Jealousy in love

Jealousy in love is described as more than fear of a rival: it grows from a relationship in which the woman has invested her sense of existence in a man who remains independent of her. Waiting may promise reunion, but the same absence can become evidence of abandonment; each glance elsewhere can feel capable of undoing the assurance love seemed to provide. The resulting jealousy is at once personal anguish and a consequence of dependence, shaping how the woman interprets attention, friendship, appearance, and the prospect of betrayal.

Waiting and the Fear of Loss

Waiting can be joyful when the woman expects her loved one to return and trusts his affection. In that confidence, absence is transformed into a promise of presence. Yet worry unsettles the promise: he may not return, or his love may have shifted to someone else. The account recalls a woman who greeted her lover with surprise at every meeting, saying she had thought he would never come back. Even when he asked why, she explained that waiting always gave her the impression she would never see him again. The scene makes reunion inseparable from the fear that it might not happen.

The woman may insist that her lover loves her intensely and could love no one else, while still suffering the possibility that he loves another. The text calls this coexistence of passionate, contradictory assertions characteristic of bad faith. Rather than directly asking whether his love has weakened, she repeatedly asks whether there is another woman. She has difficulty accepting that his feeling might gradually diminish, or that he may value love less than she does, and instead imagines rivals. Love is treated both as a free feeling and as a kind of spell: she supposes that the man remains hers by choice, yet may have been ensnared or deceived by a schemer.

Unequal Jealousy

The account contrasts this sustained anxiety with the more episodic jealousy it attributes to men. A man, it argues, tends to assume that a woman is assimilated to him and may not imagine that she can also elude his grasp. His jealousy is commonly a passing crisis, sometimes violent, but ordinarily short-lived; it may arise especially when his own life is going badly or he feels threatened by it. The contrast is not simply between different emotional temperaments. It follows from the woman’s investment in a lover whose independent life and attention she cannot command.

For a woman who loves a man as someone separate from herself, the danger is continual. Absence can resemble betrayal, and feeling unloved can make jealousy seem justified even before infidelity is established. Reproaches about waiting, boredom, dependence, or the sense of living only a diminished life may become jealous scenes. Because she has alienated her being in the beloved, the way he looks at another woman can seem to place her whole destiny at stake. The text thus connects jealousy to a broader condition: she has made love the ground of her existence, while the man’s freedom remains beyond her control.

Attention, Rivalry, and Isolation

The woman’s jealousy is treated as distinct from a man’s response to being looked at. A woman’s glance at a man, the account argues, gives him nothing; when a man looks at a woman he desires, she is transformed into an object of desire. The woman in love therefore fears not only a possible rival but the change in her own status: neglected, she returns to ordinary life after having felt elevated by love. She watches what her lover is doing, whom he is looking at, and whom he is speaking to. A smile that once seemed to give her everything may appear to be taken back by a smile directed elsewhere.

Jealousy can be mistaken or misplaced as well as justified. The account gives the example of Juliette Drouet, who suspected the women who came near Victor Hugo but failed to suspect Léonie Biard, who was his mistress for eight years. When certainty is absent, any woman can become a possible danger. This vigilance isolates the woman further: love encloses her within the loved man’s world, and jealousy intensifies the solitude and dependence that enclosure produces. Yet the struggle also supplies activity against boredom. Keeping a husband is described as work, keeping a lover as a vocation; suspicion can make the task of maintaining the relationship feel absorbing even as it narrows her life.

Self-Presentation as a Struggle

When she senses a threat, a woman who had neglected her appearance in happy adoration may begin to tend to it again. Dressing, caring for the home, and managing social appearances become part of a contest for the lover’s attention. The account presents the contest as temporarily stimulating when she believes she may win, but fear of defeat changes a freely offered gift into humiliating service. Even a proud woman may feel compelled to use gentleness, caution, smiles, charm, and docility as her means of defense.

A remembered visit makes that effort concrete. The narrator had left a young woman two hours earlier, when she was carelessly dressed and poorly made up. Returning unexpectedly, the narrator found her waiting for her lover: for an instant, before she resumed her ordinary expression, she appeared prepared for his arrival, with carefully arranged hair, special makeup, and a sparkling white lace blouse. The clothes are characterized as both party clothes and fighting clothes. Beauty treatments and professional services likewise become part of the effort to invent new forms of seduction and to become the woman the lover wishes to meet and possess.

The Impossible Ideal

The labor cannot restore the image that first attracted the lover, nor ensure that he will not be attracted to someone else. The difficulty is compounded by the lover’s contradictory demand: he wants his mistress wholly his, yet also wants her to be other than what he can imagine; he expects her to answer his desires and surprise him at once. The account finds a similar contradiction in the demands placed on a wife and a mistress. The woman tries to shape herself according to the lover’s desire, but no adjustment can resolve an ideal that requires both possession and difference.

Jealousy therefore ends not in secure possession but in a struggle structured for failure. Its recurring movement—from promise to alarm, from vigilance to self-fashioning—shows how love becomes precarious when one person’s entire sense of self depends on the other’s attention. The woman’s efforts may preserve the drama of pursuit for a time, but they cannot command another person’s freedom or make her permanently coincide with an ideal that changes according to his desire.