Jealousy Defeats Its Object. One of the worst features about jealousy is that it defeats its own object. We have been told, as stated before, that jealousy was once upon a time a racial instinct, that by frightening away rivals it helped to found the family and to keep it chaste and pure. Quite the contrary is true now. More than one man has, by accusing his innocent wife of infidelity and by torturing her with baseless suspicions, driven her into the arms of a lover. We are all more or less susceptible to suggestion, and by continually suspecting a wife of a love affair or illicit relation a man may implant the seed of suggestion so strongly that it may grow luxuriantly and the wife may be unable to resist the suggested temptation. And very often the very lover is suggested by the husband. "Yes, don't attempt to deny it. It is useless. I know you have relations with X. I know you are his mistress." He kept on repeating it so often to his absolutely blameless, innocent young wife and he made her so wretched by his rudeness and brutality that one day she did go over to X's rooms and did become his mistress. And after that she could stand her husband's outbursts with equanimity. "If I have the name I might as well have the game," is a good bit of psychologic wisdom. And a husband should be very careful about even suspecting a wife unjustly, and thus make the first step towards rendering his baseless suspicions a reality, his unjust accusations justified. And, of course, what is true of the husband is also true of the wife. Many a wife has driven her indolent husband into the hands of prostitutes or mistresses by her incessant nagging, false accusations and vicious epithets applied to all his female friends and acquaintances.
Yes, from whatever angle you consider it, jealousy is a mean, nasty, miserable feeling. Because it is a more or less universal feeling, because "we cannot help it," does not render it less mean, less nasty, less miserable.
I do not for a moment imagine that characterizing jealousy the way it deserves to be characterized, calling it a shameful, savage, primitive feeling, etc., is at once going to banish it from the breasts of men and women in which it has found an abiding place; throwing epithets at it will not cause it to unfasten its talons. Unfortunately, I know only too well that our emotions are stronger than our reason; the man or woman at whose poor heart jealousy is gnawing day and night is not amenable to reason, is not curable by arguments; all we can do is to sympathize with such a person and ask the Lord to pity him or her.
I have known a man who lived with his wife in free union, i.e., he was not married to her. He did not believe in marriage. Love was the only bond that should bind people together; as soon as love was no more the people should separate in a friendly, comradely manner. If the wife or the mistress wants another lover, she should be free to take one; she is a free human being and not her husband's chattel slave, etc., etc., etc., to the same effect. Thus the man talked. And he was sincere in his talk—or he thought he was. But one night on unexpectedly returning home he found another man; he promptly fired several shots at the man, which fortunately for both did not prove fatal, and then he beat and choked his wife—who wasn't even his wife legally—within an inch of her life. And then he married her and gave up his free love talk. And I know of any number of men who could philosophize for hours about the disgrace and humiliation of being jealous, but who, as soon as there was a justifiable cause for jealousy, became as unreasonable as a child and as jealous as any unlettered Sicilian woman ever was.
So you see, I am not deluding myself with extravagant hopes. But, nevertheless, this argumentation, this talk, is not entirely useless. A beginning must be made. This essay may not perhaps help—except for the suggestions that will be made towards the end—those who are already victims of the demon of jealousy, but it may help some people to keep out of his clutches (or should I say: her clutches? I really don't know whether the demon of jealousy is a male or a female.)
Feelings are stronger than reason; but that does not mean that feelings cannot be influenced by reason; they decidedly can be and are so influenced, and their manifestations are modified by this influence; and the more cultured, the more educated a person is (I trust you will know that I use these terms in their true and not their vulgar, misused meaning), the more will his feelings, or at least actions, be influenced by his reason. I am particularly a believer in the effect on our feelings and actions of public opinion, of ideas universally or generally entertained.
Let me give one example which is pertinent to the subject. In former days it was universally held, and in many places it is still held, that when a wife sinned she committed the most unpardonable crime that a human being could be guilty of and that she thereby dishonored her husband. And the only right thing for him to do was to shoot the rival and cast out the wife; or at least to cast her out. This was a conditio sine qua non. To take her back to his home was a disgrace, a sign of unpardonable weakness, of degeneracy. Our ideas on the subject have changed a bit. A husband is no longer considered any more dishonored—in some strata of society at least—because his wife sinned than a wife is considered dishonored because her husband sinned; and adultery in the wife is now, by most rational people, considered only different in degree, but not in kind, from adultery in the husband. These humane ideas have gained vogue only within a comparatively very recent period; but their effect has already manifested itself in a great number of instances. Forgiving the erring wife is becoming quite common. A number of cases have reached the newspapers. Recently a wife was implicated in a nasty scrape; her sin was not only unquestionable, but notorious; it was public property. And nevertheless the husband stood by her and took her back into his home and arms. And the number of such cases which do not reach the newspapers is very, very much larger than the public has any conception of, larger than it would be safe to estimate. And in a large percentage of these cases the husband begins to treat his wife with more love, more consideration, and the tie between them becomes more firm, more permanent.