Jealous Kind

The green-eyed monster can make you snoop on your partner, lose his trust and ruin a good thing before it starts.

- Hemchhaya De

If we were to identify a single factor that could wreck relationships, across the board, jealousy would be a winner. It’s such a bewildering mixture of motions. Dr Jyoti Kapoor Madan, a senior psychiatry consultant at Paras Hospitals, Gurgaon, helps us untangle them. “Jealousy contains anxiety, fear, concern, anger, resentment and a sense of inadequacy or insecurity. The intensity and triggers of it vary from person to person, based on how their personal beliefs about relationships have been shaped, growing up,” she says. There have been countless studies on jealousy around the world—some say, a propensity for it could be genetic, others maintain that it’s just a by-product of human evolution. Experts say the other face of jealousy is love. In other words, a little bit of it could be an expression of the deep feelings you have for each other and wanting to protect that. Dr Madan says, “Some amount of jealousy helps a relationship mature as couples enjoy the feeling of being important enough to be worried about. It fosters a sense of belonging.”