Jealousy - It isn’t what you’ve ever been taught.

Jealousy is a destructive force in any relationship – and helps account for the termination of gazillions of relationships – and sometimes situations worse then partners just distancing from each other and trashing their families and lives (like killing each other).

However – there is no such thing as ‘Jealousy’.

Jealousy is not ‘hard-wired’ (means exists in all persons) into human physiology like the “Brain Chemicals of Romance” are. Jealousy is a response that is learned from your culture – mostly due to the myth of the ‘Romantic Ideal’ – that dictates that you are supposed to posses and own your partner in their entirety – to own exclusively their hearts and minds – but especially to own their private body-parts – “tell death do you part”. The Romantic Ideal mandates that you may only have one intimate relationship in a lifetime.

The term jealousy is actually a ‘blanket label’ for a series of fears.

Examples: Fear of ‘abandonment’ (“They are going to leave me for Another”) - or the Fear of ‘self-worth/esteem’ (“The new lover is prettier /stronger/etc. than me”). There are other specific fears that get grouped together under “Jealousy” in our cultural training and feelings.

Like all fears – they can be overcome/resolved once the individual has identified and isolated the primary specific fear that causes their reaction. But overcoming a fear requires clear-precise-open-candid communications (and patience) among the participants.

The concept per se of jealousy is somewhat ironical. To wit: individuals make oaths/promises to try and make every effort to make their Other happy - but if having an additional intimate relationship would make one happy – the Other is culturally trained to be jealous – instead of being happy that their partner is happy. It’s almost upside-down.

Note: There is a section on Jealousy contained in the Appendix of the “Book of Relationships”. Makes for interesting reading if jealousy is part of your life with a current partner (or was part of your life with an ex-partner).

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You’ve only got one life. It’s pretty short. Don’t procrastinate.