Jealousy and the danger of Synonyms

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563

I would like to suggest to you that confusing words is dangerous. When we confuse words, we confuse concepts. And other than material reality, concepts are ninety percent what we rely on to make reality real. Like many traumatized queers, I’ve a really bad memory. You can see proof. It’s a long story involving a court, some police, and a couple kindly psychiatrists, but when I was eight, they tested me for a lot. One of the things that they found was that the memory my parents had praised just four years ago was in pretty rough shape. My bad memory means a lot of gaps: gaps in my recollection, gaps in my capacity, and gaps in my ability to retrieve words. You’ll be talking to me, and then like a senior citizen I will prove myself completely unable to retrieve the word I need. It happens to everyone, but it happens to me a lot. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I am an enemy of synonyms.^[1]

Being bad at word retrieval means that I have had to expand my vocabulary to compensate. If I can’t find a word (especially pre-smart phones) I must either give up my sentence, or get dirty with a synonym, tossing a word that almost works into the conversation, just to keep things moving along. When you do this enough, you become absolutely, utterly distraught by how insufficient and ill-suited the replacement words you dredge up are. For instance, I might be talking desperately to a friend about just how important it is to reinterpret one’s civic duty during fascist times to be more open to illegal and unlawful activities that are in the interest of the healing the body politic. Except, I can’t think of the word civic. So, I say national. Then realizing just how “national duty” sounds I sputter that that is not what I mean at all. Yet I still can’t retrieve the word civic. It’s right there and yet its not coming. So now my friend thinks that I’m interested no in healing the civic body politic, but in the health of the nation—I sound positively fascist. My cosmopolitan sensibilities shudder.

This is also how I feel about the word jealousy. We all use it far too much, when in actuality we usually mean something else. We, collectively, have a really awful understanding of just what jealousy is. We think it synonymous with envy, suspicion, bitterness, distrust, spite, and even that ever-biblical covetousness. Jealousy is not these things and confusing jealousy with them is dangerous. Ultimately, much like confusing the civic state with the nation, and thereby shrinking in our minds the capacity for pluralism implicit in a non-national state, when we let jealousy become a word which encompasses everything from love to hate, from suspicion to dejection, we render our world more black-and-white, less open to nuance and care, and more totalizing. There is a politics to jealousy, and it is domineering. Both she who believes that she is jealous and she who accuses another of being jealous often foreclose the capacity for actual communication. Because of this, we must wrestle back from jealousy all that we have come to confuse it with.

Let me tell you what is truly at work in jealousy. To do so, I will proceed in a somewhat Socratic fashion, as though we are having an argument. I will propose a definition, that jealousy is a form of anger born out of a fear of theft, and I will consider every likely objection to this claim possible. In doing so, I will take you through all that we confuse jealousy with and show you why it is not each one of those things. I will also do my best to point out the real practical danger in confusing jealousy with them.

Despite our firmly held ideological differences, I tend to keep up with Shal Marriot’s writing (her stuff on sitcoms and operas is always fun). I was reading what I believe to be her most recent piece on the importance of comedies and I found a truly perplexing idea expressed with full confidence^[2]: “Yet in their hyperbolic form, comedies allow us to see the redeemable and even charming features of the individual who exhibits these otherwise vicious behaviors. Jealousy, for example, is the result of loving too much or too deeply.” This perplexed me. Yet, when I spoke to several friends about how they thought of their jealous streaks, similar answers kept coming back to me. They believed that they simply had too much love for their partner. A mother I spoke to said that she was jealous of her child’s friends, because she loved her kid too much to see him leave. She said that she didn’t want ‘the world to have him’. She wished she could keep him all to herself. That was how much she loved him.

I agree that often jealousy appears to us as an overextension, an excess. Yet to conceptualize it as an excess of love is to valorize jealousy. We love love. Love is one of the highest goods in our society. So when something is love is to justify it. And, if we claim that jealousy is the result of an excess of love, in a society is where love is the highest good, then it is to draw a distinction between people who have more love and people who comparatively lack love. The unjealous get rhetorically repositioned as those who do not love sufficiently or at least comparatively deeply. And don’t you want to be loved as much as possible? Further, if you are the ‘jealous type’ then this claim allows you to position yourself as someone who is more in love than most people. Isn’t that wonderful? If you’re prone to jealousy but jealousy is an excess of love, then your friends who are not jealous are simply more heartless than you. Sure, you should work on controlling your jealousy, but really, no one can blame you for having such a big heart. Claiming as a jealous person that jealousy is an excess of love is to say to the unjealous, “I love her more than you love your wife. That is why I am the jealous type and you are not. I simply love too deeply.” It’s an awful slap in the face to anyone with a stable, happy relationship that is not marred by paranoia. Worse, it reveals a self-aggrandizing streak that allows the speaker to hold themselves up as noble for their jealousy. If you think your jealousy means that you love more, deeper, better than others, how will you ever bring yourself to give it up, to heal? No, jealousy is not some great sign of a purer heart, a greater sensitivity to emotions.

The cause is a belief that experiencing love for something or someone is a form of ownership or claim-staking in and of itself. If I adore a TV show and I found out that my work enemy has recently started watching and raving about that show, I feel jealousy. I think “that’s my thing!” because implicitly I believe that my affection for it allows me some form of ownership. Without that implicit belief, jealousy cannot function. Likewise, if I’m a man and if I hate my wife, but I have housed her for many years, and she has cooked and cleaned and fed me for those years too, we may scream at each other, I may even fantasize about her dying, but if another man shows interest in her, I think “You can’t have her! She is mine!” because I am attributing ownership. And what causes this sense of ownership is having spent years with her in mutual dependence. We can also look to the more polite term for a person prone to jealousy. We say, “she is possessive”. A possessive person must have a possession or else that possessiveness is never seen. Perhaps, like jealousy, it might appear when you think that you should own something, yet that is more a mistake than a difference. Believing I own something will inspire the same emotional response as if it was a true belief.

In sex we often play at possessiveness. It might appear as my lover taking her mouth away from my clit to look me in the eyes with a firm stare which my shaking body could not possibly match as, low, from the back of her throat, comes a single, guttural, “Mine.” Other times it is brough to an extreme. A friend tells me of a girlfriend who bought her a dog cage with a dog bed in it, to spend the night. She talks about wanting a microchip implant with her own unique ID number in it so that her belonging could be made manifest in her very body, under her skin, truly inside her in a way no mere penetrative act could begin to approach. Another friend tells me how she wants to wear a perfume made out of her girlfriend’s pheromones. She wants to smell like her girlfriend at her most needy. She wants to be marked by her love. She wants her girlfriend’s sex instantly unconsciously communicated to all around her. She wants to smell freshly fucked. She wants our animal brains to known that she is constantly owned. A third friend tells me how she plays at jealousy. She begged her boyfriend to surprise her one night by slamming the screen door, throwing a glass vase full of flowers and water at the wall, screaming at her that he knew that she’d been fucked, and then ripping her dress off to prove with force to her that she was his and his alone. Apparently, this is what she longed for.

With these three examples we can see how possessiveness differs from jealously. To be covetous, that is, to want to own something or to cherish owning it can be crippling. It can be locking something away behind so many padlocks and safety mechanisms that you yourself cannot enjoy it. Perhaps even the thing you’ve locked away will decay, fall into disrepair, rot, or die. There are many negative stereotypes about covetous people or beings. Outside of antisemitism, the most common is dragons. We picture Smaug sitting on a pile of gold that he could never spend and has no need of spending, and yet it is his life. He will kill and he will die for it. And that is exactly where jealousy comes in. Jealousy is not mere ownership. It must also involve anger and suspicion.

We can be jealous because we are insecure, because we fear a loss of affection, because we haven’t internalized our own value. The cause can differ greatly. But ultimately underneath the situational or psychological cause, there is implicitly the concept of ownership as the base, upholding all else as superstructure. If you are insecure or fear a loss of affection, the jealousy is still proprietary. It is just that you don’t think that you are a worthy owner. You conceive of yourself as a peasant who has found the crown jewels undefended at the wayside. He wants to own them, he wants to have them, but he fears that he could not possibly defend them. To own something so pretty would require resources and security a man in his position could not possess.

One of the things that jealousy is often confused for and intertwined with is fidelity, whether one is loyal. And it is true, that in monogamy, jealousy surrounds the possibility of someone failing to meet an obligation they’ve chosen to hold to you, that of exclusivity. Yet, experientially, we can see how they differ. When you are mad at a broken obligation, you are mad at the person who has broken the obligation. If I ask someone to hold something for men and he throws it away because someone else has offered him money or fame to hold onto something else, something larger that requires both hands, I am mad at the person who broke the obligation. I am not mad at whoever has bought his services. Meanwhile, jealousy as an emotion is near exclusively aimed not at the person who has the obligation but at the third parties who are viewed as a threat. You see this in the language of jealousy: “she stole him away from me,” “he took her away from her.” Yes, there is also an obligation that is being broken, but the fear is not centrally about the obligation. It is about who might entice them to break it, and who might want it broken.

It is true that a feeling of anger at the person who ‘cheated’ can be present when an actual transgression occurs. However, a transgression is not actually necessary for the feeling of jealousy to appear. One can be jealous because you imagined that a transgression might occur. And despite the possibility of a transgression, a loss, a theft, occurring is usually central to jealousy, we don’t tend to call the feeling of being cheated or stolen from jealousy. When a transgression does occur we voice it by saying “I’m hurt,” “I’m disappointed,” “I feel betrayed,” or “I’m angry”. We do not say “I’m jealous of you that you slept with her.” Jealousy is not directed at your partner. Your partner might bear the brunt of its consequences. But it is always directed at “the other woman”. That’s another central aspect of it. Jealousy is a directed emotion. We are jealous “of” someone or something. We can say “I am hungry” or “I am horny” without the listener reply “for what?”. Yet, when we say that we are jealous, the listener reply “of who?”

You might object to this and claim that no, you don’t care who wants your partner. What you care about is your partner’s own attention. What upsets you is not the women who has been flirting with your partner, but the way their eyes darted to them at the cocktail party while you were trying to talk to them. Yet, we rarely feel jealousy when our partner’s eyes dart to non-sexual things, like a passing bus or a soccer game on TV. We might grow frustrated with them if we’re trying to talk to them about something meaningful. But we wouldn’t label it as jealousy. We tend to be understanding when a partner must travel for work or state late at the office (provided that we believe that they are indeed actually working late). We might complain about it. But we wouldn’t commonly call it jealousy, and if we did, it would be understood primarily, perhaps exclusively, as metaphor. Thus, the idea of “I want your focus on me” is almost always in relation to “other women”, that is, to other potential owners.

Even if your partner broke a routine with you, to do it with someone else, we would be incorrect to call it jealousy. An ex of mine and I for instance had plans to see Barbenheimer together. We watched Barbie and then they suddenly revealed that they had made plans with another woman to see Oppenheimer (gosh that relationship sucked, and yes this is more or less what ended it). Still, the feeling I felt when they left me to join another woman, a woman I knew that they were sexually and romantically into, to see Oppenheimer, wasn’t jealousy. Instead, what I felt could be better captured by terms like “neglected” or “dejected”. The feelings that came out where ones of sorrow, self-pity, and loneliness. It was a blue emotion, an empty one. Meanwhile jealousy as a term is almost discussed in relation to fear and anger. Jealousy is “red hot”. It is an active and anxious emotion that is unlikely to come into play when you’ve been let down. Now, if I had pictured my ex sneaking off to the bathroom with the other woman after the movie, perhaps some of that white hot jealousy would have entered my bloodstream. Thankfully, Oppenheimer is hardly the movie to get one’s loins burning. Jealousy seems then to require a mix of fear of loss and anger at potential theft. And if both those elements aren’t present, it seems a misnomer to call it jealousy. I’d even go a step further and say that we don’t call it jealousy unless there is another person that the lover can be lost “to”.

You might tell me that jealousy is not so much about ownership but positionality. Afterall, it is a fear that we are no longer the thing that we once were to our partner. According to my argument, that thing is owner, but you could claim that instead it is about esteem. Perhaps jealousy is about a fear of a loss of specialness in the eyes of another. Yet, there are many instances when I feel my specialness slipping away that we would not call jealousy. If I make an ass of myself in front of a friend, if I get drunk and hit on them, or say something sexist or boorish, and feel them pull away, I know that I have lost a specialness in their eyes. Yet I do not feel jealousy. Once again, I feel loneliness. I feel dejected. I’m afraid and I am ashamed. But I am not jealous.

When we confuse jealousy with other emotions, we make our world smaller, we close down avenues for expressing the nuances of how we feel. When we conflate it with love, we enable other conflations, such as with anger or violence. We ennoble it and ennoble the anger contained within it. Suddenly outbursts filled with screams and thrown dinnerplates become a sign of love. Because jealousy is an emotion that we can justifiably be angry at another for experiencing (because it involves this anger and this sense of ownership and all the control involved in that) when we confuse it with dejection, we can render understandable loneliness into a something wrong. If we mistake dejection for jealousy, we can frame the dejected person as unjustified, as possessive, as morally culpable. It is far easier to yell at a needlessly jealous spouse than it is to yell at a lonely one. These are the dangers of synonyms. This is the danger of confusing concepts. When we say one thing is another, that gives us permission to justify what should not be justified. Relationships are built on communication, and they die when we can no longer understand each other.

The following people are “founding member” paid subscribers. That is, they are people who decided that my work was not only worth supporting, but that they could afford to pay more than the rate I was asking. On both a financial and emotional level these people mean an incredible amount to me. I screamed aloud the first time anyone ever became one. I cried when a second person did. The least I can do is thank each one individually. They give me hope. Thank you to:

Hopestill, derf, X Valentine, T S, i.m., Rachel K, jessie, and Vailliante

You have filled me with joy, and helped make this writing possible.

^[1] This, despite the fact that I wrote this sentence in my head ten minutes ago, went and did another task, and in the meantime lost the word “synonym”, causing me to awkwardly google “thing thesaurus is for”.

^[2] This is often one of the main benefits of reading those who experience the world dramatically different from you