that in order to really understand what jealousy is and how it operates and to what end, I would have to examine my own inner process. If you too want to understand jealousy, I invite you to do the same. The next time the opportunity arises, instead of pushing it away, welcome the chance to investigate the nature of jealousy. Fortunately, I was already quite experienced in being with uncomfortable feelings, and my own jealousy tended toward relatively low intensity, so I was well suited for this endeavor. Here’s what I found to be true for myself.
I’m most vulnerable to jealousy when I’m feeling both love and sexual arousal. Love is felt primarily in my heart center, in the center of the chest, as a sensation of expansion or sometimes cracking open or radiating outward. These physical sensations are accompanied by a sense of connection or oneness with others. Sexual arousal arises from the pelvic region as a high-voltage current, heat and tingling from my pelvic floor up into my genitals and lower abdomen, radiating both downward to my toes and upward to the top of my head. Both sensations are very pleasurable and can easily induce a desire to join with another to further increase and disperse the energy. They raise my sensitivity to stimuli of all kinds and at the same time raise my pain threshold. The experience is one of being supercharged or energized and at the same time feeling everything inside me and around me more deeply.
If something then occurs that I think might separate me from my beloved or love object, fear and anger arise within me. The fear is felt as a contraction, a tightening, and a shutting down. The anger is energizing, like sexual arousal, and like sexual arousal, it seeks a release and connection with something outside me, but it also hardens my heart center, contracting it and walling it off. These impulses of contraction and shutting down collide with the already established wave of expansion and opening up. Mind and body are confused. They cannot gracefully contain such duality. Unable to wrap my consciousness around this resounding contradiction, I long to jump out of my skin and call this powerful, churning, open-andclosed-at-the-same-time sensation jealousy. If I stay with it, I find I have a choice. I can channel this energy into further opening my heart, amplifying my arousal, leaving my body, or exploding in anger.
Another way of saying this would be that jealousy can feel like a powerful blend of all emotions at once. Love, sexual arousal, fear, and anger may all be blended together into one gigantic ball of energy that threatens to overwhelm the rational mind. If a single strong emotion has the potential to “hijack” us, as Daniel Goleman puts it in Emotional Intelligence, what chance do we stand against jealousy? The key, as in dealing with all emotions, is to notice the early signals of its approach and take appropriate action while we still have our wits about us. But what is an appropriate response to jealousy?
IS JEALOUSY HEALTHY AND INEVITABLE?
Evolutionary psychologist David Buss argues that sexual jealousy is healthy, necessary, and useful. Buss claims that jealousy not only helped ensure that our male ancestors were the biological fathers of their women’s offspring and that our female ancestors could rely on the ongoing support of their men but also that it continues to serve the purpose of maintaining sexual exclusivity, igniting sexual passion, and becoming aware of a partner’s infidelity.4
Traditionally, a psychological distinction has been made between jealousy arising from a known infidelity and an imagined one. The first is considered normal, the second pathological or neurotic. While there are certainly people whose jealous suspicions have absolutely no basis in reality, Buss cites many examples of cases in which a spouse’s apparently unfounded jealousy later turns out to have been an accurate intuition of a past, ongoing, or even future affair. But the ability to know when a sexual partner has had an intimate encounter with someone else does not always result in jealousy. Instead, Moore’s insight about jealousy being a reaction to unknown and threatening possibilities is more consistent with my own observations as illustrated by the following case history.
Linda and Mark came to me seeking help repairing their sexless marriage. Mark is an attractive, athletic man in his mid-thirties, and Linda is a pretty, somewhat overweight woman a few years older than Mark. Both grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and began dating each other while in college. When Mark took a semester abroad, they’d decided to open their relationship, and each had other partners without creating any drama between them. Linda had done her best to fulfill Mark’s sexual needs for the first eight years they’d been together. While she’d been easily orgasmic, she’d always felt something was lacking in their sexual connection, but she didn’t know what it was or how to talk about it. After the birth of their son four years earlier, she’d become increasingly sexually withdrawn and resentful about Mark’s sexual demands. Both Linda and Mark were afraid that if they continued as they were, they would end up divorced, an outcome that neither wanted because of their shared commitment to parenting and to a successful business they had started together.
In the course of working with them, I asked each to meet with me separately. When Linda came in alone, she immediately confessed that she was having a secret affair with one of their employees. “I know I should stop seeing Ricky,” she moaned, “but I just can’t make myself. Sex with Ricky is giving me something I always wanted and could never find with Mark. It’s not just sex, it’s deep and loving, almost a religious experience. I didn’t know it could be like this. I’ve encouraged Mark to find another woman for sex, but he says he just wants me. The trouble is that I just can’t settle for the mechanical sex we were havin
g now that I know there’s something else. Thank God he’s not the jealous type, or I’d have no choice but to divorce him! The problem is that Ricky is an employee, and that really complicates things.”
Meanwhile, Mark began his session by saying, “I think Linda’s having an affair. I’ve hinted around about it, and she plays innocent, but I don’t believe her. It really hurts me that she’s not telling me about it. I’d be willing to have an open relationship if that’s what she wants. I’m scared it would wreck our marriage, but it would be better than cheating.” As Mark shared more about his feelings, it became apparent that he really was not jealous. He wanted Linda’s love and acceptance, but sharing was not a problem for him. He wasn’t really interested in taking on another lover himself because he didn’t want the emotional complications, but he didn’t want a life without sex either. Mark’s parents had had a consensually open marriage, and he’d grown up at ground zero in the heyday of the sexual revolution. Polyamory was not an alien concept for him, but it was not really appealing either. His father was quite a lady’s man, and his mother eventually grew tired of her husband’s constant womanizing and divorced him. Mark and Linda definitely had marital problems, but jealousy was not one of them.
Buss maintains that sexual jealousy has been a successful means of passing on genetic information, and because of this, today’s men and women are prone to jealousy and possessiveness. “Nonjealous men and women are not our ancestors, having been left in the evolutionary dust by rivals with different passionate sensibilities. We all come from a long lineage of ancestors who possessed the dangerous passion,”5 he asserts. But what about the clever unfaithful who didn’t get caught and who may have conceived with nonjealous partners before returning to socially monogamous mates as is so common in the animal kingdom? What about all the DNA lost in murders committed in acts of jealous rage?
Most significantly, what about all the ancestors who either didn’t know or didn’t care about biological fatherhood? Many experts believe that until the rise of patriarchy about 4,000 years ago, biological fatherhood was not of much interest to humans.6 This is a very brief time frame in the million or so years of human evolution. In the matrilineal societies that were once dominant, names, titles, and property rights are passed down through the maternal line. To this day, it is the mother, not the father, whose lineage determines whether their baby is Jewish. Well into historical times in many places around the world, the royal line passed from mother to daughter, and even after queens were replaced by kings, the king derived his right to rule from his wife or mother. All these customs point to cultures in which paternity was unimportant socially and emotionally.
Among many indigenous people, children are still regarded as belonging to “the village” rather than either biological parent. In Hawaii, in premissionary times it was customary to accept as kin the children your partner previously or subsequently conceived with another partner. In the old days, jealousy in these situations was rare, but today it is expected. Adoption of children on the basis of affinity, regardless of blood ties, was common and is a tradition even now.7 Far from being the utopian fantasy that Buss suggests, disregard for paternity, not to mention an absence of lifelong sexual exclusivity, has been the norm throughout most of human evolution, casting doubt on his Darwinian theory of the evolutionary value of jealousy.
Buss admits that jealousy can be dangerous, even fatal. He reports that 13 percent of all homicides occur in domestic violence, and jealousy is almost always involved in domestic violence. The threat of killing or being killed certainly goes a long way toward explaining why jealousy is such a scary prospect. With as many as 50 percent of all married women experiencing spousal violence at some point in their marriages, it’s clear that jealousy is pervasive, but it is questionable whether it can be considered healthy. In the research for my doctoral dissertation, I found that the best predictor for whether women in shelters for battered women would leave their abuser or return was whether they believed they had a better alternative than staying in an abusive relationship. In light of this finding, suggesting that jealousy is necessary, useful, and inevitable encourages battered women to tolerate abuse.
In Texas, where Dr. Buss is based, it was permissible until 1974 for a husband to murder his wife and her lover if he discovered them having sex. The law in Texas and in many other places around the world has long considered this kind of “provocation” a defense against prosecution for murder. According to Buss, “Extreme rage upon discovering a wife naked in the arms of another man is something that people everywhere find intuitively comprehensible. Criminal acts that would normally receive harsh prison sentences routinely get reduced when the victim’s infidelity is the extenuating circumstance.”
As recently as October 2009, a British news article reported that legislators, including former judges, have defeated government plans to stop men from using a wife’s infidelity as a partial defense for murdering her. The controversy over the attempted reform has been going on for over a year. The Ministry of Justice said of the Lords vote, “The Government wants to make it clear once and for all, and in statute, that it is unacceptable to kill another person and then claim a partial defense to murder on the grounds of sexual infidelity. . . . The history of the partial-defense of provocation has led to a commonly-held belief that this is a defense which can be abused by men who kill their wives out of sexual jealousy and revenge over infidelity.” The equalities minister, Labour’s deputy leader, claimed that the proposed change would “end the ‘culture of excuses’ among men who kill. . . . For centuries the law has allowed men to escape a murder charge in homicide cases by blaming the victim.”8
“But the move was described as ‘astonishing’ and ‘obnoxious’ in the [House of] Lords yesterday as peers rejected an amendment by 99 votes to 84. Crossbencher Lord Neill of Bladen, a retired judge, said, ‘We will make ourselves look extraordinarily foolish if we say a jury cannot take account of what most people recognise as being the most dominant cause of violence by one individual against another. Every opera you go to, every novel you read has sexual infidelity at some point or other—otherwise they are not worth reading or listening to.’”
“I must confess to being uneasy about a law which so diminishes the significance of sexual infidelity,” Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the senior law lord, said recently in response to the proposals.9
Clearly, there are some in the British parliament who recognize the power of law as well as cultural expectations to shape behavioral norms, but conservatives and liberals are not in agreement about what those norms should be.
Buss admits, “Excessive jealousy can be extraordinarily destructive. But moderate jealousy, not an excess or an absence, signals commit-ment”—true perhaps in Texas but not necessarily in California. Mark and Linda were as committed to their marriage as any young couple is likely to be these days. Divorce was just not an option they even wanted to think about, although in my opinion it deserved their consideration, but extramarital sex definitely was not a taboo for them. The absence of jealousy in this case was the very thing keeping their marriage together. The question we should be asking is not what can jealousy can do for you or your genetic material but rather what the result is of the belief that jealousy is a good thing, that it’s evidence of love or, at least, commitment, as Buss says.
Science has been invoked many times in the past to defend beliefs—and laws—that are now recognized to be not only unsupported by objective evidence but also harmful and dangerous to individuals and to society as a whole. If jealousy is indeed “hardwired,” does this mean it’s an evolutionary advantage and that it’s inevitable? And if it is inevitable, does this mean that monogamy is the best solution, or are there other ways to manage jealousy? We’ll address all these questions later on, but for now let’s take a look at whether jealousy is genetically or culturally programmed.
NATURE VERSUS NURTURE
As we have seen, people often argue about whether human beings ar
e naturally jealous as a result of our biological heritage or whether jealousy is acquired through cultural conditioning and personal experiences. This issue turns out to more readily fit a “both/and” model than an “either/or” approach. Most likely, people are prone to jealousy because of a combination of acquired beliefs and genetically programmed reactions. The genetic component may well influence whether an individual experiences low-, moderate-, or high-intensity jealousy, but the nagging question remains, how much is nature and how much is nurture?
Since we can’t change our nature, a more meaningful question might be, is it possible to overcome jealousy and its destructive effects, or does choosing polyamory imply signing up for a lifetime of jealous agony and melodramatic crises as some people fear? Other important questions to ask are these: How does jealousy affect me, and what can I do about it? Must I feel ashamed of my jealous feelings, or can I accept them as normal and natural without giving them undue importance?
Nearly everyone in our monogamous society learns early in life that spouses have exclusive rights. We are conditioned to believe that if our beloved is interested in someone else, we may be replaced. But this expectation of loss is learned, not hardwired, in both men and women. Imagine a culture in which your partner’s attraction to another signified opportunities for greater pleasure, intimacy, and support. Would jealousy occur in this context? As we saw in the previous section, people who are raised in cultures, such as premissionary Hawaii, or subcultures, such as post–Summer of Love San Francisco, where sexual inclusivity is not necessarily a threat and jealousy is not expected, may have different programming than those raised in an environment where an affair is considered an excuse for murder.
Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy With Multiple Partners Page 14