The benefits of jealousy
Why in the world should a man in good standing and in full possession of intellectual capacities choose to be jealous? Isn't being jealous terribly uncomfortable? Doesn't it just hurt, confuse, depress, humiliate? Oh yeah, it does all of this, and a lot of other shit as well.
Sorry, but it also makes for the best sex. If they could package jealousy in pills as an erection aid, it would outsell Viagra. Why? Because it works so well. The most important sex organ of a man or a woman is not what is hidden within their underwear. It's what they carry between their two ears.
As with any strong medicine, the problem with jealousy is the side effects. Depression, feeling humiliated, an uncontrollable mix of anger and desire, and so on. Jealousy has to be managed if one wants to enjoy the better parts of it. To manage it, it has to be demystified. As jealousy is not as much a subject of popular science as, for example, the requirements for a woman to reach a climax, a large number of people are hit by it without being able to analyze it.
As a matter of fact, jealousy is not difficult to understand. It occurs as sexual envy. If a mother gives a large apple to one child, and only a small one to the other, the one who received the small apple will be envious. For sexual jealousy to occur in a man, something sexual that he desires has to be given to another man, or at least that's what he feels. The event doesn't have to occur in the present time. We are equipped with enough imagination to relive in the present something that has happened in the past.
I have mentioned that from my early youth, I wanted to become an expert in the field of love. I wanted to understand the mechanisms of love in order to apply them to my own advantage. I do feel that I have progressed in my endeavor. There have been a considerable number of women who have loved me, and I feel that if I have real interest in a woman, I do have a chance to win her heart. Obviously, I don't always succeed. But I'm also not always a failure. In my opinion, there are two kinds of love: one that follows the mechanisms of jealousy, and one that follows the mechanisms of best friendship. If you ask me, the mechanisms of the first one are easier to apply. One just has to follow some simple rules.
However, while easier to instill in the first place, the kind of love that is based on jealousy is much more difficult to maintain than the one based on friendship, though not all love based on jealousy is exactly the same. I mentioned at another place that I feel reasonably sure that if a young woman agrees to a sexual relationship with me, I will be able to instill in her some degree of love for me. This may sound strange primarily to people of a Western cultural background, as they tend to see love as something rather magical. It's not magical, it's factual. Of course, a young woman doesn't always agree to enter into a sexual relationship with a man because she loves him, though many cultures dictate such a setting. The reasons for which a young woman agrees to a sexual relationship with a man (who doesn't have to be a particular one) are manifold and often much more ordinary than love: seeking sexual pleasure, or just wanting to try; wanting to forget another man whom she loved; or a gain in status; in certain cultures where lack of reason for fear is combined with a generally low standard of living, plain financial interest may often be a consideration, especially when entering into a sexual relationship with a middle-aged Western man.
If you are in a relationship with a young woman, and the base for this relationship is not love; and if furthermore, you would like this woman to love you; if this is the case, just talk with her about your previous sexual relationships. Talk at random. There will surely be scenes that will appeal to her own sexual fantasies, and especially these scenes will, sooner or later, make her jealous. If you tell her that you felt sheer bliss while strolling in a city park with a previous girlfriend, she will want you to feel more bliss when strolling in the same park with her. If you tell her that with a previous woman, you often had four climaxes a night, she will want you to have five with her. Tell her that you so much loved the way your previous girlfriend smiled, and she will stand in front of a mirror and check what's wrong with her own smile. If you tell her that you regarded your previous girlfriend as a perfect woman for the way she loved you, she will want to be regarded as more perfect, even if it means that she has to love you more than the previous one. People are so terribly easy to manipulate.
And by the same mechanisms by which I succeed in manipulating others, I can also manipulate myself. If I want to instill some love in myself for a specific person, I will just start talking with that person about her previous love affairs. That works. I will get involved. I will feel hurt. I will want to possess her, and finally, I will love her. I will build a trap, and then I will step into it myself. (Hopefully I will, at the end of the day, find a way out of it.) Why should I be so stupid as to make myself jealous, even when I know that it hurts, and that it makes me feel inferior and depressed? Well, I've had the best sex in my life when I ate my heart out because of jealousy. And I am now at an age where I definitely have a prolonged response time. (I'd love to get rid of it.) I've tried all kinds of medications extensively. Most things don't work, and those that do work, such as bromocriptine and yohimbine, only work for a certain period of time. Genuine jealousy always works. It can make you a real sexual giant.
But hey, you are playing with fire. You have to be aware that if you are sufficiently jealous of a particular person, you will lose sexual interest in others. And if that particular person doesn't give you an opportunity to sleep with her, where do you go with all your sexual power? You can be a giant with her and impotent with any other. (Of course that's the kind of love we'd like to instill in her herself. That her sexual thoughts are so centered on us that she just doesn't feel the slightest desire for anybody else.) If I'm capable of manipulating myself into it, can I also manage to get myself out of this mess called jealousy? Though it may sometimes be hard, I guess I know how to do it. Basically, there are two routes. The one is to turn love into hate, and the other is rather homeopathic: combat the jealousy for her with some jealousy for somebody else. I dare to say that jealousy without hate makes for fine love. You can instill jealousy without hate in a woman, and you can instill it in yourself if you follow a simple rule. The simple rule is that it must be jealousy without reason to feel wronged.
How is that possible? Doesn't the child that received the smaller apple feel treated unjustly? Yes, sure. But consider the following: Both children received two apples of exactly the same size. One child ate them both right away, while the other one saved one for the following day. When that child eats her remaining apple in front of the other child who has no more apples to eat, that child will feel the appetite for the apple nevertheless, and envy will still evolve. But whom is there to hate for the frustration this child experiences? It doesn't have a real reason to hate the mother or the other child because the mother treated both children the same way... fairly. Obviously, it's easy to make a girlfriend or a wife jealous by parading in front of her with another woman. It's also crude, and a dead-end road. Furthermore, it's amateurish. One has to be aware of the fact that all people are born with a psychological defense mechanism that not only protects them from physical threats but also from the pain caused by being treated rudely by a loved person.
A woman who presents herself to her husband or boyfriend in the arms of another man surely will succeed in making her husband or boyfriend jealous. He may even cry in front of her. He will feel a stone where he once had a heart, he will spend sleepless nights, and if given the opportunity, he will have sex with his unfaithful wife more frequently than during their honeymoon. He will also stop loving her, and eventually, he will leave her. Her victory is only temporary. In the end, she may be the one who misses him more, rather than the other way around. But he'll be gone. She wronged him. He knows it, and all his friends will tell him. Many will also suggest that he leave that woman. She clearly treated him wrong. For some time still, he will love her, and because he loves her, he will feel ambivalent about her. He loves her, but she wronged him. He will realize that, actually, the basis for love has been withdrawn, and that he has good reason to hate her. But is it possible to instill jealousy in a person without giving him or her the easy way out by finding a reason to hate? The key is that jealousy is instilled not in a manner that makes the jealous person feel wronged. And this isn't difficult either. For example, events can be discussed that happened before a man and a woman in a particular love relationship met. In most cultures, men at least can resort to this tool.
A woman can hardly blame a man for having had sexual relationships before the two met. (It doesn't work the other way around in most cultures of the world.) If then, the man talks about previous relationships, thus instilling a degree of jealousy in his partner, she will have a hard time feeling wronged. As the man who is talking also doesn't show any tendency to leave her, she'll be jealous without any reason to hate or to fear. She will just feel that she loves with her full heart. This feeling of a full heart can go on for weeks and months. Actually, it is a pain, but it is a pain against which the psychological defense system has a hard time acting. It happens every now and then that I am on the receiving end of this kind of jealousy. It starts when I play with fire. I am with a person whom I like sufficiently. In order to make good sex even better, I am willing to experience jealousy to a certain degree. I start to ask and encourage her to talk about previous love relationships. I like to hear from her about the good sex she had before having sex with me. I encourage her to be honest. I may learn things that bring me down. Falling in love at first sight... not with me. Her first climax... also not with me. The most handsome men she ever slept with... damn it, also not me.
I'd be provoked into better sex, but also into a special kind of jealousy pain. I can't blame her for not having met me three years ago. And I can't blame her either for being past my best age. She doesn't have another lover, or at least I never see him. She even says that she wants to stay with me until the end of her life, seriously, and that she can't imagine sleeping with another man again. I have no reason to hate her, but I'm jealous nevertheless. Because I'm jealous, sex is fabulous with her. And because I'm jealous, I really only have an appetite for her. If this goes on for some time, I feel that it's becoming too much of a good thing. In reality, I don't want to stay with her until the end of my days. Not because I don't love her, but because I'm convinced of the impossibility of love until death. So how do I pull myself out of this mess? Separation will work... after a while. If I feel I need a quick fix, I'll look for a small dose of jealousy to combat the first one. So, I find another woman, talk and listen, talk and listen until she awakens my interest and makes me a little bit, just a little bit jealous.