Jealousy is a common experience in intimate relationships. Imagine you are at a party with a person with whom you are in an exclusive, sexual relationship. You notice that person standing close to someone else, talking and laughing, and occasionally putting his or her hand on the other person’s arm. At one point, you notice your partner whispering in the other person’s ear, and they both laugh. They walk out to the dance floor, where they dance together, still talking and laughing.
How does that make you feel? Are you jealous? But wait, I forgot to tell you: The person your partner was talking to and dancing with was of the same sex as your partner (if you are heterosexual) or the opposite sex (if you are homosexual). Are you still jealous? Oh yes, one more thing. The other person was your partner’s younger sibling. Now are you jealous?
Jealousy is an emotional reaction to a relationship that is being threatened (Knox et al., 1999; Sharpsteen & Kirkpatrick, 1997). A threat is a matter of interpretation; people who deeply trust their partners may not be able to imagine a situation in which the relationship is really threatened. We are most jealous in the situation just described,
when the person flirting with our partner has traits we ourselves want (or we fantasize that they do). Maybe we imagine our partner will find the other person more desirable than us, sexier or funnier.
A correlation has been found between self-esteem and jealousy; the lower the self-esteem, the more jealous a person feels and in turn the higher his or her insecurity (Knox et al., 1999). We imagine that the partner sees in the other person all those traits we believe that we lack.
Men and women experience similar levels of jealousy in intimate relationships, yet there is controversy over what triggers jealousy (Fleischmann et al., 2005). Some research supports the fact that men are more jealous when they believe that their female partner has had a sexual encounter with another man, whereas women are often more focused on the emotional or relationship aspects of infidelity (Buss, 2003). However, according to research that has attempted to replicate these findings, it may have to do with whether the relationship is short or long term. In short-term relationships, both men and women are more threatened by sexual infidelity, whereas emotional infidelity is often more threatening in a long-term relationship (Mathes, 2005). Other studies have found physiological responses (e. g., increased high blood pressure) in both men and women when they imagined scenarios of their partner committing either emotional or sexual infidelity (DeSteno et al., 2002; Harris, 2003; Turner, 2000). Cheating, either emotional or sexual, can lead to jealousy in both men and women.
Research on heterosexual couples has found that men report male-female sexual infidelity would make them most jealous, whereas women report that male-male sexual infidelity would make them most jealous (Wiederman & LaMar, 1998). Female-female sexual infidelity was rated the least jealousy-producing—some theorists claim this may be due to the fact that there is no risk of conception (Sagarin et al., 2003). Unfortunately we know very little about infidelity in same-sex relationships and marriages because the majority of the research has been done on heterosexual relationships (Blow & Hartnett, 2005). People who do not experience jealousy have been found to be more secure, and this security in intimate relationships tends to increase as the couple’s relationship grows (Knox et al., 1999). That is, the longer we are in a relationship with someone, the more our vulnerability to jealousy decreases.
Jealousy exists in all cultures, but what evokes jealousy may be very different. In Yugoslavia, for example, having your partner flirt with another evokes a strong jealousy response, whereas having your partner kiss another, or hearing your partner’s sexual fantasies about another person had the lowest jealousy response of all nations studied. The Dutch, on the other hand, seem to have a hard time with sexual fantasies about other people (Buunk et al., 1996).
Though many people think that jealousy shows that they really care for a person, in fact it shows a lack of trust in the partner. Jealousy is not a compliment, but a demonstration of lack of trust and low self-esteem (Puente & Cohen, 2003). Jealousy is also a self-fulfilling prophecy; jealous individuals can drive their mates away, even into the arms of another lover, which convinces them that they were right to be jealous in the first place. Jealousy can be contained by trying to improve one’s own self-image; by turning it around into a compliment (not “she’s flirting with other men” but “look at how lucky I am—other men also find her attractive”); and by trust of one’s partner. Communicating with your partner about your jealous feelings can often help to maintain your relationship (Guerrero & Aff, 1999). Opening up and talking about your uncertainty about the relationship or reassessing the relationship can help restore and strengthen the relationship.