Jealousy has long been portrayed as the ‘green-eyed monster which doth mock the meet it feed on’ (Othello, Shakespeare). It’s seen as a bad trait to have and one that shouldn’t be forgiven easily. After all, shouldn’t you have trust on your SO? There are countless relationships where jealousy is like a snake, entering the relationship and eating it up until there’s nothing left but pain and sorrow between the both of you.
For some reason, however, some people find it as an excuse for the way they act. They feel jealousy is an emotion that can’t be controlled, thus excusing the inexcusable pain they create. Nowadays, a lot of relationships welcomed jealousy into their life with open hands to slowly destroy them rather than fighting it together.
I know that you don’t want to lose your SO because you love them, adore them, can’t live without them but have you ever stopped and thought of how you make THEM feel? Yes, they want to be loved, wanted, even lusted over but they also want to be trusted!
I am talking to you: the jealous one, the one who gets mad when your SO hugs a person of the opposite sex, the one who screams to your SO because someone of the opposite sex messengered them and the one who decides to break up with your SO because they were supposedly ‘too friendly’ with someone of the opposite sex. I am not referring to the ones who truly have doubts for their SO, the ones who caught their SO being too intimate with someone of the opposite sex, the ones who caught their SO messaging the opposite sex in not so friendly terms and the ones who are merely being cautious.
I want you to think about it, I want to get into the shoes of the person that always gets yelled at, gets blamed for, gets restricted. If you were the one who was told not to hug, not to talk, not to approach that person because ‘they like you’, ‘they are too friendly’, ‘they want no friendship’ or because ‘you were too nice to them’ would you like it? And ‘that person’ is not solely one person that caught the eye of your SO but it is almost any person that is of the opposite sex. Wouldn’t that be too much for you to handle? Wouldn’t you wonder ‘why is she/he not trusting me?’ What am I doing so wrong?Restricting your SO as to what they can do, who they can talk to, where they can go and with whom doesn’t express love or affection and it definitely doesn’t mean you’re protecting them. Don’t get me wrong, if they’re thinking of doing something dangerous it is permissible to try to talk them out of it as you don’t want them to get hurt but not because you’re scared they would do something with someone else.
For a relationship to flourish and to remain strong, there must be air to breath and there must be air to be allowed to be you. Without trust there would always be problems, there would always be fights and someday that person who you ‘love’ so much will not be able to breathe anymore and would want to leave.
I want to clear out that when I mean jealousy I don’t talk about the mild one; where a person of the opposite sex is hitting on your SO and you might have gotten mad because your SO maybe didn’t turn them away immediately. I am talking for the paranoid one, the one I described in detail above, the one where you try to control your SO as much as possible, restring friendships and outings.
It isn’t ‘all about love’. Yes, love plays an immense role for a relationship but for a relationship to remain strong there must be trust. Without trust, there is no real love. Jealousy isn’t about love, jealousy derives from fear, from insecurities and from inconsistencies in the actual relationship. Acknowledging that you possess any or all of those three is the first step. Then, you must talk them through and find a way to diminish all three. You must find a middle ground where you both feel comfortable and relaxed and most important of all, you’re happy.
Edited by Susan Akyeampong
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