I Wanted My Husband to Be Jealous

I have a confession to make. When I was married, I wanted my husband to be jealous. I wanted him to get jealous that I was hanging out with other men, that I was getting looked at, or hit on, or people would flirt with me because he didn't care. He paid no attention to me, and yet I wanted him to be jealous. And this is a red flag in a relationship, let me tell you. This is not a sign of a healthy relationship. I was an afterthought to my husband. I was not important. I was the last priority on his list.

And in a healthy marriage, trust me, this should not be the case. Your significant other should be the number one person for you. And you should treat them as such. So I just want to talk about jealousy for a moment, because there are people that say jealousy is good, it can be healthy, and others that say it should never be in a relationship. But I just want to talk about that and tell you my thoughts on it. So I'm in a very healthy relationship now, and I can tell you that there's really no reason for jealousy to ever be an issue, because we're both confident in our relationship.

We talk about a relationship, we meet each other's needs, and we have post checks of where are we at in the relationship. And I have a history of infidelity, so I check in with my partner and say, "Hey, I had a phone call with a guy friend from back home in Minnesota, and I haven't talked to him in six months. You know, we stay in touch, but I just wanted to run that by you. Does that bother you?" That I talk to a guy on the phone, because if it does, let's have a conversation about it, because I don't want there to be any reason for you to be jealous.

Like, let's have this conversation before it starts. And I can explain what I talked about with this guy, and this guy's married, and there's absolutely no romantic interest in that. But I just want to make sure that it's always on the table for discussion if one of us is jealous, because I have mentioned in the past, "Hey, that person that I saw you talking to, I was a little bit jealous." And it doesn't mean I'm confronting him that, you know, you shouldn't have done that, or I'm accusing him of anything, but I can just tell him, "Hey, this is how I was feeling."

And we can talk about that, because really at the root of jealousy is insecurity. I don't ever want to feel insecure in my relationship, and neither does my partner. So if we are always on the same page about meeting each other's emotional needs and making sure that we're okay, there's really no reason to be jealous. That doesn't mean it's not going to come up, and we're probably going to have moments where we feel jealous once in a while. That's normal. It's a normal human emotion. But at the root of it is how secure is your relationship?

Because in my marriage, it was not a secure relationship on either sides, and wanting my husband to be jealous of me was so backwards. So I just want to invite you to think about that today. If we're looking at just jealousy as a whole, it really needs to get down to the root of insecurity and how secure you feel in your relationship. So it might need to be a conversation that you have, "Hey, I was jealous when this happened." Okay, great. Let's talk about that. And you need the fundamentals of healthy communication in order to even have this conversation.

So this needs to be a pattern in your relationship that you do pulse checks and that you check in on how each other are doing emotionally. We even use a rating scale once in a while in my current relationship. So you're feeling on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best ever, nothing's wrong at all, one being this. Let's rate it, and then let's talk about that number. So that we both know where we're at because I can tell you that infidelity in relationships or just anything that can come between a couple, it doesn't just start with one thing or one event.

It's a pattern of behaviors that goes on, and it's a lack of communication about those things like, "Hey, I'm unhappy. I'm not happy right now about this," or "I'm feeling insecure about this." It's a lack of those conversations that happens, that fuels bad things happening, like infidelity. So do a pulse check in your relationship, set that as a standard, make it a weekly date, a weekly pulse check date, and just have that ongoing open communication because I don't believe that jealousy is a bad thing.

I believe that if you allow jealousy to continue and you don't talk about it, that's when it becomes a bad thing because there's an underlying root there. So I would invite you to have those conversations and just be honest and real with your partner. And if you can't do that, that's probably another red flag. Then maybe this isn't a healthy relationship, or maybe you just need to work to get there. I'll do more videos on this topic. There's a lot to unpack here in healthy relationships, but I just wanted to speak a little bit on this topic of jealousy today.

Thanks for tuning in with me today. God bless.