Reply to What do you do with strong feelings of envy

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I rarely feel envious.

I feel discomfort when I am trying to make a genuine human connection, and the other person is playing these one-upsmanship games. It hurts. That's the feeling, not envy.

Or when people say, your just jealous. Or remember that Pantene commercial, "Don't hate me because I am beautiful"? It isn't hate because the model is beautiful, but it's the hurt in seeing how confident she is because of hair. And seeing the rewards attached to hair.

Does that make sense?

And I had similar hair to the models in the Pantene commercial. It still hurts. [/quote]

So I have felt envy before but I think there is a LOT of truth to this. Especially the thing about trying to connect with someone and instead having them play one-upsmanship games. I experience this a lot less now but it was really common in my late 20s/early 30s and reading PP immediately made me think of a very frustrating friendship I had with a woman who did this a lot.

The frustrating thing was that before this behavior started, I think we had a healthy friendship. We both had things going for us and also both had struggles and it felt like there was a lot of equality. But she started in with those games and what I primarily felt was not envy of her but hurt for myself. It felt like she was constantly putting me down a little because it was so important for her to always come out on top. Which meant that in her mind, I had to come out on the bottom. It was not enough for us to be equals with different strengths and weaknesses.

I wound up exiting the friendship and the further frustrating thing is that a lot if our mutual friends characterized it as me being too envious of her to be friends (a framing she encouraged). But that’s not what happened. I have tons of friends who have enviable lives— friends who have more money, cooler jobs, are more naturally pretty, why get to travel more. But those friendships are healthy because none of them are trying to make me feel less than.

I think people assume envy as the problem between women often but sometimes that’s the easy excuse. Look at the PP in this thread who flaunts her wealth and family, and is openly condescending, to younger women she envies. If those younger women responded in kind, she’d say they were “just jealous.” But it’s clear from her comments that’s not it at all. She’s treating them as less than to make herself feel better. Their envy, even if it exists, is really not the root of the problem.[/quote]

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