Yesterday I was speaking with my friend about jealousy. Some questions and answers came up. I'll list just the questions, so that the reader may come up with his or her own answers:
- Do you consider yourself jealous?
- Do you feel you express your jealousy fully? Or you contain some or all of it, knowing it's not real?
- Is jealousy inversely correlated to trust? If you trust your partner, are you less jealous about them?
- Is jealousy correlated to your partner's attractiveness? Have you been more jealous about beautiful partners rather than plain ones?
- Has jealousy ever proven to be useful to you? how?
- If you don't express jealousy verbally, do you express it in other ways?
- Have you sabotaged an event so that your partner would not attend out of jealousy? Example, overemphasize the importance of a chore when your partner is grabbing coffee with their ex.
- Have you witnessed a jealousy scene between two strangers? Did you pick a side? How did you feel about the whole situation?
- Does your jealousy sometimes feel like an intuition? Has it felt like like an unreal and unpleasant emotion like unreasonable fear?
- Is jealousy related to fear? do you have to fear losing your partner to someone else in order to feel jealous?
- Say your partner is spending a lot of time with her best friend who is gay (or change the situation to your sexual preference). You feel negatively charged emotions. Is it envy or jealousy?
- Say your partner cuddles a lot with the dog and not much with you. Envy or jealousy?
- Say a man has an excellent relationship with his daughter. Daughter starts dating a young man. Dad feels and acts jealous. Is it indicative of an emotional problem?
The feeling I'm trying to box in the "jealous" moniker is the insecurity when you feel your partner is being poached. If there was a map of emotions, jealousy would lie between fear and envy.