The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (30 page)

The clinical and self-help literature on coping with jealousy
and infidelity reveals a bias that ignores the usefulness of jealousy. The
central coping issue is typically framed as, How can jealousy be overcome? as
though the problem lay solely or primarily with the jealous person. Therapists
exhort the jealous person to “take responsibility” for the jealousy. In one
common therapeutic technique, called
systematic desensitization,
patients first list the situations that would trigger their jealousy and then
rank them according to the intensity of jealousy they evoke. Having one’s
partner make eye contact with a rival might evoke mild jealousy, followed by
flirting or cheek-kissing. Deep “French kissing” might evoke yet more jealousy,
especially if accompanied by groping and fondling. Witnessing a loved one
giving oral sex to someone else, however, might push a person over the edge
into an uncontrollable rage.

After this jealousy hierarchy is established, patients are
taught a progressive relaxation technique, whereby different parts of the body
are mellowed in succession. Finally, the therapist instructs the patient to
start imagining the jealousy-evoking events, beginning with the mild ones,
while maintaining bodily relaxation. If the patient tenses while going through
the hierarchy, the therapist retreats to a milder level until relaxation is
again established. The ultimate goal is to become so relaxed and comfortable
that vivid images of the partner trying out different sexual positions with a
rival are no more likely to evoke jealousy than an innocuous handshake.

Given the deep roots of the dangerous passion, eliminating
jealousy is unlikely. It could only be done if there were a zero probability of
infidelity or defection: if people never flirted with others, never smiled at
others, and never danced with others; if rivals never showed the slightest
interest in each others’ mates; if people never became dissatisfied with their
relationships; if all couples were perfectly matched on mate value; and if all
changes in desirability occurred equally and in precisely the same way for each
member of each couple. But short of locking couples alone in isolated chambers
devoid of all social interaction, these conditions will never be met.

Therapists are not alone in the view that jealousy is an emotion
that should be purged from our psychological repertoire. Some researchers argue
that jealousy is a malady that requires intervention. Several recommend
“cognitive reconstrual,” whereby remaining in a relationship despite suspected
affairs is viewed positively—a kind of happy-idiot solution. Some recommend
thinking about positive aspects of oneself as a method for “relieving
jealousy,” reminiscent of the palliative “just say no” as a magic solution to
making drug use disappear. And some view violent expressions of jealousy as
signs that a person is merely “reaching out for help in learning how to cope
with these powerful and complex emotions,” as though a man who has just
murdered his wife in a jealous rage just needs a bit of warm, unconditional
love. All of these recommendations ignore the fact that, in most instances,
it’s not the experience of jealousy per se that’s the problem but rather the
real threat of defection by a partner interested in a real rival.

Obviously, episodes of extreme, irrational, or pathological
jealousy can destroy an otherwise harmonious marriage, as we saw in the chapter
on the Othello syndrome. Coping strategies that carry the sole goal of
eliminating jealousy, however, would be like smashing a smoke alarm to solve
the problem of a house fire. Successful coping requires dealing with the fire.

One common coping strategy is to visit a therapist. Therapy can
sometimes be an enormous aid, clarifying the nature of the problem and offering
a rational set of alternative solutions. We must recognize, however, that
therapy may not be the perfect panacea. Therapists sometimes approach the
problems with moral judgments and personal biases that do more harm than good.
In a chapter in the
Clinical Handbook of CoupleTherapy,
Frank Pittman,
one of the leading experts in marital infidelity, asserted: “Infidelity is not
normal behavior, but a symptom of some problem.” Given that as many as half of
all married individuals have affairs, then according to this expert, as many as
50 percent of the population must be considered “abnormal.”

Marital experts often recognize that therapy cannot always solve
the problem of marital treachery. In one case, a man could not decide between
his wife and his affair partner, a co-worker: “The cuckolded wife threatened
divorce if he could not make up his mind. He assured her that he was not seeing
the other woman anymore, and although sex resumed in the marriage, the intimacy
was not renewed, as would be expected if he really were away from his affairee.
The wife kept finding clues, such as lipstick-stained cigarettes in his ashtray
and a woman’s underpants in his glove compartment. He told her it was her
imagination. She found his car in the woman’s driveway, and rammed it through
the woman’s laundry room, playing havoc with the plumbing. She demanded that
the affairee come to the therapy session with the couple. In the session, she
informed the affairee that she was still sleeping with her husband, and that he
was lying to both of them. The affairee felt betrayed and stalked out, saying
something to the effect that all men in her experience betray their wives, but
only a real asshole would betray his girlfriend.” Therapy was unsuccessful in
this case.

Although the therapist’s office is sometimes a safe haven to
work out adulterous triangles, passions can overheat to the point of destruction:
“The triangle meeting had been planned, but the ever-patient betrayed wife and
the long-standing affairee both failed to show up. As we discussed the matter
with the infidel [husband] in the office, we heard a scuffling in the hall. The
two women were fighting. The wife had been running late and the affairee had
been hiding in the stairwell, waiting for her. The affairee was trying to hit
the wife with a pocketbook when the husband came out and broke it up. He pushed
his bruised wife away as he comforted his sobbing affairee, and thus finally
made the decision that broke the impasse.” At least in this case, the therapy
forced a decision, although not one the wife liked.

As another example of therapy failing to heal a marriage,
consider the following case in which the husband refused to give up his affair
partner, but finally consented to go to therapy with his wife. He used the
therapy to deliver a hurtful blow: He “explained to his wife that she was lucky
to be married to him because she was such an ugly woman. She should feel proud
to be married to a man who was able to get such a beautiful affairee, and she
should appreciate the increased status that would come from accepting the new
woman into a ménage à trois.” Although the wife’s self-confidence plummeted to
an all-time low, she still had enough courage to get up and leave her husband
for good.

Despite their best intentions, therapists lacking extensive
knowledge of the real roots of jealousy can formulate diagnoses that may create
more havoc than healing. In one case, a man diagnosed as irrationally jealous
“expressed his helplessness in the face of a wife who, having returned to the
workforce after child rearing, now earned more than he and also expected him to
undertake tasks at home that contradicted his firmly held but unacknowledged
canons of manhood. In this case, jealousy was an element in a power struggle by
a man deprived of the supports for his fragile masculinity; he felt that his
wife had rendered him useless and robbed him of his self-esteem. He wanted her
home and dependent, but . . . it was easier to accuse her of adultery than to
voice . . . blatantly sexist demands.”

In attributing this man’s jealousy to sexism and fragile
masculinity, the therapist failed to recognize that women place a strong value
on men’s earning capacity. He failed to recognize that women who earn more than
their partners are indeed more likely to leave them for sound adaptive reasons.
And he failed to recognize that women who work are more likely to have affairs.
In this particular case, we do not know whether the man’s wife actually had an
affair, nor do we know whether his concerns were justified. What we do know is
that he was responding to a genuine threat, since over the long expanse of
human evolutionary history, men in these situations were more likely to suffer
from a mate’s infidelity or outright defection. This is not an argument, of
course, for women to stay at home or curtail their careers. Rather, it suggests
that the laying of blame for jealousy at the fashionable doorstep of “fragile
masculinity” and “sexist demands” fails to identify the real underlying causes,
and may lead to therapeutic interventions that fail.

Since jealousy and infidelity are human universals, it should
come as no surprise that every culture has prescribed methods of dealing with
them. When it comes to laws and other sanctions, the Golden Rule applies with a
vengeance; those who have the gold make the rule. Throughout human recorded history,
most laws have been written and legislated by men, so they reflect a male
rather than a female psychology. Across most cultures over human recorded
history, an infidelity by the wife is considered to be analogous to a “property
violation” against the husband. Laws and other cultural sanctions mete out
punishment both to the rival who has trespassed and to the wife who has
betrayed.

In some cultures, these sanctions have been severe. Among the
Bue of Fernando Po, an island off Equatorial Guinea, unfaithful women are
subjected to an escalating series of punishments: “For the first offense, the
offender’s hand is cut off and the stump is immersed in boiling oil; for the
second offense, the operation is repeated with the right hand; for the third,
the offender’s head is cut off and then there is no need of oil.”

Among the Baiga of Central India, one woman informant revealed
an episode in which her husband caught her in an embrace with her lover. The
husband attacked the rival with a blazing log, and then later inserted hot
chili peppers into her vagina as punishment.

Inflicting disgrace has been a common cultural strategy for
coping with infidelity. Among the Cumae in Campagna in ancient Italy, “the
adulterous woman was stripped and exposed to the insults of the crowd for many
hours, after which she was ridden on an ass through the city. She remained
dishonored forever after, and was called ‘she who has mounted the ass.’ ” In
North American Indian tribes, adultery was commonly punished by various forms
of body mutilation, such as cutting off the adulteress’s hair, ears, lips, or
nose.

In cultures with written laws, sexual infidelity is almost
always targeted for special legislation and punishment. This point is worthy of
pause. Throughout the entire world, wherever humans have written laws, who may
sleep with whom has always been legislated—a telling clue about human nature.

Among the Yap in the Micronesian islands, adultery by a woman is
classified as a theft, along with “the theft of personal goods, coconuts and so
forth.” In various groups in Africa, such as the Kipsigis of Kenya, women are
purchased by payment of cattle and other livestock. When a man is caught
sleeping with another man’s wife, the offender must compensate the husband in
kind with a payment of cattle.

Sanctioned methods of coping, codified in law, sometimes claim
the Bible or other religious documents as their sources. According to one
passage, for example, the Lord dictated to Moses to enjoin the people of Israel
to bring women suspected of infidelity to the priest, who would then make them
drink “water of bitterness.” If the woman was innocent, the bitter water would
have no ill effect. But if the woman was guilty of infidelity, she would absorb
the water, which would make her body swell with pain.

One culturally approved method of guarding against female
infidelity involves genital mutilation, which is widespread in cultures across
northern and central Africa, Arabia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Clitoridectomy,
the surgical removal of the clitoris, dramatically reduces the sexual pleasure
that women experience, presumably deterring them from straying. Clitoridectomy
is inflicted on millions of women in modern times, although there are movements
under way to eliminate the practice.

The writer Alice Walker describes a number of heart-wrenching
episodes of clitoridectomy. Here is one from Mali, Africa: “Among my people,
girls are not excised before they have breasts, before they develop and are
mature. I left my village to go to the capital when I was twelve, and up to
that time my father hadn’t asked me to be excised . . . when they asked me to
go through the excision with the other girls, I made an excuse that I was ill,
because I’d already asked how they did the excision. I knew they cut something off,
that it was very painful, and that some of the girls were badly traumatized . .
. I had a friend whom I loved a lot who died as a result of the excision . . .
When I told my father I didn’t want to submit to the excision . . . he did not
accept it, he hit me . . . So I tried to explain to my fiancé when he came at
night to see me; I hoped that as my future husband he would understand. I
explained to my fiancé that I was frightened; I told him how painful it would
be and that my friend had died and I might die, too . . . He didn’t try to
understand; he said he could not accept it either . . . He said he could not be
proud of a woman who would be dirty, who would be like a whore, and he would be
ashamed . . . He abandoned me.” This young woman managed to escape the
brutality of clitoridectomy, but her story and many others like it reveal that
concern with female fidelity lies at the core of genital mutilation.