Jealousy is Joe’s clearest example of the contradiction at the heart of pushing away love: one hand reaching out, the other shoving away. The jealous person clearly wants their partner’s love — “why are you giving love to somebody else? I want your love” — yet the behavior the jealousy produces is controlling, accusatory, and abusive enough to make the partner want to leave.
“Jealousy, it’s like clearly I want your love. But the act of jealousy pushes people away.”
This is the attention-for-love substitution playing out in adulthood. The jealous person learned to secure attention through intensity and control, and now deploys those same tools to win love, not realizing they guarantee its loss. The confusing inner experience — “I’m angry at you, but why are you leaving me?” — is the felt sense of a strategy that works against its own goal. The love is wanted desperately and repelled simultaneously.
Related Concepts
- Attention becomes a surrogate for love, and the surrogate repels real love
- We push away love by chasing it, avoiding it, or fighting
- Don’t do emotions at people
- We beckon love consciously while pushing it away subconsciously
- Chasing love signals that you don’t deserve it
- What we do to maintain love erodes our power
- Draw a boundary to get love without the thing it was married to