Going green

Dear Gabriel

I’m fascinated by jealousy and what drives it. More specifically, my lead character is driven by jealousy to do terrible things, as he discovers that his partner is cheating on him. I won’t go into too much detail here but suffice to say it has scary consequences. And what complicates things is that he isn’t an angel himself! He in fact has had a number of affairs and yet he still expects his partner to be faithful to him and he’s resorted to stalking behaviour. Do these things add up?

Thank you

Jacques

Hi Jacques

Thank you for a most interesting question. As luck would have it (though you be the judge of this) I saw an interesting piece in the UK Guardian online in which writer Howard Jacobson lists his top ten novels of sexual jealousy. You can find the list at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/03/howard-jacobson-top-10-sexual-jealousy and see for yourself why he makes these choices. Some obvious greats are there (Tolstoy, Hardy, Joyce, Austen, Bellow, Dostoevsky and of course Shakespeare) but have you heard of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch? No me neither I’m embarrassed to say because his name of course gave rise to the term “masochism”. As Jacobson describes this, the “hero” wants to be his mistress’s slave and his ultimate punishment, his masochism lived out if you will, is the jealous pleasure of her infidelity.

Isn’t this deliciously perverse? He both hates and desires the infidelity, suggesting some of the darkness and mixed feelings in all of us about faithfulness versus infidelity. We want to believe our lovers are faithful but if we desire them, surely others might too? And if we know we are tempted, even if in our fantasy, to act out on our desires for others, we know that our partners can be similarly frail. For some people, I think, jealousy is like the scab we pick at, it’s sore but it reminds us that we are human and imperfect.

There is something of this in your character who desires to own and control his partner so much that the idea of her (or him) being in the arms of another is overwhelming (and not in the good sense!). Yet precisely because he is unfaithful he knows that the partner could be unfaithful too and so in attempting to control the partner, he is trying to control that part of himself that is uncontrollable and has oozed out. It’s classic projection. And mixed up with a horrid fascination of his loved one being wooed and seduced by another.

It’s believed that a lot of jealousy is about our own insecurities – if we like ourselves and are confident about our abilities and qualities, and believe we are lovable, why do we need to doubt our partners? Much of this may be linked to the kind of role modelling we received from our parents who will have acted out various “dramas” around trust and jealousy. How they did or did not resolve these dramas will affect how we manage them in our own adult lives.

Perhaps too we are partly hard wired, in an evolutionary sense, to be jealous to make sure that we keep our relationship “on its toes” as it were and work at things, certainly long enough to raise the children in our fertile years. 

Like many human emotions and responses, it’s about balance. Of course all of us are a little jealous at times, but it’s when it gets to stalking, obsessionality and crime that we have tipped over into something darker. So yes, your character does “add up” – just make sure the sums are not too neat and you’ll be onto a winner.

All the best

Gabriel

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