The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (17 page)

At this point in the therapy, the wife started to accuse him of
having an affair with his brother’s wife. She swore that she could detect
erotic messages pass between them through eye contact and body signals. One
morning, she felt “moisture on his penis,” and accused him of a clandestine
encounter with his lover in the middle of the night while she slept.
Eventually, she convinced him to stop taking his medication. Shortly
thereafter, his jealousy began to flare again and he resumed his accusations of
infidelity. Apart from his jealousy, however, the therapist noticed no other
symptoms or psychiatric problems. On follow-up, the marriage had returned to
its original symbiotic state, with the husband extremely jealous and the wife
happy.

The husband’s jealousy, although it troubled him enough to seek
therapy, helped the marriage by making his wife feel loved and sexually
satisfied. When the jealousy subsided, she developed problems, and when it
returned, her problems disappeared. Like the agoraphobic women and their
jealous husbands, this couple lived in a delicate symbiotic balance that more
or less worked for them.

Couples seek therapy when their marriages become conflict-ridden
or intolerable. According to Shirley Glass, one of the world’s leading experts
on infidelity, jealousy and infidelity are among the most common core problems
of couples seeking treatment. Therapists who lack an understanding of adaptive
functions of jealousy run the risk of treating the defense while ignoring the
problems the defense is designed to combat. As noted earlier, many men and
women diagnosed as “pathologically jealous” turn out to have partners who are having
affairs, have had them in the past, or are thinking about having them.

In this chapter, I have proposed that over evolutionary time it
was more costly to
fail
to detect an infidelity that did occur than to
err in the other direction of being overly suspicious—an application of Error
Management Theory. This argument does not deny that jealousy can be
pathological. Sometimes it is, as when a husband has visual hallucinations that
his wife is having sex with another man right in front of him. Even in these
“pathological” cases, however, we often find that jealousy is responding to
real signs of potential infidelity—cues such as erectile dysfunction, inability
to sexually satisfy, or a widening difference between the partners in
desirability.

This analysis, of course, does not deny that jealousy can be
destructive. To the contrary, there may be no passion in humans that rivals
jealousy in the outpouring of violence it creates, a topic to which we now
turn.

If I Can’t Have Her, Nobody Can

Has anyone counted the victims of jealousy? Daily a revolver
cracks somewhere or other because of jealousy; daily a knife finds entrance
into a warm body; daily some unhappy ones, racked by jealousy and life weary,
sink into fathomless depths. What are all the hideous battles, narrated by
history, when compared to this frightful passion jealousy?

—Wilhelm Stekel, 1921,
The Depths of the Soul

I
N
T
HE
B
EAST IN
M
AN
by Emile Zola, the main character, named Rouband, questions his
wife about his suspicions: “ ‘Confess,’ he repeated, ‘you did sleep with him’ .
. . he knocked her down, grabbed her hair and by it held her to the floor.

“ ‘Confess. You slept with him. Confess you slept with him God
damn you,’ he cried, ‘or I’ll knife you!’ She could see murder plain on his
face . . . Fear overcame her; she capitulated just to end it all. ‘All right
then, yes, it’s true. Now let me go.’ After that it was frightful. The
admission which he had so savagely extracted was a direct body blow . . . He
seized her head and banged it against the table.”

This episode is pure fiction. Events like it, however, occur
daily by the thousands worldwide. Here are a few real-life examples of violence
triggered by sexual jealousy.

The first case is told by a woman, age 19, whose husband started
beating her shortly after they got married: “Tim [her husband] is really
jealous. I remember once when we were at my girlfriend’s house. I had to use
the bathroom. The bathroom is upstairs. Well, my girlfriend’s brother’s room is
next to the bathroom. I stood in front of his door and talked to him for a
minute on my way back downstairs. When I got to the stairs Tim was waiting for
me. He called me a whore and a tease and slugged me on the side of my head. I
fell down the stairs. I can’t blame Tim, though. I guess I shouldn’t have
talked to my girlfriend’s brother. I mean, I know Tim’s real jealous.”

In a second case, “the wife, confronted with yet another round
of accusations and cross-questioning about a boyfriend she had before marriage
and with whom she had a child, responded that at least her previous lover had
been man enough to get her pregnant. This touched on the husband’s fears about
his potency and fertility, and triggered a furious assault.”

We typically think of jealous violence as being mainly
perpetrated by men, but jealousy provokes violence in women as well, as the
following case illustrates: “A lady saw a woman in the street whom she believed
(probably correctly) was having an affair with her husband. She attempted to
walk on by, ignoring the other woman; however, as she passed her, she noticed
what she took to be a look of self-satisfaction on her face. This provoked a
sudden surge of anger, and she turned and grabbed the woman’s coat. Holding her
firmly by the collar, she warned the woman to keep away from her husband. In
gripping hold of the woman’s clothing, she somehow caused a degree of
constriction around the woman’s throat, who began to make choking noises,
presumably in an attempt to breathe against the constriction. The sound of the
other woman’s attempt to breathe triggered in the jealous assailant an
association with the heavy breathing and cries of orgasm. For her, the gasping
for breath became the sounds of this woman’s orgasm with her husband. At this
point, she lost control and in truth throttled her unfortunate rival.”

What are the links between sexual jealousy and intimate
violence? Why does jealousy erupt with such unbridled fury? And does this
seemingly destructive behavior have a hidden function behind it, a purpose that
accomplishes some goal for the perpetrator?

Evidence has been cumulating for decades suggesting that sexual
jealousy lies at the root of spousal battering and may exceed all other causes
combined. In one interview study of 44 battered wives seeking refuge in a
women’s hostel, 55 percent reported that jealousy was one of the main reasons
their husbands assaulted them. In another study of 150 cases of women who were
battered by their husbands, jealousy was listed as the key problem by the vast
majority. In a third study of 31 battered women in hostels and hospitals, 52
percent listed jealousy as the main cause of their husband’s violence, and a
whopping 94 percent cited is as it a frequent cause. A fourth study focused on
60 battered women who sought help at a rural clinic in North Carolina. In 57
out of the 60 cases, the women reported that their husbands were extremely
jealous, and that “leaving the home for any reason invariably resulted in
accusations of infidelity which culminated in assault.” A fifth study found
that 87 out of 101 battered women rated their husbands as very or extremely
jealous. Although the validity of any one study can be questioned, together
they strongly point to sexual jealousy as a major cause, and likely the leading
cause, of spousal violence.

Violence is not limited to marital mateships. It’s also
prevalent during dating. More than a dozen studies have examined date violence,
and the numbers are disturbing. Across these studies, the percentage who report
expressing any sort of violence, including threats of violence, toward a dating
partner range from 19 percent to 64 percent for men and from 22 percent to 69
percent for women, with the averages for both hovering around 40 percent. When
verbal threats are excluded and only actual acts of physical violence are
included, the self-reported rates of perpetrating date violence range from 14
percent to 45 percent for men and from 10 percent to 59 percent for women. Even
higher percentages are reported by people when asked whether they have ever
been the victims of date violence.

When dating individuals are quizzed about what causes the
violence, the results are remarkably consistent. As summarized by Sugarman and
Hotaling, “In every study in which a respondent had a chance to check or list
jealousy as a cause, it is the most frequently mentioned reason.”

Violence against partners triggered by sexual jealousy is not
limited to the United States, or to Western cultures, or even to particular
political systems. The cross-cultural evidence, although less systematically
collected than the North American evidence, reveals a strikingly similar
pattern. The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of the University of California at
Santa Barbara has studied the Yanomamö of Venezuela for more than 25 years. His
report:

“A particularly nasty husband might hit his wife with the sharp
edge of a machete or ax or shoot a barbed arrow into some nonvital area, such
as the buttocks or the leg. Another brutal punishment is to hold the glowing
end of a piece of firewood against the wife’s body, producing painful and
serious burns. Normally, however, the husband’s reprimands are consistent with
the perceived seriousness of the wife’s shortcomings,
his more drastic
measures being reserved for infidelity or suspicion of
 
infidelity
. It is not uncommon for a man
to seriously injure a sexually errant wife, and some husbands have shot and
killed unfaithful wives . . . during one of my stays in the villages a man shot
his wife in the stomach with a barbed arrow . . . Another man chopped his wife
on the arm with a machete; some tendons were severed . . . A club fight
involving a case of infidelity took place in one of the villages just before
the end of my first field trip. The male paramour was killed, and the enraged
husband cut off both of his wife’s ears.”

Halfway around the globe, the !Kung San of Botswana, often
described by anthropologists as a “peaceful people,” show a similar pattern of
male violence motivated by male sexual jealousy:

“N/ahka, a middle-aged woman, was attacked by her husband. His
assault resulted in injuries to her face, head and lips. Her husband accused
her of sleeping with another man . . . N/ahka and her husband had been married
for many years but had no children together. Her only child was a girl of about
fourteen years whose father was a Herero [a neighboring tribe] and to whom
N/ahka had not been married. The father never contributed to his daughter’s
support, and for many years the child had been reared by N/ahka’s parents who
lived in a different village. When N/ahka’s parents heard about the beating,
they made plans to lodge a formal complaint . . . against their son-in-law.
Other people, not close relatives of N/ahka or her husband, claimed that the
couple had a long history of discord, allegedly because the wife liked to sleep
with Bantu men.”

In cultures the world over, men find the thought of their
partner having sexual intercourse with other men intolerable. Suspicion or
detection of infidelity causes many men to lash out in furious anger rarely
seen in other contexts.

Paul Mullen of the University of Otago documented a range of
violent behavior in a sample of 138 patients who were referred to therapy
because of jealousy. Some acts of jealous violence were commonplace, such as
pushing, shoving, kicking, throwing objects, and destroying property. In
addition, however, six men and two women wielded a knife while issuing verbal
threats, and nine waved blunt instruments such as large clubs or pokers. One
man pressed a gun to his wife’s head while threatening her life. A full 57
percent of the sample of jealous patients had a history of committing acts of
spousal violence, again varying widely in form. Ten reported throttling their
wives with intent to kill, one attempted poisoning with gas, 11 beat the spouse
with blunt instruments, fracturing bones in four cases. Most perpetrators
seemed intent on delivering bodily damage.

The psychologists John Gottman and Neil Jacobson of the
University of Washington designed a study to explore the prevalence of
battering. They advertised for couples in local newspapers. Out of the 140
couples studied, 63 fell into the group labeled as “battered.” Couples were
classified as such only if the wife reported
six or more
episodes
within the past year of pushing or shoving (low-level violence),
at least
two
episodes of high-level violence such as kicking or punching, or
at
least one
instance of violence deemed potentially lethal, such as being
severely beaten, threatened with a weapon such a gun or knife, or sustaining
injuries from a gun or knife. The only criterion for participation in the study
was that the couples had to be experiencing “conflict” within their marriage.
No mention of battering or abuse was contained in the ads.

I recall one case of an unusual injury with particular sadness.
Several years ago, I traveled to Europe to establish cross-cultural research
collaborators to conduct research on jealousy. At one university, I met a
graduate student, 24 years old and intelligent, perceptive, alert, and sweet in
disposition. She was a strikingly attractive woman, but she bore a strange
facial feature. On both sides of her cheeks were two white scars, thin but
clearly visible, each about three inches in length running vertically. The
scars, she told me over coffee, were the result of her boyfriend’s attack when
she told him with finality that she was breaking off the relationship. He
assaulted her with a straight razor, slashing her face on both sides, while
screaming that he would ruin her for all other men. Fortunately, the story has
a happy ending. She recovered, and the last I heard she was succeeding in
graduate school and had become engaged to another man. But her face would
forever bear the scars of jealous rage.