Jealousy Is a Red Flag - Not a Green Eyed Monster

During my travels around the grid, I have been noticing a lot of mentions of “jealousy” in people’s profiles (seems like “I don’t do jealousy” is the new “I don’t do drama”), and what I read prompted me to really think about jealousy – so much so that I am actually going to defend a person’s having jealous feelings.

What kind of psycho-bitch defends jealousy?!?!?!?!?!? *gasp*

According to the profile comments that I read, jealousy is a devastatingly destructive, baseless emotion that has no place in a virtual environment like SL what-so-ever. I simply can’t think of an emotion as natural as jealousy in those terms. In my opinion, jealousy is a red flag – not a green eyed monster.

Let me pause for a moment to stress that I am not condoning omg-I-have-not-talked-to-you-for-five-seconds-so-you-must-be-fucking-someone-else-and-now-I-must-boil-bunnies-on-your-stove jealousy. Even in my most irrational, freak-out moments, I have never gone that far off of the deep end.

In my three years in SL, I have had two relationships where my controlling jealous feelings was a huge challenge for me. I still stand by what I said during those relationships: If I didn’t genuinely care for those men, then I wouldn’t have acted jealously. But! In retrospect, I can see that I was reacting not to the influence of outside forces (aka other women) but to problems within the relationships themselves.

Only through examining why I was experiencing extreme feelings of jealousy did I realize that I was not getting my needs met in a way that made me feel safe and comfortable. In this way, jealousy served its purpose, and I was able to leave those relationships since I realized that they weren’t healthy for me.

If you’re one of those people who will not tolerate even a teeny-tiny little bit of jealousy from your partner – I have to ask. Why? Is it because you plan to behave in a way that is going to illicit feelings of jealousy from your significant other and you don’t feel like dealing with the consequences? If jealousy itself a red flag, so is a person’s making comments about being intolerant of a partner’s feeling jealous.

After all, isn’t better to work through feelings of jealousy than it is to go through a relationship feeling inconsequential and unimportant with a non-jealous partner who doesn’t care one-way-or-another what you do?