My Jealousy Issues Keep Ruining My Relationships & I’m Determined To Stop Them

In books and movies, jealousy is portrayed as sexy and passionate. You can’t tell someone’s madly in love with you until they fly into a jealous rage, right? The truth is that jealousy destroys everything. It takes the trust that builds up between two people and crushes it. It invites poison, vitriol, and resentment into spaces that were once full of love, laughter, and honesty. My jealousy issues have been the ruining of my past relationships, and they threaten to hurt my marriage sometimes, but I’m not going to rest until I eradicate them completely.

1. I project my insecurities onto my partner. That’s the long and the short of it. I’m insecure. Me. I’m the one who’s insecure about my thighs, my stomach, my ambitions, my motivation, and my sloth-like laziness. My lovely wife tells me every day that I am beautiful, sexy, smart, funny, and creative. She builds me up sky high. My insecurities are not her fault. I know she’s not looking at other people wondering if they’re all the things I’m not because she thinks I’m everything. I need to think so too.
2. My jealousy makes me side-eye my partner’s friends. Okay, let me rephrase that: my jealousy used to make me side-eye my partner’s friends. I stopped it the second I recognized what I was doing. In the first place, I know all too well what it’s like to date someone who isolates you from your friends. I know how unfair it is, how sick, how manipulative, and how damaging. However, in recognizing it with my wife, I also realized that the pattern repeated itself in past relationships. That makes me feel profoundly ashamed of myself.
3. I’m essentially punishing my lover for the actions of my exes. Jealousy comes from something. Mine comes from my first youthful infatuation. I mastered the art of jealousy because I was the girl my popular football-playing BFF fooled around with on the weekends when he couldn’t hang out with his cheerleader girlfriends. It typically springs from being cheated on, dumped, or hurt in some way. Put it into perspective like that, and you realize that you’re basically making your current partner pay for what your exes did. Not fair, not cool, and not right.
4. Just because I obsessively compare myself to others, that doesn’t mean my partner does. Comparing yourself to somebody else almost always sparks feelings of envy or jealousy. I look at other women sometimes, and my feelings of inadequacy just floor me. That’s my problem, though. That’s my issue. My wife doesn’t compare me to other people. She doesn’t view me like that and it’s not her fault that I do it.
5. Fear of losing what I have makes me possessive… I tend to cling because of this. I’m like ivy. Once upon a time, I didn’t even want to let my wife out of my sight, ever. I was so afraid that somebody better would come along and snatch her away. The very thought of it devastated me because I was just so desperate to keep hold of the best thing I ever had.
6. … But people aren’t possessions. It’s that simple. Treat someone like a possession, and you end up pushing them away instead of bringing them closer to you. I don’t own my wife. I can’t follow her around all day, growling and snarling at people who look at her. She deserves better than that, anyway.
7. My partner isn’t responsible for what happens in my imagination. I can’t hold her accountable because I’ve imagined some scenario where the flirty barista who takes her order every morning asks her on a date. I can’t get mad even if that happens, honestly — not unless she says yes. Jealousy can get so thick that the things you imagine seem real, but at that point, you have to take a step back and look at yourself.
8. I don’t have a reason to feel jealous, and I need to realize that. My wife has never given me a reason to feel insecure. Not one. That’s the messed up thing, you see. I trust her implicitly, more than I’ve ever trusted another person. She’s not the flirtatious type. She doesn’t cheat – she has too much honor and integrity for that. Maybe I had a reason to feel jealous in past relationships, but not this one.
9. Jealousy obliterates the foundations of trust. You’re practically saying you don’t trust your partner. It doesn’t matter if you insist otherwise. I insisted otherwise, but all the same, I wondered about friends and coworkers and even the guy who mowed our lawn. I tried to spin it by saying I wasn’t worried about my wife, just everybody else, but that holds no weight. My love, after all, is a grown woman, fully capable of making her own decisions. It’s not like our leering lawn guy is somehow going to talk her into tripping on his junk or something.
10. Accuse someone of something enough and they’ll do it. You keep accusing someone of cheating or acting like they’re messing around, and they’re going to get sick of defending themselves all the time. In fact, constant accusations could propel someone just to do it, so they can at least enjoy the fun while they’re getting blamed for something they didn’t do. I never want to push my wife to that, so I need to get a hold of myself.
11. My jealousy is a means of manipulating my partner, and that’s not who I am. At the heart of the matter, that’s all jealousy does. “Oh, honey, your friend makes me feel insecure so don’t talk to her anymore, okay?” “Baby, that waitress is totally flirting with you, I never want to eat here again.” That’s sick. That’s not anything I ever want to do to another person.