Jealousy is an integral part of
every relationship; whether at the stage of marriage or dating.

This often times stems from the fact that conjugal love; compared to other forms of love, is an extremely selfish bond and third parties are not welcome to admire, be emotionally/sexually involved nor flirt with the ones we love.

When we are in love with someone, or when we are dating someone, or when we have married someone, we want to possess all of them. We want to possess their emotions, we want to possess their sexuality, we want all of the attention and care to ourselves alone. 
The idea that a spouse is not entirely ours is unacceptable.
The feeling  that a spouse is not entirely faithful to us is unbearable.
This is the root of jealousy.

A certain degree of jealousy is important to show the depth of your love and commitment  for your spouse.
Being jealous when a third party croses the boundaries of intimacy with your spouse to a certain degree shows that you value your spouse and are not ready to lose them to anyone. This is extremely very romantic especially for girls who feed on being the center of attention.
When a guy exhibits subtle signs  of jealousy, she feels valued, loved and secured.

But overt and chronic jealousy oftentimes achieves the opposite.
Suffocating jealousy can tear your relationship apart. It instead of showing how much you dont wanna lose your spouse; expresses weakness, childishness, selfishness and psychological immaturity.

For example if your spouse isn't home by say 11pm, and is not picking up your calls, you may decide to think that he/she is probably cheating on you, and pretty soon you will find yourself absorbing the idea until you're in a state of rage and anger.
Bear in mind that you have no evidence that this is true, but you experience it in your body as if it were, so that by the time your lover comes home, you are suspicious or angry. In this state, you will never treat him/her well, you may abuse or attack him/her verbally or physically, or just feel bad inside and create some other retaliatory behavior later on.

Remember your spouse may not be guilty of what you feel, he/she may have had a hell of a bad day and might try to explain to you but you dismissed it as lies.
In cases like this, your jealousy might make him/her want to be with someone else!
So if you are jealous, and you create such a state, you can change your negative view to something positive, and picture your loved one in trouble or working hard to get home, this new view will change your behavior towards him/her on arrival, and will make them feel loved.

Another example is.. Your spouse is in the bathroom, a call comes in to his/her phone. You're suspicious so you pick up and the caller is an opposite sex. You immediately launch into an online interview; who are you? Why are you calling this number? Dont you know he/she is taken (or married as the case may be)?, The caller is rather embarrassed and hangs up.
Your spouse on coming out of the bathroom, you subject him/her to a Spanish inquisition trying to know who the caller was. Well, probably it was his/her boss, or a business client or a recruitment agent etc and your jealousy had created an embarrassing situation. 

But there are of course times when your lover may be cheating as you imagine, but why waste lots of emotion until you find out for sure?

Most of the time its unlikely you will find out anything yet you have created all kinds of pain for the both of you, and for what??? 

Jealousy is a wide concept that cant be compressed into one article. So i am going to write about it in series. In the next article we will look at jealousy from a different angle. Try not to mis any article in this series, for jealousy is one of the chief demons of relationships and you need to know how to handle it.