Is jealousy useful in partnerships?

Relevance. Individual’s entire life is accompanied by jealousy, whether or not the individual recognizes the presence of jealousy.The study of jealousy is continued near the half of century while relations between love and jealousy have stayed unclear. The link between jealousy and partnership satisfaction, especially with such important element as a sexual satisfaction, remain unclear also. 

Objective. The clarification of these links, taking into account the dramatic increase of virtual communications between real or potential partners. Our aim was to verify too the construct validity of the Russian and Latvian versions of the new jealousy scale by Dijkstra, Barelds, and Groothof.

Methods. For this reason besides the scale of Dijkstra and his colleagues were used the 45-item scale of Love by Sternberg, the 16-item Marital Satisfaction Questionnaire by Herman, the 25-item Revised Self-Report Jealousy Scale, he Frequency Index of Sexual Satisfaction by Breslav. The sample of the study comprised 75 participants aged 22 to 57 who had stayed in a more or less long-time romantic relationships.

Results. The hypothesis about the correlation between love, satisfaction with partnership relations and sexual satisfaction was confirmed. A significant positive correlation of love and jealousy was also revealed on the 42-item scale used to measure the proneness to reactive jealousy in real and virtual environment.

Conclusion. The correlation between proneness to reactive jealousy, love, and satisfaction with partnership relations found in the study suggests a certain potential of the protective function of this type of jealousy and charges researchers with new tasks in understanding the nature of jealousy and its consequences.

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