I want to talk about something I hear constantly, and almost never hear a woman say out loud without apologizing for it in the same breath.
I want to talk about something I hear constantly, and almost never hear a woman say out loud without apologizing for it in the same breath.
You know the moment. Someone posts the ring. The offer letter. The keys. The ultrasound, the one in the group chat where everyone answers within ninety seconds. And before your face can arrange itself into the right expression, your body gets there first. A drop in your stomach. Heat across your chest. That tight little knot at the base of your throat that shows up about a second before tears do.
Then the second wave: what is wrong with me.
I want to slow that second wave down, because you’re about to spend the rest of the night arguing with yourself about whether you’re a good person, and I can tell you from years of sitting with women in exactly this spot that it’s not the argument that helps.
Here’s what I actually think is happening. That knot is usually not jealousy, and it’s almost never a character flaw. Most of the time it’s envy, which is a different emotion with different research behind it, and underneath the envy there is very often grief. Real grief, for a life you didn’t choose or haven’t reached yet, that nobody in your life has ever recognized as a loss. Getting the name right changes everything about what you can do with it. Envy that gets named tends to point somewhere useful. Envy that gets scolded goes underground and comes back later as resentment, usually at someone who didn’t earn it.
Let me correct one word
We use jealousy for everything, so let’s sort it out, because the precision genuinely helps.
Jealousy is about losing something you already have. There are three people in it: you, someone you love, and a rival. It’s the feeling of a door you thought was yours starting to swing.
Envy is about wanting something you don’t have. There are two people in it: you, and the person holding the thing. Researchers have been separating these since Parrott and Smith’s work in the early nineties, and they really are different experiences. Envy comes with longing and a sting of inferiority. Jealousy comes with fear and watching.
So when your friend announces the pregnancy and your throat closes, that’s almost certainly not jealousy. Nobody is taking anything from you. You are standing in front of something you want, and your body just told you that you want it.
Which sounds worse, I know. Jealousy at least comes with a villain. Envy just comes with you, wanting.
Stay with me, because this is where it gets useful.
What’s actually underneath it
This is the part I most want to hand you.
Envy is very often the surface of grief. Not grief for a person. Grief for a version of your life.
There’s a name for this. Kenneth Doka called it disenfranchised grief: loss that the people around you don’t recognize as loss, so nobody helps you carry it. No casserole, no card, no day off. It’s grieving the career you set down. The city you left because it made sense at the time. The relationship you ended for good reasons that you’d end again. The child you didn’t have, or haven’t had yet, or are still deciding about. The years you spent holding a family together while your own life idled in the driveway. The version of you who would have taken the risk, gone to the thing, said it out loud.
And here’s what I want you to notice about that whole list.
Almost none of it is about not being able to.
We were handed a very specific order of operations. School, then the job, then the person, then the house, then the baby, roughly on schedule, and if you did it right it would feel like arriving. A lot of us did it out of order. A lot of us did it and it didn’t feel like arriving. A lot of us are in our late thirties looking at a life we chose on purpose and grieving it anyway, which is a confusing thing to admit at a baby shower.
So sit with the knot honestly and it’s usually one of two things. “I’m not there yet.” Or, “I made a different call, and I’m only now feeling what it cost.”
Neither of those is inadequacy. Both of those are grief.
You made choices. Some were good choices you’d make again tomorrow. And they still cost you something, and the cost gets to be sad. Yes, and. You don’t have to pick which one is the true one.
Why “I should just be happy for them” backfires
Here’s the move most of us make. We feel the knot, we clock it as ugly, and we go straight to performance. We type the message. We say we’re thrilled. And we are, partly, which is exactly why the whole thing is so disorienting.
But when you jump to “I should just be happy for her,” you’re not processing the feeling. You’re supervising it. And a feeling under supervision doesn’t leave. It waits.
Try thinking about your envy the way you’d think about a kid who’s upset about something she can’t explain yet. Sending her out of the room doesn’t settle her down. Sitting with her does.
You can be genuinely glad for your friend and quietly heartbroken for yourself in the same five minutes. That is not hypocrisy. That’s being a whole person with more than one thing going on.
The feeling has a direction, and you get some say in it
Here’s the research that gives me real hope about this one.
People who study envy have found it splits into two very different kinds. One kind moves you up. You see what she has and something in you leans forward: I want that, and I want to know what it would take. The other kind moves her down. You see what she has and something in you starts building a case, against her, or against how she got it, or against women like her.
Same knot in the throat. Two completely different destinations.
What decides the direction is mostly what you do in the first few minutes, and whether you told yourself the truth about what you were feeling. Which is why the naming matters as much as it does. “I’m a jealous person” is a verdict, and verdicts have nowhere to go. “I’m grieving that I’m not there yet” is information, and information can be worked with.
Your body said it first
The knot arrived before the thought did. That’s not a malfunction, that’s just the order these things happen in.
There’s good research on what happens when we put a feeling into words: naming an emotion accurately turns its volume down, which is a strange and generous fact about how we’re built. The catch is that it has to be the right word. “I’m being petty” doesn’t calm anything, because it isn’t true, and some part of you knows it isn’t true.
So next time the knot shows up, try this instead of the scolding.
Put a hand on your chest. Not as a wellness ritual. Just because warmth and pressure on your sternum actually settles a nervous system, and because you’d do it for a friend without thinking about it for a second.
Then ask, with real curiosity: what am I longing for right now?
Not what’s wrong with me. What am I longing for. Those two questions take you to completely different rooms.
Then wait for the honest answer, which is usually smaller and more specific than you’d expect. Sometimes it isn’t the house, it’s being settled. It isn’t the baby, it’s being chosen. It isn’t the promotion, it’s somebody finally noticing how hard you’ve been working with no one watching.
That answer is the beginning of a conversation, not the whole conversation. But it’s a much better place to start than shame.
And it isn’t too late, mostly
I want to be honest with you here, because there’s a whole industry telling women that nothing is ever closed, and that isn’t quite true. You’d know I was managing you if I said it.
Some doors close. Some of them close on things that mattered enormously, and that grief is real. It deserves to be treated as grief and not as a motivation problem to be solved with a planner.
Yes, and. Far less is closed than it feels like at 11pm with a phone in your hand. Career changes at 38 are ordinary. So are first babies, first marriages, second marriages, leaving the marriage, moving countries, going back to school, making new close friends in a new decade of your life. When the story in your head says the window shut, that’s usually grief talking, and grief is not a reliable narrator about the future. It’s an excellent narrator about the past.
The work isn’t to talk yourself out of the feeling. It’s to figure out which part of it is mourning and which part is a nudge, because those two need completely different things from you. The mourning needs a witness. The nudge needs you to actually do something.
What this looks like when it’s moving
Women bring this to therapy more often than you’d think, and they almost never call it grief when they walk in. They call it comparison. They say they’re on their phone too much, or they don’t like who they become around one particular friend, or they had a hard time at a shower in June and they still feel bad about it in September.
What shifts isn’t that you stop noticing what other women have. You’ll keep noticing. We’re comparing creatures and we’re not going to fix that.
What shifts is the recovery time. The knot shows up and you know what it is inside a minute instead of a week. You stop needing her to be secretly unhappy in order for you to feel okay. You can send the congratulations and mean it, and then go feel your own thing on your own time, which is the version of this that actually holds up. And usually something practical starts happening too, because a longing you’ve finally named tends to start asking you for things.
Four questions to sit with
When the knot shows up next, these will do more for you than an hour of scrolling.
What exactly am I longing for here? Get underneath the object to the experience. Not the wedding, the being claimed. Not the title, the being taken seriously.
Is this something I chose against, or something I haven’t reached yet? Those feel identical in the body and they need completely different things from you.
If this was a choice I made, what did I get in exchange? Name it honestly, including the parts you would still choose. Grief and gratitude are roommates.
What’s one small thing that would move me toward this? Small on purpose. One conversation, one question, one email.
If you want help with this
Some of this you can do on your own, with a hand on your chest and an honest question. Some of it needs a witness, especially the grief nobody in your life has ever called grief.
At Marra, the first step is a free 15 minute consultation with our intake team. You tell them what’s going on, and they help figure out which of our therapists is the right fit for it. If nobody here is right for you, we’ll tell you that and point you somewhere better. Sessions are 55 minutes. We’re in River West and we see clients online anywhere in Illinois, and you can meet our therapists before you commit to anything at all.
You don’t need a crisis to deserve this. A knot in your throat you’ve been arguing with for a year is plenty.
If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. It’s free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day.
