It starts small. A name you don’t recognize lights up their phone, and something in your chest tightens before you’ve had a single conscious thought about it.
Jealousy is one of the most ordinary feelings in a relationship, and also one of the most exhausting. A bit of it now and then is human. When it starts running the show, though, it drains the fun out of being together, makes you act like someone you don’t much like, and quietly teaches your partner to brace whenever you go quiet.
Relationship researchers have been busy lately. Several solid studies from the last two years look at where jealousy comes from, what keeps it going, and what actually shrinks it. Some of the findings are surprising. One of them suggests that the relationship you’re in matters more than your personality does.
Below you’ll find 16 ways to get over jealousy in a relationship, each backed by a named source and each ending with something small you can do this week. You don’t need all sixteen. Pick the two or three that sting a little when you read them. Those are usually the right ones.
1. Name the feeling without obeying it
Start by calling it what it is. “I’m feeling jealous right now” sounds almost too simple to matter, yet it creates a gap between you and the emotion, and that gap is where your choices live.
Robert L. Leahy, the psychologist behind emotional schema therapy, laid out a model of jealousy in the Journal of Clinical Psychology in March 2026. He describes jealousy as an automatic reaction to a perceived threat to an attachment bond, shaped over a very long evolutionary history. In other words, it fires before you decide anything. In his account, the treatment doesn’t try to stop the feeling from showing up. It starts by normalizing it, then helps people carry the feeling without being swept along by it, and without acting on it through things like questioning or reassurance seeking.
That framing takes a lot of shame off the table. You didn’t choose the jolt. You do choose the next ten minutes.
Start small: the next time the jolt hits, say the sentence in your head, “This is jealousy,” and wait three slow breaths before you do anything else.
2. Ask whether it’s you, them, or this particular relationship
Most advice assumes jealousy is a personal flaw you carry from one relationship to the next. The data says it’s more complicated.
A team led by Mikhila Wildey, with Kayla Knopp, Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades, published a study in Personal Relationships in 2026 (covered by PsyPost in March 2026) that followed 891 unmarried adults aged 18 to 34 for five years. Because many of them changed partners along the way, the researchers could track 1,507 separate relationships. They focused on cognitive jealousy, the suspicious thoughts about a partner straying.
| Source of variation in cognitive jealousy | Share |
|---|---|
| Differences between relationships | 39.8% |
| Differences between individual people | 28.2% |
So the relationship itself accounted for a bigger slice than the person did. Individual traits still mattered: higher neuroticism and attachment anxiety predicted more jealousy, and learning about a partner’s early infidelity was linked to jealousy that stuck around. One caveat worth knowing is that the data were collected between 2007 and 2012, before dating apps changed so much about how people meet.
What this means for you is a fairer question. Instead of “What’s wrong with me?”, ask “What is it about this relationship, right now, that keeps setting this off?”
Your move: write two short lists tonight, one titled “things I’ve felt in every relationship” and one titled “things that only happen here.” The second list is often the more useful one.
3. Get to know your attachment alarm
If you tend to worry about being left, love itself can feel like a risk. That worry has a name in psychology, attachment anxiety, and it shows up again and again in jealousy research.
In a January 2025 study of jealousy and closeness in Chile and Spain, Ana María Fernández and colleagues surveyed 265 people in relationships, with data collected between April and July 2024. Anxious attachment was the strongest predictor of digital jealousy in the full sample. Two other findings are just as interesting. People who felt more merged with their partner, the “we’re basically one person” feeling, reported more jealousy, not less. And people who felt more loved reported less. The study was cross-sectional and fairly small, so it shows links, not causes, but the pattern fits a lot of older work.
That last finding is practical. Feeling loved seems to act like a buffer, and your partner can’t provide the right kind of love if they don’t know what it looks like to you. If your anxiety is loud, it may also help to build a little more comfort with your own company, which is something our guide on how to enjoy being alone walks through.
Tell your partner, on a calm day, two specific things that make you feel loved (a text when they land somewhere, a hand on your back at parties) and ask for theirs in return.
4. Separate what you think from what you know
Jealousy is persuasive because it feels like information. Your heart rate jumps, so something must be wrong. That is the trap.
Leahy’s 2026 model lays out the mechanism in four steps. First, an ambiguous cue appears: a late reply, a laugh at someone else’s joke. Second, a mind tuned for threat, and uncomfortable with uncertainty, fills the gap with the worst available story. Third, the body reacts to that story as if it were true. Fourth, the body’s reaction gets read as proof of the story. Round it goes. Leahy links this loop to rigid assumptions and low tolerance for not knowing. It’s a clinical model built from research and case work, so treat it as a well-grounded explanation rather than a proven causal chain, but it matches how most people describe their worst jealous nights.
Say you’re scrolling and you see your partner liked a coworker’s photo. Thought: “They’re into her.” Fact: one tap on a screen. Those two things live in very different places, and naming that difference out loud weakens the loop. If your thoughts tend to spiral all the way to the breakup scene, our piece on how to stop catastrophizing has more tools for that.
A quick experiment: draw a line down a page. On the left, write what you think is happening. On the right, write only what you could prove to a neutral stranger. Compare the lengths.
5. Protect your sleep before a hard conversation
This one gets ignored, and it shouldn’t. Tired brains are worse at almost everything emotional, jealousy included.
Giovanni Alvarado and C. Palmer at Montana State University presented a study at the SLEEP 2025 meeting in June 2025 in which 68 young adults reported their sleep and their social feelings every day for two weeks. Poorer sleep went along with more daily jealousy, but only for people high in attachment anxiety. For everyone else, a bad night didn’t show the same effect. Keep the limits in mind: it’s a conference abstract with a small sample, and the full paper with statistics wasn’t available, so treat it as an early signal rather than settled science.
Still, if you know you’re the anxious type, the practical takeaway is easy. Your jealousy at 1 a.m., on five hours of sleep, is not a reliable narrator.
Tonight, do this: if a jealous thought shows up after 11 p.m., write it on a note, go to bed, and only decide whether it’s worth raising once you’ve slept.
6. Drop the checking rituals
Checking their location. Rereading old messages. Asking “Are you sure nothing’s going on?” for the fourth time this week. It all feels like problem-solving. Mostly it’s scratching.
Think of a mosquito bite. Scratching brings real relief for a few seconds, and then the itch comes back stronger, which makes you scratch again. Leahy’s 2026 model treats checking and reassurance seeking in much the same way, as “safety behaviors” that calm you in the moment and keep the fear alive over time, and giving them up is a core part of the treatment he describes. A 2026 study by Yael Ecker, Jens Lange and Corey Cook in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (more on it in item 8) adds a related wrinkle: protective effort gave couples a brief lift in satisfaction a few days later, while people who leaned on protection over the long run saw their satisfaction drift down.
The analogy has limits. A bite heals on its own whether you scratch or not, while jealousy is fed by beliefs that do need some attention. And sometimes checking does uncover a real problem, which is part of what makes the habit so sticky. But if you’ve checked a dozen times and found nothing, the checking has become the problem. Some of the same urge to be reassured shows up in other parts of life too, and our article on how to stop seeking attention from others gets into that.
Pick one checking habit, the one you do most, and put a 24-hour delay on it. When the urge comes, note the time and wait. You’ll probably find the urge peaks and fades faster than you expected.
7. Quit the online detective work
Social media is a jealousy machine with good lighting. You get fragments of other people’s lives, no context, and endless room to fill in the blanks.
Tara Marshall of McMaster University published four studies with 762 participants in total in Computers in Human Behavior (online November 2025) on what happens when people keep watching an ex online. In one 10-day diary study of 84 Canadian students, 58% looked at their ex’s profile at least once, mostly on Instagram and Snapchat, and most of that looking was passive scrolling (69%) rather than active digging (22%). Across the studies, Marshall found that watching an ex on social media went with more jealousy and breakup distress, and in an experiment, imagining checking an ex’s Facebook page stirred up more jealousy than imagining running into them in person. The designs are mostly correlational, and the studies looked at people’s own exes rather than a partner’s exes or new friends, so the leap to your situation is an informed guess, not a tested fact.
The guess seems reasonable, though. Whether you’re looking at your partner’s ex, their new colleague or the person who keeps commenting on their posts, you’re feeding your brain ambiguous scraps and asking it to stay calm. If you want a wider reset, our guide to digital minimalism is a good place to start.
Give it a go: mute (you don’t need to block) the two or three accounts you check most when you’re anxious, and leave them muted for a month.
8. Keep up the boring, everyday stuff
When you feel threatened, your attention swings toward guarding the relationship. That can quietly crowd out the ordinary things that make the relationship worth guarding.
The Ecker, Lange and Cook study tested exactly this across three studies. In an experiment with about 400 UK participants, people who recalled a jealous moment reported less motivation for everyday maintenance (date nights, emotional support, the small stuff) than people who recalled an ordinary moment. In a study that tracked around 300 US adults week by week, people who habitually prioritized protecting the relationship saw their jealousy rise over time, while those who kept up regular maintenance saw it fall. A third study followed 142 UK couples for a month and found that steady maintenance went with higher, more stable satisfaction. One honest limitation: jealousy in these samples was generally low, so the effects in very jealous relationships may look different.
I like this finding because it points somewhere hopeful. Instead of trying to stamp out the feeling, you put your energy back into the relationship itself. Our list of good habits to have has ideas for building small routines that last.
Test it this week: every time you notice a jealous pang, do one ordinary maintenance act within the hour. Make the coffee, send the silly meme, ask how the meeting went.
9. Make phone-free time a shared rule
Sometimes the trigger is a screen.
A meta-analysis by Nie Ni and colleagues, published in Frontiers in Psychology in May 2025, pooled 52 studies with 19,698 participants on “partner phubbing,” the habit of snubbing your partner in favor of your phone. Across the seven studies that measured it, phubbing was linked to more jealousy (a correlation of about 0.29), and the link was stronger in Eastern samples than in Western ones. Attachment anxiety was also tied to phubbing. Most of the underlying studies were cross-sectional and the results varied a lot between them, so it’s a link, not proof that phones cause jealousy.
It makes intuitive sense, though. When your partner is glued to their phone, you see attention going somewhere else and none of the context. Your brain does the rest.
Here’s a simple way in: agree on one phone-free slot a day, dinner or the first 20 minutes after you both get home, and make it a rule for both of you rather than a test of them.
10. Say it as a feeling, not an accusation
At some point you’ll want to talk about it, and you should. How you say it matters a lot.
Mirna Đurić, Francesca Righetti and colleagues ran four studies with 1,466 people in the US, UK and the Netherlands, published in Emotion in 2025 (online December 2024). Feeling jealous went with seeing your partner as more desirable but also trusting them less, and that drop in trust fed mixed, ambivalent feelings about the relationship. The flip side is the part to remember: people who saw their partner as jealous read them as committed, yes, but also as untrusting, and that combination made them more ambivalent too. So jealousy that comes out as suspicion can leave your partner feeling distrusted rather than loved.
Picture this: one version goes, “Who were you texting all night?” The other goes, “I noticed I felt jealous last night when you were on your phone. I don’t think you did anything wrong. Can we talk about it?” Same feeling. Very different message about trust. For more on keeping hard talks steady, see our tips on how to have a good conversation.
Next time, do this: open with “I felt,” name what you noticed without interpreting it, and end with a question instead of a verdict.
11. Build trust on purpose
Trust and jealousy work like a seesaw. When one goes up, the other tends to come down.
A University of Bern team led by Oliver Schulz mapped how 810 adults’ relationship traits connect to one another and published the network in Frontiers in Psychology in July 2025. Of all the links between the traits they measured, the strongest negative one was between jealousy and trust (a correlation of −0.50). Even more telling, once trust and the other variables were accounted for, jealousy’s own direct link to relationship satisfaction almost vanished (a partial correlation of 0.01). The data were cross-sectional and self-reported, collected between October 2022 and January 2024, so cause and effect can’t be pinned down.
One reading of that pattern: jealousy may not damage a relationship so much as travel with low trust, and trust is something both of you can build. Keeping small promises is the slow, unglamorous way to do it. So is following through on what you said you’d do.
This week, pick one small promise you can keep without fail (calling when you said you would, being on time for the thing) and ask your partner to do the same. Small, kept promises give trust something to stand on.
12. Stop treating jealousy as proof of love
There’s a popular idea that if someone isn’t a little jealous, they don’t really care. It’s romantic in films. In real life it can give the feeling far too much credit.
Susan Krauss Whitbourne, professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, made this point in a Psychology Today piece in August 2026 that reviewed the Ecker, Lange and Cook findings. Her take: an occasional, mild flash of jealousy may say something about commitment, but frequent jealousy can work against the relationship, because it pulls effort away from the everyday care that keeps couples close. That fits the Đurić results above, too. Your partner may read your jealousy as caring, and as distrust, at the same time.
You can keep the feeling and still refuse to let it stand in for love.
Your move: list three ways you actually show love that have nothing to do with jealousy, then do one of them today.
13. Thank them, and say what for
Gratitude might look like an odd tool for jealousy. It works more indirectly than the others, but it’s worth a place on the list.
Michelle Roth and colleagues at the University of Zurich studied 163 Swiss couples, published in Frontiers in Psychology in December 2024. When partners supported each other through stress, the gratitude that flowed back, especially the gratitude people felt they were receiving, largely explained why that support made them more satisfied. In some models, the variables together explained over 40% of the variation in women’s satisfaction. The couples were older (they’d been together about 30 years on average) and fairly happy, the data were cross-sectional, and jealousy itself wasn’t measured. So the connection to jealousy is indirect: gratitude helps people feel valued, and as the Fernández study in item 3 found, feeling loved goes with less jealousy.
The added benefit is attention. When you’re busy noticing what your partner does right, you have less room for building cases against them. If you’d like a broader push on reading emotions in yourself and others, our guide on how to improve emotional intelligence pairs well with this habit.
Start small: once a day for a week, thank your partner for one specific thing, and name the thing. “Thanks for picking up my prescription” lands harder than “thanks for everything.”
14. Know where jealousy turns into control
Most of this article is about managing your own jealousy. This item is about a line you shouldn’t cross, and one you should recognize if your partner crosses it.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics, in its domestic abuse overview released in November 2025 (covering the year ending March 2025), estimated that 3.8 million people aged 16 and over in England and Wales, or 7.8%, experienced domestic abuse in the previous year: about 2.2 million women and 1.5 million men. The legal definition it works from, set by the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, covers controlling or coercive behavior as well as physical violence. Jealousy is often the story people tell to explain control. “I only check your phone because I love you.” “I just don’t like you seeing those friends.”
Feeling jealous isn’t abuse. Monitoring someone’s messages, restricting who they see, tracking their location without agreement, or punishing them with silence or rage moves into different territory. If any of that describes you, it’s a strong signal to get professional help (see item 16). If it describes your partner, take it seriously, and our article on dealing with a narcissistic person in a relationship covers ways to protect yourself.
Be honest with yourself about one question: in the last month, have you tried to limit what your partner does, rather than talk about how you feel? If the answer is yes, that’s where to start.
15. Practice sitting with it
Mindfulness gets prescribed for everything these days, which makes it easy to tune out. For jealousy, the evidence is more specific than you might expect.
In a 2023 paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Valeria De Cristofaro and colleagues ran five studies with 3,275 people, including couples. People higher in dispositional mindfulness, the everyday tendency to notice the present moment without judging it, had lower cognitive jealousy (the suspicious thoughts) and lower behavioral jealousy (the snooping and questioning). Part of that link ran through higher self-esteem. But mindfulness wasn’t linked to emotional jealousy, the raw hurt itself. This is an older study, and it measured a trait rather than testing a mindfulness program, so it shows association rather than proof that training helps. Leahy’s 2026 clinical model points in the same direction, with its emphasis on observing intrusive thoughts with some detachment.
That split is useful. Mindfulness may not stop the sting. It may, however, keep the sting from turning into a story and then into a search. Our guides on how to stop ruminating thoughts and Stoic exercises for daily calm offer more practices in the same spirit.
A quick experiment: when jealousy shows up, set a two-minute timer and simply describe it to yourself, where you feel it, how hot it is, whether it’s rising or falling. No fixing, no checking. Just watching.
16. Get help that actually works
If you’ve tried the steps above and jealousy still takes over, or if it’s tied to old wounds like past infidelity, it’s worth getting a professional involved. Plenty of people do this well before things are dire.
Two 2025 reviews give some sense of what to expect. A meta-analysis by Binu Joseph, Varghese Joseph and Santhosh Kareepadath Rajan in the Iranian Journal of Public Health (January 2025) pooled 12 studies of couple interventions and found a large overall benefit compared with no intervention (an effect size of d = 0.85). The authors also flagged big differences between studies and signs of publication bias, so the true effect may be smaller. A second review, by Jorge Barraca and colleagues in the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science (January 2025), looked at 17 randomized trials of acceptance and commitment therapy for couples and found it promising for some problems, while cognitive behavioral couple therapy did clearly better for marital satisfaction. Neither review focused on jealousy specifically, which is a real gap in the research.
Individual therapy is an option too, especially if the jealousy follows you from relationship to relationship. Leahy’s model is one example of a cognitive approach built for exactly this.
Book one consultation, with a couples therapist if your partner is willing or an individual therapist if not, and go in with a written list of your three most common jealousy triggers.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll check the phone, or send the sharp text, or go cold for an evening. Expect it. In the Wildey study from item 2, jealousy levels within a given relationship stayed fairly stable over time, so change tends to come from steady practice over months.
There’s encouraging news too. In Marshall’s 2025 longitudinal study (item 7), both jealousy and breakup distress fell over six months. Hard feelings fade more than they feel like they will when you’re in the middle of them.
When you do slip, repair matters more than perfection. A 2025 study by M. Valipour and colleagues in Contemporary Family Therapy interviewed seven experienced couples therapists about what makes apologies work. Their answers came down to genuine remorse, honestly owning your part, good timing (neither instantly nor weeks later), and some action that makes amends. It’s a small qualitative study based on therapists’ experience, but the advice will sound familiar to anyone who has received a good apology.
So, after a slip:
- Name what you did, plainly, without a lecture about why.
- Own it, and skip the “but you also” part.
- Make one concrete repair, such as deleting the tracking app or putting the phone down for the evening.
- Go back to your plan the next day, with no penance required.
And be gentle with yourself afterwards. Beating yourself up rarely makes the next slip less likely, and if self-criticism is a big part of your pattern, our guide on how to stop hating yourself may help. A rough evening doesn’t undo weeks of progress, and our steps for turning a bad day around work just as well for a bad night.
Conclusion
You’ll probably never stop feeling jealous entirely. Getting over jealousy in a relationship mostly comes down to what you do in the ten minutes after it shows up. Name it. Check it against the facts. Put down the phone, yours and the urge to check theirs. Then put that energy back into the ordinary care that makes a relationship feel safe in the first place.
Choose two items from this list and try them for the next two weeks. If you want more on building relationships that feel steady, browse the rest of our relationships guides.
