Jealously Jealous of Jealousy

It's crazy how fast words lose their meaning when you repeat them a lot.  Anyways, on to the topic at hand.

Jealousy is a hard driving force in our lives, whether you know it or not.  A destructive combination of envy, anger, and possessiveness, it dictates how we react to many everyday situations.  Like all emotions, it's level of influence varies from person to person as does their level of control over it.  We all are capable of it, and we all feel it from time to time.  Sometimes it drives us to do some insane things.

 I never thought I was a very jealous person, but I was way wrong about that.  I also thought it was a simple emotion with simple triggers, thus easy to defeat and reason with.  Wrong again.  My prime jealousy is a simple one to understand, yet complicated in it's details (which I will not go into).  I am jealous of men.  More specifically, men other than myself.  More specifically than that, men other than myself who have had relationships with my fiancée or who act inappropriately towards her.  It's probably the number one thing that comes to mind when one thinks of jealousy, and for good reason, it's probably the single thing most (if not all) people have jealousy about.

I used to go into bouts of intense inner rage and turmoil when I would interact with men whom I know she had been with before, and I nearly punch a gay friend of hers when he grabbed her bottom once (the surprise of the act was the only thing that saved him, I was too taken back to immediately respond, thus had time to realize who he was).  However, time and rational thought have calmed my jealousy and I now harbor no ill will towards most of these folks, and provided they keep their hands to themselves there's no quarrel to be had.  I still feel jealousy rear it's ugly head every now and then (and if you know what to look for, you can tell when I'm tweaked about it), but I'm glad to have it; it's a motivating force.

Relationship based jealousy is not the only kind, however.  Lately I've been contending with another form of jealousy.  My dear Wendy has a horrible work schedule, and ends up missing a lot of fun events because of it.  I, on the other hand, have a good amount of free time.  Back when I had no social life, this wasn't much of an issue, but lately it's starting to become the hot-button issue.  She's jealous that I get to go and do fun things with people while she's stuck at work.  And that's a completely normal thing to be upset about.  I understand where she's coming from and how shitty it feels.  So much so that I'm completely willing to not attend these social functions without her.  I'm more than willing to make that sacrifice so that she doesn't have to come home to an empty apartment.  I shouldn't have to, but I can and will.  I only wish I had another solution to the issue, all or nothing is never a good compromise.

Anyways, I'm not really sure where I was going with this whole jealousy thing.  I have no solutions, nor anything profound to say on the topic.  I mostly wanted to think my way through the situation, and I can do that best by (dis)organizing those thoughts in words.  Sometimes I wish I some emotions had toggle switches.