My ex-boyfriend John has friended and unfriended me many times on Facebook. Thus, I wasn’t shocked when he unfriended me again recently. I just rolled my eyes and shook my head.

Then I received a personal message from him:

[Unfriending you] was for your own protection. Seriously. The woman. She began to show a very mean, possessive and jealous streak and has begun contacting FB friends. You and about six other females were deleted. Nothing personal. All passwords have been changed just in case. So fed up with dating.

One might find this terribly dramatic and shocking except this is not the first time I have been warned by a man about the possibility of a woman contacting me.

Nor is it the first time I have heard men talk about women in their lives getting ahold of other women they know.

A couple years ago, my cell phone rang as I was leaving dance class. I looked at the caller and was kind of surprised to see the name of a scuba diving friend. I knew Greg was separated and going through a divorce. I had told him that should he ever want to chat, I would be all ears for him.

But Greg wasn’t angry or sad and needed the ear of Sip and Go Girl.

He called to warn me that his soon-to-be ex might be contacting me. She saw credit card information online that showed Greg had spent a nice amount of money at a higher end seafood restaurant in town plus had been out and about other places.

She demanded to know if he was dating and, if so, who was the person.

Greg wouldn’t tell her.

“I know who it is,” she had told him. “It’s Sip and Go Girl from diving.”

Greg told me he had denied that accusation.

It was an accurate denial. I’ve never been involved with Greg. I have never been his recipient of a higher end seafood dinner. We’ve shared nothing more than mutual pop culture interests, friends, and some laughs out and about socially.

Nonetheless, he was concerned his estranged wife would find me and pepper me with questions.

Although I asked too, Greg would not tell me for whom he was buying fancy meals. He told me for my protection, he declined to answer. Plus, things were still a mess, obviously, with the divorce proceedings and he didn’t want the gal in question to be caught up in any of it.

It’s jealousy that makes people want to contact others they think are encroaching within territory they stake as their own.

Feelings of jealousy and possessiveness have their root in fear. We fear loss. We fear rejection. It’s perfectly human to be jealous and afraid. I would be lying if I denied being hit by the green eyed monster plenty of times myself. It’s how we handle those emotions that’s important.

We gain very little by going all drama over something. We don’t gain true growth from it. We run the risk of losing the object of our affection. We also lose energy and we lose time. Our strength is sucked away by negativity we create.