Jealousy and Envy

Jealousy mixes several experiences: fear of loss, suspicion, wounded dignity, a wish to control, and a real breach of an agreement.

Simply forbidding yourself to be jealous is hard and usually useless. It is more useful to work out the source.

If a partner is breaching agreed boundaries, the problem is not that the jealous person is insufficiently enlightened. What is needed is a conversation about the agreement and the consequences. If there are no grounds and the anxiety keeps reproducing itself, control rarely helps. Checks, bans and demands for proof lower the fear briefly and dismantle the relationship gradually.

Loving someone doesn’t mean wanting every good thing for them regardless of your own limits. You can want their happiness and decline to take part in the form of happiness they have chosen.

Envy doesn’t disappear on the order to treat someone else’s success as unimportant either. It reports:

This person got what I would want.

That is useful information once you break it down more precisely. Do we want their money, their freedom, their recognition, their skill, their relationships, or only the picture of the result?

Another person’s life is visible selectively. We rarely know the price, the luck and the unpleasant parts of the package. But there is no obligation to comfort yourself with the successful person’s compulsory hidden misery either.

You can admit:

Yes, he has something I don’t have right now.

After that two productive questions remain:

Do I actually want this?

What part of his route applies to me?

Someone else’s success doesn’t reduce your own worth. Sometimes it just clarifies a desire in an uncomfortable way.

Envy takes apart nicely under a question about the package. The colleague who got the promotion got Saturday meetings with it, responsibility for other people’s mistakes and conversations about redundancies. What people envy is usually the line in the job description, not the calendar. If the wish survives a detailed listing of the package, it is a goal you can work with. If it evaporates, what you envied was not the person’s life but the minute the promotion was announced.

Jealousy works the same way, except that what gets checked is the agreement rather than the package. A breached agreement is one thing; you can talk about it directly. Anxiety that refers to no breach at all is another, and it therefore keeps demanding fresh proof. The first is resolved by a conversation. The second is only enlarged by one.