Trust and the Green-Eyed Monster
A reader of the blog sent this story about jealousy to me: Why Do I Get Jealous? — Yahoo! Personals I thought it brought up some common reasons jealousy occurs in relationships and how important trust is. But then I thought longer on the topic of why jealousy exists and how it starts. I realized that in order to grasp jealousy you must do more than just have trust;you must understand what trust is and with whom you have trust issues. Dictionary.com defines trust as: reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence. Reading this definition made me realize that jealousy is actually quite easy to understand. When the integrity, strength, ability, or surety of our spouse OR ourself becomes unreliable jealousy creeps in.
If we’re jealous of another person because we think our husband or wife finds them more fun, better looking, smarter, or sophisticated it’s really not the other person causing the jealousy. It’s the loss of our own self-esteem or strength that allows the jealousy to creep in. On the other hand, if your spouse has cheated on you jealousy is easily sparked because you’ve lost your reliance on their integrity and surety. Basically, there is a lack of trust. I have told my husband before that if I ever lost complete trust in him I most likely could not continue to be married to him. To me, trust is the most important thing in a marriage or any give and take relationship.
But I am prone to feel jealous if I catch him checking out another woman, overhear him talking on the phone with his guy friends discussing girls they used to know, or even comments on his MySpace page from girls can tick me off. But I realize now that I’m not so much jealous of the other people as I am in doubt of my own self. I don’t have enough trust in my own self-worth to let these things roll of my back. So I think the first step in conquering jealousy is to define where you’ve lost trust. Once you can say where you are lacking in trust, you can determine whether or not that trust can be regained and how to achieve that. More to come this week on the green-eyed monster.
jealousy, trust, marriage, relationships
June 26th, 2007 at 9:21 am
On the flip side of that, no one should do things on purpose for you to question their intentions or your own feelings. If certain things make you uncomfortable, don’t shy away from them because you think they will cause a fight.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I never implied that anyone should shy away from anything. That’s why I said you should evaluate where you lack trust and see if the trust can be earned back. In a case where someone is intentionally hurting the relationship then there are problems within the relationship much greater than jealousy.
June 28th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I have the same problem myself…I don’t have that firm grasp of self confidence in myself and I lash out and hate other women that even work with him talking to him. He struggles with it and hates my comments about women he works with. I feel terrible about that but at this point I’m like where do I go from here? I know the problem I just don’t know what to do about it.
Victoria