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Jealousy in a long relationship: what to do about it

5 min read

Years into a relationship, jealousy rarely arrives as a scene. It's a quiet tightening when a coworker's name comes up for the fifth time, or when your partner is laughing at their phone. Plenty of people in long relationships feel it, and the feeling alone isn't the problem. What matters is how it gets handled: by one person, by both, or by checking and questioning.

How common it is, and what the data can't tell you

A Pew Research Center survey of 4,860 U.S. adults, fielded in October 2019, asked partnered adults about phones and social media. Among those whose partner uses social media, 23% said their partner's interactions on it had made them feel jealous or unsure about the relationship. Separately, 34% of all partnered adults said they had looked through their partner's phone without the partner knowing.

The breakdowns are group averages, and individuals vary widely. For jealous or unsure feelings, married people (17%) were less likely than unmarried partnered people (37%) to say yes, and the share fell with age, from 34% of ages 18 to 29 to 4% of those 65 and older. Women reported both more often than men (29% against 17% for jealousy; 42% against 25% for phone-checking). On phone-checking, Pew says the gap between cohabiting and married people is largely about age. The survey is self-reported and asks about social media, so it says nothing about jealousy that has other triggers.

One earlier study of university students at the University of Guelph (Muise and colleagues, 2009) found that more time on Facebook was linked with more jealousy toward romantic partners, and that jealousy was linked with more time spent looking at a partner's page. The authors describe a loop: you look, you see something ambiguous, you feel worse, you look again. The sample was young, the study was a survey, and a survey can't show which came first.

Common triggers after years together

Triggers often aren't evidence of anything. They're moments where a gap in what you know gets filled by your worst guess.

What a jealous feeling can be, and what it isn't

Some jealousy is ordinary. A 2004 clinical review by two psychiatrists (Kingham and Gordon) describes a clinical form, "morbid jealousy," as a preoccupation with a partner's infidelity that continues despite evidence against it. They write that it is a symptom rather than a diagnosis, that it can have several different causes, and that checking, surveillance and interrogation are common in it. They note that no community surveys exist, so how common it is remains unknown. The review lists treatments including cognitive-behavioral therapy and couple therapy.

So there's a scale. At one end is a passing pang you can name and let go. At the other is a belief that won't move when the facts do. If you're near the second end, a therapist is the right person to talk to, and that's not a character flaw.

How to raise it

A common approach is to treat it as information about you, shared with your partner, not as a charge against them. A few specifics:

If you're the person hearing it, you can listen first and skip the defense. Reassurance helps some people. But it has limits, and if the same reassurance has to be repeated daily, the underlying worry probably needs another route, like the ones in jealousy early in dating, which also apply here.

When it's controlling

Couples set different rules. Some share locations or passwords happily and some would find it stifling. Both can be fine. A common test is whether both people chose the arrangement freely, and whether either can say no without a penalty.

The domestic-violence resource Love Is Respect lists the following among warning signs of abuse: extreme jealousy or insecurity, possessiveness or controlling behavior, checking your phone, email or social media without permission, and cutting you off from friends or family. One of these in isolation may be an argument you can talk through. A pattern of several, or being afraid of the reaction, is different, and boundaries in a relationship covers how to state a limit. Love Is Respect can be reached at 866-331-9474 or by texting LOVEIS to 22522, and in immediate danger you should call 911. This applies in either direction: it describes behaviors, whoever is doing them.

What to do next

  1. When jealousy hits, write two lines: what you feel, and the facts you actually have. Do it before you say anything.
  2. Wait 20 minutes before checking a phone, a profile or a location. Note whether the urge dropped.
  3. Choose one conversation this week. Open with a description of your feeling and a single request, using the lines above.
  4. Add one thing that's yours: a standing weekly plan with a friend or a class. Stop needing approval covers the habit behind a lot of this.
  5. Agree on one transparency rule together, if you want one, and write down that either of you can revisit it.
  6. If thoughts about infidelity run for hours a day and facts don't move them, book a session with a counselor.
  7. If any of the controlling signs above are present, talk to someone outside the relationship this week.

Attachment styles is a natural next read.

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