Jealousy and the Golden Rule

All my life I've handled jealousy the wrong way. As with many things, I've only begun to figure this out in recent years. As is also the case with many things, my problems with jealousy go back to my upbringing.

My mother had many fine qualities but she was prone to jealousy and would, from time to time, challenge me to prove my devotion to her. I, and my siblings, would be accused of liking our friend's families more than our own. Once, as I have discussed before on this blog, my mother tearfully accused me of not sharing any of her values. None of this strikes me as worthy of any condemnation; it was an ordinary human failing on her part and easily forgotten in favour of the many better memories I have of her.

What does seem worth focusing on his my response for I worked out a strategy for dealing with these outbursts of hers as a child that I maintained as an adult. As Robert Glover has taught me, we continue to use these strategies learned in childhood even though they never worked. My strategy was 1) try to assuage feelings of jealousy and, when that inevitably failed, 2) to hide things I was doing that might provoke these jealous feelings. What I never did was to recognize that feelings of jealous are never legitimate. As a consequence, you can't assuage them. As to hiding what you are doing, besides the whole dishonesty issue, there is no point in even trying because you couldn't possibly guess which actions of yours are going to provoke jealousy in another. Jealousy is always a projection of the inadequacy and self-hatred of the jealous person and has nothing to do with the objects of their jealousy; jealousy tells you a whole lot about the state of mind of the person who has it and nothing about reality.

Control not trust

Many years ago I was in a short-lived relationship with a woman who was intensely jealous. I dealt with it according to the strategy I had worked out as a child. I made my life an open book to her while not expecting the same from her. Indeed, I went so far as to assure her that she need not make the same gestures I was. I just wanted her to feel comfortable. It didn't work.

The punchline to the story is that my jealous girlfriend then cheated on me.

What's obvious to me now, and wasn't then, is that jealousy is about control. It's not a trust issue. It's a desire to control other people's lives felt by people who can't control their own feelings. People who can't control their own feelings live in a chaotic world full of threats. Jealousy is a way of forcing others to validate their chaotic feelings. Again, it's a strategy that doesn't work. It doesn't work because it's their feelings that are the problem and not you. By trying to assuage these feelings I was cooperating in feeding a monster that could never be satisfied. In doing so I was implicitly accepting guilt for blameless behaviour and thereby justifying her jealousy and thereby reinforcing it.

The limitations of the Golden Rule

Her affair(s) (there was one for certain and possibly another) should have been all the proof I needed that my strategy didn't work. My initial response to her jealousy—and to every case of jealousy I had to deal with since then up to a few months ago—was to try empathy and then to treat her as I imagined I would want to be treated if I'd been in her shoes. I'd imagine what I thought it was like to be this jealous person and conclude that what they were doing was sending out a call for help, that they didn't feel secure and loved and therefore couldn't trust. I'd pour on the love and make my life an open book hoping to make her feel like she could trust.

But let's approach the problem from the other end: How could someone prone to jealousy cheat? That seems like craziest thing imaginable. How could someone who didn't feel secure in a relationship destroy the trust of a person who has committed to them? Well, if the issue really was trust, as I had always imagined it was, it wouldn't make any sense. But it isn't about trust—it's about control. Seeing me have friendships with other women inspired feelings in her that she couldn't control. Cheating on me didn't.

From her perspective, she could only imagine that someone would cheat if they could.  Although she never connected the dots, the real reason she was worried I would cheat on her was because she "knew" (on some level) that she was capable of cheating on me. She didn't see that because, in her own eyes, she "wasn't that sort of girl". But that sense of herself was not the result of any commitment to real moral standards but because of shame. Her morality was driven by fear of what other people might think and she thought that was what kept everyone in line. By implication, she believed that people would all cheat if they weren't constantly watched. As always happens with shame-driven morality, that turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. All it took to make it happen was a situation where the odds of her getting caught were so small as to seem nonexistent and away she went.

The problem with the Golden Rule is that it assumes the person making the judgment and the person we are making the judgment about are morally reasonable. Treat others as you would have them treat you? Really? Cause I want others to give me special breaks and not punish me for my failings and expect nothing in return. Any real morality requires a real moral standard and not a state of mind (which is all empathy is) to work.

To try and empathize with a jealous person is to try to imagine what it feels like to be deluded. You can, and should sympathize with the person; for who has not been jealous? But the feelings of jealous are crazy feelings. They deserve no respect. These feelings are their problem to solve, not yours.

"Unconditional" love and testing

Earlier I wrote about how the promise of unconditional love from parents is a hollow one. What are the consequences of this?

One of them is that, because the existence of conditions is denied, neither we nor our parents know where the boundaries actually are. This means that your parents, thinking there are no boundaries, only become aware that something is unacceptable long after the boundaries have been crossed.

It's easier to get a grasp on this if you imagine a hypothetical situation. Imagine you are in your backyard and you have beer in an open cooler.  Someone comes in and you offer them a beer. They finish it and help themselves to a second. Your thinking that was a bit rude but you don't say anything. Then they do it again and you let that slide. Somewhere around the sixth bottle you're thinking that's a bit much. Or they leave and go home and then come back for another beer. You now have to establish a boundary but, because you've let things slide so far, you have to tell the person that something you've had no problems with up until now is too much. There is no non-aggressive way to do this.

Think how that feels to a child. They are going along doing things that no one has corrected them for and then they are not just corrected but pushed back aggressively. That is frightening and confusing. Children start thinking there are a set of moral landmines out there.

In the worst cases, a child will grow up to think that everything is a test. You'll find yourself, I certainly did, resenting every request anyone makes of you because you'll see it as a test you haven't been allowed to prepare for; you'll feel like you've been set up to fail.

I was forced to face this more clearly by going back to school. I'm doing this as an adult because I want to do it. And  yet, every time I faced a test—exam or essay—I started to feel a resentment and that led me to procrastinate. I didn't want to prepare and I didn't want to research. I still felt the resentment that came from being asked to perform without being told what all the expectations are. This is comes from being told that you are loved unconditionally only to find nothing of the sort is true.

And what to do about it? It's not a life or death issue. I've just realized that I have this lingering resentment now but it was there through some 17 or so years of schooling and an entire work career after that. I've done alright despite this but I don't think I've ever performed at my full potential until the last little while.

Part of the cure was to do volunteer work at my church. That enabled me to test myself, to set my own conditions for what was good enough. Ironically, those conditions were not only higher than what others would have set for me, they were much higher. But they were known conditions that were clearly set out. It also helped that they were set out by me.

I started applying the same approach to school work. The first step, something I borrowed from Robert Glover, will initially seem perverse. It was to give myself permission to fail. What that does is to wipe away any sense of being set up to fail because others have not set the conditions out clearly. Then I can ask myself what should be achieved (note the caveat below). Then I can ask what I can reasonably hope to accomplish in the time left to me. Related to this, I can ask how I might do this better next time as one of the things that will inevitably become clear is that I could have done better if I'd started earlier.

Caveat: passive aggressive responses

Any time we find ourselves saying something like, "I'll do it on my own terms," or "I'll do it at my own pace," we are lying. That's one great stinking pile of bullshit we are peddling to others and to ourselves. "My own terms" or "my own pace" is just another way pretending to have no boundaries. A boundary is something you can set out and measure whether you've succeeded. I'm going to deadlift four-hundred-and-fifty pounds means I'm going to take a barbell and plates weighing that much and lift it according to a certain procedure. "My own terms" is just a whiny little child resenting others and planning to fail. That's not only a recipe for failure, it's unkind to others. passive aggressive = malicious consent.

The bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal

It's very difficult to judge a marriage from outside. It's not impossible. That we can say things such as, "They seemed so happy" or "I never thought they'd make it" tells us that sometimes we can judge correctly. That may seem odd but admitting you were wrong about something is only possible if you later were able to figure out the truth. "I used to think your house was blue" means that I now know it isn't.

And what of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal? No one I've ever read thinks it was  happy marriage. That's not what's at issue. The question is, how good a wife was Elizabeth Siddal?

Most of us tend to think she was good. DGR himself loved her obsessively. And Siddal worked hard to flourish as an artist and as a person. And her life was tragic. To question her goodness now would be like kicking a puppy. A really cute puppy that everyone loved.

I don't know any different. For years now, I've seen her as an admirable figure. Just this morning though, I was reading a piece called "The bias against Fanny Cornforth" and it got me wondering, could there be an equal bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal?

This is all hypothesis but here's the case.

The whole thing hinges on Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself. He loved her. Could he have been wrong? Could he have been deluded? Unfortunately, just to ask the question is to answer it. DGR was a man given to romanticizing women, exaggerating their beauty, their intelligence and their character. You might argue that DGR's praise of Siddal was exaggerated in a way that harmed her but you can't reasonable suggest it wasn't exaggerated.

Now, there is nothing unusual about this. A lot of men are capable of attributing all sorts of nonsense to a woman they love. And we are capable of maintaining these delusions in the face of incredible evidence to the contrary.

Don't be binary about this. To be honest about Siddal, we do not have to go to the opposite pole and conclude that she was evil. We just need to be willing to acknowledge that we have blinders on the subject, blinders we have inherited from DGR and generations of writers about him, and look around to see what evidence there might be.

Unconditional love?

The single biggest lie parents tell is that the love they have for their children is unconditional. Every child in the history of the world knows it is a lie because parents noticeably withdraw their love when the child disappoints their parents.

And yet parents continue to retail this lie.

The problem is in the language. "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?" The answer is that nothing happens for we are just running words up against one another. In this world, the only test we have of what is "irresistible" is that it has not been resisted so far. And likewise "immovable". Should what has heretofore been an irresistible object run up against what has heretofore been immovable, the end result will be that our understanding of one or the other will change based on what happens.

The universe is not obliged to conform to our reason. It works the other way around.

"Unconditional love" is just another "irresistible" or "unmovable". It stands until it doesn't.

Actually, it's much worse than that. Parents give or withdraw their love as a way of manipulating their children. That sounds horrible but it's just a way of raising children. It only sounds inhumane if you've allowed the impossible standard of "unconditional" to creep in to begin with.  And this love can be, and often is, withdrawn for trivial reasons. A child embarrasses a parent in front of guests and the parent becomes cold and distant.

"But, "perhaps you insist, "the parent still loves the child even though they are unhappy with them." You think the child understands that? For that matter, do you think the parent reasons, "I am unhappy with little Joey but I still love him"? Does that seem even remotely plausible?

As an adult, you have to differentiate yourself from your parents and the question of "love" is a good place to start. This is where we can begin to see the parent as a human being and not the god-like figure they start off being for us.

Trust issues

My father used to tell a story about a psychiatrist who put his own son on top of a mantelpiece and encouraged him to jump into his waiting arms. When the kid duly jumped, the father let him go crashing to the ground. The psychiatrist then explained to horrified onlookers, "That will teach him never to trust anyone."

Whatever the merits of the humour in the story, trust issues almost always go back to our childhood.

The way things should work is this: your parents love you and support you. They teach you morality by (mostly) example that is then reinforced by precept. Starting in your mid teens, they let you develop more and more independence and then let go.

It never works out that way. I once had heated argument with a  Catholic woman who was interfering in her daughter's life. She insisted to me that she had to do so because it was her duty as a mother to make sure her children didn't go to hell. Her daughter was in her late thirties at the time.

Sometimes it isn't anybody's fault. I knew a young woman 40 years ago now whose mother died when she was 16. It was a horrible death and the poor girl was left with a mother-sized hole in her life. I know a guy whose father died a similarly horrible death from cancer years before I was born. Both struggled all their lives to form close human relationships. They see-sawed between being too trusting and too suspicious. The thing is, they both had some understanding that the problems began with them. They could see that their behaviours were destroying their chances to bond with other people but they wouldn't stop.

I say "wouldn't" instead of "couldn't" because there was something willful about it. They felt others should accommodate their special needs. They had trust issues because foundational people in their lives had been taken away from them, this brutal disruption had left them unable to build trusting relationships with others, it wasn't their fault this had happened and. therefore, other people needed to take their trust issues more seriously. Not everyone, you understand, only people who wanted to get close to them.

This is, easy to say, the exact opposite of what should be done. Trust issues are damaging to us not because other people fail to take them seriously but because we take them too seriously. When other people ask, usually with actions and not in with words, to get over ourselves, we quietly scream inside, "Can't you see, this happened to me and now I'm owed!" To which the obvious rejoinder is, "By whom exactly?"

I've done that. Like most people, I've had my heart broken, my trust betrayed and then I felt entitled to special treatment. Yes, I'm probably capable of picking up and carrying on but I deserve some special love. As I say above, I think I learned this pattern of behaviour in childhood from parents who probably learned it in their childhoods.

I've been fixing the problem bit by bit but there is more to do.