Thoughts on Jealousy, Part One
For my purposes, I’m going to define jealousy as: “the fear and other negative emotions resulting from the belief that his relationship, property, and/or skills are being compromised or interfered with by an outside source”.
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, jealousy in the males of a species is considered an evolutionary advantage. Basically, men want to be sure that “their” women are monogamous, to ensure that any offspring are the result of their genetic heritage. This prevents the possibility of “cuckolding” (which, interestingly, is a reference to the cuckoo, a species of bird who plants its eggs in another bird’s nest, leaving it for them to raise). In order to be evolutionarily successful, a man wants to spread his seed as widely as possible, and to ensure that he does not expend scarce resources raising offspring that don’t carry his genes. Jealousy effectively evolved to ensure that men did not get cuckolded - those men who were jealous tended to have more genetic offspring that those men who were not. When a male is successful enough not to require a monogamous (or polygamous) relationship, and can instead impregnate females without needing to provide for the care of offspring, then jealousy is no longer necessary. (Un?)fortunately, modern laws typically prevent highly sexually successful men from shirking their parental responsibilities in this manner.
From the same perspective, women are not nearly as prone to jealousy of sexual infidelity, but far more prone jealousy of emotional infidelity. From a female perspective, a mate is not only chosen for his genetic potential as a father, but also as a caregiver to assist in the expensive process of child-rearing. A male who demonstrates frequent emotional infidelity would be perceived as a poor caregiver - i.e. he would be more likely to abandon the woman and any children. That feature tends to dominate sexual infidelity - the worst that can happen with a case of pure sexual infidelity is that the man will conceive additional children with his “extra marital” conquests, who will consume at least some of the man’s scarce resources devoted to child rearing. In some cases, the genetic profile of a man is so appealing that the woman will ignore the caregiver requirements - e.g. extremely powerful married politicians or super-famous celebrities. On the other hand, if a woman finds a man with excellent caregiver qualities but less than stellar genetic traits, she may attempt to cuckold him by having illicit intercourse with a better genetic specimen, and rely on the caregiver to raise the resulting children.
From my perspective, I can appreciate and understand the evolutionary drives that create jealousy. The feelings are basically hard-coded in everyone, and they go back millions of years. That said, I try to take a more enlightened approach. While I have some decent genetic traits that would probably be worth passing on, I also have some hefty deficiencies that would also be passed on - something I have basically decided not to do. Since my goal is no longer procreation, the need to sequester my “breeding partners” is no longer necessary, and with it, the emotion of jealousy to enforce sexual fidelity. For me, that leaves only jealousy over emotional infidelity. This I’ve basically short-circuited with a few case examples:
- A woman is slightly unfaithful - spending time with other friends instead of with me. Given that I have extremely low emotional needs, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll feel abused. If I’m not harmed in the situation, I hardly have any recourse to feel jealous.
- A woman is mostly unfaithful - spending sufficient time with other friends/boyfriends that my emotional are not met, but she still wants to “be” with me. In this case, rather than fly into a jealous rage, I feel it would be much more rational to approach her and express my needs, and hopefully come to a mutually acceptable compromise. If that’s not possible, then we should go our separate ways.
- A woman is completely unfaithful - to the point that she no longer wants to be with me. In this case, why on earth would I want to be with her? To be fair, I’ll admit a level of carnal or aesthetic attraction to some women who have no interest in being with me, and that occasionally this manifests in a jealousy-like emotion (closer to envy), but I find it much more rational to improve myself (possibly making myself worthy of one of those attractive women) rather than wallow in an unproductive emotional funk.
There’s also my belief that everyone should be free to make their own choices. If a woman makes a choice that doesn’t involve me and does me no harm, what logical reason do I have for interfering with that choice? I do admit that I’ve never actually experienced a situation where my partner had sex with someone else - so it is possible that I will feel harmed in that event, and all this mumbo-jumbo will be for nothing. On the other hand, I’ve run through numerous thought-experiments, and given the capabilities of my imagination, I feel confident that my intuition on how I would deal with the situation is correct.
All that said, I cannot ensure that any potential partner has made the same rational (?) decisions as I have. Quite the contrary, it’s highly unlikely that any given woman would consciously forgo any thoughts of procreation. It’s also unlikely that she would undergo the ethical calculus on emotional infidelity and arrive at the exact same solution as I have. As such, it would be extremely irrational of me to demand that she allow me the same latitude that I allow her. Given that rationality and logic are the fundamental basis of my entire existence, I can’t make that demand. I could discuss everything I’ve outlined above with her, and it’s possible she’d come to the same conclusion (and indeed more likely than a median member of society, given that she’s interested in me), but I can’t require that she come to that conclusion. Doing so would undermine her freedom of choice - another of my fundamental (and thus inviolable) principles of existence.
Of course, this particular set of beliefs is not entirely without pitfalls:
- I have to make clear to my partner that any children conceived with other sexual partners are definitely not my responsibility. Unfortunately, given my propensity of assuming too much responsibility, I don’t know how effective I would be in carrying through with this decision. My worst case scenario would be a woman whose baby-daddy disappears after conception, and with whom I am still emotionally entangled - giving me 100% of the paternal responsibility, or the requirement to cut off emotional ties with both woman and child.
- The decision to avoid procreation leads to a not-insignificant degree of sexual dysfunction on my part. Even if we practice maximum non-surgical protection (condom + birth control pills), there’s still a roughly 1 in 500 to 1000 chance that pregnancy will result. Given my moral opposition to personally participating in abortion, and my subsequent need to claim responsibility for any children I father, that makes every sexual encounter a 1 in 1000 chance at betraying one of my core decisions in life. And while I could theoretically have sex every day for nearly 3 years before I could reasonably expect to face this scenario, my statistical brain always reminds me that I every time I participate could be that 1 in 1000.
- I’ve noticed that most women seem to like it when their men are jealous - even to the degree of violence. I believe that’s because insane jealousy indicates to a woman that her man is strongly emotionally invested and attached to her, which subsequently increases her attraction to him. Given that I don’t seem capable of that level of attachment, women are more likely to perceive that I would be emotionally or sexually unfaithful, triggering their jealousy (or simply convincing them to seek elsewhere).
… so take everything I say with a big ol’ grain of salt. 