Read Online Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures by Ayala Malach Pines - Free Book Online Page B

threatened by a sibling.10
    In my research, the more older brothers people had, the more jealous they were likely to be. The more younger brothers they had, the less jealous they were likely to be. The number of sisters was not related to jealousy. This suggests that it's not the presence of a sibling in and of itself that triggers jealousy. The trigger has to be a sibling who is in a position of advantage (an older brother has an age and a sex advantage in our patriarchal society). Adult jealousy is influenced by childhood envy of the older sibling's advantage and by the childhood jealousy triangle with one's sibling and mother.11
    People who have a predisposition to jealousy can expect those around them to notice it at some point. And they do. The more jealous people are (or consider themselves to be), the more likely it is that people who know them well will consider them jealous. It's not easy to hide the torment of jealousy.
    If jealousy is hard to hide from people who know you, it is doubly hard to hide from intimate partners. They are the ones most likely both to trigger and to witness our jealousy. People are less likely to exhibit jealous behavior in public or in casual relationships and more likely to exhibit it in intimate relationships. One obvious reason is that jealousy is more likely to be triggered in an intimate relationship than in a less valued casual relationship. Another reason is that jealous behavior is generally considered socially unacceptable in our culture.)2
    Do people with whom you've had an intimate relationship consider you jealous? The more jealous people feel, the more likely it is that their romantic partners will consider them jealous (far more so than other people who know them well). The reason seems simple enough: When a person is jealous, their mate can't help but notice it and "tell it like it is." Right? Not necessarily. It is also possible that the more a mate considers one jealous, the more likely one will be to consider him or herself jealous. The mate may call one jealous for different reasons, only one of which is that one truly is jealous. Another reason, as we saw, is that the mate either has fantasies about sexual involvements with other people or has real affairs and makes one think one is excessively jealous to excuse his or her own behavior.
    When I asked people what they thought caused jealousy, one of the two most common responses was "personal insecurity." Some people, and as we saw earlier some researchers, believe that jealousy is part of a person's personality, that those who are insecure in general are also insecure about their intimate relationships, and that insecurity manifests itself in jealousy" Sounds straightforward enough, doesn't it? Yet the second top-rated explanation was, "Jeal- oust' is the result of being afraid of losing face." Third in the ranking was, "Jealousy is the result of weakness in the relationship" Fourth was, "Jealousy results from feeling excluded and left out."
    Being afraid of losing face, feeling excluded, and having problems in the relationship are not stable parts of a person's personality. Rather, they are related to the dynamics of 'a particular relationship or a particular situation.
    This brings us back to the notion that jealousy always results from an interaction between a certain predisposition and a certain triggering event. The predisposition for jealousy is related to other personality characteristics such as insecurity and self-esteem. Whether or not the predisposition will actually reveal itself depends on the relationship-the nature of problems the couple experiences, involvement with other people, as well as the trust and sense of security that both partners have in the relationship.
    Whether or not the predisposition to jealousy will reveal itself also depends on people's current mental state, which may have nothing to do with jealousy. The better one's mental state, the less likely one is to suffer from jealousy. Of