The Green-Eyed Marriage by Robert L. Barker

Author:Robert L. Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1987-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Edith’s submissive behavior did not help anyone. It didn’t help her husband with his jealousy problem, and it didn’t help to make her own life better. Nor did it make the relationship any easier or lead to the harmony she was presumably seeking. All it really did was contribute to her becoming more depressed and less effective.

Unlike many people in her circumstance, however, she was able to overcome many of these problems. She was placed in a group psychotherapy program for women in similar circumstances. It provided her with a healthy outlet, an opportunity to ventilate her feelings and relate to others. She was empathetic and understanding, and her fellow group members soon recognized her perceptiveness and wisdom. Her self-esteem returned. She began to care about her appearance. She started applying the advice she gave to others in the group to herself. She had told other members to stand up for themselves when they had encounters with their husbands. She became more effective in dealing with her husband when she stopped being submissive. After a period of more intense fighting, he got used to her assertiveness and began to give her far more respect than he ever had before. Their marriage, while still troubled, is far healthier.

Depression, learned helplessness, ineffectiveness, lowered self-esteem, and other mental and physical disorders can be avoided by most people, even though they remain in unresolvable jealous relationships. To do this, it is necessary to plan effective self-defense strategies. One might take many possible actions for self-protection in dealing with a jealous person, but not all of them are effective; in fact, some are counterproductive.

Strategies that will predictably be ineffective include those that try to hurt the jealous person. Activities that occur merely because of anger or the need for revenge can only lead to a cycle of increasingly unhealthy confrontations. Self-defense tactics meant only to make the jealous person feel guilty or humiliated are also going to fail. When humiliated or guilty, the jealous person isn’t likely to become contrite or seek to improve but rather to get angry and seek more control over the partner.

Threatening to leave without actually doing so is the worst of the ineffective self-defense tactics. Ironically, it also seems to be the most frequently attempted activity by partners of jealous people. The nonjealous partner typically says something like, “If you don’t stop accusing me and checking up on me, Tm going to move into an apartment and stay there.” Making such a threat, however, is counterproductive unless there is willingness and ability to actually carry it out. One must be prepared to make the move fairly promptly and permanently for it to have any of the desired effect on the jealous person.

Although the intent of such threats is supposedly to frighten the jealous person into more reasonable behavior, they usually have the opposite effect. Jealous people act badly largely because they are already frightened about the possibility of losing their loved ones. If such threats seem serious, they will indeed cause further worry.

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