“Yesterday I ran into Fernando, he told me that I was very pretty and that we would see if we could meet up for a drink…” I look at my friend, who is talking to her boyfriend in front of me about a conversation that has not happened. She wants to make him jealous. Check that she cares. And worst of all, she’s not the first person around me that I’ve seen doing something like that.
Provoking jealousy to check that your partner cares about you is a very toxic behaviormaybe fruit of an infidelity lived in the past or simply not knowing how to manage emotions well, and it is not healthy for our relationship. This toxic habit has an explanation (and solution) and the psychologist María Esclapez tells us about it.
Making your partner jealous, a very toxic behavior
Although María Esclapez explains in her book I love me, I love you: A guide to developing healthy relationships (and improving the ones you already have) that jealousy is neither good nor bad, but “an emotion to learn to manage”, if there is something that is not good and it is intentionally provoking it with the aim of “verifying” that our partner cares about us.
I love myself, I love you: A guide to developing healthy relationships (and improving the ones you already have) (Bruguera Tendencies)
It’s called protest behavior and the psychologist has explained to us why it happens on her TikTok account, and why it’s a horrible idea to do it in our relationships. And the worst thing is that it is even normalized in some.
@maria_esclapez Do you cause jealousy to know if he loves you? #amor #parati #booktok #parativiral #jealousy #psychology #books #couple
♬ Beyonce – AMARNI
Protest behavior is attention-grabbing behavior that children do when they don’t know how to communicate things to adults, something that doesn’t work as we grow up and have more and more tools to communicate.
María Esclapez explains that in this habit of making another person jealous on purpose there are two phenomena involved: the protest behavior itself and the myths of romantic love. And he explains that “as a society we have learned that jealousy is an emotion that appears when something is very important to us and we do not want to lose it, and we have mistakenly associated it with a form of expression of love”. As if they were dominoes, we think that jealousy appears when they love us and we see it as an expression of love because we have in our heads that love is possession.
But what is really interesting is the psychologist’s last reflection, which we could also read in her latest book You are your safe place: Make peace with your past to reconnect with you (and those around you): “Love is free and you choose every day to be with your partner. There are many ways for your partner to show you that they love you and it is not necessary to resort to behaviors of a small child.”
You are your safe place: Make peace with your past to reconnect with yourself (and those around you) (Bruguera Tendencies)
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Photos | kendyle nelson and deny nikkhah in Unsplash
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