Nothing worse than a little stake-out surveillance action on my part a few years ago and a thorough search of her palm pilot.

As for the id's lying, it does not strike me as incongruous for feelings of impotence, insignificance, and disempowerment to lead to murderous rage on the part of some people. In fact it seems entirely understandable--how enraging to have oneself accounted as nothing. So I'm not sure what you mean by the id lying to you, you know?

But you aren't nothing. And I'm not, either. Yet in our jealous moments, we get attached to the rather odd notion that who we are has to do with how much attention so-and-so is paying to us. (And never mind the fact that so-and-so is often a bad match for us.)

That is a lie. We are who we are, and we're precious and valuable. That's entirely independent of what so-and-so thinks or feels.

We, the jealous, are universally feared for our unpredictability and volatility. That's why the cops come looking for us when they find dead bodies.

In an not-unrelated issue, that's also why we get locked up a lot.

I've seen jealousy swirl and surge around me. I can't say that I've experienced it that much.

The worst was when Daisycat was *trying* to make me jealous the summer we met, by wanting to spend some time with this loser geek she was playing against me.

But I knew it for what it was, let her play her little game, and called her bluff. In the end I got the girl, 'cause I knew the geek just didn't stack up in any way to me.

(*strut, strut, strut*)

OK, I get it.

I agree that to have one's sense of well-being riding entirely on the estimation of others is to live a lie. But I can think of an example just as bad as jealousy: pride. There the id is lying about how great one is, right?

Sure (though actually, it's probably the ego telling the lie). However, pride is a much more civilized emotion: jealousy is very primal. Very basic and childlike.

I just have the sense that pride tends to be more complex.

You have to get hit with jealousy to know what it is. I'm not talking about the few seconds everyone feels now and again, I mean the type that hits like a disease and stays around for years--three, in my case. The type where emotions are kept alive as if the "trigger" had just happened, with the same physiological reactions/responses. I was thirty when I got my "education" and thought myself immune, having experienced breakups before. Twenty-one years have passed and I still don't want to think about it for fear that it could all start all over again. Feelings? Absolute powerlessness, hopelessness, and unfairness. It may take two to make a relationship work, but it only takes one to walk away and blow it all to Hell. With no recourse. Friends are useless, and most don't even want to hear the first exposition, much less the constant rehashing. You are totally alone. You realize that everything you do, everything you think of doing, will only make matters worse and leave you looking like more of a fool. And yet you still consider them. You start to think that maybe those that murder their lovers are really the compassionate ones--if she really loved me she would have just given me a triple tap to the head and moved along. I won't be pressing charges.

The devastation of a breakup can be overpowering. Mine haven't had a lot of jealousy in them: mostly the jealousy has been in cases of unrequited love, open relationships. That kind of thing.

The worst breakups I ever had led me to 1) stop eating more than a little for some months. (My weight dropped to about 97 pounds from its healthy 115-120 average at that time.) And: 2) wear nothing but shades of gray and black. (Although I still had to actually break up with that person myself; he'd moved on, though, and I knew it.)