Go Green

Jealousy is such a feeble word to describe how men feel when they believe another guy has designs on their girlfriend. I’m jealous of my friend’s new Ducati motorbike. I’m jealous that soccer player Steven Gerrard gets paid $2 million a month to play for Liverpool. But when my girlfriend Anna says she’s going out for drinks with the ‘boys from work’ I want to rip the head off anyone who gets within a meter of her.

This isn’t jealousy. This is paranoia, fear and rage all cooked up together. It’s no wonder the word ‘jealousy’ stems from the Greek ‘to boil’ or ‘ferment’. It starts off as a simmering concern for your girlfriend’s wellbeing before boiling over into punch-the-wall helplessness – and all this over her quick drink at News Café.

Before long I’m at home, imagining Anna being shagged by the entire local rugby team while they sing drinking songs to keep their spirits up. ‘Thank goodness for the men’s first team,’ Anna says, in my imagination. ‘You’re all so much bigger than Jeff’.

Jealous Guy

As you can see, jealousy is a mental illness. I should be committed. Anna is the most faithful girlfriend a man could want and my behavior is unreasonable. ‘I’m the one that should be jealous,’ moaned Anna, after I gate crashed the bar and was an asshole to every male who dared to be in there. ‘You work with loads of women. Most of your friends are girls.’ She has a point. At my recent birthday drinks, I did realize there were far more X than Y chromosomes present.

I often go out for dinner with my friend Laura. Yet if Anna were to spend the evening with just one man, I’d insist it occurred behind a prison style Perspex screen with an intercom. It’s not because I don’t trust her, it’s because I fear she’ll meet someone better than me. Someone cooler. Someone whose not me.

When men get jealous it strikes our brains like some kind of computer virus. We act out of character and it turns a usually well balanced man into a ball of tension and anger – and yes, men know that’s just the kind of behavior that makes girls to disappear anyway.

Yes, jealousy seems to affect girls in a similar kind of way. Despite never having shown any signs of the green eyed monster before, Anna finally cracked this month. We were enjoying a typically raucous Friday night out – she and I had drunk a bottle of champagne before setting out, won a pub quiz, laughed our asses off and returned to her flat to do what Anna had promised earlier in a naughty whisper at the bar.

But when I popped into the bathroom to do that secret speed wash thing that girls think only they do before sex, it all went horribly wrong. When I returned, a winter freeze had swept through the flat and Anna was on the bed with The Face on. I could almost see my own breath as I asked, ‘Everything okay?’

‘Whose Ruth?’ she demanded, eyes filling with tears. Anna had been looking through my phone while I was naked. You see earlier that week I received a text from a blast from my past that read; ‘We never did get around to that second date. How about it?’ We never got around to the second date because I didn’t call. What’s more, I didn’t call eight months ago – before I even knew Anna. I was innocent.

Anna, through a heady mix of alcohol and paranoia, couldn’t resist my mobile – a Pandora’s box of supposed secrets – winking at her in the dark. So I slept with my back to Anna for a sexless night of feigned anger. Because deep down, I was pleased that Anna was jealous.

Jealousy is a good emotion. You won’t find it among the deadly sins of envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, pride, lust, greed – and snooping through someone’s phone.