Does resentment ruin or build a relationship?

2005-05-11
By Deogratias Mushi

Any human being possesses a certain percentage of jealousy, and, in fact, this is undoubted truth. Allow me begin by making the observation that there is no twisted object like love. Love is never uniform.

It is subject to many forms, interpretations, and feelings, and there are no standard measures that one can employ to get the perfect picture of love, because each individual feels differently. Other people experience love in inflaming, low intensity pull, betraying but little outward signs that they are burning up, being consumed by the fires of passion.

Yet others show it by a violent disposition, physically pining away at the absence of their loved ones, and brightening up, pulsating with life, when their dear ones are present. These different degrees of responsiveness to love, a person’s temperament so to speak, also manifest differently when this love is threatened. But what we should assert first is that the feeling of jealousy is never born where there is no love. For sure jealousy is a wrecker of relationships, where one party suspects the other of double dealing. Often there are quarrels, fights, breaking down of relationships. The heart thumps, the head swells, there is a constriction in breath – generally day turns into night, when a man for example, suspects that his girl is cheating on him.

There is no bigger tragedy in a man’s life than suspecting that some other man is running your girl; that the girl you love so much, is sharing her heart, and probably more, with you and another.

What is worse – such cases are very difficult to resolve. The ache will remain permanently.

But what is the prime cause of this? Too much love! Too much love will kill you, goes. Song, but you will not die due to the intensity of feelings for him or her, however much your heart thumps for them. What is probable is that you will die from the mere wisp of suspicion that she is seeing another person, then coming back into your arms, pretending to be as holy as a Muslim who does not miss all five daily prayers. When people are in love, there is an abundance of trust. There is a general feeling of putting your whole lifes existence in the other partys hands. So it becomes a betrayal of the highest degree when cracks appear in this armoured trust, and no amount of confrontation will take away these gnawing pangs of jealousy. They become a cancer, and the most frustrating thing is that the fact that there is a cloud between you, you can stop loving him or her. No. You can not tear yourself from your partner, because despite the feeling of insecurity that has engulfed the relationship, you are still held captive by cupids arrow.

The other day I was conversing with a hard-talking woman I met at a wedding, and in the course of talking, she asked the ladies in the group what they would do if their husband brought a woman back home, and coolly introduced her as a co-wife. The reaction, much as it was highly indignant, however, did not match the fury that greeted the lady when she cheekily posed the same question to the men. How could she even think about it, they fumed. But there it was. The tampering of exclusive rights to someones heart, purse, body – everything. And it was clear men felt more strongly than women about this hypothetical threat.

But perhaps this has leanings on feelings of male dominance than that they feel more! A discussion about jealousy can never be quite complete without some allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello. The man is always roundly condemned for having such intense pangs of jealousy, that eventually led him to strangle his beautiful Desdemona. No one ever feels with him, that he loved so intensely, but was seeing, right before his very eyes, his wife ostensibly being wooed by another. There was that issue of incontrovertible proof. Everyone would have died with jealousy, because everything pointed to the fact that his wife was being unfaithful to him. We should blame too much love, not jealousy. Even when he was deciding on her manner of death, he did not want to disfigure her loveliness.

I put it before you ladies and gentlemen, that you never flare completely out of temper when your spouse accuses you of cheating, because then you can be sure that he or she still hold you dear.

deomushi@guardian.co.tz

* SOURCE: Guardian