He startles awake. He taps his phone. 2:04am, no messages. He wonders why she didn’t reply to his goodnight text. He begins texting, knowing what he is about to do, yet unable to stop himself. 47 texts and five voicemails later, he has played out multiple breakups and reconciliations. The damage is done. She calls in the morning, saying she can’t take this anymore, and tells him it’s over. He is devastated, yet still pretty sure she was having the best sex of her life last night. Alone in her bed, she feels strangely relieved, yet hopeful that he can find a way to get over this crazy-making jealousy.
Toxic jealousy is a special kind of hell for both partners, and the fallout frequently brings at least one of them into therapy, asking why. The first therapeutic step is to identify the problem, which is often best clarified through analogy: What do the jealous lover, the conspiracy theorist, and the six year old in pajamas all have in common? They all imagine a horrific universe full of evil strangers who are hell-bent on humiliating, hoodwinking, and devouring them, respectively. Crucially, in each of their narratives about the darkness surrounding them, they are the central characters.
This fundamental belief, casually known as Main Character Syndrome, leads them into a world of psychological self-torture. Many of us drift into MCS at times, but they take this belief to cinematic heights, casting themselves as beleaguered protagonists in gripping tales of betrayal and discovery. However, they fail to recognize that (1) strangers, as a rule, do not care about our lives, (2) even loved ones are hardly ever thinking of us when we’re not right in front of them, and (3) the movie of our lives does not remotely resemble a tense psychological thriller. It looks more like a rambling, plotless nature documentary, peppered with tiny bits of action here and there.
For the vast majority of our lives, no one is watching, and no one cares. Care is curiosity about who we are and what we intend, and acceptance of our mistakes and shortcomings. Beyond a parent, partner, or therapist, very few people actually care. For most people, the only thing that has a chance of mattering is an object we make or a service we provide. They like the thing we do, not the thing we are. If we stop doing the thing they like, we fade away.
There is a cold brutality to the indifference of others, and many of us fail to soberly observe this indifference, much less integrate it into a realistic, stable worldview. Stuck on our MCS default setting, we often don’t account for indifference at all. Rather, we toggle wildly between reactive optimism or pessimism, based on emotion: one day people are great and life is beautiful, and the next day people are cruel and life is horrible. These self-centered emotional truths ignore the glaring indifference all around us that is simply part of nature, and it’s easy to forget that we humans are not at all separate from nature, despite our myriad creature comforts and glitzy technologies. Like every other element of the natural world, humans may seem either cruel or kind at times, but they’re mostly indifferent.
The grizzly bear doesn’t care whether we actually intend to threaten her cub. The rain doesn’t account for our family picnic. Death doesn’t work around our dinner plans. These natural phenomena are guided by their own processes, and those processes simply carry on without care. When other humans operate similarly, responding to motivations that are indifferent to the needs of others, it is dangerously easy to attribute cruel intentions. Such attributions make life unnecessarily painful, and over time they have a compounding effect that destroys relationships and transforms the world into a very lonely place.
All relationships, from the most casual to the most intimate, are full of indifference. Very rarely do partners in a couple think only of each other. Most of the time, neither is thinking of the other person at all. An intimate relationship is, paradoxically, an emotional arrangement that maximizes one’s ability to be indifferent, while still maintaining a deep connection. The jealous partner is troubled by any whiff of indifference and correctly intuits that when the other person is otherwise occupied, they could be really thinking about anything. Instead of observing and accepting this indifference, he refuses to perceive it and instead substitutes a fantasy of vicious carnality.
The jealous fantasy is a close cousin to both the child’s fantasies of monsters in the darkness, and the byzantine conspiracy theories of the isolated adult. In all these cases, a world that is dark and unknowable generates terror. The sense of knowing something that can never be known, however delusional, precludes this terror. A world teeming with cruel, bloodthirsty monsters relishing in the world’s destruction becomes “the devil you know.” In the paranoid mind, this deal with the devil feels like a worthwhile tradeoff and in many cases can be quite energizing.
We are all in the dark about other people. We don’t know what other people want from us, and much of the time we don’t even know what we want for ourselves. Everyone else is working with the same radically incomplete information about themselves and others around them. And like the mama bear and the rain cloud, they are motivated by obscure forces, mysterious to even themselves. They are not preoccupied with our feelings and intentions.
To live optimally, it is crucial to recognize that this movie we are all living out together is not structured like a first-person narrative. There is no plot, nor is there any grand design to keep us down. We keep ourselves down by pretending that strangers have the energy, attention, or inclination to care about us. Only by insistently dropping the thriller narrative and de-centering ourselves can we focus on what we actually want.