The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (32 page)

Imagine that you phone your romantic partner at home and an
unfamiliar voice answers. Now imagine that your romantic partner has lunch with
an attractive person of the opposite sex. Finally, imagine that your romantic
partner visits a former lover. How would you cope with these potential threats?
The psychologists Peter Salovey and Judith Rodin conducted a systematic
analysis of psychological coping strategies. They asked 95 people to rate the
degree to which they used 15 different coping strategies in response to a
variety of possible threats to romantic relationships, ranging from a partner
having lunch with someone else to a partner having a florid affair with someone
else.

Through the statistical procedure of factor analysis, these
researchers identified two primary psychological coping strategies. The first,
labeled
self-reliance,
involved psychological attempts to refrain from
thinking about, or becoming emotional about, the infidelity threat—not feeling
angry or embarrassed, and not thinking about the unfairness of the situation.
This mode of “becoming philosophical” about the matter, however, is tough to do
since one’s self-esteem can experience a tremendous blow.

The second psychological coping method is
self-bolstering,
which involves attempts to shore up self-esteem. People report consciously
thinking about their good qualities, doing something nice for themselves, and
bolstering how they feel about themselves. Self-bolstering obviously would not
be necessary if self-esteem did not plummet in the face of an infidelity threat.

No emotion can shatter dreams and bones as much as jealousy.
It’s an adaptive signal of an impending threat to a primary love relationship.
It’s an emotion that can drive a woman to obsessive vigilance, or a man to reckless
violence. It becomes all the more puzzling, therefore, that fully 50 percent of
all individuals who reported on specific episodes of jealousy indicated that
they intentionally tried to conceal their jealousy from their partner and kept
their feelings to themselves. Why would this adaptive emotion be suppressed?
Why would the alarm bell be concealed from the very person responsible for
triggering it to begin with?

The answer to this mystery lies with the logic of mate value.
While the experience of jealousy serves as a signal of external threat, the
display of jealousy is often interpreted as a sign that the jealous person is
lower than his or her partner in desirability. Those who remain indifferent to
a partner’s flirtations, confident in their mate’s fidelity, assured in their
view that their partner cannot do better on the mating market, do not display
jealousy. On the other hand, those who feel that their position is indeed
threatened, that their partner might leave, that they might find it difficult
to replace their current partner, cannot help but experience pangs of jealousy.

So the co-evolution of signals takes over. What started out as
an emotion designed to deal with a real adaptive problem has turned into a
signal that can be interpreted by one’s mate and all others as a sign of
relatively low mate value. At this stage in the co-evolutionary arms race, most
people infer that the more jealous partner is the partner lower in
desirability. And it is this awful inference, which itself can lower a person’s
self-perceived desirability, that has led to monumental efforts to suppress the
outward display of jealousy. By keeping it concealed, the jealous person avoids
getting compared unfavorably with a rival, avoids reputational damage, and
above all, reduces the odds that the regular mate will view him or her as a
loser. By concealing jealousy, a person can conceal the display of feeling
threatened and mute perceptions of a difference in desirability.

Another common strategy is to intentionally evoke jealousy in
one’s partner. In our studies of mate retention tactics, we found that some
individuals intentionally talk to members of the opposite sex at parties to
make their partner jealous, show overt interest in others to make their partner
angry, and even smile and flirt with others in front of their partner to evoke
jealousy. Women proved to be twice as likely as men to intentionally elicit
jealousy from their partner. Given that men’s jealousy is the root cause of
most violence against women, why would a woman go out of her way to
deliberately provoke an emotion that could unleash a torrent of abuse?

A clue to this puzzle comes from the lab of Gregory White, who
identified the circumstances in which women consciously evoke their partner’s
jealousy. White asked men and women to indicate who was more involved in the
relationships—themselves or their partners. He found that whereas 50 percent of
the women who view themselves as more involved than their partner intentionally
provoke jealousy, only 26 percent of the women who are equally or less involved
resort to this mode of coping. Differences in involvement, of course, signal a
gap in desirability; the more involved partner is generally less desirable,
whereas the less involved partner is generally more desirable.

During subsequent interviews, women admitted that they are
motivated to evoke jealousy in order to inspire greater commitment and
possessiveness in their partner, as well as to increase psychological
closeness. They also instigate jealousy to test the strength of the
relationship, a topic we will explore in the final chapter. Although
motivations for arousing jealousy are varied and complex, one function seems
clear—an attempt to rectify the imbalance in perceived mate value. By eliciting
jealousy, women convey a vital message to their partners: “Others are
interested in me; I’m highly desirable; don’t take me for granted.”

If suppressing one’s own jealousy and evoking jealousy in
partners are two tactics for coping with problems of relative mate value, a
third coping strategy involves derogation of competitors. In one study,
students who were currently involved in serious romantic relationships of at
least three months’ duration were asked to indicate their perceptions of their
partner’s preferences in an ideal mate. Then they evaluated their own standing
regarding each of these traits, how they measured up to their partner’s picture
of an ideal mate. The qualities included honesty, sociability, warmth,
sincerity, good looks, wit, popularity, reliability, charm, spontaneity, the
right height, activity level, intelligence, emotional expressiveness, humor,
and generosity.

After rating their partner’s preferences and then their own
standing, participants read the following instructions: “A jealousy situation
usually involves three persons: yourself, your partner, and a third person to
whom you or your partner is attracted. Please try to remember the last instance
in your present relationship when you felt jealous because you thought that
your partner was attracted to another person; if you are currently jealous
because you think your partner is attracted to another person, you should
choose this instance. Please answer the following questions about your
perception of this other person.”

The participants then provided background information on their
rivals and the rival’s relationship with their partner, and then rated their
rivals on the 18 attributes. Jealousy turned out to be extremely important in
the lives of most of these participants. A full 59 percent believed that their
partner had had some kind of sexual contact with their rival, 45 percent
reported that their rival was at the same university, and 59 percent had some
kind of direct contact with their rival. So the threat of a partner’s potential
defection was not just hypothetical; it was a reality, or at least a perceived
reality, for a majority.

The most important finding was that people denigrated their
rivals on precisely the dimensions they believed that their partner valued. If
their partner prized intelligence in a potential partner, then participants
derogated their rivals by evaluating them as stupid. If their partner valued
honesty, participants rated their rivals as deceitful. If their partner
appreciated height, participants rated their rivals as Lilliputian. Whatever
qualities their partner admired, participants found rivals woefully lacking in
precisely those qualities.

The author of this study interprets these findings according to
a standard theory of self-esteem: people’s self-esteem is threatened when their
partners are attracted to rivals, and so denigrating the rival is a method of
restoring feelings of self-worth. This interpretation is endorsed by two
leading jealousy researchers, Gregory White and Paul Mullen: “The goal of
derogation of the rival is to reduce the . . . threat to self-esteem.”

The importance of this coping strategy has roots deep in human
history, probably traceable to the origin of language itself. But the first
codified version appeared in Ecclesiasticus: “The blow of the whip raises a
welt, but the blow of the tongue crushes bones.” The psychologists Gordon
Allport and Leo Postman put it more precisely: “Rumor is set in motion and
continues to travel by its appeal to the strong personal interests of the
individuals involved in the transmission.” Running down a rival does more than
make a person feel good; it serves a valuable purpose. Derogation is an
adaptive strategy that succeeds when it effectively decreases a rival’s mate
value. It’s an excellent method for coping with an infidelity threat, provided
it succeeds in rendering the rival less desirable. Lisa Dedden, David Schmitt,
and I tested this idea through a series of studies of derogation of
competitors. We first wanted to find out all the ways in which men and women
grapple with rivals by attempting to damage their social reputation.

We started by asking men and women to tell us what verbal barbs
they have used themselves, or heard others use, to render their rivals less
desirable to their romantic partners. People were loquacious on the topic,
mentioning slurs ranging from men telling their partners that the rival enjoyed
“using” women, to women telling their partners that the rival has a sexually
transmitted disease. From these nominations we derived a list of 83 things
people could do to render their rivals less desirable. Next, we wanted to
discover which derogation tactics men and women used and how effective they
were likely to be. We found remarkable sex differences in how often each tactic
was used, precisely in line with our theory. Men tended to denigrate their
rival’s resources, indicating that their rival lacked money, drove a run-down
old car, was viewed as a loser, and was likely to do poorly professionally.
Women, in contrast, tended to deride their rival’s physical appearance, making
fun of the size and shape of the rival’s body, laughing at the rival’s
hairstyle and clothes, and pointing out blemishes and asymmetries. The tactics
were also sex-linked in their perceived effectiveness. It proved to be far more
effective for men than for women to derogate a rival’s resource potential,
present or future, whereas women achieved greater success by ridiculing a
rival’s appearance.

These findings were disconcerting for one very obvious reason:
men can clearly observe a woman’s physical appearance for themselves, so how
could mere words alter those observations? Would a man really be dissuaded if
his romantic partner declared to him, “You shouldn’t be attracted to supermodel
Claudia Schiffer . . . she’s really a dog!” Wouldn’t direct observation give
lie to these verbal efforts at psychological manipulation?

Further exploration revealed that these verbal tactics can work
in two ways. First, making public one’s disparaging opinion of another woman’s
appearance can enhance its effectiveness. The fact that others in one’s social
world believe a woman to be unattractive can damage a man’s reputation by
association. Since men’s social status is affected by the physical appearance
of his partner, men are highly sensitive to how others view their partner’s
looks.

Second, this tactic can work by steering a man’s attention to
flaws that are not otherwise directly observable or may not have been noticed.
In one episode, a friend reported attending a party with his girlfriend, but
ended up flirting with another woman, which the girlfriend observed. Driving
away from the party, the girlfriend, in the most casual and offhanded manner,
happened to mention that the other woman (her rival at the party) had heavy
thighs, but said no more. The next time the man encountered the object of his
flirtation, he found himself staring at her thighs, and concluded that, indeed,
they were a tad heavy. What started out unnoticed became amplified in his
attentional field. His girlfriend’s coping strategy worked. Our actual
perceptions of a person’s beauty can be influenced in subtle ways by the views
of others.

The story turns out to be a good deal more complicated, of
course. Many derogation tactics attain their effectiveness because they are
difficult for the target to verify directly, such as impugning a rival’s
intentions (he just wants to get laid) or implying a sexually transmitted
disease (who really wants to verify this directly?). Still others capitalize on
informational ambiguity, as in implications that the rival “might be bisexual.”
Others exploit the fact that a person’s future is always highly uncertain, and
so it is hard for the target to check out whether someone really will do poorly
professionally several years down the road. Derogation tactics also take
advantage of the fact that prior behavior is often difficult to substantiate
(hinting that one’s rival has had many past sex partners, or has slept with the
entire football team, for example).

Many put-down tactics involve sweeping inferences about
personality characteristics. Derogators emphasize that their rivals are weak,
wimpy, cowardly, and lacking ambition; insensitive, selfish, uncaring, and
inconsiderate; cheating, disloyal, exploitative, loose, and undisciplined;
emotionally unstable, flighty, and prone to cry easily; and dumb, boring,
stupid, and “dizzy.” These tactics acquire their effectiveness from the
personality traits that people in cultures around the world want in a romantic
partner—someone who is active, bold, agreeable, dependable, emotionally stable,
creative, and intelligent.