Rose-red love mutates into that green-eyed monster, jealousy

The rose is a more appropriate symbol of Valentines day than it might initially seem, writes Justin Thomas.

The rose is a more appropriate symbol of Valentines day than it might initially seem. Photo: Wafaa Saeed AlHadrami

Yesterday was Valentine’s day, a celebration of romantic love. The rose, the floral emblem of love is an anagram of the word eros (desire) and about 200 million roses were cultivated for last year’s Valentine’s day. In the UAE too, many malls adopt a red rose theme: red hearts, red balloons, shop girls dressed in red and cute red teddy bears holding, of course, red roses. But there is a much darker side to all this cuteness, brightness and redness.

In western mythology for instance, the rose reflects jealousy and violence. According to one telling of the rose myth, Venus’s beloved Adonis is brutally murdered by the jealous Mars. The slain Adonis’s red blood gives rise to blood-red roses, while the mournful Venus’s tears produce roses of purest white. These are powerful images that have assured the rose its place as a symbol of both passion and pain, love and loss.

It is the same today, Rose-red romantic love frequently mutates into a sickly green jealousy, which can get pretty ugly pretty quickly, ending in tears and sometimes even in violence.

Great writers – the most poetic students of the human psyche – have referred to jealousy as “love’s executioner” and the “green-eyed monster”. In its more extreme state, psychologists refer to it as pathological jealousy, Othello syndrome, or delusional disorder.

But most of us experience the occasional tinge of jealousy, and in moderate doses it can be healthy. However, the problem with the pathologically jealous is that they are excessively intolerant of uncertainty and have an insatiable appetite for reassurance. In their futile pursuit of certainty, they can get caught up in a destructive quest to verify their partner’s true feelings towards them.

The pathologically jealous will incessantly look for signs of betrayal or infidelity by scanning phone records, inboxes, and, if possible, CCTV footage. They may also seek regular reassurance (“Tell me how much you love me again”), or even set traps for their unsuspecting partners (“Flirt with him and let’s see what he does”).

Pathological jealousy is good love gone bad: an explosive blend of worry (betrayal anxiety), anger and agitation. The rose has died and all that remains are the thorns. In extreme cases the anger and agitation escalates into acts of violence and aggression.

Gerhard Falk, a historian and sociologist with an extensive and rather morbid knowledge of US crime statistics, lists jealousy as the fourth most common motive for murder. It is the reason for 10.8 per cent of all homicides.

Even in its milder forms, free from the green tint of jealousy, romantic love has been likened to a mild-to-moderate mental health problem.

A Swiss study published in 2007 in the Journal of Adolescent Health concluded that early-stage romantic love in teenagers was comparable to hypomania, with symptoms including sleeplessness, unrealistic optimism and an excessively positive mood.

Dorothy Tenov, a psychology professor and author of Love and Limerence, suggests that romantic love can also be likened to obsessive compulsive disorder or drug addiction. The singular fixation on the love-interest leads to all other previous interests being abandoned, as is common in substance addiction. Through the distorting lenses of rose-tinted glasses, the love-interest becomes overly idealised, and every waking moment is now devoted to thoughts and fantasies about them.

In today’s online world, such an unhealthy obsession can find an equally unhealthy outlet in the form of cyberstalking. Like most things involving the internet, there is limited research from which to draw firm conclusions about the status of such behaviours. For example, if I read every tweet someone ever wrote – up to tens of thousands of them – am I a cyberstalker? Where exactly do we draw the line between healthy and unhealthy levels of interest?

One recent US study about cyberstalking, published in the journal Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention, suggested that about 3.7 per cent of college students had been cyberstalked. Interestingly, men were significantly more likely to have been cyberstalked than women – the opposite of the offline world. The cyberstalker, in this study at least, was most commonly a former flame – another example of good love gone bad.

Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States

On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas