On the same day my boyfriend received news that he didn’t get the job in which he had interviewed, one of my girlfriends, sent out a group e-mail with her new address down South. She and her boyfriend were moving because he had received a “fantastic job offer”; meanwhile, my boyfriend was struggling to find one.

The job market sucks. It’s depressing. And, then I did something I would later regret: I looked up her new address on Zillow and saw the gorgeous, incredibly lavish condo she and her boyfriend just purchased. I felt sick to my stomach. I’m not usually a jealous person, but for some reason, this struck a nerve deep within. It made me wonder: Why do we women feel such jealousy when one of our friends is doing better than us? Why can’t we just be happy for them?

Since we lived together a few years back, my friend and I have grown apart. I don’t enjoy seeing her anymore because every time we get together, she blathers on and on about how “rich” her boyfriend is, and it makes me want to throw a drink in her face and smack her upside the head because it’s obnoxious.

Instead, I just sit there in silent disgust and listen to her talk about how great her life is, and the more she talks, the shittier I feel. My boyfriend and I don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have any money saved. We have to rent because we can’t afford to buy. And, since he’s been looking for work for a couple of months, we’ve been living off my paycheck. Times are tough for us, which made my girlfriend’s e-mail even more annoying. It’s not that I wasn’t happy for her because I was; it was the aggravation in knowing that she was walking around, telling everybody how her guy received an amazing job offer, and that they would be living in the lap of luxury.

I don’t know if it was because their new pad looked as if it had been ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest, or the fact we had been buying groceries and gas with our credit cards all summer to free up cash to pay bills. When I saw the words “fantastic job offer” in my e-mail on a day when I was trying to keep my boyfriend and myself from jumping out a plate glass window, it was difficult not to let it affect me.

Where do these feelings come from?Jealousy is a funny thing because it’s an uncontrollable emotion. We’ve all felt those pangs when we’ve seen somebody doing better than us. It’s a natural reaction. However, feeling envy or not really depends on the situation. If your girlfriend is boasting every minute you spend with her, then that shit gets old – quickly.

You may become jealous of her or her glamorous lifestyle just for the sole reason that she brings so much attention to it. Say you have a friend who has a great job, relationship, and a beautiful home, but she barely mentions it. Would you be as green with envy? I think not, and I would even go as far to say: you would probably be happier for that friend than the one who can’t stop babbling about it.

Through all this, I’ve realized that being jealous of her was not going to change anything; it was just going to make me more miserable. I put my envy aside and focused less on her life and more on mine. There was no point in poring over every detail of her life and thinking: “Why her and not me?” Instead, I chose to look at my life and ask myself:

“What do I need to do to make my life as good as it possibly can be?”

And, once I did that, the jealousy went away – for good.

image via ABC News