It’s time to come clean — I’m a jealous person. It sucks having to constantly be jealous of what others have or what others are doing at my age that I’m not doing or haven’t done yet. The hard truth is that it can truly get in the way of feminism.
Jealousy in relationships
One of my many examples is the fact that in a past relationship (no matter how bad the cheating scandal was), I was very picky with the women that my significant other was friends with. They needed to invite me into their friendship too, and that’s obviously no way to be mature about things. I’ll admit day and night that I am a jealous person when it comes to relationships, but it truly bothers me.
Jealousy ruins potential friendships
My ex had some pretty cool women who he was friends with, but due to my own personal jealousy and insecurity, those friendships came to a quick end and I sincerely regret that. Some of the women tried to be friends with me, but I was too stubborn and didn’t realize this. This is what I mean when I said that it gets in the way.
Pure Jealousy
Some other things that don’t have anything to do with relationships are purely just being jealous over another woman in general — so much that it allows you to be angry. I remember in high school picking on girls in my head just because I could, but mainly because they had a new iPhone I wanted, or they were able to drive before I was. It’s silly and it really set an idea in my head that jealousy like that is okay to have. It’s absolutely not.
Let’s be hype women for each other
As women, we should always be each other’s hype girls. We should be rooting for women in general — for our successes in general, and not just our own personal successes. I mean, it’s totally fair that we’ve got our head in the game with our own personal success, but we shouldn’t let jealousy get in the way when someone on LinkedIn posts about her newest promotion. In my opinion, I think we should all comment on that post and really let them know the support from our community.
With that being said, not being jealous is hard. I’m speaking from experience of 20 years of jealousy. I don’t have the perfect set of advice for this, but I have a few ways that have helped me over the course of the last couple of years. As far as relationships go, that’s a trust thing. My current significant other has never done anything to hurt my trust when it comes to his female friends. Therefore, I don’t feel a need to get jealous because of it. My past relationship had a lot of flaws from the beginning that we should have worked out before we even started dating.
Moving forward, insecurities are genuinely where my jealousy of jobs and education comes from. It has nothing to do with the woman herself, but 100% to do with the fact that she is doing better than me. But, we’re all made differently. I’ve not had the same experience as the woman I’m tearing down on LinkedIn, so how can I compare my wins and losses to hers? The answer is fairly simple — I cannot.
I had to really train my mind to do this, but every time I see a win for a woman, I think of it as a win for all of us. That’s truly what it is. Think of it this way: women don’t get enough credit for what we do, regardless of if it’s from a man or a woman. We have to be the ones to step up for one another, and to be able to say, “I am proud of you,” or, “Congratulations” without being jealous.
The future is woman, and we’re going to be the ones to see that it stays that way. Here’s to all of our achievements, big or small, and here’s to feminism.