On Love and jealousy

Let me start my writing here by picking a subject everyone can relate to because it plays such an important role in everybody's life: love. And this blog being all about Heinlein, let's take a definition by Heinlein himself:

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy."

Jealousy a disease? So how come almost everybody suffers from this disease? Heinlein has an answer to that question as well:

"A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity."

And so in fact, the disease mankind suffers from, is insecurity. And suffering is what we do. Jealousy is not a part of love, it is the opposite of love. By acting jealous what we are really doing is saying: "I don't want you to do what makes you happy, because I am afraid I will get hurt.". Thus limiting someone we claim to love in exploring everything they want to explore. Not out of love, but out of fear. Fear of our partner leaving us or spending less time with us, primarily. Jealousy is a very self centered emotion.

Love on the other hand is a two way street. Note how Heinlein doesn't say that love means putting the other person's happiness first. There needs to be a balance. Only if the other person is happy, we can be happy too. And if all is well, the same goes vice versa. If both (or more, because Heinlein wasn't exactly a big fan of monogamous relationships) partners are happy because they can fully be themselves, explore what they want to explore and live their life to the max without fear for repercussions from their partner(s), love will bloom almost automatically.

And what if a partner does indeed leave us for another? Well, obviously breaking up is never a fun thing. But I honestly don't believe we can prevent that from happening by being jealous. Plus: if we are free to be who we are and live our life the way we want to live it, we will be secure, balanced people, not depending on someone else for our personal happiness. People like that are much more likely to quickly overcome the less pleasant things in life than the insecure, fearful, dependent type. They make much better partners too.