Book review by Kathy Labriola. What is Retroactive Jealousy? Billings writes from a heterosexual perspective, but I believe other people will find the book very enlightening and relevant to their lives as well.
Anyone who has ever felt insecure in a relationship will be able to relate to the topics in this book! He also writes from a monogamous perspective, and the book assumes that you are in a monogamous relationship. However, this book can still be extremely useful to people in open relationships. This is because the two key causes of retroactive jealousy, fear and judgement, are also operational in jealousy experienced in open relationships.
The same insecurities, low self-esteem, fears of loss, and judgements that drive jealousy in open relationships are at the core of retroactive jealousy. Billings describes his own descent into the hell of retroactive jealousy, which started on his first date with his now-wife, when she disclosed that she had been single for the past year and was sexually active with a number of different men during that time.
For the next several months, he interrogated her relentlessly about these hook-ups, searched endlessly for information on these relationships, and the more he found out, the more distraught and insanely jealous he became of guys she had slept with once while drunk and barely remembered. He realized eventually that it was all based on a belief that if she had casual sex with men in the past, that somehow meant she would do so again, and would lie and cheat on him, and break any agreements they made.
He realized that this made no sense, because —Hello! That was then and this is now! Get a grip, dude! Even more importantly, the underlying fear was that he was scared to death of losing her to someone else, and that fear was based on the possibility that she would be dissatisfied with him and want someone else instead.
