3 hidden messages that jealousy gives you, from a psychologist

Feeling jealous in a romantic relationship is not a moral weakness. Thanks to the social baggage that jealousy carries, most of us are taught to push it down, dismiss it, or, on the hardest days, pretend it’s not happening at all and move on.

But jealousy, when you see it through a scientific lensit is neither a defect nor a deficiency of any kind. It is a sophisticated signal that we receive from our nervous system that alerts us to something important. And when we learn to understand this signal, we allow ourselves to experience the full range of human emotions.

As a result, jealousy ceases to be a source of conflict and becomes a surprisingly clear doorway to one’s hidden needs, boundaries, and attachment patterns that may require some tending.

In fact, jealousy often contains information that is not only useful but necessary for building a secure relationship. Here are three hidden messages that often manifest in the form of romantic jealousy.

1. Jealousy is a repressed need to be heard

The researchers emphasize that emotions are not just reactions to external events, but also attempts by our nervous system to protect our deeper relationships and survival needs. In short, they are signals about what matters most to you in a given situation.

A Study 2023 Testing Ekman’s basic model of emotion reinforces this: people rarely agree on exactly what emotion a person is expressing at any given time, even when they are emotionally competent. The study highlighted, in particular, that people with higher levels of alexithymia – the inability to recognize or describe one’s feelings – often assigned broad, simplistic labels, often negative ones.

In other words, emotional experiences in everyday life are too subtle to fit neatly into rigid categories like ‘anger’, ‘fear’ or even pure ‘jealousy’. And when we can’t identify the specific need beneath an emotion, we grab the closest available label. So what you call “jealousy” may actually be your mind pointing to a deeper, unspoken need.

That’s why it helps to pause at the first spark of jealousy and ask, “What, specifically, am I afraid of losing right now?” Fear embodied in jealousy often indicates one of three basic needs:

• The need for emotional security
• The need for visible commitment
• The need for prioritization

Most of us feel these needs long before we express them. We imply, hope and assume, and when the need is not met, jealousy emerges as the emotional vehicle. When you understand the driving force behind it, jealousy becomes an invitation to start repairing the broken part of the relationship, rather than a weapon that creates new ones.

2. Jealousy is a call for clearer boundaries

Jealousy often arises just when a couple’s relationship dynamics begin to feel ambiguous. This ambiguity could be a combination of unclear intentions, unspoken expectations, or even suspicions inherited from past relationships. Unspoken boundaries (those that are felt or assumed, but never openly discussed) are one of the main sources of conflict in a relationship.

An interesting 2024 qualitative study found that the way people interpret jealousy is shaped by the clarity of their relationship agreements. Monogamous women, who tend to rely on implicit, culturally inherited boundaries, often perceive jealousy as something caused by their partner’s behavior (for example, an ambiguous crossing of an unspoken line.)

Meanwhile, women in consensual nonmonogamous arrangements, whose relationships require constant, explicit negotiation of boundaries, were much more likely to interpret jealousy as a signal directing them toward a conversation or an unmet need, rather than a sign of wrongdoing.

In short, the clearer the expression of boundaries in a relationship, the more accurate the assessment of the source of one’s or one’s partner’s jealousy. For example, saying, “This level of emotional intimacy with a colleague seems more than friendly to me,” is not necessarily an effort police associate; it may simply be an attempt to clarify a blurred boundary.

In fact, sometimes, jealousy can be dealt with not by creating a new boundary, but simply by updating an old one. Over time, the evolution of boundaries comes to reflect the evolution of the relationship and the people in it.

3. Jealousy is the cry of an old wound reopening

This is perhaps the most misunderstood dimension of jealousy. Not all jealousy belongs to the moment it was sparked. Sometimes, it comes from a past relationship wound that has been reopened by something small in the present.

Attachment researchers found that our early experiences of safety and responsiveness shape how sensitive we become to potential relational threat. More recent findings build on this, with studies showing that attachment anxiety strongly predicts jealousy. This link is intensified when a person has low self-differentiation.

People with low self-differentiation struggle to stay emotionally grounded and separate the past from the present. In these moments, the nervous system is not responding to what your partner just did. In fact, it could be responding to something someone else once did in a previous relationship, or what your partner may have done in the past.

When you see your partner being distracted, laughing with someone else, or delaying a message, it can immediately trigger a reaction that feels disproportionately strong. This is because it can brush off an older fear, such as:

• A betrayal you never fully healed from
• A caregiver who was inconsistent
• A childhood moment of feeling was replaced
• Infidelity of a previous partner
• A long-standing fear of not being “enough”

The problem is that our nervous system can’t always tell the difference between then and now. A powerful question to ask yourself in these moments, then, is: Is this reaction familiar? Does it remind me of something earlier in my life? Jealousy is not always a sign that your partner has done something wrong, even if your answer to this question is “yes”. All you need to do is listen carefully to the part of you that is asking for your attention.

While you’re at it, remember that it’s impossible to completely eliminate jealousy from your emotional spectrum. That would be a bit like trying to eliminate hunger from the list of things you can feel – which is biologically impossible. Instead, the goal should be to develop a compassionate relationship with your jealousy.

Has jealousy driven a wedge between you and your partner? Take this science-backed test to find out: Emotional Jealousy Scale