Yes

by N. Owen Holme

Created on: November 12, 2011   Last Updated: April 27, 2012

If you are willing to consider that love is the state in life to which you are committed and attached to preserving, protecting, attaining or reacquiring a close relationship, then jealousy definitely proves love. While I am no psychologist, I have come to believe that emotions, including jealousy, are the prompts which drive our behavior. Without a profound link to something we care about, often deeply, a feeling like jealousy can never manifest or be acted upon. Look within. Have you ever been jealous over something you cared nothing about?

The problems associated with jealousy are not from the emotion itself, but in the thought processes which are the poisonous environment it needs to grow. At its base is the real or imagined threat of loss, essentially grief. This is especially evident in children and toddlers with their mothers. Children are heavily dependent for their personal welfare on their parents. They seem fanatical and histrionic if that continued support appears to be threatened by a parent's absence, lack of attention or attention given to a sibling. The panic they feel to their continued ability to survive by themselves manifests as jealous behavior.  As most people mature, they no longer feel threatened by extinction if mother isn't near and on call just for us.

There's another facet to the jealousy urge that lingers much longer into adults: the desire to control. The impulse to control fertilizes adult jealousy as surely as threat of loss is its soil. The control urge is still wrapped up in a survival strategy that perceives the loss of a specific intimacy as death. The feelings can't make the fine distinctions, only the thoughts. The control aspect is driven by foreshadowing and getting in front of the loss, thus preventing it. The sense of impending loss can also be driven by perceived changes in the quality of an intimate relationship and jealous behavior will try to prevent inevitable changes. If jealous behavior shows up as sulking, pouting or pleading, it can be perceived as weak. This can drive escalating behavior.

Without doubt, the most harmful and potentially life-threatening manifestations of jealousy are those which are retributive and punishing by intention.  Threats are made, abuse is common in all its forms and sometimes stalking occurs with all the menace that that entails. By the above definition, this still proves love, but it isn't a love that anybody wants. Our toxic plant is now a tangled, massive mess. 

And avoidable. By a change in thinking and also telling your emotions they do not have a license to drive your life. Love, by itself, can make anyone giddy, goofy, and senseless. We automatically associate the person and the relationship with the feeling. But we become quickly lost and disoriented when the person and relationship are objectified, in our minds, made into things that are responsible agents to producing this feeling, and that without the objects, we may lose; lose our reason to live, lose our reputation, lose the justification for the time invested.

The feelings aren't the problem. The immature thinking process is. 

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