How Jealous Are You?
One of the three kinds is a sign of love. The other two are not.
In 1989 two researchers split jealousy into three parts and found something that still gets ignored in every argument about it. Feeling a pang when your partner is admired is positively related to love. Suspecting them is negatively related to it. And checking up on them - the phone, the messages, the questions - is related to being less happy. Same word, three different things, pulling in opposite directions. Most people have one of the three much higher than the others, and almost nobody knows which.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your current relationship, or the way you usually are in one. Everybody scores something on the second bar - it is the height that is informative, not the presence.
What it measures
The three components of the Multidimensional Jealousy Scale. Emotional jealousy is how much a situation stings. Cognitive jealousy is how much you suspect, in the absence of evidence. Behavioural jealousy is what you do about it - checking, asking, keeping track. They are measured separately because they behave separately.
Based on: Multidimensional Jealousy Scale (Pfeiffer & Wong, 1989)
Possible results
The feeling
How much it stings when someone else is interested.
The suspicion
Thoughts about what might be happening, with no evidence.
The checking
What you actually do about it.
Common questions
Is a bit of jealousy healthy?
The first kind is normal, and normal is not the same as healthy or unhealthy - it is simply what happens when something you value might be at risk. The original research did find it going with love, which is where the folk saying comes from. Where the saying goes wrong is in extending that to the other two: suspicion went the opposite way, and checking went with being less happy. So the honest version is narrower than the proverb. Feeling it is fine. Acting on it is what has a price.
My partner says I am too jealous. Are they right?
Look at your third bar, because that is the only one they can see. Nobody can be bothered by a feeling they do not know about - what they are responding to is the questions, the checking, the change in the atmosphere after a night out. If your third bar is low and they still say this, the conversation is about something else. If it is high, they are describing your behaviour accurately, and the useful thing is that behaviour can be changed without waiting for the feeling to agree.
Why does reassurance not help for long?
Because it treats the second bar with a tool that only reaches the third. An answer settles one specific worry, and the suspicion that produced it simply generates another - usually within the day. Worse, the relief teaches the system that certainty is available on request, so the gaps become harder to sit in and the asking gets more frequent. This is why people who check more end up feeling less secure, not more, which is the opposite of what anyone expects going in.
Sources
- Pfeiffer, S. M., & Wong, P. T. P. (1989). Multidimensional jealousy. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
- Guerrero, L. K. (1998). Attachment-style differences in the experience and expression of romantic jealousy. Personal Relationships.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of the Multidimensional Jealousy Scale rather than the scale itself, and a result here is a description rather than a score. The three-part structure is solid - it has held up across decades and across countries - but two cautions belong with it. First, the findings about love come from correlations in surveys, so emotional jealousy going with love does not mean feeling more of it makes you love more, and it certainly does not make jealousy a thing to cultivate. Second, jealousy sometimes has an ordinary external cause: if you are suspicious in this relationship and were not in others, the useful question may be about the relationship rather than about you. If checking has become something you cannot stop, or if anyone is being controlled or frightened, that is past the point a test is any use for.