Jealousy and love languages

T

Timmer

New member
My nesting partner and I were having one of our frequent check-ins with each other recently, and we started talking about the way we both have jealousy flare up occasionally. We each broke down where it comes from and found that in each of our cases it is tied to our love languages.

So Cait's love language is acts of service. She feels my love and feels her love back to me most strongly when I'm fixing something, doing something spontaneous for her or for our daughter, etc. So Cait feels most jealous when I have a weekday off and spend much of the day at my other partner's house helping her with her house and yard work etc. Cait almost never feels jealousy at any other time.

My love language is touch. So on my end, jealousy can flare up when there are signs of a very strong sexual encounter, like, the morning after seeing her other partner, if Cait mentions sore thighs. Now, our intimacy is strong too, and these are all minor jealousies that are healthy, but that's definitely where I feel a bit green.

So I'm curious... do your jealousies stem from your love language?
 
Interesting question.

I must admit, I am more likely to feel envious than jealous when I can't share my love languages with my partners and someone else can, but considering I have spent so much time in long distance relationships, I have to process that envy really quickly.

Do you guys perhaps experience envy rather than jealousy?

I'm not sure I have one love language that rises above the others any more. It used to be touch, but LDRs put paid to that. Quality time is mostly online and somewhat scheduled. Gifts are horribly expensive to ship overseas. Acts of service are emails, photos or videos. Words of affirmation are the easiest thing to employ so that's often the default and I've really had to make an effort to learn to be creative in my language choices. "I love you" gets repetitive quite quickly.

I wouldn't call it jealousy as such, but I got unexpectedly miffed when my husband served his girlfriend a cup of tea in a mug that I'd been recently given by a new friend. Because it was a joint friend and not precisely a romantic one, he didn't think I'd attached any sentiment to the mug. I had. He now knows not to serve anyone but me a drink in that mug 😅
 
Hi Tim,

I don't have much if any jealousy nowadays, I used to have some in the past, back then it could usually be fixed by getting one of my needs met. When I took the test, Touch came up as my love language, with Words of Affirmation and Quality Time not far behind. I think that was about 13 years ago, I don't know what my love language would be today. Probably Words of Affirmation.

From what I've seen (on poly forums) so far, jealousy seems to stem from any number of things, depending on the person and the situation. Love language issues are certainly one of the things that can cause jealousy.

Regards,
Kevin T.
 
My primary love language is physical affection. Most of my jealous feelings are tied to that but I find it to be primarily when I feel like those needs are not being met. Early on it manifested as kind of a how can you pass it around when I am not getting enough. As things progressed I realized that my partners interactions with others had nothing to do with that. My feeling in the moment was that my needs were not being met and I could have the same feeling if she was not seeing anyone else.
I also have times where I have jealous feelings about quality time. Most of that came from the fact that we were not great at carving that out for us as a couple. We were together all of the time but always about the business of our life and family. This really manifested recently as we got vaccinated and began to emerge from isolation.
 
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