Jealousy, and Other Visitors

A Brief Romance, the Nature of Feelings, and a Mindfulness Practice

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Pueblo Bonito, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo by Don Boivin

A Brief Romance

I had met a girl at the hostel in Santa Fe. I was thirty-six and newly divorced, still recovering. She was an artist researching the turquoise jewelry of the Southwest, and even though she had to return to Michigan two weeks later, we agreed to try out some sort of long-distance relationship.

A road trip might help us get to know each other better, we decided, and so, a few months later, we departed Michigan, heading southeast toward Virginia, then down to Florida, across the southern states, and up the Pacific coast.

I thought of the trip as my chance to determine if this was the person I wanted to “be with.” She was, and still is I’m sure, a good person: intelligent, creative, liberal and kind.

In Austin we met a friendly couple on the Congress Avenue Bridge, home to the largest urban bat colony in the world (crowds gather daily to witness the bats’ twilight departure—an awesome performance, they say, though we didn’t end up staying). After what I thought was a stimulating interchange with this couple, the two departed and S. turned to me in anger.

“You hogged all their attention,” she said.

I’m not a big talker, and that wasn’t the issue. It was that they had made more eye contact with me than with her, asked me more questions. This subject would surface repeatedly in our future time together. Part of it is warranted; there is a gender bias, and it is sometimes the case that people will defer to the man in a mixed-gender conversation (though I think more often they simply pay attention to whomever seems the most self-assured or open).

But I think the bigger issue was that my new friend, who would actually become my girlfriend for the next few years, suffered from a particular social insecurity: she felt invisible. This freely-admitted fear was one of those self-fulfilling prophesies; she dressed conservatively, in muted fall colors, spent a lot of time alone in her studio, and seldom reached out to others for companionship or support.

In our rare social meetings, I tried deferring questions to her, but, knowing her fixation, I would feel self-conscious if someone took an interest in me. And I began to resent that.

We all have our weaknesses and I am not trying to blame her for anything. I was no Romeo myself; an unemployed, wounded soul with a swiftly receding hairline! As I said, she was a wonderful person and I don’t regret the time we shared.

At a campground outside Portland, I told her we were not going to be a couple. Thus began an awkward few days. After trying to answer every variation of, “What is it about me you don’t like?” we re-established some equilibrium and continued to enjoy our trip. Glacier National Park was amazing. At some point I backtracked on my decision.

For the next five years we cobbled a relationship together. We talked on the phone for hours, wrote long letters. She came to live with me in Massachusetts, where we shared a winter rental on the South Coast and then camped for the summer on Cape Cod. I lived with her in Detroit for a year.

I was a coward for staying as long as I did. I really wanted it to work. We had a connection, a friendship. We both loved bagels and chocolate. We listened to Jack White, the Gypsy Kings, Lucinda Williams. We went to dozens of performances at the Detroit Institute of Arts (this was before the city went bankrupt) and attended any other cultural event that seemed interesting, from jazz festivals to church bazaars. She made a living as an artist, which I admired.

She had no friends, and that was difficult for me. I didn’t want to be her only friend. That’s a heavy burden. And she obsessed over privacy (the argument we had over whether she could be seen through the second-floor bathroom curtains by a pedestrian who might be passing along the street below).

And stemming from that same conflicted fear-of-invisibility/desire-to-be-invisible was the assumption that I would prefer to be with someone else, someone prettier (she was certainly pretty), or more vivacious or carefree. This manifested itself in real time. She would spy a woman, at Barnes & Noble Cafe, say, whom she thought I would like, and point her out to me. A trap, obviously, asking me to confirm her worst fear (and if the stranger actually was attractive to me, someone I’d already noticed, add my guilt to the mix). I grew tired of this awkward public behavior and once confronted her with an ultimatum. I needed things to change. They didn’t.

After I left, we maintained a friendship, even met up for a trip to the Florida Keys (friends with benefits, in case you’re wondering), until I met someone else, at which point she stated very clearly that she didn’t want to see or hear from me ever again.

S. is not a “crazy ex-girlfriend.” I value the relationship we had and remember her as pure-hearted, virtuous and compassionate. I appreciate her love of music and artistic passion, her independence and curiosity. It’s regrettable that we couldn’t stay friends but I respect her wishes.

It’s been many years, and since she has no online presence (the privacy thing), I am assuming and hoping she won’t read this (her one emphatic request when we broke up was that I not talk about her to other people, especially to other women, so I am decidedly hesitant to publish this essay. But then again, it’s been eighteen years, so I would say the statute of limitations has been reached.)

May she be well; may her best intentions be realized.

Photo by Jay Castor on Unsplash

Feelings, and a Mindfulness Practice

The Buddhist teachings refer to feelings in this way: They arise, they abide for a while, they subside.

In other words, feelings may stop in for a visit, often an unexpected one, they may stay for an appropriate (or inappropriate) period of time, but they always move on at some point. While this wise observation may be true, the problem is that if those feelings—jealousy, say, or anger—visit often enough, they eventually trod a smooth and straight path directly to your door, thus making it easier to find their way back again. And again, and again.

My most frequent visitor is anxiety, usually having to do with finances and responsibilities, to myself and to those I love. The unwelcome caller arrives in colorless cloaks, revealing itself only as the nervous question: What am I not doing that I should be doing? (I wrote about this in “When Anxiety Knocks…”)

The solution to these unwanted visitors is not resistance, rejection, or repression. You can’t vanquish negative feelings through brute force or by willing them away. Or by ignoring them or distracting yourself from them. In fact, resistance and passivity often only strengthen them.

The solution is to pay closer attention to your mind, to what we call “self,” and everything that goes on there. If you pay close attention, you will know better when your visitors are on their way, you’ll recognize them when they arrive, and, understanding that they will be leaving soon, you will not bother fighting them off, but you will also not take them too seriously:

Hello, anger. Hello, jealousy. I remember you, and won’t deny you. You don’t frighten me now because I’ve seen you come and go so often. Remember the last time I let you get under my skin, how I suffered so much? This time I am just smiling at you. I don’t have to respond to your lies or your ridiculous demands. You can’t trick me this time, say what you will. Sit for a while if you must, but you’re only getting tea, not dinner.

You have to remind yourself to practice this objectivity, but don’t think of it as a fight to get rid of something. The negative feeling is here on the one hand. You don’t try to push it away. On the other hand is your awareness. You see the feeling as an object of reflection. There’s no resistance, no turning your mind into a battlefield. It’s just: Here is my familiar visitor, anxiety (or jealousy or anger or fear...). What is that, really? Let’s have a closer look. Where does it come from? Where does it exist inside me? What does it really feel like? What does it want? How long does it stay? What happens to it when I don’t resist it, but just focus in on it?

Reflection is really the heart of a mindfulness practice. Just being willing to sit with whatever is, sitting quietly and observing; observing the self, observing the world around you, without judgement, without desire for a different set of circumstances, a different feeling, a different time, a different place. Just being willing to be with things as they are.

Meditation is this same reflective practice but in an intentional setting, for an intended period of time. It primes and prepares you for letting that kind of non-judgmental awareness spread to the rest of the hours of your day. It’s a habit that takes time to develop, but equanimity is the reward. So, I do recommend meditation, but it is not the main thing. The honest looking—without judgement or resistance—is the main thing. You could be walking in the woods, or shopping at the mall. You could be making dinner or washing the dishes. Being present is the key.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the beloved Vietnamese mindfulness teacher who passed away in 2022, liked to use washing dishes as a way to practice being present. When you wash dishes with mindfulness, you pay attention: to the clanging of pans and the sparkling spray of the faucet, to the feel of your hands submerged in the hot soapy water, to the passing of the sponge over the smooth surface of each dish and utensil. You obviously can’t be in a hurry, but the upshot of this patient practice is that you don’t feel hurried. You actually enjoy the occasion. It is rich with sensitivity and graciousness. You walk away with the feeling that you just spent your time well.

And that kind of thing can happen when you treat the contents of your mind in the same way: with care and attention. You find that the mind isn’t such a mysterious or alarming place, and that those horrible feelings were not so horrible after all, they were really just kind of... innocuous. Just obstacles, like a tree fallen across your path. Or like clouds. Scary and dark for a little while maybe, but not really of any substance. Just something else in the world to observe passing overhead.

Photo by Micah Bratt on Unsplash

Conclusion

My intention with this essay was to introduce feelings and their passing nature. I didn’t really intend to write about my ex-girlfriend, certainly not in a negative way. To be honest, I’m not sure how that came up; I just found myself writing and there it was. I hope I have not maligned her or come across as haughty or superior. I can speak about insecurity, pain, and suffering only because, as a human being, I experience these feelings myself—a lot—and I have been practicing meditation and mindfulness as a way to understand them more deeply.

Relationships aren’t easy, not even healthy relationships. My sincere hope is that, despite all of our quirks and wounds, green-eyed monsters and emotional crises, despite these very human, sometimes overwhelming feelings, we can each find some quiet space within, a reflective place where there is understanding, acceptance, some grace, and maybe even a little love; love for self, first of all, and then, by extension, for those we meet in passing, for those with whom we share a few years, and for those who may (or may not) become companions for a lifetime.

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