Competition in marriage plays as much of an important role as love and most couples are not even aware of how significant of a role competition is playing in their relationship. They would like to believe that competition should not exist in the relationship if you really love each other, so they deny it’s existence and are never able to resolve their challenges.
The reality of relationships is that you are two people. Yes, two people – made one person over time, but definitely not immediately. It takes time to become one and even after you become one – you still have to manage it or you’ll easily slip back into being two again. The psychological element of the relationship that causes this is the natural tendency that humans have to compete and depending on how your childhood interactions were in your family system, your natural tendency to complete can be influenced by the detrimental influence of jealousy.
Jealousy destroys relationships regardless of how much you love each other. A jealous person can be in love! For a jealous person love is very real. Commitment and dedication is authentic. The problem is that you can never accomplish goals that are good for the both of you because a jealous partner tears down progress and hides their hands. They will literally work hard on whatever you both set out to do while simultaneously tearing it down. You will spend more energy dealing with issues within the relationship than you do building the vision.
The reason it is so difficult is because jealousy in intimate relationships is so manipulative causing people to rarely admit that they are jealous of their partner. As a matter of fact, they often don’t even realize how jealous they are until they come to therapy. Jealousy doesn’t allow them to see that ‘what is good for you is also good for them’ because they don’t attribute your success to their benefit even though they may have already benefited from your success.
The core of jealousy in a relationship is directly related to what they tell themselves. The themes they play in their mind consistently solidifies irrational truths for them and makes it very difficult to change because these thoughts build perceptions that become their reality.
Here are three things that jealous partners tell themselves:
#1 – Your success makes me feel inadequate.
Your success makes me feel like I don’t measure up. Like I’m not as good as you. Like I’m a failure. If you have children, the jealous partner may even triangulate the children to win superficial approval and superiority with them to psychologically balance their feelings of inadequacies.
#2 – I am never good enough.
I am never good enough literally means – “I will never be good as you.” They never feel like they can catch up with you. The burden of them comparing themselves to you puts pressure on their esteem and sets the stage for them to stop trying, cave-in and blame you for it. The objective is to stop you so they can catch up with you and eventually pass you up.
#3 – You’re hurting me.
Aristotle said that jealousy is actually pain at the success of others. This is insightful because it explains that the jealous partner is not simply envious of your success, but it hurts them to see you succeed. The pain of jealousy is sometimes more excruciating than any other pain. The more you get – the more it hurts them. They often let you know you’re hurting them in other ways that are often illogical, but they never admit that their jealousy is actually what’s hurting them.
In closing, the ultimate theme for a jealous partner is ‘what is good for one is not good for the other’ and that psychological construct originates in childhood. Issues of neglect, abandonment, fear, intimidation, abuse, verbal insults, sibling rivalry and other issues influence this behavior so neither partner ever gets
what they desire out the relationship and ultimately out of their life together.
The good thing is that they can get it fixed. For over 20 years, I’ve been helping couples identify and fix this disturbing dynamic in their relationship.