Unbearable Lightness of Being DVD cover from Criterion Productions.

In comments to my post A Prudish Libertine's Thoughts on Jealousy, which is short enough to restate in its entirety: "One of the things I've learned as a reluctant but sincere monogamist is that a heck of a lot of what we construct as jealousy amounts not to possessiveness but longing," Ms.Inconspicuous said

"Can you elaborate on this please; what you mean by longing?"

I began to reply in comments and realized it was turning into a separate post.

As far back as my first long-term relationship in high school what I usually felt and called jealousy was about wishing for something that wasn't happening, and wasn't going to happen, and maybe even couldn't happen.

When my first girlfriend came back from a college course saying "I met this guy and we had sex so now I have to break up with you" it didn't bother me at all that she'd met someone, or that she'd had sex with them. It was that it meant (to her!) that we couldn't have our relationship too. It wasn't "hey, she's mine, nobody else can have her," it was a feeling of longing for what could no longer be.

Like when a friend I had a crush on hooked up with someone else. It wasn't that I didn't want them in each other's arms, it's that I wanted her in my arms too. It wasn't "hey, she shouldn't want to be with anyone but me." Instead it was a feeling of longing for a sense of closeness *right now,* even if I knew (as we could know such things in those days) that another night she *would* be with me.

And even now, to use an example from Ms. Inconspicuous's blog, even though I'm happily in a relationship when I hear her describe lying in bed with a lover, away from the world, reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being between bouts of sex and melting ice cream I'm filled with an impractical ache to do that with her. It's not that I think "it should have been me instead of him," and *certainly* isn't "it should be her instead of my partner!" Not at all. Instead it's knowing her and liking her even through the little windows of her writing, and longing to have known her better... known her well enough... to have done the same.

Multiply that by dozens of friends and hundreds of writers and thousands of situations and all the vagaries of time and age and distance and preference and it stops being about jealously "coveting my neighbor's wife nor his house nor his cattle" and so on, nor is it about jealous fear or anger that a neighbor might covet (or even have) a relationship with my partner. Instead it's an emptiness of knowing or fearing that what I long for will never be.

I guess in the simplest terms, at least for me, what I feel when I feel jealous isn't "I want that" as it is "that would be so nice." That, for me, is the difference between possessiveness and longing.

Incidentally, and speaking of impossibilities, what inspired my original post was reflecting on the experiences and expressions of first-time crushes, romance, love, and loss chiming softly through the newly-minted class of high-schoolers in my oldest child's circle of friends. I'd not go back, not least because I remember the anguish as well as the exhaltation. And for that matter I couldn't do that because I've already known first-time love, romance, danger, and lust. But I was feeling wistful jealousy for them and on reflection it occurred to me that, well, as I said the first time one heck of a lot of what we construct as jealousy amounts not to possessiveness but longing.

Update: I think poly people have a word, compersion, "a state of empathetic happiness and joy experienced when an individual's current or former romantic partner experiences happiness and joy through an outside source, including, but not limited to, another romantic interest." That's sort of the opposite of what I mean.  Or maybe the opposite of the opposite -- a genuine but wistful or empty happiness for the good fortune of others.  Oh, and for what it's worth, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera had a great word, litost, for the desire for or action of self-sabotaging revenge that can arise through jealous longing.

The Wise Guys column Em & Lo this week has something from me in it. Here’s the question.

Advice from three of our guy friends. This week they answer the following: “My boyfriend claims it means nothing when he looks at other women, and yet he gets jealous when I look at other men. Why is that?”

Read the quote in context here.

Here’s my answer (which, probably not coincidentally, is fairly closely follows my reactions in Interconnections: Women, Men, Infidelity, Morality, Betrayal, Dignity, “Manhood,” Etc..)

Straight Married Guy (Figleaf): Funny you should mention that. I’ve got a woman friend who flirts shamelessly but almost blacks out with jealousy when her partner so much as asks another woman to pass the salt. Her answer for the double standard is a lot like men’s: She knows she’s not looking to change relationships, so it’s okay for her, but not having the same insider information about what her partner’s thinking, she sees it as a total threat. Something similar is probably going though your partner’s head.

But that’s just the general case — there’s a more specific case related to what we “know” about men and women in relationships. We “know” that women are all “naturally” monogamous and men are just as “naturally” promiscuous, right? And so all your boyfriend’s cultural messages are that it’s really harmless for him to eye other women. He’d at most want a one-night stand, but we all “know” he wouldn’t want an emotional attachment. Meanwhile, though, all the cultural messages about you as a woman say that if you’re looking, it’s because you’d rather be with them. Forever! So he “knows” you’d really “only” want an emotional attachment and not a one-night stand. And as Em & Lo’s survey showed back in September, both men and women feel way more threatened by emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity. Is it fair that women are thought to be “naturally” monogamous and men are thought to be “naturally” promiscuous? No, but a lot of things aren’t fair, and jealousy will probably always be with us. The bigger question is whether it’s true? No, it’s not. Which is a bigger problem, but one that, unlike jealousy, we can get over.

Lot of scare quotes in that response. But then words like “know” and “natural” are scary in declarations about gender differences.

But bottom line I think the bogus Two Rules of Desire, wherein it’s both inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to just think some guy’s good looking, accounts for most of the double standards of gender and jealousy.