Love's Ugly Stepsister

It ought to seem axiomatic, but unfortunately many things that are obvious are considered to be problematic by our culture.

When we invest ourselves completely in a relationship, and risk so much for the love and affection of one person, cutting ourselves off from the love and affection of every other person for the joy of rooting an eternal love with the one person of our choice, there is bound to be a desire to make sure that the other person is just as committed and just as "off the market" as we make ourselves.

It is commonly believed in our culture that jealousy is a bad thing. But in fact, exclusive, permanent, self-abandoning love is impossible without a tinge of jealousy.

Even in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the chapter containing the Ten Commandments asserts that God is "a jealous God." Certainly these religious traditions would maintain that God is a loving God - yet his love is manifested in such a way that he can be jealous about the ones that he loves.

All of life is made up of yin and yang, masculine and feminine, positive and negative.

Love is without a doubt, when reciprocated, one of the highest positives in life. But it comes joined with a slight negative. When we commit ourselves to someone else, we take it upon ourselves to guard our relationship so as to ensure that they have committed themselves to the relationship as well.

This tendency to guard our investment in another and reduce the risk is called "jealousy."

Love is beautiful. Jealousy is the ugly stepsister of love. But they are always joined together. Jealousy is that thing in me that reminds the object of my love that he/she has a responsibility to not only NOT break the bounds of our relationship, but to not even APPEAR to break the bounds of the relationship.

Attempting to remove jealousy from the equation ultimately undermines our ability to love. The modern notion that love can exist without jealousy asks us to remove our expectation of both permanence and exclusivity from our romantic entanglements - and the romantic carnage that has been left in the wake of such unrealistic expectations indicates that we would be better off admitting that true love always condones, perhaps even appreciates, the contribution that jealousy makes to keeping people together.