Relationship Advice - Overcoming Jealousy in Your Relationship

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by Sarah Love

If the man you love has other women in his life, as pals or even an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend, you may find yourself feeling jealous and angry about his relationships with them. You aren’t alone. Many women are faced with this same challenge in their relationships.

There are many different reasons that the jealousy monster can rear its ugly head. Reasons can be real - like your boyfriend or husband cheating on you or being obvious about checking some other girl out. But jealousy can also arise from occurrences that do not actually happen - like you seeing him talking to another woman and imagining all sorts of bad things.

No matter how it happens, jealousy is not fun. Whether your jealousy is reasonable or not, it makes you FEEL all kinds of negative emotions, like hurt, anger, resentment - even reproach and disgust.

Let’s look at two types of jealousy - founded and unfounded. Jealousy that is reasonable would be when your boyfriend or husband has cheated on you. Jealousy that is NOT reasonable is getting mad about him mentioning his ex-girlfriend, or running into her in the store.

The reasonable kind of jealousy - for you - is a sign that something is not right in your relationship. When you feel jealousy over him cheating on you - that is of course completely normal. But what it is screaming at you is that you have something HUGE in your relationship that you and your beau need to work on with each other. If he won’t work on it WITH you - then you need to walk away.

What your emotions are telling you that you may not understand at that point is that he is making you feel like a second class citizen in your relationship. This lack of balance is difficult to deal with, and if it is not corrected, will lead to a lopsided relationship - where perhaps you are doing all the giving or all the taking. Those relationships don’t last.

Now the second kind of jealousy is jealousy about things in the past, or inconsequential things. First of all - EVERYONE HAS A PAST. Including you. If you are jealous over things that happened in the past with your man, then that is a problem YOU need to work on and get rid of.

In cases like this, your emotions are sending up a signal to your brain that all is not well within you. These are signs of emotional insecurity and fear. This is when you need to stop what you are doing and take a look inside to see what the true root of this jealousy is. Perhaps you have been hurt before and are acting defensively, or perhaps you are afraid of the unknown.

There is also a jealousy about things that have not even HAPPENED yet. This is also an emotion founded in fear and insecurity. This happens when you see your man having a conversation or something with another woman and you instantly get jealous, imagining all sorts of wrongs. When this happens to you, you need to reach down deep again and dig out exactly what it is that you are afraid of.

When jealousy is founded in legitimate emotion - it means that something needs corrected quickly within your relationship. If you are becoming jealous over insignificant things, then you need to do a self-check, and correct the things within yourself that are out of balance.

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