On Jealousy

[The following is an excerpt from a story I wrote about 2½ years ago.  It represents a satirical exaggeration of my own beliefs—I think it's reductive but partially true.  And here it is.]

On Jealousy

     I don't much go for the power-struggle view of human relationships, nor do I feel comfortable with the possessiveness that can creep into these affairs, but there is definitely something about seeing your girlfriend with another man (or, more commonly, visualizing it, which is the same thing), something deeply, powerfully discomfiting, to say the least.

     Now, some don't care to acknowledge it, but the fact of the matter is that you can locate the root, the cause—sometimes even the basic form or template of almost all complex human experience way the hell down deep in the biological, evolutionary, instinctual muck and filth of our animal selves and personalities.  Jealousy is the perfect example.  Why do people get jealous?  What's the reason?

     Men and women get jealous for different reasons and in different ways.

     Why does a man care whether another man sleeps with his woman?  Why does it bother him so much?  Why does the sight or mental image of such a thing cause him such distress?

     Answer: his most basic need and purpose in life is to ensure that his genes get passed along, that his children are born and that they live long enough to pass those genes along even further.  And any time the man is sticking around investing time and effort in the protection of one or more of these offspring—particularly if it's one of those monogamous deals in which he isn't free to go spreading it around, impregnating other women—then just about the worst thing that can happen is his getting stuck protecting some other man's child.  That's the big danger when your woman sleeps around: that she'll get pregnant and you won't know whose.  There, in turn, you find the whole meaning behind the cuckold stigma: evolutionary–existential meaninglessness—bafflement, at best.

     Seeing another man have sex with your woman is preferable (in the wild) only to two things: seeing a predator make off with your baby and seeing a predator make off with your penis.

     That's why men are most afraid of the sex aspect of cheating and women are most afraid of the emotional aspect.  Women, too, want to pass on their genes, but they don't have to worry about their men's getting laid up for nine months with some rival individual's genetic information, reproductively unavailable; nor do they have to worry about getting stuck raising somebody else's baby.  In a state of nature, you can be sure that any baby that comes out of your vagina has at least one parent who is you.

     So why do women care if their men fuck around?

     As far as women are concerned (on this primal level we're talking about), men have only one use once they've spurted, or squirted, as Chloë says in the Whit Stillman film Last Days of Disco—and it's not love and comfort.  Those things are evolutionary tools for making sure the important stuff gets done.  And the important stuff is: sticking around for a bare minimum of nine months to make sure baby gets born and, once she's born, doesn't die.  (This is important to men, too, that their offspring don't die—but men could spend that whole nine months impregnating as many women as possible; women are too busy being pregnant to hedge their genetic bets with other men.)  So the real thing women are afraid of is abandonment.

     In other words, a woman should hate to see her man sleeping with another woman only because it might suggest emotional intimacy, whereas a man should hate to see evidence of emotional intimacy between his woman and another man only because it might suggest that they're sleeping together.

     It is my understanding that you cannot copyright a theory, so let it be recognized that the theory laid out here is my theory and that I came up with it—just in case it takes hold in the public consciousness and becomes one of those things that everybody "just knows," the way Freud has been "discredited" and yet half of what everybody goes around saying and thinking is Freud.

[Interesting side note: this little mini-essay struck me, this time around (2008), as serving almost as a kind of roundabout argument for gay love's being the purest love...which is probably true anyway.]