Focusing on Life Outside of Your Relationships Can Help Minimize Jealousy
When you’re at a party and you see your partner talking to someone — and suddenly, your stomach resides in your throat — you know the green-eyed monster has reared her ugly head. Jealousy isn’t exactly an uncommon phenomenon, but it is one that can ruin relationships, not to mention put a serious dent in your mental health. But telling someone not to be jealous is sort of like telling them to stop being nauseous, explains Robert Leahy, Ph.D., author of The Jealousy Cure and director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy. It’s a natural feeling and one that impacts everyone, back to our earliest forefathers.
Jealousy has a deep biological root, says Kathy Labriola, a counselor and author of The Jealousy Workbook. Men have historically practiced “mate guarding,” or trying to keep their mate from other partners to perpetuate their genes. Women have long wanted to keep other women away from their men to ensure their partner would provide for them, and them alone, especially when resources are scarce. The primal root of jealous feelings persists today — especially in romantic relationships.
That doesn’t mean you need to succumb to its vicious grasp. While there’s no one-size-fits-all tutorial for how to not be jealous, experts do have strategies to keep those complicated feelings from totally ruining your life.
Am I feeling jealousy or envy?
In order to address our jealous tendencies, we first must understand what we’re dealing with. As Leahy explains, jealousy takes place between three people: The jealous person, the person they’re jealous about, and the one they’re jealous of. Say, you, your partner, and that vixen at the party. Envy, on the other hand, deals with your status in society. You can be envious of that woman’s more stylish clothes, for example. And coveting, Labriola adds, is seeing something you want to take from someone else — like wanting to rip those clothes from that woman’s grasp.
Think about it in terms of scarcity. “With jealousy, you're so fearful of losing something you have, you're fiercely guarding it,” Labriola says. “And with envy, it's not a scarce resource. You have the option of going out and trying to get it.”
What causes jealousy?
It’s also important to understand jealousy as not a feeling itself, but a composite of multiple emotions. Labriola’s workbook identifies 45 different feelings that can make up jealousy, but they all fall into one of three buckets: fear, anger, or sadness. She notes that women are more likely to feel fear- or anxiety-based jealousy, whereas men’s tend to stem from anger. Being able to name and list the emotions you’re feeling is the first step to addressing them.
“It's really about asking powerful questions,” says Kitty Chambliss, a polyamorous relationship coach and author of The Jealousy Survival Guide. “So many times, we'll point at a person or a situation and say, ‘that's what's causing me to feel jealous.’ And then we try and stop it. But what’s really powerful is to ask more curious questions about ourselves and observing what we’re experiencing.”
How do I understand where my jealousy comes from?
Finding the basis for your jealousy can also help you address it. “The feeling can have its roots in low self-esteem, fear of abandonment, humiliation, anger, or even rage,” explains dating and relationships coach Chuck Rockey. People who experienced abandonment as children or early on in their romantic life may fear that circumstance repeating itself, which can cause jealousy in subsequent relationships. Or those who have been cheated on may remember that humiliation deep in their gut, and become jealous of a later partner’s most innocent glances at another person.
Labriola notes that recognizing your jealousy triggers can help provide a reality check when you start experiencing it. Ask yourself: are these feelings based in reality, or are they based in a painful past relationship with a parent, sibling, or boyfriend who did this to me? Are these feelings really based in the current situation or am I projecting something from the past onto somebody in my present?
Of course, jealousy does have a purpose. While your brain’s amygdala can go haywire watching for threats that don’t exist, your spidey sense sometimes tingles for a reason. “I think of jealousy sometimes as a barometer in a relationship,” Leahy says. “All of our emotions have evolved because they’re useful evolutionary adaptations. And sometimes, there is an imbalance of commitment in a relationship.”
A lot of times, it’s not jealous thoughts but actions that cause problems. “Jealousy is a threat to an attachment relationship,” Leahy explains. “If you attack your partner and other people, that then becomes a real threat to the relationship and it may fall apart because of the behavior.”
People who get jealous may engage in worst-case scenario thinking, interrogate their partner, accuse them of infidelity, read into innocuous “signs,” or try to keep them all to themselves. “It ends up leaving them in a state of stress, depriving their system of health and vitality, leaving them even less resources to deal with challenges,” Rockey explains. “The stress almost always bleeds into the rest of their lives, lowering their self-image and their ability to connect positively with others.”
Here's how to dial down jealousy once and for all.
Instead of letting jealousy drive your actions, acknowledge that it exists but it doesn’t have to take over. Rockey suggests laying your cards out on the table and telling your partner how you’re feeling so you can work through it together. Chambliss adds that it can help to channel those strong emotions into something positive, since burying your emotions will almost always lead them to burst out in other ways. Take that anxiety, fear, or anger, and turn it around into gratitude. Consider how lucky you are to have someone you love so much that you want to guard them like a bulldog with a bone, and focus on the qualities your partner possesses that make you feel that way.
Focusing on your life outside your relationship helps too, Leahy explains. “People often talk about their financial portfolios, stocks and bonds and cash, real estate. I like to think about life portfolios.” If you picture your life as a pie chart, your relationship is just one piece of the pie. Others might be your family, faith, career, hobbies, and friends. Cultivating those things can help you feel like your entire being isn’t tied up in your relationship, which will also help you realize you would survive if your relationship didn’t. That, in turn, takes away some of jealousy’s venom.
And finally, create a habit of checking in with your partner on a regular basis, jealousy or no jealousy. “It's wise for any person in a relationship to say, how is my relationship? Is there anything I need to do to strengthen it? Is there anything I need to ask for from my partner to strengthen our marriage?” Labriola says. Relationships are about learning, growing, and changing together. Staying open, honest, and trustworthy can help ensure jealousy doesn’t get in our way.
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