It’s Not About Trying To Measure Up

No matter how much time you spend controlling and trying to prevent your partner straying, if the person you are in love with, is the kind of person to be disloyal, then all of the energy you put into worrying about whether they will cheat won’t stop it from happening. You can’t control what another person does. You can only control how you think, feel and behave. Let Go Of The Fear! It really is your choice to let go of the fear, and actively decide that you will no longer waste your energy trying to prevent, predict or control the actions of your partner, so you can feel more positive and calm in your relationship. The first thing to do is to stop seeking constant reassurance. Receiving reassurance can become an addiction. It feels good to have someone tell us how much they love us and would never hurt us, and it’s possible to get caught up in a cycle of creating conflict, just so you can get that hit of reassurance you’ve become hooked on. But just like a drug, the power of that hit wears off pretty quickly when you keep taking it and soon, it’s never enough. It’s also exhausting for a partner to keep trying to convince you of their love and many will just stop if they feel like you don’t hear them anyway. Step into your own power and nurture the belief that you are valuable, loveable and important to your partner. Provide your own reassurance when you start to feel doubtful with affirmations like ‘I am all that I need to be’, or ‘I am loved, valued and important’. Choose whatever feels good to say to your self and use it in times of fear. Being confident and self assured is much more appealing and a kind of sexy that’s hard to stray from rather than being needy and lacking self value. There will always be someone out there that could be considered more attractive, more interesting, funnier, richer, or smarter. It’s not about trying to measure up so that your partner will want only you, it’s about believing that you are loveable and trusting that your partner picked you for exactly who and what you are. From an article by Rachael Lay http://www.rachaellay.com/why-worrying-about-cheating-is-pointless/

Cheating is easy.
Try something hard
like….Being Faithful.
Daniel Engelbrecht

Who’s More Jealous: Men or Women?

“It is not love that is blind, but jealousy,” according to the writer Lawrence Durrell. Jealousy is defined as a fear and rage response that preserves romantic bonds between sexual partners. Its function, it is believed, is to curb infidelity between parents, which advances the survival of their children and their subsequent reproductive success. Romantic jealously is widely understood to be different for men and women because each gender has a different level of investment in reproduction. For a man to provide for genetically distant children decreases his reproductive success — and because men are uncertain whether they really are the father of said children, they are most susceptible to sexual infidelity. By contrast, women can rest assured that they are the mother of their own children; however, they are more dependent on men for resources, making them more sensitive to emotional infidelity, since it could threaten the supply of resources for herself and her child. While many subscribe to this view, the research has been admittedly inconclusive. Now, a team led by Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has broken new ground. Participants were presented with two hypothetical infidelity scenarios: “Sexual jealousy: ‘You suspect that while your boyfriend/ girlfriend was on vacation s/he had a one nightstand. You realize that even if s/he did have sex with this other person, they will probably never see each other again. How upset do you think you would feel if this happened?’” “Emotional jealousy: ‘You suspect that while your boyfriend/girlfriend was on a trip s/he fell in love with someone else. You realize that even if s/he did develop these feelings, s/he will probably never see this other person again. How upset do you think you would feel if this happened?’” They were then asked to answer these questions along a 10-point scale, ranging from 1 (not at all) to 10 (extremely). What did they find? Consistent with prior research, women reported higher levels of jealousy on both measures, and both men and women scored higher on sexual jealousy than on emotional jealousy. However, men reported greater jealousy in response to sexual infidelity by comparison to emotional infidelity. These findings square with the theory that men and women differ when it comes to the types of jealousy, that is, sexual vs. emotional. From an article by Vinita Mehta, Ph.D., Ed.M. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/head-games/201308/whos-more-jealous-men-or-women

In jealousy there is more self-love than love.
François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Jealousy: A Voice of Possessiveness Past

When you feel a surge of sexual jealousy, you’re responding to the possibility of being abandoned by your partner. But on a deeper level, jealousy is sounding a genetic alarm. Of course, your genes are the last thing on your mind as you watch your beloved flirt with an attractive stranger, but it is our genetic booty that jealousy’s urgent stab has evolved to defend. Our bodies and minds spring from thousands of generations of successful survival and mating ploys, all of which now operate in us. The most basic strategy is mate-guarding, on display during any cocktail party or Sunday stroll through the park: the innocent urge to put your arm around your partner in casual conversation; the not-so-innocent mention of a partner’s flaws, as if to say, “Trust me, this person is not the dazzling package she appears to be.” These are time-honored techniques to fend off potential rivals. Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists believe that our ancestors rarely got a second chance to woo a mate. And the pool of potential dates on Cavematch.com was in the low two digits. It therefore behooved our ancestors to be hypervigilant about any real or imagined threats to their relationships. There are two ways jealousy manifests itself: as an appropriate concern and as a destructive disturbance. Jealousy is either a fine feather duster or a blunt mallet, depending on how we perceive our own value on the mate market. When jealousy simply alerts us, it is likely to result from a concern for the relationship. But when it is destructive, it is usually triggered by insecurity about our prospects. People with a poor sense of self (that is, those who are desperate to preserve their mating prospects) are more prone to the deep hurt and fury that precede angry outbursts. Today your odds of longevity and fecundity are much better, but if you feel that you’re worthless, then you might as well be living in the Pleistocene, so tenaciously will you try to retain your mate. The trouble is, it won’t work. Because the easily tripped alarm of excessive jealousy stimulates Neanderthink, the consequences of abandonment (the worst-case scenario) are exaggerated. Getting dumped requires an adjustment, and although that adjustment is rarely life or (genetic) death, as it might have been eons ago, we still fear the loss of our partner and crave constant reassurance. Paradoxically, however, a person who needs reassurance of devotion and fidelity will drive a partner away and into the arms of a rival. Othello instructed us: Harmful jealousy springs from a weak sense of self.. By accepting that perfect reassurance cannot really exist and that you do not absolutely need it, you can redirect your efforts to improving your relationship. The energy spent seeking an ironclad guarantee of fidelity could be better spent, say, being the fun-loving person with whom your partner would want to have an affair. From an on-line article by Nando Pelusi, Ph.D. http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200607/jealousy-voice-possessiveness-past

Chains do not hold a marriage together.
It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads
which sew people together through the years.
Simone Signoret

Why Are Men So Jealous?

One of the reasons for this jealousy is insecurity. A man may be paired with a very beautiful woman and feel that he is not quite handsome enough to be with her. The male may feel that she’ll dump him for somebody else. Even if he feels, quote, unquote “handsome enough”, every time she smiles and looks at somebody else-he will still feel insecure about himself and his relationship with his partner. Insecurities can be the heart and soul of every jealousy: insecurity about appearance, relationship status and such. Through such feelings, comes a loss of trust, faith-never mind self-esteem. In the vast majority of all cases, the jealousy is simply not warranted. But say that to an insecure man. First, he’ll deny it. But when it becomes very apparent, he’ll say that she probably is cheating on him-wants another man. You may stand there, in deep consternation and befuddlement over these illusory jealousies. But he will still feel jealous, and may not be able to stop it. The wife or girlfriend in question ends up feeling insecure over her own relationship. She feels restricted or under a tight leash because she may have a number of male friends and her male partner cannot handle it. Jealousies have torn apart many a relationship over the years. It verges on and has easily crossed the lines of paranoia and obsessive behavior. By bukisa.com http://www.modernghana.com/lifestyle/2170/16/why-are-men-so-jealous.html

A woman never forgets
the men she could have had;
a man, the women he couldn’t.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings