Jealousy after the Divorce?

 When someone came into elementary school with a new pencil box, some classmates may have felt envious of it. It looked brighter, bigger and loaded with all the colorful pencils a child could want. And people might have stolen it, or perhaps stared at it endlessly.

But what happens when envy sticks around to adulthood during a divorce?  When envy, in other words, goes from wanting a classmate's clothing or toys to "I got the house, but he got the hot, new wife" syndrome. Jealousy.

"I was happy that he married her, because in my case, it was like we had grown apart," Elizabeth Delwinter of Chicago, Ill. says of her ex-husband. Delwinter's ex-husband had gotten remarried, and everything seemed fine. "Her kids used to baby-sit my kids," she says, explaining how the two families had gotten along well enough that she often allowed the step-siblings to watch her own children.

But though Delwinter had not been married to her ex-husband for years and had since moved from Missouri to Illinois, but he still felt the need to ask for her back. "He was so upset that he came all the way to Illinois to follow me," she says.

Although her ex-husband had since remarried, Delwinter hadn't - and perhaps he saw that as an opportunity to try again. Delwinter says that she was surprised. "I told him, 'I don't feel the same way. I don't want to be with you anymore.'"

"Usually, I ask, 'What's really going on?'" says Jim Brenner, a marriage therapist in Anchorage, Alaska. "It depends on how long they've been divorced. Sometimes, there's other stuff going on, but often jealousy. Everyone, once they're separated or divorced - they don't like to see that person with another person. We all kind of look like, 'He belongs to us,' even if they're divorced."

Brenner says that ex-spouses often like to use children as a means of getting through to an ex and reconnecting, even when remarried. "When they have kids, they're always going to be connected to that. Some women stay dependant on their ex-husband when they get remarried and call them up when they are newly married, and I think they call them up just to upset them in the new marriage," he says.

"I have called him before about it, but one of the things is the kids were very angry at him for a long time. They were upset, because they felt that he had to choose," says Elizabeth Delwinter, whose ex-husband tried to speak with her about the children before asking for her to return.

The jealousy and anger issues aren't limited to ex-wives. The ex-husband's new wife is frequently annoyed with the ex-wife's over-involvement in her new family.
 
"I ask them how they feel when the ex-wife calls, and there's jealousy on her part too," says Brenner, who has treated couples with marriage issues for over 30 years. "If they're paying child support, then the new wife really resents money going away from her family. The ex-wife is angry at the new wife, and the new wife is angry at the ex-wife, and usually, the man is caught in the middle."