Was jealousy the motive behind Madonna and Guy Ritchie's split?

It's the most corrosive emotion of all, and is said to be partly responsible for Madonna and Guy Ritchie's split. Jim Gilchrist on the power of the green-eyed monster

THE green-eyed monster is alive and well and living in Marylebone, and Wiltshire, and New York, and Beverly Hills… or wherever else the world's most publicly severing relationship has been played out. As mutual mud-slinging between Madonna and Guy Ritchie and the long process of division of some £300 million gets underway – providing, if nothing else, a public service in nudging the recession off the front pages – it transpires that, if one of yesterday's tabloid newspapers is to be believed, one reason for the split is that Mrs Ciccone Ritchie was consumed with suspicions that her film-director husband still had
yearnings for his former girlfriend, the leggy Danish model Tania
Strecker.

There is no emotion more corrosive than jealousy, and it is no respecter of fame, wealth or Kabbalah counselling sessions. As shameful to express as it is impossible to suppress, jealousy may arise over perceived sexual infidelity or inequities of wealth and success.

Wealth and fame are clearly no buffers against the most insidious emotion of them all, as Coldplay singer Chris Martin admitted earlier this year, talking about his difficulties with the fact that his wife (and pal of Madonna), the actress Gwyneth Paltrow, was briefly engaged to Brad Pitt.

It was jealousy, too, that destroyed the marriage between Ingrid Bergman and the Italian film director Roberto Rossellini (for whom she had left her first husband), after the actress started working with the French director Jean Renoir. Even in the supposedly swinging 1960s, the Rolling Stones were not immune: Keith Richards has written about his simmering feelings when he, Brian Jones and Mick Jagger were all besotted with Anita Pallenberg, who became Richards's partner for more than a decade. And Abba, while raking in millions with their songs, was apparently riven with jealousy and acrimony.

But while jealousy over a genuine infidelity may be natural and understandable – a degree of emotional possessiveness is probably hard-wired into us from way back in the mists of time – jealousy founded upon nothing more than suspicion is far more corrosive. As George Bernard Shaw advised: "Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run."

Shakespeare, as ever, put it in a nutshell in Othello, his play about the obsessed Moor who ultimately kills his wife, Desdemona, whom he believes to be unfaithful. Othello is unheeding of Iago's famous warning: "O, beware, my lord, of Jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on…" Ironically, it is Iago's own green-eye syndrome which lies behind the inexorably unfolding tragedy.

When jealousy rears its ugly head, rationality tends to go out the window. "Jealousy is sometimes rational and understandable, but sometimes it really is the green-eyed monster, absolutely mad and based on nothing," says Virginia Ironside, author and long-standing problem-page journalist.

"Obviously if someone is having a relationship with someone else while married, jealousy is completely natural, but to be jealous of something in the past suggests incredible insecurity. It's also unresolvable, because the jealous partner is focusing on something that the person who is meant to be the guilty one is powerless to repair.

"There's nothing you can do about the past. It's a very unkind sort of accusation and, I think, says everything about the person who is jealous rather than about the other person."

Ironside describes such "pathological jealousy" as "very consuming, very primal and very hard to get to the heart of. The jealous person might say to themselves that they know it's irrational, and all in the past, but there's a part of them that just continues to churn away."

Honest and frank discussion, she believes, can't work in such circumstances. "It's such an irrational emotion, the only answer might be for the jealous person to seek counselling."

As the marriage that started eight years ago with a five-day extravaganza at Skibo Castle now juggernauts its way towards what could be the largest divorce settlement in British legal history, hand-holding doesn't seem a likely option.