Schooled in Jealousy

by Thomas Moore, author of Psychology Today's Care of the Soul blog.

When I think of how naive and ignorant I was about love in my late teens and twenties, and not much better in my thirties, I wonder how I survived. When I was twenty-six, going on thirteen, a friend who was a Catholic sister pleaded with me not to get seriously involved with anyone. She knew how inexperienced I was.

But I learned quickly. I had to, given my romantic temperament and my tendency to fall fast and deep into love. I learned most of the laws of love through jealousy-burning, painful, clinging, obliterating jealousy.

I know that jealousy can be a dangerous thing. It is one of the love sicknesses. But you shouldn't just try to get rid of it. It has a purpose: to make your capacity to love more mature.

Jealousy forces you to consider one of the great conundrums that every person faces: how to want another person madly and at the same time grant her her freedom as a person with her own life and fate. You can't learn this from a book or a counseling session. Jealousy can teach you, but only if you are able to go through it to the end. All the questions with which you torture yourself, all your doubts, all your shifting back and forth-all of these tools of jealousy twist you out of your immaturity and eventually teach you how to love. Your heart expands, and you become capable of loving the other passionately while taking pleasure in honoring the mysterious laws and attractions that make her who she is.

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Read more by Thomas Moore on Psychology Today’s Care of the Soul blog.

Related Topics:

• Modern Love
• careofthesoul.net
• Seeing Green: All About Jealousy
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