Jealousy is a complex subject. Jealousy can lead to cracks in relationships, messy endings, and, in the worst cases, death.

In the tragedy Othello, Desdemona was a kind-hearted woman who truly saw the best in everyone, so when her husband Othello’s former Lieutenant asks her for help gaining his position back,  she accepts and does everything she can to help him. But because she now was preoccupied with her help, Othello became blinded by his jealousy towards this man and the one possibility that Iago manipulated him as to why she could possibly be spending this much time with him. This turned Desdemona from a  polite gentlewoman into a lying person with shameless infidelity to Othello. He convinced himself that “she must die, else she’ll betray more men.” So he murdered her in her own bed, and Othello responded to the cries of disbelief by calling himself “an honorable murderer,” saying that what he did was “in honor.”

This sad excuse for a blameless murder is not very honorable by today’s standards, but for millennia it would have been enough to pass by free with no repercussions other than your own guilt. Honor killings were very common in the past and painfully some still appear around the world even today. 

Many people use the word honor to signify that something was respected, but in these terms,  it is used as “a magic word that can be used to cloak the most heinous of crimes,” said Radhika Coomaraswamy while doing a report on violence against women. 

Joanne Adela

Women all over the world have been murdered for no reason other than lies. When someone is murdered because another believed a lie about their wife committing adultery with another person, it is a very wrongfully justified argument. Yet Burckhardt wrote that “it was common throughout Europe for men to murder their wives because they suspected infidelity and to kill their daughters because they eloped. It was also common for brothers to kill their sisters because they refused to marry the man their family had chosen for them,” it was true. 

When you are blinded by rage and jealousy all you see is what you think you should see. If you believe that your wife is cheating on you, you start to “notice” little suspicious discrepancies and start to connect the dots but there are no dots to connect. Or if you think someone is lying you may start to see tells that they are, but in actuality, you don’t see anything. You are blinded by your own opinions and views. You don’t know what you don’t know. This is why so many of us are stuck in our thoughts. “There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires, and so forth.  We literally see the world the way we want to see it,” said David Dunning.  Jealousy blinding us in moments of need follows this exact statement. 

Many people only see and hear what they want and think is the truth without realizing that it is, in fact, not. This leads to people breaking up, friends splitting apart, and families developing cracks. It leads to death, war, and suffering on both ends of the illusion. As Dunning and his partner argued, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” 

We can see this within Othello’s reasonings to kill Desdemona over something that didn’t even happen. We can see it through history in many of the deaths and divorces of King Henry VII. And we see it today in offices, in school classrooms, and in homes.

Don’t let this be you.