Turns out jealousy isn't always a YOU problem

追加: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Jealousy is one of the most fascinating emotions to humans. We watch movies about love triangles. We condemn cheaters online. And it makes sense why.

[00:00:08]Evolutionarily, jealousy evolved as a way for us to prevent losing our partner to someone else. If we could keep our partner only interested in us, then it would increase our chances of our partner staying with us and our offspring survive, which would hopefully perpetuate our species. But although jealousy is a very natural emotion to feel, it's also one of the most pathized emotions. I'm guessing that most women have at some point been told that they're too jealous when they brought up feeling disrespected by a partner's wandering eye. But is jealousy an individual issue or does it reflect something that's not quite working in the relationship? Recently, a large longitudinal study came out about this very topic. Researchers wanted to know, is cognitive jealousy a stable personality trait or is it a reaction to specific romantic partners? The findings are very telling, so let's talk about them.

[00:01:03]So, the study talks about how there are two types of jealousy. There's emotional jealousy, which is an in the- moment feeling to some sort of like imminent threat, like someone blatantly flirting in front of your partner, and there's cognitive jealousy, which is a persistent intrusive suspicion that your partner might not be faithful, not necessarily with any evidence behind it.

[00:01:21]So researchers wanted to know do people carry jealousy with them from one relationship to another? They tracked 891 unmarried adults who are aged 18 to 34 across 5 years giving them surveys every 4 to 6 months. So across participants they were able to track 1,57 distinct relationships. The surveys included questionnaires to measure cognitive jealousy, neuroticism, attachment anxiety, and whether there was any actual infidelity in the relationship. What were the findings?

[00:01:50]Well, jealousy doesn't change much across the same relationship, contrary to popular belief that it just kind of decreases with time in a relationship.

[00:01:58]Simply time passing didn't really help when people were in the same relationship. But there was significant variation between relationships, meaning one person could be highly jealous with one partner and then not at all very jealous with the next. They estimated that 28.2% 2% of the variation in cognitive jealousy was tied to the individual person. Whereas the largest portion of the variance, almost 40% was due to the differences between relationships. Now, history of infidelity did play a huge role. Those who knew that their partner had cheated in the past were more jealous, but it was also higher among those who cheated themselves, which we'll talk more about in a second. Some people did have consistently high jealousy regardless of relationship, though they seem to be in the minority. Attachment anxiety was linked to higher jealousy and men tended to report higher levels of initial jealousy than women. You want to know what I'm jealous of? I'm jealous of the fact that if you're in the US, you're able to use ZDOC, the sponsor of today's video. I use ZDOC a lot when I lived in the US when I needed to find a doctor somewhere knew I had moved or I needed a specific kind of doctor and I didn't know where to find one. And I really missed being able to do like a next day appointment without needing to call anyone cuz that's not currently possible where I live. Zduck is a free app and website designed to help you find highquality in network healthcare providers of all different kinds. I find that a lot of times we procrastinate going to the doctor just because we don't want to pick up the phone and talk to someone or we're afraid that we're going to get turned down or that they're not going to take our insurance and then we're going to have to pay a ton of money. Zach solves all of those issues.

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[00:04:01]Okay, so what are the takeaways from this study? If you feel jealous in your relationship, it might have less to do with the character flaw on your part and more to do with the relationship itself.

[00:04:11]Now, there are some exceptions. There are people who have what's called romantic OCD who have these like persistent intrusive thoughts of their partner cheating on them or um sometimes thoughts of like the partner being with a previous partner. There are also abusers who tend to be highly possessive and jealous no matter who they're with sort of across their lifespan. But it seems like those are more the exception and that typically speaking, jealousy is a sign that something's not quite feeling secure in the relationship. That something in the relationship requires your attention rather than that there's something wrong with you. Your jealousy then isn't something necessarily for you to stamp out artificially to just like get over. It's something to be faced and looked at and addressed in your relationship. The study confirmed what probably most people would suspect, which is that if there's jealousy in a relationship, there's a higher likelihood that there's been a past betrayal in that relationship. Of course, you're going to feel more jealous if your partner has cheated on you in the past. Like, duh. So, it doesn't make sense to try to eradicate an emotion. That's perfectly valid to feel in that situation. And for the love of God, do not let a partner make you feel crazy if you don't trust them after they've betrayed you. That is completely normal, and they need to earn back your trust. If there's been a betrayal or there's just trust lacking in the relationship, maybe for a different reason, that's still something you need to address head-on. Trying to invalidate jealousy in that situation is kind of like inviting a plumber over to your house cuz like one of the pipes is leaking and asking him to just put tape over it instead of actually fixing the root problem. Like that's not going to get you very far long term. So what do I mean by addressing the problem headon?

[00:05:42]Well, for starters, jealousy is a sign that trust is lacking in the relationship. So you need to sit down together and get really honest and look at why that is. Whether it's you who feels jealous or your partner, what is going on in the relationship and the dynamics and the specific behaviors between the two of you that's feeding that jealousy? Whether it means a person, you know, isn't super responsive for days at a time or you don't trust a particular person that they're friends with or something along those lines.

[00:06:07]There might be something very specific and behavioral that the person can do to make to make you feel more secure in that relationship. Maybe one person keeps not following through on their promises and not being reliable or showing up for you in the way that they promised to. Maybe one person has been unfaithful in the past or keeps giving off red flags that they might be unfaithful in the future, like having a wandering eye, flirting, being really secretive. Maybe one person has infidelity trauma from a previous relationship. But the study does reveal a little bit of projection. Beware of projection because sometimes people accuse their partner of cheating on them because they themselves have cheated in the relationship because the way the mind works is like typically we assume that other people are doing and thinking and feeling the same things that we do and think and feel. So if we know that we are a cheater, of course we're going to assume our partner has the same intentions or has done the same things and of course that's going to make us feel more jealous in turn. Or it could also be the opposite way. It could be that the jealousy comes first. They feel jealous for whatever reason. They don't feel secure in their relationship. So, they cheat on the other person first so that the other person doesn't do it to them first. The study also showed that attachment anxiety definitely plays a role. People who have an insecure, anxious attachment style are more prone to feeling jealous, but it doesn't tell the whole story. While attachment style tends to be stable across time and relationships and attachment anxiety in particular can definitely make jealousy worse, research from the past few years has shown that people can heal their attachment style through even just one secure relationship. So even if somebody has an insecure, anxious attachment style from past relationship issues, they should ideally be able to learn to feel secure if the new relationship feels safe for them. to be really honest, like I definitely had an insecure, anxious attachment style when I first got together with my husband.

[00:07:53]And it took me a really long time to genuinely trust him. I think it took me like 2 or 3 years to get to a point where I'm safe with this person. This person wants only me, like I I feel good about it. So even if someone has struggled with attachment anxiety or has a history of being cheated on, they should still eventually feel secure if the relationship is safe and they should still learn to trust their partner. And if that's not happening, it might be a sign that even this new relationship is not all that secure. I think many of us have been in situations where someone was just like, you know, get over your jealousy, but they were giving off every single sign that they were not trustworthy. And it's like, how can you get over an emotion if it's completely valid to feel in that situation? And especially as women, I think our jealousy tends to get viewed through a very sexist lens where it's like, actually, it's a you problem that you're not okay with me ogling naked people on my phone all day. you need to work on your insecurities. But in reality, jealousy doesn't just go away by someone telling you to stop being jealous. It can go away only if you address the root cause. And it turns out the root cause isn't always so individual. It's more relational. And one last takeaway from the study is if you're waiting on a relationship to naturally decrease in jealousy, don't hold your breath cuz chances are it's not very likely to happen on its own. Couples therapy can of course help, but I wouldn't stay in a relationship in which either you or your partner is highly jealous unless both of you are committed to changing what's underneath it. And interventions to solve the problem must be both individual and at the couple's level, but especially at the couple's level.

[00:09:21]What do you think of the study? Thank you for watching and take care.

[00:09:29]Tell me, tell me, tell me what you want.

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