When jealousy makes you lose your mind

Jealousy is that lousy feeling you get in the pit of your stomach, and it makes you all shades of crazy. It feels like everything is happening to you at the same time; headache, internal heat, sweaty palms, blinding rage, loosened tongue, and a pain that is absolutely heartbreaking. That is what happens to you the moment jealousy holds you in its grip.

Life becomes a mess, your vision becomes blurred, your thinking becomes crooked, you seem to lack focus…it is a devastating emotion that can destroy a good thing. It can make you say, and do, things you will, more than likely, later regret but unfortunately can not take back. Jealously ruins relationships!

However, it isn’t bad in a healthy dose. It can provide the right balance in a relationship, but just the smallest step further, and you are in a place you would rather not be. When you have a gut feeling that your partner is cheating on you, jealousy is often the natural reaction. However, if all you are doing in basing your jealousy on just your gut feeling, with no proof to substantiate it, or if it is just a function of your insecurity, then there is a problem…a big one.

This type of jealousy is fed by fear, not fact. It is the fear of losing the other person…the fear of the other person finding out that there are, indeed, better options out there…that the grass is greener on the other side. That kind of fear can feed a self-created fit of jealousy.

Jealousy can be cute at first…but after a while, it gets tired, and old, and stifling. There is nothing sexy or attractive about a jealous partner. Rather than act as an endearment, it is a downright put-off. And instead of holding on to your partner, in most cases, the jealous party loses out in the end.

A member of our community, Nengi* could not get over the fear that her longtime boyfriend was cheating on her. He had just started working in a bank that was notorious for it’s light skinned and beautiful female staff.

She was constantly checking his phone for anything incriminating, and found herself constantly driving by his branch, to see if she would catch him in a compromising position. She made sure she called all unknown numbers on his phone, and heaven forbid if it was a woman’s voice on the receiving end! She would rave, rant, curse, and warn off such women from her boyfriend. The same fate met any woman she saw around her him on his bank’s premises. Let’s just say that his colleagues witnessed one scene too many in the parking lot. The result was that she made him a laughing stock, not only to his colleagues, but, worse still, to the bank’s customers. Embarrassed and humiliated, he had ended their relationship. So, her jealousy had taken her nowhere in the end.

So, how do you know if your own jealousy has gone out of hand? The following are some key indicators:

If you are on your partner’s social media page, more than necessary.

Well, this one is called social media stalking. If you find yourself constantly monitoring what your partner is doing, who they are talking to, what they are sharing, who they are following, what posts they are liking…then we hate to break it to you, but you have become a full bona s.t.a.l.k.e.r! Worse still is when you extend this stalking to the pages of the suspected love interest(s) of your partner. If you find yourself scanning a stranger’s pictures as far back as 2007, colour yourself jealous! Doing this will only increase your blood pressure, not to mention heighten your feelings of insecurity.

And don’t get us started on the search for passwords and/or phone pins! So you find them…then what? Send messages to, or worse call, people you suspect your partner is cheating with, to warn them? Apart from making you look a fool, you gain absolutely nothing!

You call your partner throughout the day

Are you one of those people who become really agitated when their partner doesn’t answer his/her calls, or reply messages, in what you think is a timely manner? Do you become physically sick, and make yourself go crazy with you wonder, visualising what could, or couldn’t be? As people who have been there, we know that this is a miserable life for the over-jealous partner.—Bellanaija