Mild jealousy

What this means

This is the most common place to land, and the range where the total on its own tells you least. A score here almost always comes from one of the three parts running warm rather than all three lifting together.

The three shapes look nothing like each other from the inside. High cognitive with low everything else is the person who notices details, builds explanations, and then does nothing with them. The work happens in the head and stays there. High emotional is the person who is not suspicious at all but gets hit hard when an imagined scene arrives and needs an hour to come back down. High behavioural with low suspicion is the least intuitive of the three and the one people miss entirely: checking a phone calmly, out of habit, with no particular belief that anything is wrong.

Which one you have matters more than the score, because the useful response is different for each. Mental scenarios respond to noticing the difference between a thought and evidence, and to declining to go looking. Strong reactions respond to time rather than to answers. Checking responds to friction and to saying the thing out loud instead, and notably not to reassurance, which tends to make checking more frequent rather than less.

One thing a warm score does not mean: that something is wrong in the relationship. Jealousy correlates with how much you have invested and how safe you feel, not with how trustworthy your partner is. A good share of the scores in this range come from people in perfectly steady relationships who have simply started paying closer attention than the situation asks for.

What to do next

Find your part first. Go back over the twelve items and see which four cluster highest: the suspicion ones, the reaction ones, or the checking ones.

If it is the thoughts, practise the smallest possible separation. Notice the scenario, name it as a scenario, and do not go looking for evidence to settle it. Looking is what turns a passing thought into a project.

If it is the reaction, aim for a delay rather than a fix. Nothing needs deciding, saying, or checking inside the first twenty minutes of a spike. The feeling does not need to be argued with, only outlasted.

If it is the checking, change the access rather than relying on willpower. Logged out, notifications off, phone in another room during the hours it usually happens.

If the loop is mostly mental, the overthinking tool linked below walks through the same interruption in more detail. If it would help to work out what to say to your partner about any of this, Lovon can help you get the wording together first.