Bob On Jealousy
"'Love' is not the emotion that caused you to flee. What is 'love,' Ben?""What? Oh, come off it! Everybody from Shakespeare to Freud has taken a swing at that; nobody has answered it yet. All I know is, it hurts."
Jubal shook his head. "I'll give an exact definition. 'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
Ben said slowly, "I'll buy that...because that's the way I feel about Jill."
"Good. Then you are asserting that your stomach turned and you fled in panic because of a need to make Jill happy."
"Hey, wait a minute! I didn't say—"
"Or was it some other emotion?"
"I simply said—" Caxton stopped. "Okay, I was jealous! But, Jubal, I would have sworn I wasn't. I knew I had lost out, I had accepted it long ago—hell, I didn't like Mike the less for it. Jealousy gets you nowhere."
"Nowhere one would wish, certainly. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy—in fact, they're almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. Both at once can produce unbearable turmoil—and I grok that was your trouble, Ben. When jealousy reared its head, you couldn't look it in the eye—so you fled."
Robert Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land
