Originally Posted by lucidfer

True AJay. In order to be a well rounded individual you have to experience all emotions, preferably in abundance, preferably on the full scale of all things. The person who goes around all day 'loving' everyone, in the end, has no love for anyone, because it becomes their natural mental state. There is no proper way to express to those closest what they mean to them, because there's no way to differentiate their love with those of the everyday person. It's all the same shade of grey. To be human, you need all emotions, all ranges, all intensities. All colors to properly paint the map of your emotional life with, and that includes jealousy.

You have a natural investment in her, and you natural tendency is to protect what is yours. We all have a constant battle back and forth between the Id (our caveman us) and ego. Jealousy as it is is a natural phenomenon and should be embraced in a lot of things. Jealousy (envy, greed) is a natural driving force that pushes us to move beyond our limits, to strive for better and more, and to protect what we have. Jealousy helps fulfill the ego through pride and vanity in what we have achieved. It makes us into happy, healthy humans, with fully developed mental and emotional states that allow us to properly interact and thrive in our environment. But this jealousy should only be in certain areas of our lives, and controlled in others.

Occasionally jealously leaks out into things that it shouldn't, or in ways that are unacceptable. When we're young and inexperienced (especially with relationships), we're don't have past experiences to fall back on for how to react to certain situations (e.g. another guy talking to your girl at a party), and we fall back on the natural (id) programming inside us to make those choices (which are usually incorrect for modern times, e.g. percieving this guy as a threat and arguing with her later), or we model or behavior on other people we look up to (friends, family, or now adays movie actors, and as we've talked about a lot of modern movies are written completely backasawards for seduction). The society in which we live (and especially the contemporary dating ritual) is built upon artificial social biases and rules compounded throughout the ages by our parents parents; rules that are ancestors didn't have to deal with. (I could go into a lot of details about why this is the way it is, but my post could easily triple in length). So its no question why when we have no past experiences with dating that we often react in the wrong way... our natural instincts are running off of Human OS v.1.0, and society expects us to be on Human v5000.0.

So without each of us having that background of past relationship fuckups, or without information gained through other peoples' zeitgeist (older brothers, dating books, these forums), we're likely to screw up... or feel jealous for stupid shit. But even you're really good (you phil), you're still human and therefor susceptible to these basic human emotions leaking through.

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I guess I don't know where I'm going with this, probably was just a bunch of new connections being made in my head that had to come out (mixing philosophy, religion, economics, entrepreneurship, dating, anthropology and a bunch of other shit I've been reading lately).