How To Overcome Jealousy In A Relationship

If you saw your girlfriend in a bar flirting with and kissing someone, would this make you jealous?

Suppose she where holding hands with or embracing another man while walking in a park? Most people would feel instant jealousy under these instances. In both examples, the threat to your relationship is real. Feeling jealous is normal when your relationship is threatened.

Even in less threatening circumstances such as her day to day interactions with men at her job or her socializing with male friends, feeling uneasy is normal especially if you haven’t known your girlfriend for very long.

Being jealous about your girlfriend becomes a problem when you’ve known her for a long time and she has given you no reason for feeling this way.

If you exhibit any of the following symptoms, it’s time to admit you have a problem and do something about it:

You continually question her loyalty
You attempt to control her
You obsessively keep track of her whereabouts throughout the day
You become enraged or have used physical force
You have zero tolerance of her glancing at or mentioning the name of another guy
You feel compelled to listen in on her phone conversations or read her private email.

The chronically jealous person lacks the capacity to trust. When this happens, his greatest fear comes to be. He loses his partner. The sad thing is this loss comes about because of his own actions, not because another man took her away.

How Jealousy Destroys Relationships

Jealousy eats away at trust, the foundation of all relationships. The obsessively jealous person is incapable of trusting his partner which is why he keeps tabs on her whereabouts and restricts her interactions with other men. When you can’t trust your partner, relationship meltdown is inevitable.

The jealous person only looks for confirmations of his suspicions and fails to appreciate the good that his partner brings to the relationship. This leads to stress and tension because of the constant arguments, and fights.

The quality of life of your partner gets diminished. She feels she is kept on a tight leash that is smothering her.

The Source of Jealousy

The jealous person often has feelings of low self esteem. These feelings may be deep seated and have roots in his childhood or they may have come about from bad experiences in past relationships where he was dumped for another guy or was cheated on.

If he tends to choose these types of partners, this experience may be a recurring one. He may have been dumped for one of his friends, a coworker, or even a sibling, thus causing great humiliation.

He fears the loss of his partner, or the humiliation of this loss. He may have not received enough attention from his parents as a child and thus fears being excluded by people including the women in his life.

Jealousy

This makes him anxious and causes him to become more controlling and possessive. He tries to keep track of her whereabouts at all times. He does this because he wants to hold on to her. He doesn’t want his greatest fear to happen or he doesn’t want the past to repeat itself.

He may feel that he doesn’t measure up to other men. He may find it difficult to meet and attract the opposite sex which reinforces his insecurities. He may question why his partner wants to be with him in the first place. Perhaps she’s just waiting until a better prospect shows up.

When a person feels this way, it is no surprise that the sight of his partner interacting with other men is very disturbing to him. It is no surprise that he lives in fear of losing her to another man.

How To Overcome Your Jealousy

1.) Realize that your behavior is causing your greatest fear to come true.

If you have a long history of unsuccessful relationships where your partners left you for another guy, ask yourself whether it was your jealousy that was to blame rather than assuming that she left because you didn’t measure up or that women can’t be trusted.

2.) Assume the best about your partner.

Women are selective about the men they choose to get involved with. If she finds you attractive enough to start a relationship with, then give yourself a break and feel good about this. She is with you because she sees qualities in you that she loves.

3.) Try to be more self aware.

You need to become more alert to when your insecure feelings are controlling your thinking. Don’t let your imagination do your thinking for you.

All of us have the occasional suspicious thought about someone. This can happen after the person has done something odd or out of the ordinary. For the average person, these thoughts go away after a few minutes. Their attention shifts elsewhere and they forget about it.

When the insecure person has a suspicious thought, he latches on to it. His imagination takes over and the thought becomes a real possibility. Constant fixation on this thought causes the suspicion to take on a life of its own.

4.) Talk it over with your partner.

Tell her that your relationship with her means the world to you and that is why you are feeling insecure. This kind of dialog where you are expressing your feelings for her will strengthen the bonding between you. You will find out from these discussions that she loves you and that you deserve her.

How To Deal With a Jealous Partner

1.) Eliminate unnecessary behaviors that cause jealousy

Behaving seductively for the opposite sex
There are certain behaviors that tell the opposite sex that you are available and are actively looking for a partner. These include flirtation, seductive body language, your dress, and lots of touching.

If you are doing this because of the fun of it or because the attention boosts your ego, you should stop. Even if your partner didn’t have jealousy issues, this behavior is inappropriate for someone already in a relationship and will cause damage.
Evasiveness
Some people are secretive by nature. If this is you, understand that never talking about where you’ve been or your day at work or not telling your partner why and where you went out for the evening will naturally arouse suspicion.

Maybe it’s your independent streak that makes you not want to tell your partner that you will be home late but if you require this much independence, then you shouldn’t be in a relationship in the first place.
Quirkiness or eccentricities
People have their own oddities that make sense to them but causes others to scratch their heads. If for some reason you need privacy from your partner when you are on the phone or you have your own innocent reasons for hiding your cell phone from him, you should realize that this is considered highly suspicious behavior.

While many people are blind to their own little quirks, you should be alert to his reactions to things that you do.
Not giving your partner enough attention
If you are having difficulties with intimacy or you are taking him for granted, he will feel left out. An active social life that doesn’t include him will also make him feel excluded. Be willing to show your love for him in reassuring ways.

2.) Find out from him what sets him off

If these are behaviors that would naturally arouse suspicion, generate insecurity or resentment in most normal people, then set up some rules regarding this and abide by them. Relationships do require giving. You can’t behave as you did when you were single.

If he has problems with reasonable behavior on your part or insists on rules that are demeaning, controlling, and invasive of basic privacy, then he must take steps to recognize that he has a problem and do something about it.

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