Men deploy multiple ways to overcome the feeling of jealousy in a romantic relationship. The possessive type would hound and keep track of his partner at every turn. If you don’t think this is the best way to go about it, you should try using trust as the cure to jealousy in your relationship.
Types of Jealousy
In romantic relationships, psychiatrists and medical professionals classify jealousy as cognitive, emotional, and behavioral. Cognitive jealousy arises from what you imagine or think is happening, while emotional jealousy is the situations, which may or may not have happened, involving your partner that can make you jealous (and most of us don’t feel jealous about the same things). These two are often interrelated: your emotional jealousy can jack up your cognitive jealousy, which is why if you’re caught cheating once, your partner is going to assume the worst more often.
The last category, behavioral jealousy is what you do to cope with jealousy. This can range from a violent man inflicting physical harm on his partner to a depressive man’s suicidal thoughts. In any event, behavioral jealousy can cause quite a bit of turmoil.
Learn to Trust
A bit of jealousy can be healthy in a romantic relationship. It is how you know you care about the other person. And you should probably feel flattered if you can invoke jealousy in your partner.
You can take this one step further and learn to trust your partner. More often than not, your partner would reciprocate and learn to trust you. In a perfect world, you both would try your best to be reliable so as to not betray the other’s trust.
Evaluate and Make Your Decision
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. However, trusting the other can reveal whether your partner deserves your trust. If you find your partner untrustworthy after giving it an honest try, or if you yourself proved unreliable, you should both reevaluate your relationship.
If it means a break-up, it would probably be for the best, but it can also include having an open relationship instead. A University of Michigan study found that heterosexual couples in consensual open relationships are just as happy as monogamous couples, but with the added benefits of higher trust and less jealousy.
But we have assumed the worst in the above. There’s a good chance that both you and your partner would prove trustworthy to each other, and thus found the cure to jealousy in your relationship and live happily ever after.
