Desire, Jealousy And Then Reality
I’m not proud that the phrase “bitch, how dare you” is a thought that goes through my mind several times a week.
It goes against everything I like to think about myself. I try not to engage in girl hate, I work really hard to be an open and caring ally to women everywhere. I want to always come from a place of love and understanding. I want to assume the best of people, especially women. I always want to acknowledge that if we are engaged in some kind of unspoken competition, it is because society has taught us to pit ourselves against the very people we should be relying on for help.
I want all those things but I fail at them with alarming frequency. My ideology gets quickly swept underfoot when my pride or vanity comes into question. If asked to identify the energy source that motivates my day to day, I’d probably point to caffeine and jealousy. It’s not pretty. I’m entirely ruled by the desire to be better. Better than who I was 10 years ago, better than who I am today, better than everyone standing near me.
I am confident that my marriage is a good one. I understand why women might be attracted to my husband. He’s a very handsome man. He’s kind and charming and funny. He is attentive and sweet. He has the best smile and remembers to turn my heating pad on every night before I come to bed so my feet never get cold. He doesn’t complain about taking out the trash and every Monday he asks if I have clothes that need washed so he can do the laundry. My mother adores him; my friends think he’s great. He’s compassionate and sexy and hilarious. That’s why I married him.
So, of course I am filled with sweet-natured benevolence when another woman (and more than a few men) find my husband appealing. Of course people think he’s attractive, he is! Of course you want to climb him like a tree — who wouldn’t?! So I center myself around a beatific calm and beam out happy, non-threatened vibes.
Only not really. I want to be all those things, I strive to reach some kind of enlightened stage of existence where I can really live those obvious bullshit platitudes I just recited. Because seriously, when you like my husband’s pictures and Facebook status updates, all I can think is, “Um, fuck you, no.”
You, random woman who is only tangentially involved in his life through work or mutual friends, do not get to tell him he’s handsome or post vague self-satisfied inside jokes on his photos.
You, girl who thinks it’s acceptable to text him questions about your birth control or panty lines, do not get to post heart-eyed emoji’s on his Instagram photos.
You, girl he had a fling with before we started dating, do not get to post things to his Facebook wall just because “I thought of you when I saw this.”
Well actually, you do. You do get to do all of those things. And because I am not nearly as out of control as my internal monologue would have me believe, I will simply silently seethe about it instead of baring my teeth and attacking you like a fox caught in a trap. I will let my stomach churn while I envision the (completely make-believe) intimate moments between you and the love of my life. I will let my anxiety and low self-worth get the best of me as I walk myself through what I assume will be the speech he gives me when he leaves me for you. I have it all planned out. It starts with “if you had only…” and goes downhill from there into a complete accounting of my wifely failures.
I look through all your photos and wonder if you’re prettier than me, funnier, less uptight and angry all the time. I wonder if you’d feel jealousy if things were reversed. I read your blogs and your tweets, curious what your thoughts on the economy and “Star Wars” and feminism are. I wonder how alike we are and how different. I wonder if my husband secretly wishes I were less aggressive, less fueled by feminist outrage, less likely to correct his friends when they say something sexist. I wonder if I embarrass him. I wonder if he would rather be with someone more like you, more easy going, more compliant.
The burden of being brutally self-aware is that I can easily point out all my own flaws. And because I can point them out, I’m almost certain everyone else can too. I’m constantly caught between this desire to be some hard to articulate version of myself and the cold reality of who I actually am.
