Marriages are hard these days, with both partners often working and trying to balance family life with the stressful daily demands. Couples need every advantage to make a marriage work and keep their relationship healthy.
One major contributor to a negative marriage is jealousy. It’s that creeping feeling that a spouse gets when their partner is working late with that attractive coworker. Jealousy is that gentle nudge to check your spouse’s phone whenever they leave it unattended.
While little acts of jealousy seem innocent, they weave a thread of negativity and mistrust into a relationship. Recognizing jealousy isn’t the hard part, changing this negative pattern is. How do you become less jealous if you have already fallen into this pattern of behavior?
How Bad Could It Be to Be Alone?
It sounds like strange advice, but take a step back from the relationship and visualize how life would be if the relationship ended. Would it be the end of the world? No.
It’s important to have the right perspective about marriage, love, and romance if you want to purge jealousy from your life. One step toward weakening jealousy’s grip on you is to recognize that there is more to life than your relationship.
Trust Your Partner’s Devotion to You
Emotions are powerful and the thought of your spouse desiring another person can feel like a dagger to the heart. The truth is, everyone is attracted to people other than their spouses. This is human nature and it doesn’t guarantee someone is going to cheat.
While indulging in extramarital fantasies should be avoided, people aren’t in control of who they find attractive in passing. Actively choose to believe that your partner will remain faithful to you even as they contend with the fact that they – and all of us – will find ourselves attracted to others from time-to-time.
Develop Trust
There are those who are naturally paranoid or mistrustful. The basis of this could be a variety of things ranging from past relationships to childhood traumas. Ultimately, this is an individual issue that needs to be addressed with counseling, therapy, or something more. If you know that you fall into this camp, it doesn’t mean you are strange or defective. Knowing you struggle with jealousy gives you the opportunity to grow in trusting others.
When jealousy rears its head, breathe and think logically about the root of that emotion. Are you really worried about your partner? Have they really given you any indication that you need to worry? Small steps in controlling and channeling the emotion of jealousy are key.
Stop Comparing
There will always be someone out there who is stronger, smarter, more beautiful, more gifted, or more successful than you. You gain nothing by comparing yourself to other people. There is no one like you and the more you love yourself the less you will worry about how much more someone else could offer your partner.
No one wants to be constantly questioned about their motives. A marriage can’t thrive in a distrustful environment. Jealousy shoves the trust and intimacy out of a marriage, slowly suffocating it.
The good news is that nothing is set in stone. If you have been jealous or struggle with controlling jealous actions, it’s never too late to turn things around. Focus inward, identifying the bases of those jealous emotions, and begin to deal with them. The more you become confident and happy with you, the less jealous you will be.
Written content for this topic by Jesse Price.
