“A lot of people will tell me, ‘oh, I wish I could be polyamorous or a relationship anarchist, but I just get too jealous.’ And it’s like, well, I get jealous too. I’m not void of that emotion. I also experience jealousy. If my partner is talking to somebody new, I feel threatened by that. But the way to deal with that is not to make some rule about how your partner is engaging with other people. It’s to figure out what you need to do for yourself,” they say. “It’s really fucking hard, actually.”

This is a good point. It’s one of my peeves when people are like “oh i’m too jealous” and leave it at that. That’s a flaw and time bomb you can work on.

A friend of mine told me about how a guy in her friend group broke up with his girlfriend because he didn’t like that she was dancing at a concert. He just leapt all the way to the idea that she was cheating on him. The insecurity would be laughable if I wasn’t low grade worried he’s going to do violence to a woman in the future. Just chill out, my guy.

In college I was dating someone, and she was like “What would you do if I made out with a guy at a party??” I thought about it for a while, and asked “Are you going to come back to me after? We’ll still be together?”. She was like, “Yeah.” I thought about it some more and went, “OK. So long as you show up for our plans, and are safe, it’s not a problem for me. I want you to be happy.” She didn’t like that answer.

I think the dating apps are all trash, though, and are making everything worse. It creates the illusion that they’re a means to meet people you’ll like, but their incentives are only engagement and subscriptions. Actually introducing you to people you’ll get along with is a secondary concern at best. Some of them have options to specify monogamy or not, but none of them are especially good at it.