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This doesn't ring true for me. If someone rejects me, I get sad but not jealous. If she subsequently gets with someone else, I get jealous. I often get somewhat jealous if someone I wasn't particularly interested in gets with someone. But if someone doesn't have a chance to reject me, I experience little or no jealousy relating to her (e.g. if she was in a relationship before I knew her).
This seems a lot more complicated than "conflating love with ownership".
Sounds like a clear case of endowment effect. People have done experiments that show this bias occurring with ordinary objects like mugs. So yes, it is "complicated", but in a broadly applicable way.
I object on three counts.
Minorly, the endowment effect seems to be about valuing things more if I own them versus if I don't own them. If my jealousy experience can be pigeonholed into something similar, it would be valuing things more if someone else owns them versus if nobody owns them.
But valuing something more would presumably change the magnitude of my feelings, and that isn't what's happening. Jealousy is a totally different feeling to the sadness I feel from rejection. It's not just a more intense version that I feel because suddenly I like this person more because she's with someone else.
And that formulation also doesn't explain why it's relevant that she had a chance to reject me.
Suppose you are in a relationship and you want to be exclusive. Why? (Let's assume there is no risk of STDs or unintended pregnancies.) Suppose your partner checks out someone else. Do you feel a pang of jealousy? If so, what exactly goes through your mind in that fleeting moment?
I don't know. I've never been in a relationship, and have no intuitions about how whether or why I would want to be exclusive, or how I would react if she checks out someone else.