I’ve dealt with it mostly in a polyamorous relationship context, whereas some of the other comments in this thread are about “jealousy” of someone you’re interested in but aren’t in a relationship with. Those seem to be pretty different.
Jealousy as mind projection fallacy
The mind-projection view is that jealousy means that your partner has done something wrong. They have made you jealous, either intentionally or negligently, and it is their fault. This is incredibly unhelpful. It gives neither of you much insight into how to avoid the situation in the future. Being angry is not the best state to understand what’s happened and why it caused you trouble. And it’s self-reinforcing — even if they do avoid doing whatever you think “made you” jealous, that won’t stop you from later becoming jealous over something even smaller. And it actively deters you from self-awareness and self-control, because you’ve pushed responsibility for your reactions onto someone else.
(Sure, it is possible for a manipulative partner to deliberately set out to make you jealous, because they have a model of your emotional reactions. To know someone is to be able to manipulate them. That kind of behavior is inconsistent with a consent-based relationship; though I would not go so far as to call it “emotional abuse” in every case. I still rank it at least as bad as deliberately sneaking bacon into a vegetarian’s food. Or maybe cow eyeballs.)
Jealousy as a smoke alarm
A different view is that jealousy is not a reliable indicator of wrongdoing. It is usually an oversensitive one. But because it is so incredibly unpleasant to most people, it is itself worth avoiding for its own sake.
But that doesn’t make it entirely a bad thing. The alarm on a smoke detector is an irritating loud beep. If it goes off every time you cook dinner, that’s both oversensitive (as an alarm) and unpleasant (as something to live with). But disconnecting the smoke detector is not the best idea either.
(When I was in high school, my family had an oversensitive and underspecific smoke alarm near the kitchen. When it went off, 98% of the time it meant “Mom’s cooking hamburgers for dinner and they’re ready.” So I came to associate that particular smoke alarm with good news (tasty food) even though the sound of the alarm was still irritating.)
One meme I picked up at OpenSF (a big polyamory conference a couple years ago) is that jealousy is not an assertion that your partner has done something bad — rather, it is an salient emotional warning sign, an indicator that you actually do possess some evidence of a threat to the relationship, or that some of your needs aren’t getting met. (It may well be weak evidence, just as the presence of particulates in the air is weak evidence of a house fire.) That’s something worth talking about.
It’s probably not a good idea to jump from “some of my needs aren’t getting met” to “I have a need for absolute social exclusivity and that need isn’t being met,” though.
OTOH, I suspect that even in a polyamorous, compersive context, a total absence of jealousy would cause relationships to drift apart a lot more than they do today — because sometimes jealousy does correctly detect that your relationship is at risk of burning down.
Generally, we shouldn’t ignore our emotions, but we also shouldn’t act on them without reflection. Emotions are signals, sometimes unreliable, but they correlate with something.
This may be a selective memory bias, but my experience is that when I was jealous, there usually was a reason.
(However, I don’t want to generalize from one mind. Maybe I am better calibrated than average. Maybe I only receive exceptionally strong signals, where the probability of some real cause is much bigger. There were situations where jealousy didn’t warn me. Someone else might be more sensitive to weaker signals, and therefore also have more false alarms.)
I agree. My definition is as follows. Jealousy, unlike envy, where you want what someone else has, and possibly resent them because you do not, is the want to restrict the other person’s thoughts, actions or choices to prevent some real or perceived harm to yourself.
Jealousy as a smoke alarm
I agree with that. Though my guess that there are more accurate fire alarms out there.
OTOH, I suspect that even in a polyamorous, compersive context, a total absence of jealousy would cause relationships to drift apart a lot more than they do today
Quite possibly, if there is no other feedback available. But first, I am not sure that it is a bad thing. People change and polyamory goes some ways toward making the relationships change with them, rather than becoming a burden. Also, I suspect that compersion does not equal “no-feedback”, though. Certainly healthy parent-child relationships tend to be compersive, with plenty of feedback along the way.
Warning: This is a ramble.
“Jealousy” needs to be unpacked.
I’ve dealt with it mostly in a polyamorous relationship context, whereas some of the other comments in this thread are about “jealousy” of someone you’re interested in but aren’t in a relationship with. Those seem to be pretty different.
Jealousy as mind projection fallacy
The mind-projection view is that jealousy means that your partner has done something wrong. They have made you jealous, either intentionally or negligently, and it is their fault. This is incredibly unhelpful. It gives neither of you much insight into how to avoid the situation in the future. Being angry is not the best state to understand what’s happened and why it caused you trouble. And it’s self-reinforcing — even if they do avoid doing whatever you think “made you” jealous, that won’t stop you from later becoming jealous over something even smaller. And it actively deters you from self-awareness and self-control, because you’ve pushed responsibility for your reactions onto someone else.
(Sure, it is possible for a manipulative partner to deliberately set out to make you jealous, because they have a model of your emotional reactions. To know someone is to be able to manipulate them. That kind of behavior is inconsistent with a consent-based relationship; though I would not go so far as to call it “emotional abuse” in every case. I still rank it at least as bad as deliberately sneaking bacon into a vegetarian’s food. Or maybe cow eyeballs.)
Jealousy as a smoke alarm
A different view is that jealousy is not a reliable indicator of wrongdoing. It is usually an oversensitive one. But because it is so incredibly unpleasant to most people, it is itself worth avoiding for its own sake.
But that doesn’t make it entirely a bad thing. The alarm on a smoke detector is an irritating loud beep. If it goes off every time you cook dinner, that’s both oversensitive (as an alarm) and unpleasant (as something to live with). But disconnecting the smoke detector is not the best idea either.
(When I was in high school, my family had an oversensitive and underspecific smoke alarm near the kitchen. When it went off, 98% of the time it meant “Mom’s cooking hamburgers for dinner and they’re ready.” So I came to associate that particular smoke alarm with good news (tasty food) even though the sound of the alarm was still irritating.)
One meme I picked up at OpenSF (a big polyamory conference a couple years ago) is that jealousy is not an assertion that your partner has done something bad — rather, it is an salient emotional warning sign, an indicator that you actually do possess some evidence of a threat to the relationship, or that some of your needs aren’t getting met. (It may well be weak evidence, just as the presence of particulates in the air is weak evidence of a house fire.) That’s something worth talking about.
It’s probably not a good idea to jump from “some of my needs aren’t getting met” to “I have a need for absolute social exclusivity and that need isn’t being met,” though.
OTOH, I suspect that even in a polyamorous, compersive context, a total absence of jealousy would cause relationships to drift apart a lot more than they do today — because sometimes jealousy does correctly detect that your relationship is at risk of burning down.
Generally, we shouldn’t ignore our emotions, but we also shouldn’t act on them without reflection. Emotions are signals, sometimes unreliable, but they correlate with something.
This may be a selective memory bias, but my experience is that when I was jealous, there usually was a reason.
(However, I don’t want to generalize from one mind. Maybe I am better calibrated than average. Maybe I only receive exceptionally strong signals, where the probability of some real cause is much bigger. There were situations where jealousy didn’t warn me. Someone else might be more sensitive to weaker signals, and therefore also have more false alarms.)
I agree. My definition is as follows. Jealousy, unlike envy, where you want what someone else has, and possibly resent them because you do not, is the want to restrict the other person’s thoughts, actions or choices to prevent some real or perceived harm to yourself.
I agree with that. Though my guess that there are more accurate fire alarms out there.
Quite possibly, if there is no other feedback available. But first, I am not sure that it is a bad thing. People change and polyamory goes some ways toward making the relationships change with them, rather than becoming a burden. Also, I suspect that compersion does not equal “no-feedback”, though. Certainly healthy parent-child relationships tend to be compersive, with plenty of feedback along the way.