Sometimes you have to face hard truths by stating the painful facts baldly. I am 33, I have never been kissed, and the only guy who ever wanted to hold hands with me was killing time while he tried to find someone hot enough to date. I know this because that’s what he told my housemate when he hit on her.

To the best of my knowledge, no one who has seen me in person has ever been attracted to me. I’m not catcalled or harassed. The only relationships I’ve had have been online. The only boyfriend who met me offline would not do more than give me a hug. I have met potential partners from the Internet, only to watch the interest in their eyes die when they see me.

I often feel like the only woman on the face of the planet who no one is attracted to. And I am ashamed — in part because this is something no one ever talks about.

I often feel like the only woman on the face of the planet who no one is attracted to.
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We turn virginity into a punchline — a sign of misplaced religious conviction, physical grotesqueness, or social ineptitude. We try to escape the reality that sex is a choice that some are never offered, and ignore the fact that trumpeting sexual freedom also has the power to wound deeply. The sexually inexperienced (especially those with no choice in the matter) feel a strong urge to hide this fact, in order to let people assume a common level of sexual history. It’s a lot easier than trying to explain the truth, and it hurts less, too.

I’ve sat through countless conversations with groups of women, praying that the conversation wouldn’t turn to sex, cringing inwardly when it inevitably did, and trying to laugh with the others until the topic changed and I could relax again, my secret safe. For now.

When I was growing up, the conversation was always about how to say “no,” how to not be pressured into sex, how to turn down a date honestly and fairly. My educators, ministers, and youth group leaders never told me what to do when I wasn’t pressured, when I wasn’t asked out on dates. Teenage me was practically quivering with excitement over my first chance to say “no,” because even “no” contained the possibility that I could choose to say “yes.” But the question never came.

I thought that, perhaps, things would get better in college. Surely, the smart guys would at least be attracted to my intellect. Instead, while I made friends with lots of great guys who I’m still close with, I was never once asked on a date. No one ever tried to cop a feel at an event or in the movie theater. There was never the hint of a hookup. Perhaps, if my upbringing hadn’t been so conservative, or if I’d had a few dates in high school, I would have had the courage to ask someone out for myself instead of waiting, but that was unthinkable to me.

I was so confused. This wasn’t how the movies went. This wasn’t how the novels ended. Most of my friends got married right out of college, and those that didn’t at least had dates. I sat down to take inventory: Why wasn’t anyone interested? Was it my appearance? I’ve always been on the large side of curvy, but I knew plenty of girls my size and larger who had found happy relationships. Was it my face? I’ve never been pretty, but again, I knew women who were objectively less “pretty” than me who had found love. Was it my personality? I’m shy and reserved (unless you bring up Star Wars or Dune, then good luck getting me to shut up), but I’m comfortable talking to friends. I was part of several active social groups, and enjoyed spending time with friends. I couldn’t find a persuasive reason why no one was interested in me. And in the decade or so since college, as the disinterest has persisted, I still haven’t.

I was so confused. This wasn’t how the movies went. This wasn’t how the novels ended.
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Over the past few years, I’ve made a certain amount of peace with being single. It took some time, especially since I could find very little to help me. The books I found on being single were almost exclusively geared toward “being single until you get married because of course you will.” The singles activities at my church were rare, and everyone in them was a good 40 years older than me. I eventually realized that I could not rely on a guide to help me; I had to find out what the single life meant for me. I had to build a life of my own, instead of waiting to find my “other half.”

It’s not my preferred choice, but I’m not going to fling myself at someone out of desperation. This sense of acceptance comes and goes. There are days when I’m tempted to run outside and proposition the first man I can find. But most days, I just accept that this is my reality right now, and change will not happen quickly or easily. Regardless, the frustration lingers: I would have liked it to be a real choice, not a matter of mere acceptance.

I’ve tried talking about my story a few times. I’ve pushed back when people assume that certain levels of romantic history are universal; when people make offhand remarks that assume that, given my age, I’ve had several intimate relationships, I correct them. I try to remind people that “virgin” is not an insult, and that sex isn’t the guarantor of adulthood. The rare times I’ve brought up this pain, I’ve been told that I simply didn’t notice guys who were interested, or that I just needed to “be myself” and admirers would miraculously appear.

That’s what hurts the worst: the absolute refusal of others to believe me when I talk about my experience. The insistence that I don’t know my own life. The appropriation of my narrative to turn it into a more palatable story for the comfort of others. I’ve tried to understand why my story makes others uncomfortable. It’s possible that it’s because it introduces an element of uncertainty into all relationships: What if a lot of it comes down to luck? If there’s no real reason behind my lack of relationships, maybe it’s just a coincidence, an accident of chance. And that means they found their partners due to chance as well, and their lives might have been like mine if a few things had gone differently. And so they rationalize and explain my story; if it’s due to something I’m not doing, then they are safe in their relationships. They didn’t make my mistakes.

Female friends try to assure me that I am attractive, but have no explanation for why men don’t seem to agree. They don’t understand why I rebuff their compliments, assuming that I’m only operating from a foundation of low self-esteem, when in actuality I’m just trying to keep my grip on reality. If it were true that I were attractive, then at some point, someone would have acted on said attraction. No one has, and my narrative accounts for the truth better than their perspective does.

That’s what hurts the worst: the absolute refusal of others to believe me when I talk about my experience.
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And yet, my friends seem to think my rejection of their narrative is a personal rebuff; I spend my energy protecting their feelings from the truth of mine. I laugh away the pain that runs deep so they won’t feel sorry for me. I go to their bridal showers, their weddings, and I’m genuinely happy for them. I enjoy dinners at their houses, trying not to be jealous of the cookware that they received when they married. No one throws showers for single women; all my cookware comes from the thrift store or the cheap aisle at the grocery store.

I wish I could talk more about others who have shared this experience. But the truth is, I don’t know of any others within my personal circles. I have many single friends, but all of them have had their share of admirers. According to CDC research conducted a few years ago, 2% of women age 25–44 (and 3% of men in the same age range) have never had vaginal sex. Surely some of these millions of virgins include those like me, who want physical intimacy but have never been offered it.

But we hide our stories, afraid of being judged, laughed at, or worse, pitied. We miss out on the support of others with similar stories.

The question I find myself facing now is whether or not to keep trying. As L.M. Montgomery wrote in The Blue Castle, “Yes, I’m ‘still young’ — but that’s so different from young.” The reality is that if no one has wanted more than a hug from me by now, that’s not likely to change as I age. I don’t want to be single forever. I would very much like to be kissed at least once. Do I keep trying to find someone, or do I accept my situation for what it is, and direct my energies elsewhere? Will other people let me accept being unwillingly single, or will they keep pushing me to believe that I am somehow secretly attractive, in the face of all experiential evidence that suggests otherwise?

I may never stop wanting my story to change, but I will keep fighting to tell it my way. I intend to cling to the truth, even when it’s a painful one. I hope others with more normative experiences will start to understand, and find ways to include women like me in discussions about sex and love, without resorting to alienating comments about what “all women” experience.

We’re all women, we all have our stories, and we all want the chance to tell them with dignity and truth.

Most people I knew were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

I wasn’t trying to lie — not to outright deceive, anyway. I liked to think I was getting straight to the point. People were always asking questions that I already knew they didn’t want the real answers to. They wanted to be reassured and sent on their way. Like when my mom gave me the rest of her finely smoked bacon before she and my dad went on vacation. It was a way of thanking me for a ride to the airport. Though if they had ever looked in my refrigerator, they would have known I was trying to cut down on my meat consumption. If they paid attention to how I lived, they’d have asked for a ride a week in advance.

“So how was the bacon?” my mom asked a week later. They had dusted my backseat in a light layer of sand. I told her that it was great. It was fantastic. I knew it was, she had told me so herself. Its quality had not diminished because I left it on my counter overnight and did not want to eat afterwards. It wasn’t not great because I threw it away.

“Okay, good.” My mom nodded and we said nothing more about it.

“Well, that’s on you,” my ex-girlfriend, August, might say. She was the kind of woman who was always showing up for friends who sometimes got so worked up that they had to take space and not talk for months. She liked to encourage me to take some space myself or take up more space or create space — the space around me wasn’t right.

One night, August and I got drinks with some new friends of hers and when I dropped her off at home I said, “That was fun, thanks.”

“Was it?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was fun,” I said again. I meant it. We all sat around a cozy booth in a bar I liked and laughed and drank cheap beer and drew pictures of our young queer selves. I was charming and understanding and funny — because I knew that was what August had invited me there to be — and we really were an excellent team in that particular department. I enjoyed being those people together. But now with her pouting out the window, I wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know anything about you. I tell you everything about me and you never tell me anything. Why is that?” she asked.

I watched her head shake and I tried to imagine that several months ago, we had not sat in this same car, in this exact driveway, her head faced away from me in the exact same posture, while I cried because she was breaking my heart and she had asked me to stop because I was making her uncomfortable. That this kind of pressure on her was exactly why we were breaking up.

So, now, as we sat again in her driveway and she wondered aloud why I was not open and forthcoming with her, I told her what I thought a person without my painful memory of that driveway conversation might find helpful. “We have different ways of being friends,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie, it was absolutely true. But it wasn’t everything I was thinking right then, and I knew I was not taking up the requisite amount of space.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not mad or anything, I just want to know about you.”

“I know,” I said. “I really care about you.”

“I don’t just care about you, I love you a lot.” August said this with more than a hint of exasperation. She leaned over to give me one of those car hugs, where you hang half of your body over someone else and then pat each other. I felt simultaneously stupid and comforted by this because it was sharing myself with another person, but also more of a redistribution of weight than anything else.

I went home after that. I put on my t-shirt that featured a Mt. Rushmore configuration of adorable kittens. I watched Friday Night Lights and lusted after Tim Riggins and Tammy Taylor until that got boring. Then I tried to read an old New Yorker article about Jeb Bush and charter schools, but fell asleep instead. I woke up a little while later and the lights were still on. I considered that maybe in another version of my life, there could be a person who would know to turn the light off for me, and how nice it would be to let them do that.

“So what did you do last night?” my co-worker Ben asked me the next day. He popped his little head over the top of the wall between our cubicles.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d spent the evening working toward a productive friendship with my ex-girlfriend. So many of my friends tended to scoff at that idea. But then, most of my friends had an incredibly easy time finding people to turn their lights on and off for them, so I didn’t think we were operating with the same value system.

Ben seemed to notice that I was just standing there too long, fingers hovering over my keyboard. “Must have been some crazy nothing,” he said. “Mama’s a little slo-ho this morning.”

I sighed. “Mama did have some beers last night and then she didn’t sleep all that well.”

Ben shook his head. “Taking a page from Daddy, I see. Well the aspirin’s on my desk if you need it.”

This was the kind of lie that I didn’t feel terrible about because Ben knew I was not telling him everything and he didn’t mind. Ben also just wanted to get straight to the point.

“Okay,” he continued. “If you had to be stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with me or Allan, who would you choose?” He paused to adjust his glasses. “And remember that I’ll feel bad if you choose Allan, but that I would also understand because he is more handsome than me and I’d choose him because I’d hope he’d hold my head to his perfectly hairy chest and then fuck me.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Don’t worry, I like you better than Allan. If I were going to die on this raft, I’d want it to be with you.”

“Awww, thanks,” he said and reached his hand down from his giraffe height to pat my shoulder.

“But,” I added, “if there was any chance of a rescue — any at all — I’d better be with Allan, because Daddy would definitely do something stupid and get us killed.”

“It’s like I can’t even argue with that, because you’re so right,” Ben said. His voice betrayed his unreasonable gratefulness to me. “You’re so wise,” he murmured, and I heard him descend into his desk chair.

These were the kinds of truths that my friends applauded me for dispensing. I didn’t know what to do with the fact that I felt no ownership, no special relationship to these types of “truths” — that they were no more or less real to me than the greatness of the bacon or mine and August’s friendship. Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. There were just other peoples’ versions of reality that you could acknowledge and learn your way around and eventually find a reasonable place to stand within. That was what I meant when I said that I liked to get straight to the point. I wanted to find a good place to stand in other peoples’ lives, where I liked the scenery and felt that I was wearing appropriate shoes.

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Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist.
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In Ben’s case, he was far too logical to ever let me die in a raft. But we both carried the hope that his manic hysteria — which was the trademark of his nighttime alter-ego, Blackout Ben — would claim a greater part of his life and lead to his satisfaction one day. It was a familiar sentiment. I, too, hoped one day to become bold and satisfied. And so I pretended that we were. That was the short, sandy beach where our realities overlapped, and it was enough to make us feel united in the world.

There were other cases that weren’t as easy, but which I’d learned to navigate, all the same.

“Would you consider me to be high maintenance?” Goldie, my first love and now an exquisitely costumed drag king, texted me one evening. As if our relationship had not been born out of a shared obsession with Goldie. As if the question, itself, were not the answer. It was 10:30 pm in California, too late in New York City for unloaded banter.

“Ferraris are high maintenance,” I texted Goldie back. “They also feature high performance.”

“Thank you, that’s right,” came their prompt reply, and I heard nothing else for a week.

This was all well and good, though sometimes I lost track of the points I was trying to get to. With Goldie, it seemed that for more than a decade, the point had been to efficiently remind each other that we knew each other — that this prevented us from being entirely alone in the world. But it did occur to me that getting straight to the point left certain territories of our lives — namely the more recently developed, somewhat more mature portions — perfect mysteries to each other.

And it wasn’t just with Goldie. There were large swaths of my life that nobody knew about. This was absurd because I had so many people in my life and they all knew so much about me. Still, there were nights when I went out walking, just to let the sharp prick of the stars make me feel lonely.

Sometimes I went into a dark dive bar alone and ordered a whiskey soda. I drank it very slowly and closed my eyes to really listen to the music. I made up dishwashing challenges for myself. I stood in front of the mirror after I got dressed and told myself, “Girl, I don’t know what’s up with that thing your pants are doing, but damn, you look cute today.” I played the keyboard with my headphones on and recorded catchy tunes that got stuck in my head. My voice was so deep in the morning, so high and bright at night. I drank coffee on my tiny deck and imagined that the whoosh of the train passing by was the sound of the ocean. There was so much delicate beauty in my life.

And everybody had ruined it, just by being there. Though there was an exception.

“I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is,” was Sophie’s conclusion. This observation was not unlike one of the “truths” that I would dispense myself. This made Sophie the lone fixture on the lawn of my life. It didn’t matter where she stood, it was always reasonable and did not require shoes — that was my highest level of friendship. We both lived for the moments when the movie we were watching on Netflix paused to buffer and rendered an otherwise flawlessly beautiful woman, horrifying. We believed success was living in the eye of a storm — in absolute calm, but at the center of everything.

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‘I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is.’
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There was no direct point to get to with Sophie and so I never pretended anything. We wrote long meandering letters addressing every detail and turn of thought in preparing for and executing routine errands, like getting gas or going to the grocery store. When she came to visit me in the first apartment I’d ever lived in alone, she said, “It feels exactly like you, like home.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. But I understood that this sentiment was not even remotely available to anyone else. I had to consider that the series of direct points to which I’d been intent on adhering, had led me astray. Because I was 30 years old, and while I didn’t expect to fall into deranged love anymore, while I didn’t presume I’d be moved on a daily basis, I did hope that one day I would find others to contribute to the delicate beauty in my life. At least one person for whom the conflation of me and home would be natural. Which is to say, I still believed in an uncynical kind of romance. And if this wasn’t happening through my active social life, then maybe my writing would take me there. Either way, it hinged on my ability to share my most private of property.

So the only reasonable action, I supposed, was to leave the gate open, if you will. To let people wander where they would and give them the chance to try to find a good place to stand. I began with August, who, as a poet and my ex-girlfriend, was already familiar with the landscape. Even if she couldn’t contribute to the delicate beauty herself, I knew she would facilitate my own contributions.

“Let’s rent a cabin,” she emailed me one afternoon. I figured since she was the expert on space, I’d follow her advice. I chose a little place in Mendocino, in California, surrounded by trees and nothing else. I imagined I would reconfigure my space into a little donut, the hole of which would contain the final touches on the novel I’d been wrestling with for three years. Why not? Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. If we declared ourselves good friends, we were. If my novel sounded finished, it was. Afterward, in some other reality, these things would not be more or less true, but August would be there to remind me that I wanted them to be.

She and I had dinner together one evening in a beautiful restaurant with a high wood beam ceiling and low, warm candlelight. It reminded me of a cabin. “I can’t wait to get away and just disappear into my book,” I told her.

“What if you could do that all the time?” she asked me. “You’ve been wanting to quit your job since I met you. You might want to get started on that sometime.”

“I might,” I said. Then, instead of going home and putting on my kitten shirt and looking for life advice from Friday Night Lights, I said to her, “I might also need to admit that if I haven’t quit yet, I lack the will and gumption to be a real writer. I fear I may not want it enough. Or maybe I fear that I do.”

August pushed the last of our chocolate torte at me and shrugged. “You might, you might not. Don’t you think just doing it is better than all of this navel-gazing? I, for one, believe in you.” She said this like it was no big deal, but in that moment, we’d finally found appropriate places to stand, and it nearly brought me to tears.

I had to admit that I was feeling emotional. Assessing the value of my life and its collection of lies and truths seemed urgent because I’d suddenly gotten accepted into a writing residency in Vermont. It was not an altogether life-changing situation. However, if I were getting straight to the point with myself, I had really wanted it to be. I’d applied to the program knowing it would make a graceful way to leave my job. If I were going to brashly dispense my own “truth,” the entire purpose of all of my private property — each delicate beauty — was to have a rich and endless abyss from which to pull threads for my writing. And the purpose of my writing was to create public pieces of my own private property, where myself and maybe others could feel that they’d come home.

Which wasn’t happening. Or at least it wasn’t happening at any rate that could propel me into the eye of any storm.

“I have to agree with August,” Sophie sighed. She didn’t like having to agree with anyone who had ever made me cry in a driveway. But she and I saved all of our letters so that when we became famous writers one day, the journey there would be preserved for any curious bystanders. There was no question about the point of our lives and yet, it had never seemed obvious how to get directly to it.

For the first time, I allowed myself to go around and ask for advice — not for validation, but for actual answers. “What do you think?” I asked everyone: the glitter-faced women with whom I sat around in Dolores Park on Pride, old friends who liked to make bread and cookies, new friends who liked tiki bars, my sunglass-clad art friends in LA and New York, my aunt who gave me the best gifts I had ever received. “Is it crazy and selfish to quit my job and run away with my writing? Am I just ungrateful? Will we all die alone anyway?”

“Hmmm,” they said. I think it was safe to say that everyone had been aware of my private property for some time and had wanted to look in without being intrusive. Now that my proverbial gate was unlatched, they all hesitated briefly. My internal landscape was more cluttered and hilly, less sunny than they’d imagined. Not everyone appreciated my brand of delicate beauty. Eventually, however, they offered me a collective, “You know, why not?”

When I asked Sophie what I should be doing with my life she said, “The hard part is that you’ve yet to fall into serious decline and so it could start at any time. But that’s okay because you already have such a beautiful life. You can always make that again.”

Sophie was leaving her job in a month. There was a new life stage ahead of her, in which her boyfriend was going to attempt to become a lawyer in New York City and they were likely going to become a family — the kind that included children and a home, maybe even a legal contract. It didn’t change the point of Sophie’s life now, but I didn’t see how it couldn’t eventually have an effect on where we would stand. I told her as much, of course.

She had answered my phone call while riding her bicycle and I heard the click of her chain and the rush of her breathing while she considered this. “I don’t know who I’ll become yet, but if all else fails, I think I’d like the option to be happy,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, maybe,” I replied.

I was generally all-in or all-out. I wasn’t sure I knew how to maintain a back-up plan like that. I saw friends most nights of the week, felt fleetingly alive and then went home to put on my kitten shirt and then watch TV or write or cry or read until I fell asleep with the light on. There was a certain beauty in that. It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness. It did keep my mind and my heart in constant motion, but it wasn’t bold and it wasn’t satisfying.

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It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness.
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I understood, then, why my parents wanted me to have their high-quality bacon in the first place. And why — when I told my dad that I was going to Vermont and quitting my job, too — he looked crazed and said to me, “Do you want to be poor and helpless at 50, is that what you want? What you’re supposed to do is support yourself and maybe have a good time doing it!”

“You can’t be like Elizabeth,” my mom added sternly. Elizabeth, her massage therapist, who unequivocally gave the best massages my mom had ever received. Elizabeth, who purportedly couldn’t get her cavity drilled because she had no dental insurance.

My parents wanted my reality to be like theirs. Everyone who loved me did, too. Most people I knew and even some I didn’t, were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

It was so much easier to construct half-truths and direct points that we could use to skirt around the real issue. Happiness, theirs or mine, was not the point of my life, exactly. It sounded melodramatic and inflammatory when spoken aloud. It sounded a lot like a lie.

Because I was well-known for my pool floatie collection, for colorful nights out, my love for pizza, personalized gifts and peaceful weekend getaways. I was incredibly fun. My private property, however, was something else. It was my place for exploring my unproductive tangles and knots. It was where I kept all of the people I was and might become and knew and resented and loved and missed and would lose — I hung around with lovely ghosts who left me with the same perfect ache as a loose tooth.

Together we wallowed and navel-gazed, were wistful and nostalgic, occasionally hopeful and forever incomplete. That was where my writing and I wanted to bask. It was life at its most gorgeous. And maybe that was selfish and irresponsible. I’m not saying there wasn’t more to do with a person’s life — with mine specifically. I certainly wasn’t sure who could be expected to find a good place to stand, let alone a home in that. But this was my reality and I didn’t have to keep it a secret. It was no more or less valuable than anyone else’s. If the point was to keep company for my fluttering heart and its garden of sweet misery, there was no reason to make it private.

“It’s like, what is happiness, even?” Ben had asked me on one of the quiet, dull days in our office. “It’s basically just a social construction.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t really. It was what August and Sophie had been telling me the whole time. I was allowed to make the people in my life acknowledge my private property, to spend as much time as I wanted wrapped up in its nuances — that was one version of what it meant to be bold and satisfied.

And I could live there if I wanted.

I have always liked economics. I’ve always been drawn to the way in which its concepts could be applied anywhere. Economics as a social science “aims to describe the factors that determine the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” In practice, however, its theories can and have been applied throughout each sector of society.

Even in our everyday lives, we make choices based on laws of behavior that most of us are probably unaware of. Everything is governed by economic theory in one way or the other.

The law of diminishing marginal utility states that, with all things held constant, as a person consumes more of a product, there is a decline in the additional satisfaction a person derives from consuming one additional unit of production (or marginal utility). Continual consumption will at some point result in negative incremental satisfaction. The most typical example used to demonstrate this law is the concept of an all-you-can-eat buffet, wherein the more plates you eat, the less satisfied you become by the meal, until you eventually make yourself sick.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of marginal utility lately in regards to sex. And love.

INITIAL CONSUMPTION: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
Marginal Satisfaction: 8
TOTAL SATISFACTION: 8

Looking back, there is a good chance I romanticize the night that started things off. There was a party, mostly a group of us sitting around playing cards, drinking whatever we had brought, and a lot of smoking. There was some baked weed concoction passing around. We laid in bed and traded some drunken small talk, cuddling led to kisses, and kisses led to sex. And that was it.

The next time I saw him, we went for drinks and fucked in the backseat of his car on the way home. We talked about making the sex exclusive that night. As is the way of commitment phobic 22 year-olds, we assured each other that we would not catch feelings. Things fizzled two months later when his presumed ex (to be fair, my presumption) visited and we agreed it was best he not see me for a while.

I must have cried a lot in this period. Or was just righteously mad. I can’t remember which it was, or the combination that carried me over months of loneliness. Other things that happened in this period: buying my first car on my own; being steadily belittled at the most meaningless of jobs; drinking, a lot; falling into a hole of depression and anxiety I hadn’t realized I had started digging.

When he did reach out I was sure that it was him (or something like him) that I needed to make things better.

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION: DATING

Marginal Satisfaction: 10

Total Satisfaction:18

There were apologies and notes of me deserving more and him wanting to be more. There were his promises of trying to give all that I wanted, but slowly. And my promises of not wanting much. There were dates, and sex in beds, and introductions to friends. Slowly I started feeling important or at least wanting to feel important. I broke my promise first and asked for too much too soon. We decided it was best we stay friends.

I learnt about the benefits of break up sex that afternoon.

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION: OFF AND ON FWB

Marginal Satisfaction: 6
Total Satisfaction: 24

I had previously spent a long portion of my life lying to the people around me, and most of all, myself. Sometimes, it’s easy to slip back into the lying — like slipping on that old, worn hoodie that’s seen better days — lying that had become second nature at one point will always feel like a second skin. The best and worst parts of getting closer to people is them recognizing the lies you tell before you recognize them in yourself.

At this point in my life I was struggling with the lie I wanted desperately to believe: that I was not in love, and that I was okay with the casual nature of our relationship. We went back and forth between sleeping together and being friends, or close approximations of these.

Utility is completely subjective. In logic-driven fields of study like economics, the subjective nature of satisfaction never made much sense to me. Utility can only increase for an individual if that person considers his state of affairs improved. That said, utility is pretty difficult to measure as well. In fact, outside of theoretical discussion, utility cannot be measured among different people; it can only be said to be higher or lower from the viewpoint of an individual.

There was a moment a couple days ago: I looked in the mirror at work, adjusted my glasses and realized I didn’t quite recognize the person looking back at me. I knew it was me, but something about me looked older, more mature, a little hardened. My cheeks were slimmer, but not the slimness of my teenage years when the milk was still fresh in my face. My posture was straighter, my stance more deliberate, less casual. Can utility be subjective even to yourself?

Can your past-self derive greater satisfaction from a situation than your current-self? It would certainly seem so.

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION: DATING
(OR SOMETHING LIKE IT)

Marginal Satisfaction: 5
Total Satisfaction: 29

There were no more conversations about our status at this point. We had wound up sleeping together one day and didn’t stop. There were sleep overs now, and birthday celebrations. There were introductions to parents, family breakfasts, and Valentine’s Day dinners. There were days and weekends spent in bed.

There were also anxiety attacks and accusations. There were tantrums thrown and in one particularly embarrassing night over 12 phone calls made one after the other, and none answered. There was social media stalking and interrogations of friends. In the lowest moment, I was hunched over his phone while he slept, succumbing to reading his messages instead of leaving his house. The night we broke up he told me he loved me. He told me he could marry me. He cried against my stomach as he hugged me tight.

When I drove off, my glasses were frosted with tears, my windshield from night dew. I scraped my car against the sidewalk in front of his neighbor’s house and drove to work the next morning with a flat tyre I knew nothing about.

Sometimes, when faced with all you’ve asked for, you realize that its worth is severely diminished. An alternate definition: “the rise in the supply of a good leads to a decline in the marginal utility of the unit.”

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION: FUCKING
Marginal Satisfaction:1

Total Satisfaction: 30

A birthday wish turned into sex that just continued for what felt like months, but was more like a sequence of days. We broke up, had sex, and broke up again. We didn’t speak for months. Until we did, and had sex the first time we saw each other.

I found myself emphatically telling him that I would not beg him to love me, that I would not beg him to be with me, and then begging him to do both. I think we must’ve hated each other then.

Or at least he hated me. I never stopped loving him.

I heard he had a girlfriend a week or two after we last slept together and I fell apart. I deleted all his social media accounts, his phone number (from my phone, not my brain), and avoided places I knew he frequented. I stayed home at the times I knew he enjoyed being out best. We didn’t speak for well over a year (with the exception of misguided birthday wishes).

When I finally did see him, it managed to be exciting, awkward and painful all at once. Twice we exchanged hellos and air kisses; his girlfriend stood awkwardly behind, never introduced. The third time, I hid in the crowd and willed myself not to cry in the middle of a party. I willed myself directly on top of a cooler, and danced like I was 18 again. I willed myself very, very drunk.

Peak satisfaction meant my limit. I had consumed all that I could have. Had swallowed all that my stomach would allow. This was all there could be without the very real possibility of making myself sick.

ADDITIONAL CONSUMPTION:
BOOTY CALLS AND AFFAIRS
Marginal Satisfaction: Negative
Total Satisfaction: Unknown/Unrealistic

We were pretending to be friends. Friends who laid in bed side by side watching Project Runway. Friends who spoke about the gym, and the changes we saw in each other’s bodies.

Friends who cuddled. Friends who felt each other up. Friends who gave each other head. Friends who fucked.

We talked after about youthful mistakes and indiscretions. We talked “never agains” and avoiding temptation. We spoke about his intention to end things and the roadblocks preventing him from doing it. We didn’t talk about anything after that. We messaged each other when we felt like having sex, but each pretending that we wanted to see our friend.

There was something buoyant about this. My ego completely inflated and held me afloat. But as we’ve learned with anything, there is a come down, and the feeling of satisfaction continues to dwindle. My ego, fragile as I know she is, deflated again once the time we spent together devolved from evenings spent watching tv and cuddles and talking, to tv and sex, to watching him wrap up a video game and sex, to just an hour in the middle of the night, sneaking in and out the back door of his house.

A final explanation: “as more and more quantity of a commodity is consumed, the intensity of desire decreases and also the utility derived from the additional unit.”

Growing up, TV convinced me that rejection wasn’t only hurtful, but also inherently cruel. From baby shows whose hosts routinely tore down the fourth wall and begged for companionship to very special episodes of Disney Channel sitcoms wherein the protagonist has no choice but to befriend a marginalized character in order to save them, the insidious message was clear: “No” was almost always the wrong answer. In a typical kid’s show, a protagonist’s bedrock relationships were impossible to leave or be ousted from because of their lives’ strict adherence to “The Status Quo is God,” a trope that dictates everything in an episode reverts back to how it originally was at the beginning before the credits can roll.

I graduated to the fraught world of teen dramas and anime in middle school. When I’d finished Gilmore Girls and Fruits Basket, I became infatuated with the many iterations of Degrassi that populated the airwaves in the mid 2000s. Though the storylines and language that made my beloved fictitious worlds whole became more mature and dynamic, their misrepresentations of rejection only grew worse. In the world of adult and adult-ish media, the refusal of attention wasn’t a solvable child-friendly problem-of-the-week. It was the absolute worst thing in existence, the ultimate form of humiliation. For the hero, being turned down was an intense personal smite, a societal defect, or both.

Writers often framed permanent rejections—the ones that couldn’t be overcome—as misunderstandings by using instances of the protagonist being accepted as proof. A denial of admission from any dream school became not a matter of luck but the fault of gatekeepers who could never understand the hero’s true talent. Same for an aloof heart-throb: the hero was too good to be rejected by them, so of course there would be some better, more accepting love interest in plain view for the jilted once the jilter realized their mistake.

Both on television and in real life, there are the uncomfortable gender politics of rejection. Girls are expected to find polite, nice answers to their problems while boys destroy the boundaries that hold them back. A strong boy never turned down a challenge; he either finished it, or hid his defeat, lest he be thought of as weak. As the boys in my life became more demanding, I became shy and cloying. I forced myself to kiss family members on the cheek when I was mad at them or didn’t like the texture of their skin, fearing that if didn’t and they died, they’d die feeling alone. I always said thank you, even when I didn’t mean it, even when people didn’t deserve it.  

Only after I switched out passivity for critical introspection did I learn that “no” wasn’t a mean word. I was just as entitled to use it as anyone else. But media continues to misconstrue its fundamental purpose and, by extension, consent. Consent advocates in all media spaces need to teach people, especially men and boys pressured by the immense weight of their need be invulnerable, that rejection is not an inherent wrong but objective instrument that can be separated from situational subtext.

We’re social creatures by nature. Early humans survived harsh environments by depending on small enclaves of other humans in order to meet survival and reproductive needs. Consequently, social rejection in any form then was often a literal death sentence. Human language uses the idea of hurt to describe both physical and emotional pains.

In a 2011 report, University of Michigan psychology professor Ethan Koss found that this conflation was the result of not just culture but also biology, upon discovering that rejection and physical pain share a common somatosensory representation. Using a MRI to monitor brain activity, Koss had test subjects whose partners broke up with them perform two separate tasks: the first, stare at a picture of their former significant other and the second, receive a “noxious thermal stimulation.” In both tests, the same regions of each subject’s brain lit up on the MRI. A broken romance hurt only slightly less than an actual burn.

It’s natural that rejection hurts, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be oppressive. What makes humans humans isn’t only our ability to feel but rather our ability to process our own emotions rationally, especially in an era where being denied companionship doesn’t signify literal death.

Both on television and in real-life, there are the uncomfortable gender politics of rejection. Girls are expected to find polite, nice answers to their problems while boys destroy the boundaries that hold them back.
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Not all rejection is personal. Institutional prejudices influence who we accept and who we reject.

I first became aware of this after my introduction to sexual racism. OkCupid’s popular five year study revealed that heterosexual Black women and Asian men statistically received the least amount of attention from all men and all women respectively. I found the results disheartening, but even worse was the discourse surrounding them. People in my life both on and offline likened personal preference to the act of disregarding a whole race of people as potential romantic partners. Even those condemning the senseless vapidity behind online dating culture didn’t seem to understand that the study wasn’t about silly preferences at all, but the outright discrimination and social conditioning that weaponized rejection.

I wanted to be desired and I wanted to fight the very idea of it. I couldn’t force racists who I didn’t even like to like me. I became apathetic to the concept of attraction as a natural construct. I didn’t care if anti-Black men didn’t want to date me. I cared because many of them were in positions of power that allow them to determine the metrics of desirability, a valuable social currency. I cared because once in middle school, a white acquaintance of mine had told me they liked the hyper-realistic sketch I’d done of myself because my features looked beautiful on the white watercolor paper.

Because no one believed the victims of serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw since they were Black women, and thus historically viewed as un-rapeable. And because Tinder dates wouldn’t stop fetishizing me for my Blackness, and when I told one of them to stop he said, “What? Did you want me to say I think you’re ugly? Is that what you want?”

For as long as I can remember, the white spaces I inhabited have operated as echo chambers for heterosexual men to routinely remind me of their God-given right to say that not liking me sexually was the same as not liking a man. It was especially ironic when the same people complained about superficial women who didn’t want to sleep with them. I felt their contempt everywhere, in articles that use pseudoscience to argue how Asians are inherently cute and Black people masculine, on websites dedicated to pretty women that completely exclude black and brown women. I felt it even in explicitly black media when black artists like Donald Glover declared their fetishistic infatuation for women of other races and existential boredom for those in their own communities.

In her recent essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?”, Amia Srinivasan, a British-Indian philosopher, argues against the racial policing of sex and romance.

[…] [w]hereas you can quite reasonably demand that a group of children share their sandwiches inclusively, you just can’t do the same with sex. What works in one case will not work in the other. Sex isn’t a sandwich, and it isn’t really like anything else either. There is nothing else so riven with politics and yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms.

Srinivasan criticizes how feminist consent advocates make overly simplistic one-to-one comparison between sex, a human trait, and some personal object, creating a false discord between moral consciousness and consent that allows sexually regressive subreddits to thrive. Traditional consent politics, she argues, objectifies the people it tries to protect, reinforcing the idea of sexuality as a valuable currency rather than a non-transferable essence of being. For instance, the Rebecca Solnit essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me” compares sex to a sandwich. “Tea and Consent,” a British-produced PSA, compares sex to tea. Sex is viewed as a good that can literally be consumed.

We need to acknowledge when rejection is based in problematic beliefs. According to Srinivasan, before teaching, sex educators should first familiarize themselves with radical self-love movements, groups unified by the idea that we all have a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our problematic and often racist biases in all parts of our lives. But that doesn’t mean all rejection is based in institutionally-influenced prejudice. At a certain point, no one can be compelled to want someone.

I had to mute the television during Gossip Girl when Chuck Bass, a tragic rich boy, tries to attack Jenny Humphrey. I was afraid my mom would see and make me turn it off.

He lures Jenny away from a party and up to an abandoned rooftop, where he pins her down. The scene is visceral. She struggles against him until her brother Dan saves her, punching Chuck in the face. I assumed the attempted rape would become a central part of the narrative, reshaping the characters involved.

Chuck’s punishment is as brief as it is indirect. In a subsequent episode, he and his classmates fight for a coveted usher position with Dartmouth College. Of course, already being an established villain from his first non-rapey appearance on screen, Chuck is rejected again, this time from being an usher. His cockiness makes his comeuppance more enjoyable for audiences even though it is only a passive form of poetic justice, a simultaneous erasure and acknowledgement of the severity of his most recent crime. As the series progresses, Jenny and all the other central characters quickly, wordlessly, forget Chuck’s violent nature, absolving him from the unglamorous role of rapist and proving that the show can’t handle the permanency of rejection.

At a certain point, no one can be compelled to want someone.
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At best, rejection is portrayed as a weapon for smiting the Chucks of the world, and at worst it is the ultimate punishment. The latter is especially the case if the supposed victim is a man pursuing a woman. John Hughes’ 1986 film Pretty In Pink created an indignant subculture of fans who believed Ducky, an affable nerd, deserved the affections of his closest friend Andie instead of quintessential ’80s heartthrob Blane. In the Salon piece “The trouble with Duckie: How Pretty in Pink’s most lovable character gave a generation of teenage boys the wrong idea,” critic Jon Cyer invalidates the misplaced indignation behind “Duckiegate” by comparing Duckie to the more recent “nice guy” archetype, a man who believes the women he desires should reciprocate his male niceness with offers of romance or sex.

Duckie defenders fail to see Andie’s decision to continue her friendship with Duckie after he insults her as a valid form of acceptance—all because of the pervasive idea that in order to truly love someone, we have to accept their sexual advances. The “friendzone” has come to mean something just as bad as indifference or contempt because, to them, rejection in every form is equally bad. They misinterpret her choice as an intentional slight against her best friend, without understanding that her rejection of him as a romantic partner isn’t a rejection of his friendship or personhood.

Duckiegate is a part of an age-old paranoia that a woman’s autonomy exists to oppress vulnerable men. If you type “false rape” into Reddit, the search results are too numerous to count. On the controversial subreddit r/MensRights, two of some of the most popular discussion threads suggest false rape allegations are rampant and that extremist MRAs known as Incels are right in their belief that women are sexual gatekeepers who resent Duckie-esque “beta-males.” The group is an infamous star in the misogynistic and often racist constellation of online spaces colloquially known as the “manosphere.” What they all share in common is their obsession with how society punishes men who aren’t Blane-esque “Chad Thundercocks” by denying them sexual intimacy and, by extension, power, supposedly leaving them vulnerable to the judgmental perceptions of women.

They misinterpret her choice as an intentional slight against her best friend, without understanding that her rejection of him as a romantic partner isn’t a rejection of his friendship or personhood.
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While the manosphere loathes women, it doesn’t defend the Chads who prey on them. Some of the most popular comments and posts on r/MensRights about Brock Turner, an ex-Stanford jock who sexually assaulted a woman in 2015, condemn the wealthy alpha male (comment: “[Turner] isn’t being honest about what [the police report] said”). Same for convicted Steubenville rapists and former football stars Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, the latter of whom is Black (post: “I think that as a community we should mention the Steubenville rape trials. We always talk about false rape allegations, but it’s just as important that we acknowledge real accusations”). Compare this to the site’s sympathetic view of Peter Naussenger, the middle class, white, nerdy man who fellow Columbia alum Emma Sulkowicz accused of sexual assault while the two were in college together.

Knowing that society believes punishment and rejection to be the same, MRAs view the ostracization of Chads as righteous and Duckies as offensive. To them, Chads not only deserve to not be loved by women but also hated by them. The internet Duckies believe they’re oppressed because they think their rejection/ostracization is undeserved. 4chan is famous for drawing national attention to the victim blaming that embroiled the Steubenville case, going as far as to demonstrate IRL wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and to send death and rape threats to Sulkowicz for indirectly ousting her alleged rapist through performance art.

During a workshop on dating violence in college, everyone in the classroom had to come up with a characteristic of a healthy relationship. The room was quiet. We’d already filled up more than half the whiteboard with traits of an unhealthy one (“gaslighting,” “physical violence,” “intolerance,” etc.). After a minute passed, a trickle of suggestions came, but they were all vague, and could apply to any type of relationship, good or bad. Hugs, hand holding, saying I love you—these were things even convicted wife killers had done.

It reminded me of that one cheesy ’80s song “What Is Love?” where the singer basically just repeats the title and “baby don’t hurt me.” I said nothing. If I were asked to do the exercise now, I would say rejection was the ultimate sign of a solid partnership. Regardless of who’s being problematic for what, acknowledging when a romance is or might turn sour is the definition of emotional strength.

However, going back in time won’t be enough to change societal views on rejection. Improving our communities would mean forcing people, especially men, to not only embrace the idea of consent but to also reevaluate the intrinsic violence of desirability, using their own experiences with people’s problematic preferences as an empathetic guide. Men are literally killing women for rejecting them. Until men learn it’s okay to be rejected, no one will be safe. And that’s going to take a cultural shift to turn “no” from an attack to just another word.

Falling in love with Peter Kavinsky—right along with Lara Jean—shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. And not just because of his swoon-inducing smile, his ability to make a back-pocket spin in the middle of a cafeteria look downright sinful, or even his impressive emotional depth, either. Rather, I love him—as so many other grown-ass women now do—because I have spent my life falling in and out of love with Peter Kavinskys, just as I was trained to.

I should begin by saying that my now, maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame. As a young black woman who came of age at a flashpoint in our nation’s relationship to and dialogue about race, it’s the dirty little secret I aimed to bury once I reached adulthood. I’d promised myself it would go the way of my heinous Aeropostale tee collection and my hot pink Samsung SEEK: matured past, grown out of.

My maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame.
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While I was never the type of girl to pour her feelings out onto the page like Lara Jean—for fear of making them tangible would make them too real, perhaps—I was the type of girl who daydreamed. Who imagined herself tangled in all sorts of intricate, decidedly un-Indiana romances with the kinds of boys that populated all of my favorite stories: the sensitive nerdy musician type a la Nick O’Leary (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), the bad boy with a troubled past in John Bender (The Breakfast Club) and especially the, “It’s your dream dad, not mine!” star jock and secret poet of Austin Ames (A Cinderella Story). These characters, or what I thought these characters embodied, helped me formulate what would become The Perfect Boy.

The “White” following “Perfect” kind of just went without saying. (The “Boy” and not “Girl” or “Nonbinary Person,” on the other hand, was reiterated strongly and often.)

You should know that I’ve only ever dated people of color. Even in high school, my not-so-spectacular track record with almost-boyfriends is exclusively black. Somewhere deep, somewhere beyond the formula of book-and-movie boyfriends I’d concocted, I was still much more interested in finding kinship and solace and—I can’t believe I’m gonna say this about my high school “ex”, but here we go—passion with other people who looked like me than I was with finding my Kavinsky.

But the white boy thing was more than an embarrassing blip on the radar of my adolescence—my longing for these boys was the product of a sound indoctrination from years of white media consumption.

To All the Boys I Loved Before (both the book and the movie) subverted narratives in which the quirky white girl is the one deemed worthy enough to get the get The Perfect Boy—girls like the one I was relegated to background roles and left romance-less by the end of the story—in so many of the right ways. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before created, for me, a rich world of beautiful, smart young women that neither relied on men to uplift them not validate them. But, you know, it was sort of a perfect bonus when that happened too.

Even now, weeks after its release, my inbox still occasionally pings with messages from friends watching it for the first time. Today, for instance, one of my closest friends couldn’t even wait for the credits to roll before she texted me. She said she’d tried to get away from her love of romances, but this managed to draw her right back in. There were moments throughout where she worried she’d have to turn it off, abandon it once it followed the same trajectory of so many of its predecessors.

“I just knew [Peter Kavinsky] had to do something to ruin things. I just knew there was no way they could end up together,” she said. “The happy ending just felt impossible.”

So many of us were waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the catch. The first time I watched it, I just knew that the inevitable breakdown seen was right around the corner. The part of the story where the young bookish girl, or so often the woman of color, has what seems like a light at the end of the tunnel, extinguished. Where she encounters some sort of embarrassment, some unearthed trauma that precludes her from a happy ending without also enduring great suffering.

The perceived impossibility of To All the Boys, I realize, is at the heart of why I loved it—why I found myself clicking replay before we’d even reached the brief mid-credits scene. The image of a young, smart, bookish woman of color falling in love without grief (related to the relationship) or shame on screen felt too big to assign a name. Felt too close to a dream not to hold tight to it, to close my eyes and will myself back to a world in which those things still seemed attainable.

Half of the story is the fact I didn’t grow up with images of young girls of color falling in love on screen at all, let alone with a heartthrob like Kavinsky. But the other half—perhaps the half that’s even more harrowing—is that I certainly didn’t see us falling in love separate from trauma, or rarer still, with another person of color.

I watched and read hundreds of stories in which the luckiest girls fell in love and rode off into the sunset—often in a cool Jeep!—with their Prince Charming. And that Prince Charming always looked like Peter Kavinsky. Peter Kavinsky—and by extension, Peter and Lara Jean’s fauxlationship—was everything, but it was also precisely what I’ve been implicitly taught to desire. In this way, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before did what so many of its genre forebears had done before it.

And the thing is, I’m not asking this movie to be some wild break from the genre. I don’t even really want that of this particular film. What I do want, though, is thousands of different narratives about what it looks like for girls from all backgrounds to fall in love. We deserve every iteration of story in which young women of color get to fall in love with a sweet, emotionally-adept, whatever-trope-suits-your-fancy partner.

So much of what makes To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before an unbelievably awe-inspiring, tweet-worthy movie, particularly for adults like me, is the element of unconscious wish fulfillment. Like, of course I’m not a teenage girl in a hyper white space, yearning for a story about a bookworm woman of color who falls in love—period, let alone with the “it” guy—anymore. And of course I’m no longer relying on these images to help me feel worthy of love and affection in the way I once was. But I’ve been sitting with that same yearning since then. That girl, the me who needed those things so desperately when she was a kid, never went away, she just evolved.

But even in that evolution, there are moments of deeply troubling considerations about what my love of Peter Kavinsky and this story might mean. Is it him, this particular character and this particular actor, or does my desire speak to something greater?

I’m 24 years old and settled into a community of black folks—friends and found family alike—that not only affirm, but uplift me. Everyday I am reminded of the beauty and brilliance of our people. And I am reminded of my own beauty and brilliance, by extension. This is a far cry from my hometown in suburban Indiana, from an upbringing that was largely populated by people and spaces that could do neither of those things. But that juxtaposition only serves to ground me more firmly in what I know to be true: one of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.

Yet, knowing those things doesn’t automatically undo the years of isolation and forced assimilation I endured to get here. Knowing those things doesn’t automatically help me unlearn the lies I internalized about myself and any potential partners who looked like me.

One of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.
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What I’m saying is shaking this doesn’t happen for all of us overnight. I’m saying that the mechanisms of white supremacy are complex and, oftentimes, hidden in plain sight. If I spent a lifetime both abhorring and simultaneously craving the white male gaze, then it’s going to take some time—ruminating on my understandings of desire and shame and identity—to walk back the decades of deeply entrenched ideologies which taught me to aspire to finding my happy ever after in the arms of a white man.

By the time the waiter came to take our drink orders, K had asked if I’d ever been married and if I wanted kids. I admit there was something exhilarating about the directness, like a game of truth or dare.

K’s pupils were a little too black—too fixed somehow—making me wonder if he were on drugs, but perhaps it was just the contrast against his pale, grey irises. Other than the intensity of his stare, K looked just like his profile picture — tall, square-jawed, boasting a buzz cut and a tan.

By the time the waiter came back with our drinks, K had ascertained the length of my last relationship and whether I rented or owned.

“What about politics?” he asked. “Do you lean left or right?”

“Left.”

K held up his forearms like goal posts, in case he wasn’t being clear.

“Hillary or Trump?” I looked him dead between the goalposts and laughed.

“Bernie!”

K lowered his voice and leaned in closer. “You don’t know about the socialist plans he has for our country?”

“Socialist plans?” I repeated loudly. “You mean like equal access to healthcare and education? Hell yeah!”

K had no comeback. He must have though the s-bomb would resolve the conflict swiftly and decisively in his favor, and now he was stuck without exit strategy.

I looked down the barrel of his black pupils. “Are you a Trump supporter?” I asked.

He blinked. “I’m a Conservative Republican.”

“That’s not the same thing. Not all conservative Republicans support Trump.”

“I support a lot of what Trump’s trying to do,” he said, “but I get frustrated with all the red tape.”

“I know,” I said sweetly. “You can’t just tweet and make it so — thank God!”Just then the poor waiter returned in hopes of a dinner order.

“I’m ready,” K said.

“Cheater, you must’ve read the menu online before we got here.” I’d barely glanced at the thing.

“No, I’m just good at making decisions. I know what I want.”

I felt him watching smugly as I perused the menu, which had suddenly come to signify my every life choice. My exes flashed before my eyes:

Pasture-raised New England beefcake, roasted over spent uranium fuel rods from the decommissioned nuclear power plant, then smothered in Grade A maple syrup and topped with organic jealous greens.

Free-range Coque au Mexique, raised on a diet of GMO-free corn, Saturday morning cartoons, and ‘90s sitcoms, with just a savory hint of macho seasoning.

Wild-caught south shore man-child, marinated in academia until soft and flaky, served over a cannabis and Adderall comfit.

After the waiter finally made off with my order of Gorgonzola and sweet potato ravioli (analyze that) I tried to steer the conversation back to safer waters. I asked about K’s travels: Zion National Park, I’ve been there too! Bryce Canyon, beautiful, isn’t it? Colorado, great hiking! Afghanistan, Syria, umm…

His OkCupid profile hadn’t mentioned military service. Unfortunately, the subject of Syria lead us to the subject of refugees, which led us to the subject of immigration, the political issue with which I’m most personally involved.

“You think ICE is actually separating families?” K asked. “Or you’re just afraid of that happening?” (This was a few weeks before we awoke to images of ICE agents ripping children from their parents’ arms.)

I slapped my hand on the table. “It’s happening alright! Three blocks from here, there is a woman living in a church basement to avoid being deported and separated from her American-born children. She’s afraid of being sent back to Russia where she faces persecution because of her sexual orientation.”

“Wait, she’s a lesbian and she has children? I’m still confused how that works…”

I sighed. Loudly. “It works, okay?” Now was not the time to educate a 38-year-old man about the birds, the bees, and the butterflies.

I plowed on with the story of Irida Kakhtiranova and launched into that of Lucio Perez, the heteronormative father of four from Guatemala, who has sought sanctuary in another local church since October. I’ve gotten to know the Perez family personally through my volunteer work with immigrants’ rights groups. K nodded sympathetically as I described the emotional and financial toll on the family.

Now was not the time to educate a 38-year-old man about the birds, the bees, and the butterflies.
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“I still don’t think Muslims should be allowed in this country.”

“Excuse me?”

He said it so casually I thought I’d misheard.

I hadn’t.

“In my experience, all Muslims want to kill us.”

Suddenly the waiter swooped in with our plates. I stared at the little pile of limp gluten before me. My mind raced. Should I just walk out? Throw my food in his face? My shoe? Could I even get it off in time? Why didn’t I wear slip-ons instead of lace-up boots?

Here was my big chance to stand in solidarity with my Muslim friends and neighbors, but something deep inside me resisted making a scene.

Partly it had to do with being an introvert. It’s also not easy to go against generations of social conditioning that make accommodating men and their opinions, no matter how unacceptable, almost second nature. And if I did call K what he was — a bigoted Islamophobe — I could be labeled hysterical, or a snowflake. A hysterical snowflake.

I took a deep breath. I was too upset to muster my most logical arguments (more crimes are committed against Muslim immigrants than by Muslim immigrants; high-skilled tech workers will go to China instead). But why should I need data and statistics to justify the basic humanity of 1.8 billion people?

“All Muslims?” I said. “Every single man, woman, and child? You can’t say that. You just can’t.”

“When I was over there, even the kids wanted to kill us.”

“That was war. You were occupying their land. Of course they wanted to kill you.”

“I’ve read the Quran,” he said. (And yet he obviously didn’t make it all the way through my OkCupid profile). “Mohamed was not a peaceful guy.”

K calmly munched his steak tips and scallops, while I ranted about religious interpretation.

“You just can’t make blanket statements about an entire of religious or ethnic group. You just can’t. How do you like it when people make sweeping generalizations about Christians? About people in the military?”

To my surprise he set down his fork.

“You’re right,” he said. “You can’t.” A couple of mouthfuls later, “You’ve given me a new perspective.”

I paused and met his eyes. Was he just saying this to shut me up? I’ll never know why he uttered those five words, but it allowed us to get through the rest of dinner quickly and peacefully and part with a firm handshake.

Just how did I end up here? Nothing in K’s online profile hinted at such extreme views. He was the right age, fit, attractive, enjoyed travel and the outdoors; he loved dogs and children.

He did mention that he had “high standards”— “too high,” according to friends — but haven’t we all heard that if we are still single over 30, let alone 35?

And if K had such high standards, why did he offer to drive a hundred miles from northwest Connecticut, to Northampton, Massachusetts of all places—the western outpost of the liberal elite empire—to meet a woman whose only qualifying characteristics were age, availability, and attractiveness?

Nothing in K’s online profile hinted at such extreme views.
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If he had dug just a little into my profile he would have more-than-discovered my political leanings, or at least inferred it based on other information. I’m sure they’re out there, but I have yet to meet an MFA in Creative Writing, or a human service worker, who is a Trump supporter.

But in truth, if K pegged me based on education, profession, and place of residence, he would have been engaging in the same kind of gross generalizations I’d just called him out for.

Recent, compelling—but not shocking—research by Yale Professor Gregory Huber and Neil Malhotra of Stanford show that shared political beliefs factor significantly in our choice of romantic partners. And according to the authors of a 2013 study entitled,“The Dating Preferences of Liberals and Conservatives,” online dating contributes to America’s polarization by making it easier to sort partners by political affiliation.

If I remember correctly, earlier versions of OkCupid listed members’ political affiliation in a sidebar with other basic stats like age, height, education, and astrological sign. Maybe now you have to pay $29.99 a month to find out if you match a Scorpio or a xenophobe?

Malhotra and Stanford colleague Robert Willer argue—check out the TED talk—that the danger of this kind of unnatural selection breeds “ideological silos.” Without exposure to dissenting viewpoints, both sides become more extreme in their ideology.

This perspective makes me feel better about having stuck it out and attempting civil conversation with K. However, I also refuse to accept that religious pluralism is an extremist view. It’s one thing to debate democratic socialism over the dinner table, but it’s quite another to call into question respect for basic human rights.

I noticed that K ordered steak tip and scallop salad—the first item on the menu. Maybe the problem wasn’t high standards, but a failure to appreciate the full range of options, in life and in love.

In the age of #MeToo, what does it mean if he insists on ordering for you?

Huy Phan/Unsplash

By Liz Posner

I n January, at the tail end of a storm of accusations of sexual misconduct by powerful men in Hollywood, Babe.net published an account by “Grace,” a woman who went on a date with actor and comedian Aziz Ansari and later described it as the “worst date of her life.” Many critics of the article derided one detail in the article that must have seemed important enough to the writer to include: “After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. ‘It was white,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.’”

To suggest that Grace’s lack of control over the wine they drank foreshadowed Ansari’s later abusive behavior indeed seems a bit trivial. But on closer inspection, and amidst #MeToo conversations about how so many men get away with exercising control over women, maybe this detail deserves more serious examination. It can be argued that men who choose what their dates eat and drink without first asking them what they prefer play into a wider gender power imbalance in dating. In the cases of some men, it can even be a sign of more dangerous behavior.

The ability to select what they want to order in a restaurant is a freedom most women take for granted. Historically, women sat silently in restaurants while their male companions ordered for them. As Chowhound writes, “The first female restaurant-goers would not have dreamed of ordering for themselves. Women began dining out for pleasure around the 1840s in the United States… Before this, public eating establishments consisted of taverns, inns, and men’s clubs and did not cater to women. Well-bred women always had a male companion who ordered their dinner.”

To Raise A Feminist Son, Talk To Him About Aziz Ansari

Men continued to order for women long after the 19th century. In a Quora chatroom from 2015, a woman said it was her boyfriend’s habit to order for her on occasion, and she wondered if it demonstrated “controlling” behavior. One respondent explained that this was normal male behavior until fairly recently: “I am almost 70, and when I [was] first starting dating, it was normal for a well-brought-up young man to order for a woman.”

Some self-proclaimed “old-fashioned” men still insist on ordering for women, especially early on in the courtship. Men may do this out of a sense of chivalry if they’re more familiar with the restaurant than their date and consider themselves the host. “He likes to order for people,” Zadie Smith wrote in her profile of Jay-Z for the New York Times’ T Magazine after the two dined together. “Apparently I look like the fish-sandwich type.” Jay-Z, whose most popular songs include references to misogyny and violence against women, has talked publicly about his struggles with his alpha male identity, including infidelity in his marriage to Beyonce. By no means does Jay-Z’s habit of ordering for women mean he is a bad man, nor does it imply that any man who orders for women at restaurants will necessarily exhibit toxic masculine behavior in any other capacity. But all of these actions fall under the umbrella of exhibiting male control.

Women who have been on these kinds of dates share stories amongst themselves, usually alongside the question “should I be bothered by this?” There are also some frightening stories about women whose partners insist on ordering for them at restaurants, or exercise control over their food choices in other ways. Reddit is full of such food-control stories, including one in which a man actually snatched a plate of potato salad out of his girlfriend’s hand after restricting her to a carb-free diet, claiming it was for her health. Or another about a man so controlling he “freaks out” when his girlfriend eats candy in front of him. Both women describe their partners as nutrition-obsessed, but their partners’ actions have negative impacts on their relationships, as well as the women’s relationships with their own bodies.

In a piece for Refinery29 on the topic of food control, Kathryn Lindsay writes that according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, some red flags for abuse are “jealousy of your friends and family, isolating you from them, controlling your finances, as well as making demeaning comments, shaming you, or pressuring you into sex. Food control is not necessarily a warning sign of abuse, but it could be a symptom.”

Although man-who-opens-the-door-for-woman gets much more debate among feminists about whether or not he is sexist, man-who-orders-for-woman perhaps deserves more scrutiny. It is 2018, and surely, women should be asserting control over what they eat just as they seek to speak and be heard without being silenced, and have control over their finances and general autonomy over their own bodies. We can draw a direct parallel to reproductive rights. Controlling what a woman eats implies a desire for dominion over her body — the same kind we’re still seeing conservative men proclaim in the abortion debate.

Control over women’s bodies is a theme on the political right; in the past year alone, the Trump administration has insisted on detaining pregnant undocumented women and blocking teenagers from having abortions, while conservative legislators are doing everything they can to make it impossible for poor women to safely abort their pregnancies, even going so far as to deny women who are raped the opportunity to terminate the pregnancy.

Ordering for women at restaurants may seem like a chivalrous gesture. But unless the man has the woman’s consent, it’s just another degrading gesture pulling us back to a time when women did not make such decisions for themselves.

Of course, not every woman has a problem with men who chose their meal for them at restaurants. In a piece titled “Is Ordering For Your Lady Friend Low-Key Sexist?” Helena writes for xojane about the phenomenon: “In the long list of potentially chauvinistic stuff I’m cool with cute guys doing, ordering an entree for me during dinner is one of them. It’s weird and old-timey and therefore sort of sexy in the same way that suede elbow patches can act as an aphrodisiac. But chauvinism done sexily can only work if the dude doing it is in on his own joke.”

It’s clear that even for those women who aren’t seriously bothered by men who do this, it’s hard to deny there’s something creepy and paternalistic about it.

This story first appeared at AlterNet, and is republished here with permission.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/is-love-infinite-a-polyamorous-roundtable-on-jealousy/ Fri, 17 Nov 2017 22:08:40 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8374 Read more]]> ‘I’m happiest when my support networks are as wide and tribe-like as possible, and a lack of jealousy makes that easier to sustain.’

Is monogamy a choice or a societal steeping? Is it romantic, a sacrifice, an expression of devotion, glorified claustrophobia, Puritanical backwash, or some good old fashioned cultural evolution? Or…something different altogether?

I think many folks (myself included) intellectually understand how fraught monogamy is—one person satiating every sexual desire for 50+ years?!—but in the more reptilian facets of our brains we can’t handle the sickening jealously of even thinking about sharing the person we love.

It feels too messy, too complicated; it can feel like desiring more than one person is greedy or predicated on that person not being “enough.”

While it would seem that poly folks have seemingly banished the green-eyed monster—after all, who would voluntarily subject themselves to that sensation?—it’s actually, like so many theories in life, exponentially more complicated than that. Poly folks aren’t impervious to jealousy, but instead engage with it as yet another emotion to wrangle, another salient data point in how they’re relating to the world, themselves, and intimacy in their lives.

The Est. asked four poly folks to talk about their relationship with jealousy, the beauty of shared romantic love, and what they’ve learned along the way.

Holly Francis on the fostering of implicit trust:

To love and be loved: This is the fundamental state most yearn for. Humanity has long been looking to prophecy, divination, and the essence of the human experience to figure out how to live the very best life. For some, the answer comes in the form of polyamory and the practice of ethical non-monogamy; but how do we approach the seemingly inherent jealousy of human relationships in a way that is nurturing, rather than destructive?

A common theme in polyamory — especially for those newly embracing the lifestyle — is how to quash seemingly rebellious feelings of anger at betrayal and fear of being cast aside. Trying to hide insecurities works most effectively in settings where those insecurities are never challenged, but the dynamic interplay between jealousy and successfully navigating polyamory isn’t one of those settings. Challenging the status quo handed down in the form of monogamy and navigating the emotional upheaval of a standard way of life requires immense trust, communication, ownership, and respect.

The secret? Polyamorous people can, and do, get jealous. Rather than being a negative trait, though, it can be the impetus for introspection and the critical examination of how to more effectively deal with challenges. Jealousy lets us know when something needs to be addressed, and it rather frequently seems to come back to a fear of neglect or abandonment. As with any relationship, learning and growing with one partner can be difficult — in a relationship with multiple partners and multiple considerations it can feel impossible.

Trusting your partners have your best interests at heart, fostering effective communication that addresses concerns before they spiral out of control, taking ownership of one’s own feelings and actions, and respecting the choices and limitations of others are among the standards of success in polyamory.

“Well, it’s just not for me. I could never do that.”

And that’s fine. One of the best parts of poly, for me, is that no one is trying to force their approach to relationships on others — it’s a matter of basic respect. Exploring the reason why you “could never do that,” however, is vital to the idea of personal ownership. In the searching for an answer to the question of why jealousy is so uncomfortable and the idea of sharing is so abhorrent, many people start finding the idea of polyamory more relatable. These questions don’t have to be asked within the confines of a monogamous relationship, but in any search for love and how to be loved.

How do we approach the seemingly inherent jealousy of human relationships in a way that is nurturing, rather than destructive?
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Jealousy is indeed an often green-eyed monster that turns some into a nervous or even aggressive wreck. It’s uncomfortable and it brings up feelings we’d rather not deal with. If you don’t trust your partner around others, but you posit that you trust them, the reality is that you don’t actually trust them to be in control of themselves when presented with opportunity. Perhaps you’ve been hurt in the past, and can’t tolerate your significant other speaking with exes and thus try and limit their autonomy — you become sick to the core at the thought of sharing your partner with others and so you do not. You tell yourself you can’t. But what happens to your relationship when you remove the limitations you never even created to begin with and place real, implicit trust in your partner?

Allison Elliot on odious comparisons:

Having multiple relationships means navigating a host of feelings — feeling both good and bad. For me the link between compersion — the feeling of happiness for your partner’s relationship with another person — and jealousy, is all about comparison.

Compersion happens naturally for me at the beginning of my relationship with a new partner. I admire the love that that person has with their other partner (or partners) and feel genuinely happy that that love exists in their life.

As the relationship progresses, however, I begin to compare my relationship with my partner to their relationship with their other partner. What once made me happy suddenly makes me feel like my partner and I don’t go to the movies enough, they don’t text me enough, or they text too much during ourdates — every difference I perceive in my relationship versus their other relationships becomes a potential problem, and I grow jealous.

“Enough” becomes this inexact measuring stick I begin using to gauge my emotions in an effort to make the good in my relationship equal to the good of the other relationships that I’m perceiving.

While comparisons can be odious, I’ve realized that these comparisons can lead to positive outcomes; for example, feeling jealous after my partner goes to the movies with their other partner has lead to me simply realizing that I just want to go to the movies with my partner. The feeling doesn’t actually extend beyond that.

Comparison-caused jealousy grows particularly difficult when my self-esteem isn’t as intact as I’d like it to be or my relationship with my partner is struggling. If my partner wasn’t feeling up for sex during our last date, but they had sex with another partner days later, my brain makes leaps — it makes connections and conclusions before I can take a breath.

My brain tells me my partner had sex with someone else because of my flaws, because our relationship is rocky or not as good as the others in their life. I force myself to reiterate, again and again — “their sex is not about me” — to try and dispel all the dangerous and damaging conclusions my brain is trying to draw from that sequence of events. I remind myself of the bottom line: Comparison is unfair, unhelpful, and unhealthy. It’s also bullshit, obviously, because “their sex is not about me” is absolutely true.

Also, their relationship isn’t about me either, which makes even a seemingly positive concept like compersion exponentially more complicated. Because compersion allows an individual to mentally insert themselves into a dynamic they are actually not a part of, good feelings can quickly give way to bad ones. And at that point, thinking about yourself in the context of other peoples’ relationships becomes unreasonably self-centered.

While not all polyamorous people experience these emotions, I think the trick to all of this is conceiving of your relationship with your partner as though it were on its own — is it good alone, without comparison?

Zephyr Schott on undermining the patriarchy:

Eight years ago I told one of my closest friends I felt a tremendous amount of bottled-up affection for the people in my life who wanted to be closer to me; I told them I wished I could clone myself so that I could give all of them the care and appreciation they wanted from me. I was in the middle of a four-year monogamous relationship at the time and the thought of anything outside of that familiar and exclusive relationship structure had not even occurred to me.

Monogamy was so assumed, ingrained, and automatic that the thought of cloning myself occurred to me before any notion of dating more than one person. I was steadfastly loyal to all my monogamous partners for years and felt pangs of jealousy when my ex-girlfriend flirted with other people, when my high school ex-boyfriend went to prom with someone else while I was sick and stuck at home. I also felt that my jealousy was unwarranted and never brought it up with either partner. But looking back my real mistake was not discussing those feelings openly with them and stewing in my insecurities instead.

A couple of years later I found myself in a new relationship with someone incredibly jealous. He would check my text messages and even my receipts to make sure that my conversations were not too friendly and to check that I was being honest about my location at any given time. Yet the main feedback I got about this relationship from my friends and family was that they were so happy to see me with someone who cared about me so much. I was miserable, confused — I felt trapped and isolated.

After we broke up I joined a Rocky Horror Picture Show cast and started to date someone I liked and trusted a lot — they were also poly and preparing to move to the other side of the country after graduating from university. I’ll admit that having felt trapped in my last relationship, having the upcoming physical distance gave me a sense of safety.

Knowing that I was new to a nonmonogamous relationship structure, this partner was extremely caring and conscientious about checking in with my feelings. At first I did feel uncomfortable and jealous, but I largely tend to approach even the most personal experiences from an anthropological and rational perspective. Rationally, the philosophy behind ethical non-monogamy made a lot of sense to me and I recognized monogamy as being the kind of authoritative and hierarchical construct that I am generally opposed to.

Monogamy was so assumed, ingrained, and automatic that the thought of cloning myself occurred to me before any notion of dating more than one person.
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When my emotions did not match up with my thoughts I started asking myself what I was afraid of and why exactly I was feeling these pangs of jealousy. What were those feelings grounded in and were my assumptions based on empirical evidence or enculturation? I talked to my partner about my feelings and slowly became friends with some of the people he was involved with, which was really helpful. I started to realize that going on dates with and sleeping with other people did not reduce his feelings for me; I began to realize that jealousy was an unnecessary and even a counterproductive emotion. I realized I could just feel happy that someone I cared for was happy.

I started to experience a paradigm shift and my emotions started to align with my rational thoughts. He seemed surprised at how content I was to just sleep with him and let him have multiple partners of different genders as long as he was safe about it. He was a bit concerned that I wasn’t dating or sleeping with anyone else, but I explained this was just due to the simple fact that there weren’t other people who I felt like dating at the time.

And while I’m not impervious to pangs of jealousy, every time I feel it, I ask myself why and it almost always results from some kind of internalized insecurity. But the more I communicate openly and critically reflect on my emotions, the more natural poly relationship dynamics have become for me, the more I feel that I am living in alignment with my values of autonomy, consent, open and honest communication, and in opposition to property or hierarchy.

Molly Stratton on the dangers of the lizard brain:

I don’t get blindsided by jealousy very often, but one of my most intense pangs to date was in response to one of my partners telling me he’d been reading science-fiction short stories aloud to his primary. But even then, the sensation was pretty short-lived — I couldn’t help laughing at myself: This is what sets me off?

I used to think practicing polyamory would somehow make me a more empathetic person, but experience has shown me again and again that I can still be just as confused and anxious while poly as I am in any other relationship configuration. I just happen to be unbothered about “normal” relationship jealousies — like who sleeps with who and how often — and honestly? I still don’t have a good theory as to why.

Perhaps it’s because I was lucky enough to fall into a close-knit group of friends before we started boinking each other, and watching two people I’ve already known for six years engage in PDA is as jealousy-inducing as knowing that they snore or that they’re allergic to apricots. Or maybe it’s simply that my personality is so intensely nerdy that it isn’t sex but the (in my experience) much rarer shared interest in Golden Age sci-fi which trips my jealousy meter.

Other times, I think of my lack of jealousy as a sort of queer survival mechanism. I’m an only child from a tiny family, with no desire to marry or have children of my own. But I’m happiest when my support networks are as wide and tribe-like as possible, and a lack of jealousy makes that easier to sustain. Poly people don’t actually all sleep with each other all the time, but the fact that it’s a possibility can ironically help us relax and see each other as people, rather than competition for affection. (I knew I had “made it”, relationship-wise, when I found myself not only having regular dates with my partner, but regularly playing Zelda with his wife.)

Interestingly enough, when people talk about jealously creeping in, I find myself thinking not of my romantic relationships, but of my friendships. When my longest-running fandom friend confirmed that she had, in fact, been talking to a Tumblr mutual longer than she had me, my lizard brain immediately wondered if the other person was somehow “better.” When my best friend moved an hour away, I felt as intensely about it as I had as a lonely grade-schooler. And every time I plan a party, I have to stop myself from speculating on how the number of guests reflects my likeability as a person.

Maybe it’s because (irrationally), I see romantic relationships as something people will move mountains for, whereas a friendship can be derailed by a busy schedule, a new job, or simply discovering you don’t have the same fandoms in common anymore.

“I was sexually and mentally attracted to this guy for 12 years. We used to have the best times together, then suddenly he seemed a little standoffish, though I continued to be sexually involved with him.

I find out he got married while we were still sleeping together. He had been married six months before I even found out about it.

I still love him. His wife is extremely bougie, and he is not that type. He is like me — just likes to laugh and enjoy life. He is constantly calling, telling me he misses all the fun we had and the laughs.

I don’t know what to do, but I do know I can’t sleep with him now, knowing he’s married.”

—From “Anonymous” via Carolyn Hax, Washington Post, 26 September 2017

Dear Anonymous,

Don’t be so hard on yourself! As long as this philandering liar’s wife is “bougie,” you’re totally in the clear to bang him as much as you want, because the only choice he has is to stay married to her and keep trying to roll up on you for some non-bougie relief from Bougie McBougerpants. Bougie women don’t deserve to be involved in mutually committed relationships built on fundamental trust with their partners, because they hate laughing and enjoying life, activities which you uniquely enjoy with this man, who is so interesting due to his love of the niche hobbies of laughing and enjoying life.

As long as this philandering liar’s wife is 'bougie,' you’re totally in the clear to bang him as much as you want!
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This guy is 100% telling you the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s honest truth about his relationship, and definitely is not trying to have a multi-tiered cake and eat it, too. He is a completely reliable source about his lifestyle and feelings, and definitely is not hoping you’ll fall for the adulterous chicanery that allows him to maintain a relationship with you and his wife at the same time. Good, upstanding people often lie to their partners about major life decisions such as marriage, because sometimes they marry bougie people from which they can never extricate themselves by getting a damn divorce.

“My 40-year-old son signed up with an online dating site. He has a 17-year-old son and has never been married. During his initial contact with one woman, she mentioned she had several kids and my son asked if they were all by the same father. She said he was out of line to ask that question!

I realize people today think one’s sexual history shouldn’t matter, but doesn’t my son have a right to know how many other men he’s going to be involved with if he becomes involved with her? How does one find out this kind of information relatively soon into the relationship? Waiting until he knows her better seems like a waste of both parties’ time if he’s not interested in someone who brings several other families into the relationship.

Relationships are hard enough when a man brings his family and a woman brings her family together in the marriage. It’s harder when the man and woman have exes. Each ex increases the level of difficulty to make the relationship work. Love is a choice, and it would be painful for my son to give up a young lady he really cared for because he found out after a few dates that a future with her involved four or more baby daddies.”

—From “OUT OF LINE IN ARIZONA” via “Dear Abby,” 25 September 2017

Dear Out of Line,

What a dear you are to take such an active interest in your large adult son’s dating life. Other parents might make the grave mistake of deciding that grown-ass men should be able to engage in romantic engagements without the assistance of their parents, but other parents aren’t you, a real-life angel who is singularly concerned with the sexual history of people you’ve never met.

What a dear you are to take such an active interest in your large adult son’s dating life.
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There is a threshold after which women are entirely worthless, and that threshold is “having children with four men,” an objective standard of human value. It would be an absolute travesty if your son decided for himself that he’s capable of loving someone for who they are, instead of how many sexual partners they have had, and it’s vital that you continue to monitor your son’s engagement with unsuitable sluts. Don’t let him meander into an attachment with a woman who has past relationships, which are likely to make any future relationships impossible, because no one on earth is capable of acting like a regular fucking adult without your careful guidance. Attend first dates with your son, if you can — this will send a strong message to these dangerous sluts he’s reached out to, and significantly decrease the likelihood that he’ll end up with any of them.

“After cleaning up after three relatives who have gone into senior-living residences, I would like your many readers to know that leaving endless piles of junk and money in countless numbers of banks/investments/holdings for others to deal with after you no longer can, is selfish and careless.

We are facing another such disaster soon because this particular family obviously has some DNA strand that makes them slobs, and they have no shame in saddling this miserable chore on others.

If you are growing older, look around your home and start straightening things up and purging while you still have the strength and will to do so. Consolidate your holdings and finances and leave directives to where they can be found. My own mother was very organized and meticulous but it was still a months-long task to get things in order. Other people should not have to clean up your mess just because you’d rather play bridge than deal with it. Have some self-discipline!”

— From “Sick of This” via “Ask Amy,” Chicago Tribune, 26 August 2017

Dear Sick of This,

All old people who die do so knowing, with glee, that they will leave behind a massive hassle for other people to deal with. They are all cruel and vindictive assholes who think of nothing but playing cards instead of consolidating their financial holdings to the specific liking of their loved ones. Thank you for this valuable public service announcement about how ungrateful and thoughtless old, sick people are.

We know people often pick a spouse who resembles a parent. What about one who resembles a sibling?

Pixabay

By Tamsin Saxton

The peacock’s dazzling tail feathers do not exist for them to carry out everyday activities such as eating or sleeping, but because their colorfulness is attractive to peahens: the more brilliant the feathers, the greater the chance the peacock has of finding a sexual partner. Tail feathers, to peahens, can be powerfully attractive.

Scientists have long been interested in unravelling the subconscious processes that influence partner choice, since heritable characteristics that are favored in sexual partners will tend to increase in frequency in subsequent generations. That’s why the peacock’s tail feathers are so radiant: over many generations, more beautiful tail feathers have been selected. This means that partner preferences tell us something about the evolutionary pressures that shape a species — including us. So what do we find attractive in each other, and why?

Much of our sense of what is attractive comes into focus when viewed through the lens of successful reproduction. Childbearing and childrearing have fed into our idea of what we want in a partner. Health, fecundity, and the willingness and ability to invest in parenting are not exclusively or inevitably desired in a partner, but they are reliably found attractive across different populations, though there are of course some cultural differences.

What Silicon Valley, Tinder, And Trump Have In Common

These biological preferences also align with mate choice in other species. It’s clear that what we want in a partner has roots that stretch back long before Instagram, makeup counters, marketing campaigns or corsetry. Safe to say, these preferences have something to do with our basic human nature.

There are also individual differences in partner choice. Your ideal partner is vanishingly unlikely to be my ideal partner, even if we are matched for gender, age and sexual orientation. To an extent, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. But even these differences between people’s preferences are somewhat predictable: a person’s family influences the partner he or she chooses. Several studies have found that, on average, there’s some physical similarity between one’s parent and one’s partner. That is, your girlfriend might well look a little bit like your mother. This physical similarity is apparent whether you ask strangers to compare facial photos of partners and parents, or whether you assess things such as parent and partner height, hair or eye color, ethnicity, or even body hair.

A person’s family influences the partner he or she chooses. Why? Familiar things are attractive.

Why? Familiar things are attractive. So long as something isn’t initially aversive, and you’re not over-exposed, then in general something will become more appealing the more you encounter it. Part of the attraction to parental features could be attributed to this familiarity effect. Yet familiarity doesn’t account for the whole phenomenon. First, people’s partners seem to be more likely to resemble the parent of the corresponding gender: girlfriends match mothers, and boyfriends match fathers, irrespective of whether they’re in a heterosexual or homosexual relationship. Second, emotional closeness to a parent increases the likelihood that your partner will resemble your parent.

Another possible reason is that, biologically speaking, prime reproductive partners sometimes look a little like our parents. Of course, incest itself is a different game: reproduction between close relatives can lead to dangerous recessive genetic disorders. And yet, some genes work well together, so a partner with subtle resemblance to family members might actually be one whose genetic material contains some of that useful overlap. A wonderful study of all known couples in Iceland across a 165-year period found that those with the most grandchildren were related at about the level of third or fourth cousin — no more, no less. So it seems there is some evolutionary advantage to finding traces of parental features attractive.

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But what about sibling appearance? My research team and I realized that explanations for the appeal of parental features would also tend to apply to sibling features. Indeed, in historical high-fertility populations, siblings might have been more frequent and therefore more familiar playmates than parents.

So, in our latest study, instead of looking at the similarities between partners and parents, we turned our focus onto brothers. We collected together facial photographs of the brothers and male partners of 56 women. Some of the women were volunteers whom we contacted directly, and some were people whom we didn’t know personally, but who had a sufficient public profile that we could identify their brother and boyfriend. We then asked female volunteers to compare each photo of a woman’s brother against four other men, one of whom was that woman’s partner. The volunteers did not know that the men they saw were the brothers and partners of specific women. The volunteers ranked every group of four partners according to how much they looked like the brother.

We found that nearly one third of the raters’ choices were for the ‘correct’ brother-boyfriend pair as looking most similar.

If there was no similarity at all between a woman’s brother and partner, then we’d expect the volunteers to pick randomly, selecting each of the four pictures one quarter of the time. When we looked just at the raw numbers, we found that nearly one third of the raters’ choices were for the ‘correct’ brother-boyfriend pair as looking most similar. However, these raw numbers are only indicative, and we wanted to know how we might extrapolate the data to the population at large. We used a statistical model to predict this, which indicated that if we generalized beyond our dataset, people would select the correct brother-boyfriend pair as most similar 27% of the time, and as first or second most similar a combined 59% of the time (instead of 50%). The model predicted that people would say that a woman’s boyfriend and her brother looked least alike just 16% of the time.

Of course, not every woman in our study had a partner who looked like her brother, and that is true of women in the world at large. But when we compared our data to the data from previous studies, it appeared that people’s boyfriends resemble their brothers about as much as people’s partners resemble their parents. Since siblings resemble their parents, it’s possible that brother-boyfriend resemblance is merely an essential corollary of parent-partner resemblance, or even vice versa.

Since siblings resemble their parents, it’s possible that brother-boyfriend resemblance is merely an essential corollary of parent-partner resemblance, or even vice versa.

Although the similarity that we saw between partners and brothers was only subtle, these subtle effects matter because human behavior is a messy thing, arising from a complex interplay of impulses and influences. The formation of a relationship between two people is an unusually complicated behavior.

There is a great deal of published research on our preferences, choices, and attractiveness judgments within relationships, because this sheds light on why we humans do what we do, as well as what the future of our species might look like. Even though we have a robust aversion to incest, it just so happens that this aversion does not seem to extend to people who resemble our family members.

This article originally appeared on Aeon. Republished here with permission under Creative Commons.

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