Will you continue to update this blog as well?

… jealousy encourages a person to feel bad when good things happen to other people. To be jealous of someone is to wish ill fortune on that person. Jealousy is, in effect, the opposite of love. If love is a symbiotic relationship, where one party’s happiness creates happiness for everyone, jealousy is a parasitic relationship, where one party’s happiness drains happiness from all other parties. In that sense, the more love in a relationship, the less jealousy. wfenza

I would suggest considering a different way to look at jealously. I see jealously as a constellation of various emotional responses (such as fear of loss, anger at betrayal (real or imagined), fear of rejection, etc) rather than an intent. If jealousy were an intentional choice, or a personal value, I would agree will all that you have written. I’d prefer not to have jealously in my life.

I am in a relatively new relationship (one year) as well as two long term relationships (10 and 12 years). I don’t recall any feelings of jealousy related to either of my long term relationships. But my new relationship has elicited quite strong emotions in me that I would have to characterize as jealously.

I choose to apply the same strategies that I use when working with any shadow emotions *. I try not to judge jealously. I don’t allow jealously to control my behavior. I do not expect others to modify their behavior to appease my jealousy. I do not make any attempt to internally suppress my emotions (though I also do not act out on these emotions). Instead, I allow myself to feel the emotions, listen to what they have to say, learn from them, and allow them to pass on their own. Often, on the other side of this process, I open the door to intense compersion**. From my own direct experience, I believe that compersion is impossible in the presence of suppressed jealousy.

If I don’t allow my emotions to be felt and expressed (at least to myself in private), I can expect them to leak out sideways. If jealousy is suppressed, it will still be there, creating a barrier to love.

* Shadow emotions: The definition varies quite a bit depending on the source. My definition: emotions (whether positive or negative) that are inconsistent with my intentional values. For example, joy at another’s failure, anger triggered by another’s actions that I would willingly do myself, fear of anything that my rational mind does not perceive as an actual threat.

** Compersion: The joyful feeling you get in response to witnessing your lover enjoying a sexual or romantic connection with somebody else.

I think Evid3nc3 his point has value. People like me don’t know anything about feminism and are subject to bias because of a name. So I like it that Evid3nc3 clears up this point for someone who is curious to literally read a thing or two on the subject (I don’t have the time to dig in, for me personally there are more interesting things to read).

My opinion before his posts on feminists was: not much of an opinion at all, but because of the name I guess I was biased to believe it was more about women defending themselves than men. I thought it was a temporary opinion (= lack of information).