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I recognize that outside the mucked-up sexual sphere, my (blessedly rare) envy toward other women is a resounding warning bell that it's time to do some work on myself. Professional jealousy can ultimately be constructive, too. It can light a fire under you. Or it can spur you to a level of soul searching that reminds you success is relative. Hey, I could've written Eat, Pray, Love. I just chose not to.
Sexual jealousy, on the other hand is unproductive, frequently infantile and sometimes lethal. I've heard there are men who are flattered by it, but outside of I Love Lucy episodes I can't imagine it as anything but irritating as hell. When it's been directed at me I've wanted less to patiently explain myself, and more to hit the jealous party in the head with a mallet. Being accused of infidelity is like being accused of trying to shoplift — however you respond you sound guilty. I acknowledge that without sexual jealousy there would be far fewer novels, no soap operas — no opera operas. But I hear myself saying it yet again and want so badly to believe it: I'm not the jealous type. Is it possible?
I don't want to compete with other women. I don't want to compete with anyone except myself. I managed not to express toxic jealousy even in my brief first marriage, during which my husband was sleeping around. Okay, the marriage was doomed from the start and my biggest concern was that he'd get the car back home in time for me to leave for work in the morning.
Hey, I could've written Eat, Pray, Love. I just chose not to. |
But in relationships with a deeper connection I managed to refrain from asking "where have you been?" not out of virtue, but because I don't want anyone asking me the same question. The few times my late husband asked, "Where were you?" under normal circumstances (it wasn't as if I'd disappeared for two days) it sent a shudder down my spine. In marriage or comparable relationships, what we like to call trust can be less Golden Rule and more Mutually Assured Destruction — two potentially deadly missiles, armed and pointed at each other. I am aware of many marriages that sustain themselves more on the India-Pakistan model than that of Ozzie and Harriet. Marriage is not easy. Still, through the difficult times, most of us opt for tense diplomacy to avoid blowing the whole arrangement to hell in a mushroom cloud of legal fees and custody battles.
These days, for the uneasily curious as well as the pathologically possessive, it has never been easier to turn jealousy into action. The Web is a tangled one; it is to sexual jealousy what the ineptly secreted liquor-cabinet key is to the alcoholic. I recall my friends' cloak-and-dagger antics pre-Internet, when a disgruntled woman would access her partner's answering-machine messages or peek at his car odometer. How quaint it all seems. With a modem and two functioning fingers, we're all stalkers now. Why does the man I'm falling for continue to troll the personals? My best friend, a gay man, says it's because he's a guy, period. This is good! Should I mention it? "No," says my friend. "Do NOT say a word." This, he insists, could spell death to a budding relationship. Forget Dr. Phil; better to heed the wisdom of Dorothy Parker: Hogamus higamous, men are polygamous.
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