Why do I get jealous of the people they're close to?

You probably get jealous of the people they’re close to because those people already have what you don’t have yet: years of history and an established place in this person’s life. The feeling usually isn’t measuring the friends. It’s guarding your own spot, and it gets loudest when you’re not sure yet how much room there is for you.

Picture it. You’re 36, you teach high school chemistry, and you’re three months into seeing Sol. Sol has a best friend, Maya, and they dated for about a year in their twenties. Now Maya is the first person Sol calls with good news, the friend with a spare key, and the voice at dinner saying “remember Montreal?” while everyone else laughs. Then there are the four friends from college with a running joke you’ve had explained to you twice and still don’t quite get.

What happened is simple: Sol has a close friend who is also an ex, and an old friend group. Your reading is that you’re on the outside of something that matters more to Sol than you do. The fear underneath is sharper: “I’m the person who could be swapped out.” The next step, for now, is just understanding where that fear is coming from.

What is this feeling actually guarding?

Your place in their life. Psychologist Sarah Gomillion and her colleagues tested the idea that a partner’s same-sex friends, people who aren’t romantic rivals at all, can still set off jealousy by seeming to threaten your central role. Across two studies, it was strongest in people whose partner had become very central to their own life, and stronger still when they had some reason to doubt how committed the partner was.1

Read that the other way round and it’s oddly reassuring. The jealousy says something about how much this person has started to matter to you, and how unsure you feel about where you stand. It doesn’t say anything, on its own, about Maya or the college friends.

Why does one friend feel different from another?

Because you’re not having one kind of jealousy. Communication researchers have described four kinds that come up around a partner’s friendships: worry about something sexual, worry about emotional closeness, worry that the friend has more influence, and worry that the friendship takes up time you’d share.2 In a study of 201 people, a partner’s close friendship with someone of a different sex felt more threatening than a same-sex friendship, both to whether the relationship would last and to how good it was. And which kind of jealousy people felt depended on which of those two threats they saw.3

That’s a useful question to ask yourself about Sol. Is it the history with Maya that bothers you, the fact that Maya hears things first, or the Saturdays that keep getting booked? Each points at a different fear, and only one of them is about romance.

There’s also a twist. In the same line of research, a partner’s new friendships set off more jealousy than old ones.2 A friend from years back is often less of a threat than they feel like. The person who’s new to the picture, in Sol’s life, is you. Some of what you’re feeling may just be what it’s like to be the newest person in someone’s world.

Why does it feel like you have to compete?

Because almost everyone wants to feel hard to replace. A research team led by Sandra Murray proposed that people are motivated to feel irreplaceable to a partner, because that feeling is what lets them trust the partner will keep showing up. In their studies, people with lower self-esteem trusted more when they felt irreplaceable, and people with higher self-esteem who felt replaceable started working harder to prove they were indispensable.4

So if you’ve noticed yourself trying to be funnier than the college friends, or quietly keeping score against Maya, that’s not a character flaw. It’s the “don’t replace me” alarm doing exactly what it was built to do. It just can’t be satisfied by winning against people who were never in the same contest.

What about the ex who stayed a friend?

This is the friendship that tends to hurt most, and it helps to know why people stay friends with an ex at all. In research from Oakland University, people rated the reasons former partners might stay friends. The most important ones were about the ex being reliable, trustworthy and of sentimental value. Practical reasons ranked lowest.5 That’s a picture of what most people say about this in general. It can’t tell you anything about Sol and Maya in particular, and neither can your fear. What you can know is what you see over time, and what Sol tells you if you ask. The signs that actually carry weight look like this:

• Room: Sol makes space for you when Maya and the college friends are around, instead of leaving you at the edge of the table.
• Introductions: you get brought into the circle, with names and stories, not kept separate from it.
• Follow-through: plans with you hold, even when a friend calls.
• Curiosity: Sol asks about your people, too.

When is it more than jealousy?

Asking someone to drop their friends, checking their phone, tracking where they are, or wanting their passwords are not normal jealousy, even early on and even when you’re scared. If you’re the person being watched, controlled or kept from people you’re close to, or you feel afraid of how someone acts when they’re jealous, that’s a safety issue worth talking to a hotline or a professional about. The support line is listed on this page.

And if this feeling is persistent, intense, or starts to crowd out your sleep, work or your own friendships, a licensed mental-health professional is the right help in tracing where it comes from.

What to notice this week

When it flares, ask which kind it is: the history, the closeness, the influence or the time. Then ask the older question: when did you first feel like the person who could be left out? If the answer is a sibling, a friend group at 14 or a past relationship, you’ve found what this feeling is really guarding, and it isn’t Sol’s friendship with Maya.

What doesn’t the research show?

Several of these studies used scenarios or student samples, and the reasons for staying friends with an ex are averages across many people, not a read on anyone you know. The research describes where jealousy of a partner’s friends tends to come from. It can’t tell you whether any particular friendship is a problem, and it doesn’t replace a direct, curious conversation with the person you’re seeing.