VI
JEALOUSY
A woman wants to know if there is any cure for jealousy. She says that she knows her husband loves her devotedly. He is true and faithful to her. He is as domesticated as the house cat and casts no roving eye at the pretty flappers. Nevertheless, every time he speaks to another woman she endures grinding torments of suspicion.
There is only one cure for jealousy. That is to use a little common sense, but this puts the remedy out of the reach of the green-eyed, because jealousy is a form of insanity.
It is a lack of mental balance that makes people imagine things that do not exist, that causes them to see deep, dark plots in the most innocent acts and that makes them deliberately torture themselves by believing that the ones that they love most are traitors to them. Also, it is what the alienists call “the exaggerated ego” that makes any man or woman believe that he or she can supply another individual’s whole need of human companionship.
For jealousy isn’t confined solely to lovers. Some of the most acute attacks are the jealousy that men and women feel for their in-laws. Sometimes parents are even jealous of their own children. Wives are often jealous of their husband’s business, and always jealous of the old friends of their bachelor days. But however and wherever it is, and no matter how causeless and needless it may be, jealousy poisons the life and ruins the happiness of all of those who indulge in it. It is the source of endless quarrels between husbands and wives, and it slays love quicker than any other one thing. Indeed, the jealous bring down the curse they fear upon their own heads.
By their suspicions the jealous materialize the very thing they most dread, for there is no surer way of driving a man or a woman into philandering than by keeping dangling continually before his or her eyes a romantic possibility in which he or she is likely to indulge at any moment. Many a married man would never think of himself as a lady-killer—in fact, he would consider that he was married and settled, and done with sentimental episodes, except that his wife keeps alive his belief in himself as a heart-smasher by her jealousy. If she considers him so fascinating that she is afraid to let him have a casual conversation with another woman, or take a turn around a ballroom floor with a pretty girl, he argues that he must be some sheik. And so he buys him some Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes and sets his hat on the side of his head and proceeds to justify her once groundless suspicions.
Furthermore, jealousy is its own undoing, because it strikes a death blow at our personal liberty, which is dearer to us and more necessary to our happiness than any man or woman ever is. None of us likes to be called upon to furnish an alibi. None of us enjoys being put through a questionnaire about everything that was said to us and everything we said. None of us but resents not being free to go and come as we like within reasonable bounds and to hold ordinary social intercourse with any one we choose. So if husbands and wives went about deliberately to kill every particle of affection that their mates have for them, they could take no better way to do it than by spying upon them, by attributing unworthy motives to them, by curtailing their freedom and by making such jealous scenes that, for the sake of peace, they are forced to lie and deceive. Besides, jealousy is an unforgivable insult.
There are women who have conniption fits every time their husbands make themselves agreeable to their dinner partners or take a chance-met old woman friend out to lunch. There are wives who never believe that their husbands can admire a beautiful woman or enjoy the society of a brilliant one innocently. They attribute the basest motives to the men they love and accuse them not only of being faithless, but of the grossest animalism, which was far and away from the thoughts of the poor gentlemen.
Finally, jealousy is an indication of the inferiority complex. The woman who is jealous of all other women in her heart believes them all her superiors. She believes them better looking, more intelligent, more charming, with more attraction for her husband than she has. That is why she is so afraid of their getting him away from her. You can’t imagine a queen being jealous of a milkmaid or a Lillian Russell being jealous of an ugly duckling, or a star dancer not being willing to have her husband to tread a measure with some lump of a girl who would walk all over his feet. All of this being true, then, the way to cure jealousy is to apply common sense to the situation. Try to look at it fairly and squarely. In the first place, your husband or wife wouldn’t have married you if he or she hadn’t preferred you to every one else in the world. If you had charm before marriage you have it still, if you will take the trouble to use it. In the second place, you know that you enjoy talking to other people, and that your contact with them is perfectly harmless. Why not believe your husband or wife is as decent as you are? In the third place, why keep your husband or wife always fed up with the idea that he or she is a fascinator that no woman or man can resist? It makes them want to try and see if they can stand them up. And lastly, if you are married to a man or woman whom you believe to have so little truth and honor, and who cares so little for you that he or she can’t be trusted out of your sight, why worry about him or about her? He or she isn’t worth a single pang of jealousy.