The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (11 page)

Women also report that the sexual aspects of their involvement
with other men provoke their current partner’s jealousy more than anything
else. Here is what one woman reported:

“My boyfriend and I broke up, but then we decided to rekindle
the relationship. He insisted on knowing what I’d been doing since our first
break-up, and I told him how many people I’d slept with. He was
very, very,
very
upset. He had come to visit for the fourth of July, and I thought we
would rekindle what we had. Boy did I ever blow the spark out of that one! When
I told him the number of people I’d slept with he nearly jumped through his
skin.”

Bear in mind that sexual and emotional infidelity upset both men
and women. Men are not indifferent to their partners getting emotionally
intimate with other men, nor are women indifferent to their partners having
sexual intercourse with other women. When asked to describe a specific episode
of jealousy, however, men more often recite sexual aspects of infidelity, often
with vivid descriptions of their partners in sexual positions with other men.
Men have trouble exorcising these images from their minds. Women more often
describe emotional aspects of infidelity, including a partner spending time,
giving attention, sharing confidences, joking, and laughing with a rival.

The sex differences in events that activate jealousy are so
strong that they filter down to the very definition of infidelity. When asked
to define infidelity, men tend to focus narrowly on a partner who has had sex
with someone else. Women have a broader definition and include a partner
spending time with someone else or giving a lot of attention to someone else.
As journalist Judith Viorst noted, speaking on behalf of women, “I think the
everyday kind of jealousy has less to do with a fear of overt sexual betrayal
than it does with a fear of intimacy that excludes us.” In these respects, men
and women differ in their psychology of jealousy as much as they differ in the
size and shapes of their bodies.

For committed romantic relationships, pretty much everyone, no
matter what their sexual orientation, wants honesty, kindness, stability, low
levels of conflict, sexual satisfaction, affection, and equality. Gay men also
share with their heterosexual counterparts a strong desire for youth and
physical attractiveness in potential partners. The evolutionary anthropologist
William Jankowiak and his colleagues asked gay men and lesbians to rank sets of
photographs of men and women who differed in age and physical attractiveness.
Gay and straight men alike rank the younger partners as more attractive.
Neither lesbian nor straight women, in contrast, place much importance on youth
in their rankings of attractiveness. In these respects, gay and heterosexual
men are alike and lesbian and heterosexual women are alike.

Gay men differ from heterosexual men, however, in the frequency
of sexual encounters outside of their primary relationship. One study found that
gay men were seven times as likely to have outside encounters, and other
studies confirm this general finding. If gay men are more sexually permissive,
it raises an interesting question about the role of jealousy in gay
relationships. In principle, it could go either way. One possibility is that
because gay men tend to have more outside involvements, their jealousy might
become hyperactivated since they are confronted with rivals and threats of
defection more often. On the other hand, perhaps gay couples quell their
jealousy because of mutual agreements to permit outside sexual encounters.

Data on this question are sparse, but research is starting to
reveal the outlines of homosexual jealousy. One study compared 113 homosexual
men with 81 heterosexual men on a measure of sexual jealousy. Sample items from
this measure are: “If ——— [romantic partner] were to admire someone of the same
sex [opposite sex], I would feel irritated.” “The thought of ——— kissing
someone else drives me up the wall.” Scores for this sexual jealousy scale
ranged from 28 to 252. Heterosexual men scored 131 on average, whereas
homosexual men scored only 106, which was significantly lower.

Robert Bringle of Purdue University in Indianapolis conducted a
larger study of jealousy among gay men to see whether gay men really are less
sexually jealous. He too found that gay men reported less jealousy than did
heterosexual men in response to events such as witnessing a partner kissing
someone else at a party or discovering that a partner is having an affair. Gay
men, however, were also less likely to disclose jealous feelings to their
partner when they had them, despite the tendency of gay men to be more
emotionally expressive in general. This result raises the possibility that gay
men actually experience similar levels of jealousy as heterosexual men but are
simply more reluctant to report it. Gay men in committed relationships may face
the same problem as heterosexuals in open marriages—how to grapple with the
conflict between a desire for a more sexually liberal lifestyle and the
jealousy that follows when a partner also tries to fulfill that desire. Whether
gay men are truly less jealous than heterosexual men, or are merely more
reluctant to express it, remains to be discovered.

What about sex differences among homosexuals in reactions to the
“Sophie’s Choice” of the jealousy dilemma? A team of Dutch psychologists led by
Pieternel Dijkstra of the University of Groningen secured the cooperation of 99
lesbians and 138 gay men by recruiting them in gay bars in several Dutch towns.
The dilemmas consisted of two infidelity scenarios, and the participants were
asked which would upset them more. For example: (
a
) imagining your
partner enjoying passionate sexual intercourse with that other man/woman, or (
b
)
imagining your partner forming a deep emotional attachment to that other
man/woman.

Another scenario asked participants to imagine that both forms
of infidelity had occurred: “Imagine that your partner formed an emotional
attachment to another man/woman and had sexual intercourse with that other
person. Which aspect of your partner’s involvement would upset you more: (
a
)
the sexual intercourse with that other person, or (
b
) the emotional
attachment to that other person?”

The results were different from the results of the parallel
studies using heterosexuals. In response to the first dilemma, 51 percent of
the lesbians found the sexual infidelity more distressing, but only 32 percent
of the gay men found the sexual infidelity more distressing—a reversal of the
usual sex difference. The investigators found similar results for the second
dilemma, which asked “which aspect” would be most upsetting. Lesbians, in
short, seem more distressed than heterosexual women about the sexual infidelity
of a partner, whereas gay men show more distress than heterosexual men about
emotional betrayal.

Michael Bailey of Northwestern University found similar results
in American samples. When forced to choose which form of infidelity was more
distressing, gay men in his sample were more likely than heterosexual men to
become upset at a partner’s emotional betrayal; lesbians were slightly more
likely than heterosexual women to be distressed by a partner’s sexual
unfaithfulness.

Based on these studies, we can offer tentative conclusions about
jealousy in homosexuals. First, homosexual men appear to express less sexual
jealousy than heterosexual men. This may reflect the fact that, in many
homosexual relationships, it is understood that the partners will have casual
sexual encounters with others, as long as they do not affect the primary
relationship. Or, it’s entirely possible that gay men experience the same
levels of jealousy, but keep it under wraps. Lesbians appear to be more
sexually jealous than their heterosexual counterparts, who overwhelmingly
express more distress at emotional infidelity. The often-replicated sex
differences in jealousy found among heterosexuals—with men more upset by a
partner’s sexual infidelity and women more upset by a partner’s emotional
infidelity—appear to be reversed among homosexuals. Gay men appear to be more
like heterosexual women than heterosexual men in their reactions to the
jealousy dilemmas. Clearly, we need additional research on this topic before
reaching any firm conclusions.

On July 30, 1771, a man named Werther wrote a letter of distress
to his brother Wilhelm. Werther had been caught by the love for a young woman
named Charlotte. He had confessed to Charlotte his deep love, telling her that
she was sacred to him and that he worshipped the ground she walked on. In his
letter to his brother, he said that he almost fainted in her presence, so great
was his love for her. The letter, however, betrayed the deep psychological
agony when he compared himself to his rival, Albert, who was engaged to
Charlotte:

Albert has arrived, and I shall go. Even if he were the best,
the noblest man, whom I could respect as my superior in every respect, it would
be intolerable to see him before me in possession of so many perfections.
Possession! Enough, Wilhelm, the fiancé is here. A nice, dear man, whom one
cannot help liking . . . His calm exterior contrasts sharply with the
restlessness of my character, which I cannot conceal. He is a man of deep
feeling and knows what a treasure he has in Lotte. He seems to have little
ill-humor, and you know that is the sin I hate in people more than any other.

Despite his admiration for his rival, whom he describes as “the
best person in the world,” he deliberates on whether he should kill him, not
because Albert deserved to die, but simply because his comparative superiority
was intolerable to Werther. Eventually, Werther decides to kill himself instead
in order to end his psychological pain.

The presence of rivals who may attempt to lure a mate away from
an existing long-term mateship, by itself, may not constitute an adaptive
threat. A street bum or a bag lady leering at your partner, for example, may
not tempt your partner in the slightest, and so poses no threat. Rivals become
relevant only when they display an equivalent or higher level of desirability.

Men’s value as a mate, more than women’s, is closely linked with
the ability to secure resources as well as the qualities that tend to lead to
resources such as status, ambition, industriousness, and maturity. Women
universally desire men with good financial prospects. This preference does not
diminish when women gain personal access to financial resources, nor when women
achieve high socioeconomic status, nor even when women reside in cultures of relatively
high economic equality between the sexes. Furthermore, since violence has been
a recurrent problem women face at the hands of men, women place a greater
premium on qualities that signal a man’s ability to protect her, such as
physical strength and athletic prowess. The ability to secure economic
resources and possess athletic prowess, in short, are more central to men’s
than to women’s overall value on the mating market. Physical attractiveness in
contrast is more central to women’s overall desirability on the mating market.

These fundamental sex-linked desires have enormous consequences
for the triggers of jealousy in men and women, following the principle of
co-evolution. Jealousy in each sex has evolved to mirror the mate preferences
of the other sex. Since women desire professionally successful men, for
example, men’s jealousy should have evolved in tandem to be activated by a
rival who excels professionally. And since men place a premium on youth and
physical appearance, women’s jealousy should have evolved to be especially
sensitive to rivals who are younger or more physically alluring. The design of
the jealousy defense, in short, should have been sculpted by generations of
mate preferences imposed by the opposite sex.

The co-evolutionary theory of jealousy provides some powerful
insights into the psychological design of jealousy, but are these insights
borne out by the empirical studies? Pieternel Dijkstra and Bram Buunk conducted
a study in the Netherlands to find out. They presented men and women with
scenarios of rivals flirting with their partners. The following is an example
of a scenario presented to the men in the study:

“You are at a party with your girlfriend and you are talking
with some of your friends. You notice your girlfriend across the room talking
to a man you do not know. You can see from his face that he is very interested
in your girlfriend. He is listening closely to what she is saying and you
notice that he casually touches her hand. You notice that he is flirting with
her. After a minute, your girlfriend also begins to act flirtatiously. You can
tell from the way she is looking at him that she likes him a great deal. They
seem completely absorbed in each other.”

After reading this scenario, participants turned the page and
saw a photograph of the rival along with a personality description. In one
version, the rival was exceptionally good looking, whereas in the other he was
unattractive. Then the rival was described as either a dominant leader or a
more passive follower. Here’s how the dominant rival was described: “You find
out that your girlfriend is flirting with Hans, the man in the photo. Hans is a
student in Groningen [a city in the Netherlands in which the study took place]
and is about the same age as you. Hans is a teaching assistant and teaches
courses to undergraduates. He is also president of DLP, an activities club that
numbers about 600 members. Hans knows what he wants and is a good judge of
character. Hans also often takes the initiative to do something new and he has
a lot of influence on other people. At parties he always livens things up.”