The green-eyed monster kept showing up in my relationships, but what was really going on?

Don’t say it. Don’t say it. “I can’t be with you,” I blurted out. It was the middle of the night on my 31st birthday and all my friends stood around us, wide-eyed. It hadn’t been the first time I’d broken up with my girlfriend on my birthday. There had been the time when a man hadn’t left her alone at a nightclub, repeatedly stating, “God, she’s really hot, isn’t she?!” to me the whole while. But this one was different.

ASKS DR GINA BEVAN

After bumping into some people I’d known from school, one of them had taken it upon himself to declare that my partner was a “10” and I was “punching”. The wind left my stomach, and my green-eyed monster rose with a vengeance. It had triggered such a visceral response that all logic went out the window and my friends were witnessing my jealousy and lack of self-esteem destroy my eightyear relationship. These feelings, of course, had been building over the years. Each day I stepped out with my partner, my pseudo-confidence became more difficult to find, and my green-eyed monster grew and grew. Jealousy was ruining an otherwise incredible, healthy relationship with a woman so selfless I called her my “golden girl”. How could I let this bother me so much?

Jealousy is a part of any relationship, regardless of gender or sexuality. But my own experience of jealousy in lesbian relationships got me thinking. When I began researching the topic, the usual themes surfaced: feeling envious of your partner spending time with their friends, jealousy surrounding them getting too close to a particular friend, or feeling you’re not receiving enough attention. Relationship website YourTango ran an article, Why Jealousy Is Such A HUGE Problem Among Lesbians. The writer suggests that sapphic couples might be more susceptible to jealousy stemming from “emotional infidelity”, where intimate feelings for someone else develop without the physical aspects of cheating.