Jealousy - the monster within
A friend of mine, strapping Army officer, over 6 ft tall, who braved
the terrorist war with a lot of endurance suddenly became sick at a
domestic social gathering once. Excusing himself, he swiftly whooshed
into a nearest toilet, bent over the wash basin, turned the taps on and
started to puke. Certainly he was not intoxicated with liquor, but in a
silent aside he muttered to me: "That bloody woman"! I tried to help him
by propping his head over the basin.
He had a rather heartbreaking tale but I was convinced by the fact
that while he was engaged in a fearsome battle to bail out his
motherland from a terrorist grip out of sheer patriotism he had been
simultaneously confronted with a different kind of 'love-war' with his
fiancé .
Tear-jerking it was to hear about how the will of such a strong and
robust soldier had been sapped by a striking pretty woman of 5ft tall
and pressurizing him to give up his army career. In Marie Corelli's
words, it goes to show how 'serpents coiled round in men's lives as
beautiful women are capable of sapping the will of the strongest
hero".......!
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Sigmund
Freud |
Under such pressure he had withered to such an extent that on several
occasions seriously attempted to quit the Army officially but at every
such occurrence he was rebuffed by senior officers, the ultimate result
being he was booted out of her life.
Amazing word
The guy became severely sick with jealousy at the party when he
bumped into his ex-fiancé with her new found love. Cramped up inside a
toilet watching a hulking mass jelly of a man behaving like a spoilt
brat was sufficient to make any sensible person sick!
Jealousy is an amazing word. It is simple to pronounce, intensely
deep rooted in its origin, frequently used amongst all creeds, castes
and rich or poor. The Oxford dictionary illustrates it as a 'state of
fear, suspicion caused by real or imagined threat or a challenge to
one's possessive instincts'. It typically refers to the negative
thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear and anxiety over an
anticipated loss of something that a person values'.
Jealousy is not to be confused with envy. Envy on the other hand is
an emotion one feels when a peer possesses some material object of value
one wishes to have.
Envy often causes low self-esteem or low self-confidence and a
feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another's
advantages, success, possessions, wealth etc.
For instance, when a husband's or fiancés' eyes linger too long on
his or her best friend, or the husband talks with excitement about a
girl at work or his secretary, it paves the way to catch fire -
jealousy. The sickening combination of possessiveness, suspicion, rage
and humiliation can overtake one's mind and threaten one's very core as
one contemplates one's rival.
Animal research
The green-eyed monster, as Shakespeare called it, can camp in
anyone's head at any time during a relationship when madly in love, even
when one dislikes one's partner.
Either gender is routinely more jealous, though women are known to
work to win back a lover, while men tend to flaunt their money and
status and are more likely to walk out to protect their self-esteem or
save face.
Jealousy bedevils animals too, observes Helen Fisher, by illustrating
how a female chimp (Passion) tipped her buttocks toward a young male in
the classic 'come hither' pose and when the male ignored her and began
to court another, passion slapping the young male hard.
Bluebirds are also said to experience jealousy. Another illustration
refers to an experiment conducted by evolutionary biologist David Barash
involving a breeding pair by placing a stuffed male on a branch, three
feet away from the nest where the female rested, when the cock bird was
away. The cock upon arrival had begun to squawk, hover, and snap in fury
at the dummy and had begun to attack his mate, pulling feathers from her
wing until she escaped (Ref: Understanding Jealousy - Helen Fisher, PhD
on Relationships).
Psychologists version on jealousy regard the demon as a scar of
childhood trauma or a symptom of a psychological problem which can take
root inside a system as young as six years of age in humans.
The monster can be dormant within a soul until the unfortunate day it
decides to raise its obnoxious head. Rest assured, it will come
everyone's way in our life time, unless we are born as an 'Arahath' or a
'Bodhisathva'! Once given into this serpent there is nothing on earth
could deal with it.
The majority believe that jealousy should be treated with contempt.
In extreme cases, a tight pain in the stomach is supposed to bring out
nausea with jealousy. The torment is said to be equivalent to a
surgeon's knife without an anaesthetic, particularly when the victim is
subjected to 'sexual love', like in the case of the officer mentioned
above.
Sigmund Freud's theory on jealousy goes back to its origins in
repressed impulses towards unfaithfulness or homosexuality. The morbid
variety is based on something like a smile or an innocent flirtation but
some say it is pathological to believe that one should own all of the
love object's smile or the innocent flirtation. Throughout man's
primordial past it has discouraged desertion by a mate to bolster the
family unit. Simultaneously it has helped to abandon philanderers in
favour of more stable and rewarding partnerships.
Jealousy can go seriously off beam too. Some people, for no apparent
reason, become consumed by it undermining their self-esteem and even
driving their partner into another's arms - the very outcome they had
feared. In the worst cases, some can become violent and stand as a
leading cause of spousal homicide worldwide.
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