Not understanding jealousy (and other things)

Post Reply New Topic

I have a very hard time understanding jealousy. In that I have a hard time completely wrapping my head around it at all. I have several NT friends where thoughts of jealousy are well...overwhelming, especially other women. I have also seen others here write about it. But this is something that is a foreign concept to me. I am not sure how common this is with folks who are autistic, aspergers, NLD, etc. Am I the only one?

Other things I have trouble with:
Why weddings are a big deal for the people involved? I honestly just have a hard time processing the importance of them. I like the dresses and costuming in general, but outside of that much of it is lost on me.

I am just trying to grasp some of these issues because I often have difficulties processing peoples attachment to certain social rituals.

Part of me is just trying to figure out just how common this is, because I sometimes do feel extremely disconnected to certain prevailing social rituals.

I've noticed in my life that normal people invest a great deal of time and energy COMPARING themselves to other people. That is the "keeping up with the Jones's" mentality that people with AS seem to be lacking. People with AS, for better and worse, have self-centered mindsets and don't give much thought to the accomplishments or acquisitions of others and how that compares to their life. Many NTs, typically of the Type A form, spend their life playing a game of one-upmanship by always trying to outdo their peers. They always get jealous if a co-worker gets a hot new car, girlfriend, or promotion and then they are determined to match that gain.

Type A NTs focus overwhelmingly on what other people do. They love to get involved in other people's busines and gossip, scheme, and intermingle. They are not satisfied just being alone. They need more stimulus in their life and they get it by messing around with other people and trying to "mentor" them. They like to be in charge of everything around them and play social games. If things are calm, they have to "stir the pot" and generate drama and conflict, if for no other reason than to satisfy an urge and keep mentally occupied. Jealousy is a prime emotion for these people, because they always have to maintain a feeling of superiority and are agitated if they perceive that possibly with someone else the grass could be greener on the other side.

For people with AS, birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, etc... have little esteem. I absolutly hate the hassle of having to by gifts or cards. I myself hold such dates with no regard and consider them to be just spaces on the calender. Even when I was a small boy and oould expect a bevy of gifts, I still really didn't care about my birthday or Christmas because receiving material goods was of no importance to me. All I really want(ed) was free time. Having to buy gifts and cards is just so distracting.

Normal people love social rituals because they love to assimilate. Normal people typically are on a constant quest to find and apply ways that they can better fit into society. NTs are overwhelmingly concerned with their external appearance, much to the detriment of their real personalities. On a basic level, holidays and birthdays are an excuse for a party and social function, which is anathema to an AS individual. Digging deeper, the more manipulative NT person loves to use social functions to play little "Devil Wears Prada" style social games and to show off the quality of their lives to others. Normal people use parties as a medium to show off how sociable they are and they just love to talk about themselves with others. Normal people don't really listen when they have conversations, they just wait for their turn to speak.

Weddings are a HUGE deal for NT women, but most NT and AS men really don't care. Social functions are really all about appearances and formalities, things that people with AS couldn't care less about.

I must've been up the back of the queue when they were handing out jealousy. It creates a lot of problems not having much of it. I just don't read situations correctly.

I have had social problems because of not understanding jealousy, too. For instance, I don't understand why wives will hate and blame "the other woman" in an affair, when that woman wasn't breaking any contract with the wife--it's their own husband who is at fault. I also don't understand being envious of other people's good fortune, especially the good fortune of people I like. The happiness of my friends makes me more happy, not less.

Personally, I've had problems resulting from my own jealousy throughout my life.

As a child, I invested everything into a friendship. One boy & one girl was pretty much all I could handle - there seemed to be nothing left for additional friendships - I had filled my quota. And I could never understand why anyone would need another friend besides me (this is what I now know to be my lack of Theory of Mind.)

When I grew into adolescence & started having romantic relationships, it was the same thing. (Actually jealousy was not a problem with my first girlfriend - we were obsessed with one another, so there were virtually no other people in our lives to be jealous about.) Where it really became a problem, was with my girlfriend in college. She was an extremely social person & I simply could not handle that - especially since she didn't understand why I couldn't just be social too (this was long before anyone knew about AS.)

Now that I understand more about my tendencies, I think I'd be able to deal with relationships & resist the jealousy impulse.

Just waiting for the opportunity to test that hypothesis.

Thanks so far. It is making a little more sense.

As far as drama, my nontypical emotional responses to emotional stimuli have gotten me into trouble on numerous times and have caused drama in its own right. The fact is I get myself in plenty of situations where I have been in trouble because I was not sure how the other person would take it. In addition to that I think my use of language often finds people taking offense. My writing style can sometimes be rather dense.

My partner finds it weird because I can be with him when he meets a girl he wants to sleep with and be happy for him, yet get really upset when he brings up something that is part of my routine. I mean he is trying to understand it, but the fact is I barely have the answers myself. I mean this stuff was only begining to be pointed out to me and brought up right before I met him, at least with relation to a causality. The relationship itself is highly structured, though I am not going to go into to many details about that.

I do like giving gifts, just not so much with the holidays. Getting gifts I can care less about.

I do think I am not very materialistic, I live in a spartan one bedroom apartment that has my music studio. The only thing that I am really possesive of is my musical equipment, since it has to do with an obsession i had since seven. I mean my cloths are replacible, my books are replacible, my dvds are replacible, my music is replacible, my musical equipment...very hard to replace in my mind. My instruments and music studio have been an obsession for years.

Alot of what you wrote Brusilov made sense, especially with regards to social cerimonies. But the one thing is I am a girl, so I am always kind of exposed to this stuff, even though i don't put great weight on it myself. I always feel akward and out of place at these functions. I can go to a concert and get alot out of it, but I don't get anything out of certian social functions. I mean I am not even comfortable with parties unless i know people there to some extent, and even then the entire excersize in exhausting. I am only really somewhat functional and social in specific social environments. For example my love of rock shows. At rock shows took me years to find myself comfortable and start talking to other people, it has become a familiar place and revolves around a subject matter I understand, music, and I can just talk about that subject matter exclusively and still be social. Even at rock shows I don't have to talk to people to listen to the show, though I have to admit random men hitting on me can get a bit irritable. But even with rock shows if the atmosphere is not just right, I am often motivated to leave because I do not feel comfortable. But just going to some random party, especially it is something cerimonial, it is something fundimentally uncomfortable to me, as i feel disconnected.

As far as assimilaition, I think my parents desperately wanted me to assimiliate for years, but it never really happened. They were very concerned about their neighbors and others in their community, to me it did not make sense at all, why couldn't people just be themselves and accept other people for being themselves. To this day I still have a hard time understanding assimiliation to a large degree, or the desire for that. To me the question often was, why can't you accept me for who I am no matter what?

I know I am rambling alot, and getting off topic a bit, but thanks for the input so far.
Arielhawksquill, I definately know what you are talking about.

yeah, jealousy has always been a foreign concept to me too. it was hard for me to watch my female friends who I grew up with go into jealous rages when they first started serious dating- I actually thought they were going insane. I didn't realise that such posessiveness about the significant other is normal. I always tried to talk them out of it with my usual rationalising of everything and I couldn't grasp why they never followed my advice.

nowdays I'm sort of settled on the fact that humans follow their emotions and not reason, that they have a lot more emotions than I do (and a lot more complex ones) and far less reason than I do, and that I seem just as alien to them as they do to me.

but there is more of them, so their way is "normal" and mine is "pathological". but meh, whatever. I don't envy them at all. I'm pretty zen about most stuff, material stuff including, just like the OP.

I have the same problems.

Jealousy I've never understood...my motto was, either someone wanted to be with me or they didn't, they had that choice... the same as I did. Normally attempts in trying to make me jealous just resulted in me ceasing to care.

Weddings to me have always seemed like such a waste and have become more like a performance of who can have the "biggest" and "best" and spend the most money.

If jealousy is a manifestation of a person's own insecurity, whether it's about their abilities, talents, goals or relationships etc, then I'm better off without it. I'm insecure enough as it is.

I mainly understand jealousy as a manifestation of insecurity.

Any jealousy I have experienced has been pretty much that.

Sometimes I can insecure about a lot of things....many of the things I feel insecure about have to do with my mind-blindness and my taking things literally..and the way that I seem so different from other people....and the things that I can't do...etc...

I can feel jealous of other people for not having the deficits that i have.

Sometimes I feel jealous of feminine ectomorphic females because I will never be one. I am short and round....I have been and will always be short and round....I am a vegetarian and I exercise every day..and struggle to stay under 155 lbs..
It is not that I think they are better than me...I just know that people I care about find them to be more attractive....and society tries to tell us that they are biologically at an advantage...and so-on....

I feel like I am of a different species practically.

Yeah, that puzzled me for years that particular courting ritual - you like them, they like you and suddenly they introduce some other woman into the picture. Apparently you're supposed to have a cat fight over the guy and that way he knows you really care. I just used to walk away from the (potential) relationship, it seemed tacky.

On the other hand, I always thought my boyfriends were very 'cool' about me, like they didn't really care one way or the other - I probably needed to use jealousy to find out what they thought.

This is what I've found seems to confuse NT people the most. They are unable to conceive of it being possible that someone genuinely would not care about what other people thought of them. If I were to attempt to name the core factor in 'what makes an NT', it would be the continual concern, to one degree or another, with how they appear in the eyes of others.



It's a bizarre way of thinking, looked at logically. As if 'warning' you that there's this other person they're interested in as well and might leave you for at any moment is supposed to make you like them better. Very arrogant and narcissistic - assuming that the loss of their glorious presence from your life is such a horrific prospect to you that you'll fight to keep them, while they simply sit back and bask in the attention.

I wonder how many relationships/potential relationships are little more than an ego trip on both sides.