The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (5 page)

Jealousy is often triggered by circumstances that signal a real
threat to a relationship, such as differences in the desirability of the
partners, as illustrated by the following case. The man was 35 years old,
working as a foreman, when he was referred to a psychiatrist and diagnosed with
“morbid jealousy.” He had married at age 20 to a woman of 16 whom he deeply
loved. During their first two years of marriage, he was stationed in military
service in England. During this two-year separation, he received several
anonymous letters saying that his wife was carrying on an affair. When he
returned to America to rejoin her, he questioned her intensely about the
allegations, but she denied them. Their own sexual relations proved
disappointing. He became obsessed with the earlier time in their marriage,
repeatedly accused his wife of infidelity, and hit her from time to time,
especially after a bout of drinking. He tried to strangle her twice, and
several times he threatened to kill himself.

He openly admitted his problems to the psychiatrist: “I’m so
jealous that when I see anyone near her I want to hurt her. I have always loved
her but do not think she has returned my affection. This jealousy is something
I feel in my stomach and when it comes out of me there is nothing I can do
about it. That is why I behave so madly. . . . My wife is always telling me
that other men are stronger and can beat me. . . . I’m not a big chap or a
handsome chap but my wife is so pretty and I don’t think I come up to her high
standards.” In other words, he perceived a difference in their level of
desirability; she was attractive and alluring, and he saw himself as beneath
her. When the psychiatrist questioned the wife in private, she admitted to
meeting and having an affair with a married man. The affair was carried on in
secret, and throughout the duration of her affair she insisted that her
husband’s jealousy was delusional. The affair began roughly one year before the
husband was referred to the psychiatrist to treat “his problem.”

Differences in desirability—when an “8” is married to a “10”—can
heighten sensitivity to signals of infidelity in the partner who has fewer
outside mating options. Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues at the University of
Hawaii discovered that the more desirable partner in the couple in fact is more
likely to stray. Those who have been in relationships with both more attractive
and less attractive partners have an acute awareness of how jealousy is attuned
to these differences. These differences represent one among many signs of
actual or impending infidelity explored in depth later in the book.

Jealousy is necessary because of the real threat of sexual
treachery. In a hazardous world where rivals lurk, partners harbor passions for
other people, and infidelity threatens to destroy what could have been a
lifelong love, it would be surprising if evolution had not forged elaborate
defenses to detect and fend off these threats. Exposing these threats, and the
psychological arms we have to combat them, is a first step toward comprehending
the wisdom of passions that sometimes seem so destructive.

The Dangerous Passion
takes us on a journey through the
rationality of these seemingly irrational emotions, examining the fundamental
desires of what men and women want, and why these longings so often produce
conflict. Chapter 2 introduces the jealousy paradox—why an emotion that evolved
to protect love can rip a relationship apart. It explores the evolution of
conflict between men and women, why painful emotions are necessary in resolving
conflicts, and why men and women are locked in a never-ending spiral of love
and strife.

Chapter 3 focuses on why men and women differ in their
underlying psychology of jealousy. It reveals that men and women are neither
unisex equivalents nor aliens from different planets. When it comes to adaptive
problems that differ for men and women, passions diverge; for adaptive problems
that are the same, their emotions joyfully commingle.

Chapter 4, “The Othello Syndrome,” investigates seemingly
bizarre clinical cases in which a jealous person becomes untethered, resulting
in delusional suspicions about a partner’s infidelity. We explore why our minds
are designed not merely to pick up on infidelities that have already occurred,
but also to detect circumstances that signal an increased likelihood that a
partner will stray in the future. Chapter 5 delves into the frightening abuses
produced by the dangerous passion—battering, stalking, and killing—and
identifies when women are most vulnerable to these violations.

Although I call jealousy the dangerous passion, it cannot be
disentangled from the risky cravings that men and women harbor for other
lovers. Chapter 6 examines the qualities of relationships that make a person
susceptible to infidelity, the personality characteristics that predict who’s
likely to cheat, and why some people unwittingly drive their partners into the
arms of a paramour. Chapter 7 explores why women have affairs, and why modern
women have inherited from their ancestral mothers a roving eye.

Chapter 8 identifies the strategies we use to cope with jealousy
and infidelity and why some therapeutic efforts to eradicate jealousy are often
misguided. The final chapter reveals the positive uses of jealousy for
enhancing sexual passion and life-long love, and examines how we can harness
emotional wisdom to enrich our relationships.

The Jealousy Paradox

[Men] originally lived in small communities, each with a single
wife, or if powerful with several, whom he jealousy guarded against all other
men.

—Charles Darwin, 1871,
The Descent of Man and Selection
in Relation to Sex

W
HEN
I
BEGAN TO EXPLORE
sexual
jealousy in my research, a colleague warned me to stay away from the topic. He
related the following experience. He wanted to elicit jealousy in a laboratory
setting to examine the various emotional expressions and behaviors that
followed. So to pilot the study, he brought a married couple into the lab and
put the husband in a room containing a speaker through which he could listen to
the conversation in the next room. Then the researcher took the wife into the
adjoining room and instructed her to answer his questions using an intimate and
seductive tone of voice. After two minutes of the interview, which the husband
could hear through the speaker, he burst into the room and punched my colleague
in the nose. The husband had listened to his wife talking to another man in a
tone of voice reserved only for him. The jealousy induction was too strong. My
colleague had to stop the experiment due to the ethical problems of evoking
such an intense emotion, hence his warning to me to stay away from this volatile
topic.

I was deterred only briefly, for soon I came to realize that
jealousy was a deeply rooted human emotion largely neglected by social
scientists. When I questioned my colleagues about the neglect of jealousy by
the scientific community, some told me that jealousy was not a “primary”
emotion, but rather merely a blend of other more “basic” emotions such as
anger, fear, and sadness. As a derivative of other emotions, it simply did not
deserve the attention usually reserved for the more basic emotions. Others
dismissed jealousy as a symptom of other problems, such as immaturity or
neurosis. Mere symptoms, they argued, did not deserve study like the more
fundamental problems.

The more I probed, however, the more I came to believe that
these dismissals were premature. Jealousy turned out not to be merely a mark of
some character defect. It is expressed in perfectly normal people who show no
signs of neurosis or immaturity. Moreover, jealousy has deep evolutionary roots
that were critical to the success and proliferation of our ancestors. By
uncovering the origins of this emotion, we can better understand its modern
manifestations and learn how to grapple with them. Jealousy, I was forced to
conclude, is no less basic than fear or rage, its expression no less important
than flight or fight.

Jealousy poses a paradox. Consider these findings: 46 percent of
a community sample stated that jealousy was an
inevitable
consequence
of true love. St. Augustine noted this link when he declared that “He that is
not jealous, is not in love.” Shakespeare’s tormented Othello “dotes, yet
doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves.” Women and men typically interpret a
partner’s jealousy as a sign of the depth of their love, a partner’s absence of
jealousy as lack of love.

The psychologist Eugene Mathes of Western Illinois University
asked a sample of unmarried, but romantically involved, men and women to
complete a jealousy test. Seven years later, he contacted the participants
again and asked them about the current status of their relationship. Roughly 25
percent of the participants had married, while 75 percent had broken up. The
jealousy scores from seven years earlier for those who married averaged 168,
whereas the scores for those who broke up registered significantly lower at
142. These results must be interpreted cautiously; it’s just one study with a
small sample. Nonetheless, it points to the possibility that jealousy might be
inexorably linked with long-term love.

Contrast this with another finding: In a sample of 651
university students who were actively dating, more than 33 percent reported
that jealousy posed a significant problem in their current relationship. The
problems ranged from the loss of self-esteem to verbal abuse, from rageridden
arguments to the terror of being stalked.

Jealousy, paradoxically, flows from deep and abiding love, but
can shatter the most harmonious relationships. The paradox was reflected in O.
J. Simpson’s statement: “Let’s say I committed this crime [the slaying of his
ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson]. Even if I did do this, it would have to have
been because I loved her very much, right?” The emotion of jealousy, designed
to shelter a relationship from intruders, “turns homes that might be
sanctuaries of love into hells of discord and hate.” This book attempts to
resolve the paradox.

The word
jealousy
came into the English language
through the French language. Comparable words in French are
jaloux
and
jalousie,
both of which derive from the Latin word
zelosus.
The Latin, in turn, was borrowed from the Greek work
zelos,
which
meant fervor, warmth, ardor, or intense desire. The French word
jalousie,
however, has a dual meaning. One meaning is similar to the English
jealous,
but
jalousie
also refers to a Venetian blind, the kind with numerous
horizontal slats suspended one above the other. The Norwegian psychiatrist Nils
Retterstol at the University of Oslo speculates that this meaning arose from a
situation in which a husband suspicious of his wife could observe her undetected
from behind the
jalousie,
presumably to catch her in the act of
intercourse with another man.

The psychologist Gordon Clanton of San Diego State University
defines jealousy as “a feeling of displeasure which expresses itself either as
a fear of loss of the partner or as discomfort over a real or imagined
experience the partner has had with a third party.” This definition captures
two central ingredients of jealousy: the threat of losing a partner and the
presence of a third party. Indeed, the jealous situation is sometimes described
as “the eternal triangle,” referring to the fact that three parties are
involved: the jealous party, the mate, and the rival. The definition, however,
leaves open precisely what sort of “real or imagined experience” the partner
has had with someone else—time, attention, sharing a cup of tea, oral sex, or
intercourse. As we will discover later in this book, different imagined
experiences evoke different facets of jealousy. It also leaves out the complex
array of emotions that characterize the jealous experience, including anger,
rage, humiliation, fear, anxiety, sadness, and depression. Finally, this
definition omits the behavior that people exhibit when jealous; jealousy is not
merely an emotion that rattles around in people’s heads, lacking expression in
action.

Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of
McMaster University in Ontario define jealousy as “a
state
that is
aroused by a perceived threat to a valued relationship or position and
motivates behavior aimed at countering the threat. Jealousy is ‘sexual’ if the
valued relationship is sexual.” This definition highlights three additional
facets of jealousy. First, jealousy is a state, which means that it is a
temporary or episodic experience, not a permanent affliction. Unlike qualities
such as height or hair color, no one can remain in a state of jealousy
constantly. Second, jealousy is a response to a threat to a valued relationship
in which a person is heavily invested. People rarely experience jealousy by
threats to a casual acquaintanceship, a brief affair, or a temporary alliance.
Third, jealousy motivates action designed to deal with the threat.

But even this definition fails to identify all the layers of
this complex human emotion. To take one example, there are many different forms
of threats to romantic relationships, such as sexual threats, emotional
threats, economic threats, and even intellectual threats. To penetrate the
jealousy paradox, we must understand the precise nature of the threats it is
designed to combat.

Some writers fail to distinguish
jealousy
from another
term that is sometimes used in its stead:
envy.
Envy appears to come
from the Latin word
invidere,
which means to look upon with malice.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines envy this way: “To feel displeasure and
ill-will at the superiority of (another person) in happiness, success,
reputation, or the possession of anything desirable.” A concrete example
illustrates the difference between jealousy and envy. A man might experience envy
of another man who has a beautiful wife. The envy is directed at the man who
possesses what he wants, but lacks. The husband, however, may be jealous of his
beautiful wife if he suspects she is developing an interest in another man.
Envy implies covetousness, malice, and ill-will directed at someone who has
what you lack; jealousy, in contrast, implies the fear of losing to a rival a
valuable partner that you already have.