On Jealousy

            I first experienced the truly singular heartbreak of cheating when I was sixteen years old.

            It was a typical story: He and I had been dating for a year. He went off to (local, community) college and I was still in high school. Something felt off—he felt distant, he was picking fights with me, which he had never done before, and he was insisting that he needed more “alone time.” The feeling that something wasn’t right grew and grew. I can’t remember the catalyst, but some event happened that made me suspicious enough to hack into his email, and there they were: Slews of emails between him and a classmate: Flirting, discussing their sexual encounters in excruciating detail, and bemoaning his relationship status, all while reveling in the drama of it (we were, after all, teenagers.)

            I was only sixteen, in my very first relationship, but my reaction to this revelation was as agonizing as any other future discovery of infidelity: The ground crumbled beneath me. My sense of reality—of who my boyfriend was, of our relationship, of every word he’d said in the past few months—revealed itself as a pathetic façade. I felt dizzy. I felt sick. I felt my heart sink like an anchor in my chest. It was the single worst feeling I had ever experienced, and the ensuing fallout—the reveal, the explosion of emotion between us, the conflicting desires to destroy him utterly and to take him back and make everything “normal” again—was an absolute nightmare. To Teen Dee, a creature constantly hijacked by her extremely strong emotions in everyday life, it felt like a trauma. Everything had felt so certain, so solid. We were the couple that everyone thought was going to get married. His family adored me. And it had all been a lie.

            It seems almost laughable in retrospect (less than 2% of all marriages are high school sweethearts, and they have almost twice the average rate of divorce in the first ten years,) but at the time, I had no basis for comparison, and it felt like the end of the world.

            Sadly, my run-ins with infidelity were only going to get worse. Right up to the point where I wised up and started dating my amazing husband, my relationships were with truly terrible people. I’ve always—always—been a lover of the outcast, the black sheep, the beautiful freaks of society. But for most of my romantic life, I wasn’t able to tell the difference between ‘beautiful freaks’ and dangerous, manipulative, abusive monsters or, at best, apathetic leeches.

            At twenty, I ended up in a relationship with a true sociopath who seemed to feed off of discord and extreme emotional strife. In our tumultuous 2-year relationship, he isolated me from friends and warped my reality into a world of potential threats. A benign text or Facebook post from a friend became a slight against me and he pushed me to retaliate in kind, a male friend was definitely into me and I needed to confront him about his underhanded intentions. Everyone and everything was hostile, out to get me, or had insidious alternative motives for interacting with me.

He constantly reminded me that I wasn’t his usual “type of girl.” He preferred tall women with minimal curves, short (preferably blonde) hair, and lots of tattoos—which I didn’t have at the time. He pointed out anyone he interacted with who looked like that—classmates, group projects, members of any of his recreational activities—and told me to ‘not get jealous,’ even though I hadn’t yet been jealous in this relationship. Then he would exchange numbers with these women, walk them home from class, constantly mention them, all while proclaiming I had a jealousy problem. I hadn’t before, but after months of being told I did, months of my boyfriend deliberately provoking any insecurities I had in our relationship, ohhhh, man, did I develop that jealousy problem.

It only got worse when actual evidence of cheating began to surface; his German TA showing up drunk at our door, him vanishing and refusing to answer his phone for hours at a time (and calling me crazy for getting concerned or suspicious,) hiding text messages, etc. Finally I discovered a slew of chat rooms and secret email accounts on my computer (he didn’t have one of his own) where he met women under various guises—here he was a reformed alcoholic, there he was a soldier in the 101^st Airborne division, all sorts of crazy shit—and started “relationships” with them.

And there was that feeling again—the feeling that my happy relationship (no idea why I believed my relationship was happy, all I can say is that I had no sense of reality with this person) was a lie. The betrayal, the heartache—he really fed on that pain. He denied every discretion until I presented him with evidence. Then he broke down into tears, fell to his knees—high drama—and proclaimed that he “has a problem” and that he was “so broken,” but I “made him a better person” and begged for another chance. He assured me that he only did this online and that no nudes were ever exchanged, that he was fulfilling a need to "be someone else" and nothing more—setting parameters of what was and wasn’t cheating and making me feel horrible or unfair if I disagreed. And I, having been so broken by this relationship myself, felt there was nothing to do but give him a second chance. And a third. And a fourth.

That relationship eventually imploded, but not before I had gone further off the deep end than I ever had before in regards to my jealousy. By the end of that toxicity, I was comparing myself to every single woman I saw—and coming up short. I wasn’t tall enough, wasn’t “alt” enough, my breasts were too big, etc. Not that it stopped there—he went “against his type” for me, after all, and he could probably do it again, so every woman was a mirror for my inadequacy, every woman was a potential threat. I was routinely hacking into his email, checking with mutual friends to make sure he was where he said he was with who he said he was with, and checking his phone. Every moment he didn’t want to spend with me was suspect. Why didn’t he want to stay the night? He had to be with someone. I had to drive him to class—if he walked, he could be with that cute classmate of his he kept mentioning. He would toy with me whenever I tried to relax enough to be okay with him going out with friends—he would promise to text me and deliberately didn’t, he would claim a friend “took his phone from him” because of “his crazy girlfriend” ruining their fun (I learned after our breakup that no friends of ours had done this as he’d claimed.) I had become exactly what he’d wanted me to become: Unhinged, completely irrational, constantly threatened, and completely under his control.

I also caught the other end of jealousy, because he was nearly as irrationally jealous as he had made me in this relationship. When he accused me of cheating, as he often did (many cheaters do—it’s called “projecting,”) he was able to talk me into giving him the passwords to my laptop and my phone and, had I the funds to buy one, he would have put a tracker in my backpack. I stopped talking to any male friend he deemed a threat—not because these guys were threats, but because it was easier to cut them off and ‘prove’ I didn’t care about them than to argue with him about it. I stopped performing in shows or going to Theta events without him (Theta was a theatre interest group I was involved with) because he couldn’t trust me during rehearsals or around Theta members. I eventually even stopped going to the iNation (he was banned and couldn’t come with me.) No creative outlet, friendship, or beloved activity was worth facing his suspicion and his anger.

There were others after this relationship—some far, far worse in the abuse department—but this one is what shaped me into a jealous psycho and showed me what it was like to be with a jealous psycho. All ensuing relationships were tainted by this. I still felt threatened when a partner had a female friend or acquaintance. I still felt the urge to check their phones, to drive them everywhere or check in to make sure they weren’t lying about where they were or with whom they were. Obviously, this did not foster healthy or trusting relationships, but I just couldn’t quell my fears, I just couldn’t stop dreading that moment where I found a text or saw a kiss and my world would come crashing down around me.

Then came my husband.

I’m not going to bullshit you and tell you that the right person will come along one day and whoosh, away flies all your emotional baggage! Sorry to shatter the dream, kids, but that’s not how our brains work. What happened when I started dating my husband was for the first time, I fell head over heels in love with a good person. For the first time, I had a healthy relationship with someone who cared about my happiness and respected my autonomy. I was in a relationship without gaslighting, without negging, without manipulation or violence. I had come to expect a swinging pendulum in relationships: For every happy moment, there was an equally terrible moment to contend with, like I had to ‘pay’ for happiness with misery. I truly believed that was how love had to be. For the first time, I truly realized what a happy bond was. And there was no fucking way I was going to let it go.

Ladies and gentlemen, the aesthetic paragraph break.

Once I realized how happy I was with Hubby, I made a conscious choice: I had to get my jealousy under control. No more diving into panic whenever I didn’t receive a text. No more sneaking peaks at phones or emails. No more flying off the handle when he interacted with a female friend. I couldn’t indulge my insecurities anymore and use my anger to justify them. In past relationships, when I got jealous, I got angry, and I let my anger overtake me—I hurled accusations at partners, demanded gestures of fidelity (“If I’m really more important to you, block her!” “You didn’t remember your ex’s number was in your phone? I don’t believe you!”) And then I would hate myself, because I remembered what it was like to be on the receiving end of those accusations. I remember what it felt like to not be trusted, to know that nothing I did to reassure my jealous partner was ever “enough.” And I refused to let this relationship be swallowed by my fears, my anger, my need to control.

Here’s what I’ve learned about this sort of jealousy: It doesn’t help. It doesn’t prevent your partner from cheating on you. It doesn’t make you relationship “safer” from infidelity. All it does is exhaust you and your partner. You’re exhausted because all you do is worry, panic, and rage. You’re always on guard, always looking for the next threat. Every forced unfriending or fight about an ex they forgot to mention is a little dose of venom in your bond: It may numb your pain for the time being, but in the meantime, it’s slowly killing you. You may feel safe for the moment when you’ve bullied your partner into staying the night when they hadn’t intended to before, but it will hurt your partner. In the end, your partner feels like they can’t be trusted; that no matter what they do or how many times they “prove themselves,” they know that you’re just one missed text message away from a huge fight. And I have to tell you a hard truth: No one is happy in a relationship where they’re constantly suspected of doing something wrong. No one wants to always have to defend themselves or constantly explain themselves. If you continue to let jealousy rule your relationship, your relationship will end—most likely badly.

I knew this fact in previous relationships, but I always felt like I had no control over my jealousy. It was as natural as breath. How could I control my emotional reaction to something? It’s not possible. You feel what you feel. And that is very true. Trying to bury my feelings of jealousy always ended up with them boiling over even worse at a later time. If I wanted my relationship with my (not yet) husband to work out, I had to accept that I had a lot of issues with jealousy, but I couldn’t continue the pattern of accusations and forced control of my past.

Ladies and gentlemen, another aesthetic paragraph break.

I tackled my jealousy with a combination of self-awareness and communication. When my husband and I started to get serious, I sat him down. I explained that I had some very serious issues with jealousy (he knew some of my worst past partners, so it was easy for him to understand,) and that I didn’t want that jealousy to destroy us. So we came up with a plan of action. For the first few months, I would need to indulge some of my need for control. I was ashamed of it, but I knew I would have to. I asked him if he would be comfortable with managing some of my jealousy triggers with excessive communication: Telling me exactly who was out with him when he went with friends, and letting me know if someone else unexpectedly showed up. Telling me where he was going when he went out. Letting me know when he would be home, or the latest he’d be out if it wasn’t a timed event. He promised to periodically check his phone so we would be in constant contact for the few first outings, until our relationship hit a comfortable groove.

On my end, I promised that I would calmly and rationally tell him when I was feeling jealous, and he and I would hash it out together. This was incredibly difficult at first. I was so used to flying off the handle the moment I felt a twinge of jealousy. I was so used to lashing out and apologizing later instead of stopping and analyzing my jealousy. My husband is a bartender. So many of his coworkers are beautiful young women—women he’s with all night, talking to, whose numbers he has for scheduling and work communication purposes. This was an incredibly difficult thing for me to deal with, especially when I had a day job and couldn’t stay up until he got home. The first few months we were together, whenever I would see a coworker of his whom I deemed dangerously attractive, I took a deep breath and I talked to him about it.

“I’m feeling a little jealous,” I’d say. “I think your one coworker is gorgeous, and it’s making me nervous that you’re going to be around her when I’m not here.”

First of all, just voicing my fears made me feel better, because they sounded…really, really stupid. Putting my feeling into words made me realize where it was coming from—in this example, it was coming from insecurity. And my husband, knowing where the jealousy was coming from, would respond appropriately, with something like:

“I’m not interested in being with anyone else. I love you and that’s why I’m with you. I don’t care what anyone else looks like. You make me so happy. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I love you, and I love us.”

Simple, but it helped. Again, I’m not going to lie and say it made me feel instantly better—I still had nagging thoughts like well what if you get to know her better and you bond with her? or felt the urge to prod him about whether or not he thought she was attractive, but I resisted those thoughts because they would only cause fights. One was asking a hypothetical that, no matter how my husband answered, may or may not happen. My asking the question wouldn’t prevent him from bonding with a female coworker and eventually being attracted to her. That very well might happen, or it might not. My being afraid of that won’t prevent it from happening. That thought was terrifying, but it was—is—a reality in all relationships. I had to learn to accept that uncertainty somehow. And asking him if he thought the woman I was afraid of was attractive? What purpose would that serve except to start a fight? If he said no, I’d worry he was lying, which would make me more suspicious, make me think there really was something going on. If he said yes, of course that would upset me. Either way, entrapping him wasn’t going to do anything but fuel my fear and anger.

Forcing myself to be calm about my jealousy and openly communicating with my husband about it was difficult, but extremely effective. Not only was I able to realize when I was being irrational before lashing out, but he was able to understand where my jealousy was coming from and reassure me in the way I needed to be reassured in that moment. And I was very lucky that my husband was kind enough to text me and keep me informed of the who/what/where/when details of his goings-on. That was enough knowledge to make me feel secure enough to battle my more irrational worries until he got home.

However, recovery didn’t happen overnight. I had setbacks and moments where I lost my temper. My husband had times where he forgot to text me or some unexpected female friend showed up and he forgot to mention it. But slowly and surely, our communication allowed me to build up trust. My need to text him while he was out began to wane, as did my fear when he didn’t immediately get back to me. I’m now able to sleep when he’s at work—instead of being haunted by thoughts of him sneaking home later because he hooked up with someone (anyone who knows my husband probably laughed at how ridiculously out of character that would be for him, but jealousy isn’t rational, so I certainly had those fears.)

We still communicate this way from time to time, especially when my depression rears its ugly head and feeds my insecurities (“Why is such a wonderful man in love with a freak like you?” is a common thought when I’m depressed.) I still feel twinges of jealousy when I see how gorgeous some of his coworkers are, and big changes, like new jobs, always bring a little burst of fear and suspicion in me. But I do my absolute best to stop, breathe, think, and openly communicate how I’m feeling, and he does his absolute best to reassure me when I need it. My husband is almost inhumanly patient and understanding when it comes to my emotional baggage and psychological woes, and I will never take that for granted.

I think I’ll always be a jealous person in relationships. I’ll always have fears and insecurities. I cringe whenever I look at infidelity statistics or when the plot of something I’m reading or watching involves cheating. The uncertainty of the romantic human bond still frightens me. But I’ve done my best to set my fears aside, and I’ve found a way to live with all of my emotional baggage. I would never forgive myself if I had let it destroy my OTP.