Promethean, you’re not rethinking any concept here. You’re just being confusing.
No, jealousy is not evil, it’s natural. Even people who settle upon open relationships (I have my own experience on the subject, and Daniel mentioned he does too and in the same sense) are bound to feel jealous or to at least tend to faithfulness. Call it human nature, call it biological drive or call it culture, the fact is even Sartre and De Beauvoir admitted to feeling jealous, and there’s nothing wrong about it. If you don’t feel jealousy, well, congratulations. I’m rather skeptic about this applied to most people, but if you tell me you particularly don’t experience it, I’ll believe you.
What you don’t seem to understand, and Andrew has said that in the very first reply to this topic, and many people have tried to elaborate on the subject after him, is that faithfulness needn’t be a social institution. It has to do with love. Loving a person ain’t just having casual sex with them and perhaps being friendly to them and living together: it’s about sharing a life! I don’t know if you’ll get the impact and the extension of such expression, because it’s beat and used by now, but “sharing a life” has a literal sense which is quite powerful, and which is really true.
/me feels the urge to disclose a couple of things, but decides not to. Especially not in the Lounge.
Alright, listen. I’m not an advocate to jealousy. I don’t think it’s the nicest thing ever or anything, but when it happens, it happens for a reason. It’s not like we, human beings, are brainwashed into experiencing it stronger than our own free will. We can fight jealousy, or try to suppress it, or try to work out the situation with whoever is the source of such feeling. What we can’t do to it, for it is a sentiment, is just dismiss the damned thing.
Now, jealousy shows up for a couple of different reasons. In most infants, it shows up due to lack of self–esteem. When you don’t trust your own ahem when you don’t trust your own pride–and–joy, so to speak, you tend to feel the relationship you’re in was a favour bestowed upon you by the benevolent soul the other party is. And then you fear losing it to, well, anyone you deem better than you. Which is pretty much just “anyone” when you lack self–esteem.
With more adult people, it can happen for anything from “the morals say so,” as you insist in seeing as the only possible explanation, to “loving someone dearly and wanting to share a life with them” which is how come I felt jealous very recently. When you commit to someone and have a project with them, and you kind of plan a future and see yourself with that person doing lots of things (and I’m not specifically talking about sex here): seeing that person valuing such project just as much as they value it with someone else kind of hurts. And seeing them value it as much as they value casual sex with another person hurts even worse, because then you feel you were just the stupid person who was there the whole time caring about someone who didn’t bother caring about you all that much. You feel used. And that sucks.
So seriously. Don’t assume faithfulness to be a subject as shallow as jealousy, and don’t assume jealousy to be a matter as shallow as social conventions. When it comes to love and passions and all those things with turn your mind upside down and make you walk in clouds and tell logics to shove themselves out of your head, things are just not a bit as simple as they might seem.