“I like my girls BBW.” - Drake

Nearly everyone has a type. Dark hair, dark eyes, strong hands, muscles, tattoos, glasses—those happen to be the core components of mine. But pick your combination: dark or light skin, tall or petite, thin or curvy, bookish or athletic. When it comes to most physical preferences in dating, nearly nobody blinks.

A person who prefers thin, gamer men, for example, is rarely accused of fetishizing them. Even when they are very specific about their type. Even if, over the years, they consistently only date one kind of person. Most of us accept that each of us have a physical type or preference in dating, and we don’t particularly care how specific those types might become. And so, in most cases, a preference can become a pattern, a pattern can become a type, and a type can become ingrained without anyone assuming there is something pathologically or morally underhanded about the person with the preference. So, I wonder, why does the conversation change suddenly when the physical preference falls outside our conventional beauty standards? When, for example, the preference is for a fat woman?

The obvious answer is that fatness itself is stigmatized. And because of that, we do not always treat attraction to it as something people can genuinely feel. We treat fatness as something to be overlooked, tolerated, or loved in spite of, rather than something that could simply be part of what someone finds beautiful in another person. And when we cannot figure out why someone might desire something we have been taught is undesirable, we often begin to look for an explanation.

We reach for something to explain why a fat woman, a woman our society has told us is unloveable, has a partner we do not believe she should have. We begin to speculate: maybe her partner is being rebellious; maybe they are attracted to the taboo; maybe they have a particular sexual fixation; or maybe, in other words, it’s a fetish. And that word, fetish, gives us a way to make sense of an attraction that doesn’t fit the beauty standards our society wants us to internalize as normal. Instead of accepting that someone might simply look at a fat body and think, I like that, we start to question what must be going on underneath the attraction.

This can create a strange problem for fat people. You can date someone who subscribes to Western beauty standards and is likely only tolerating your body, so you’re left to wonder whether they actually desire you. Or you can date someone who is attracted to your body, even intensely so, but wonder whether they are actually seeing you for you. Neither one is ideal.

Fetishization is a real issue. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of it knows there is a difference between being desired and being reduced to the thing someone desires about you. Of course, there are people who pursue fat partners, or partners of a particular racial identity, because they see those characteristics as taboo or exotic. There are also, regardless of body type, people who are less interested in the person in front of them than in the particular characteristic they find sexually compelling. And I understand the discomfort there. But the existence of actual fetishization doesn’t mean every attraction to fatness is one. In fact, we risk becoming so wary, and so rightly protective, that we can sometimes collapse the two. And in doing so, suspicion can become the default and we begin assuming bad intent until proven otherwise.

That’s understandable on some level, but it’s also costly. I do not think the distinction between preference and fetish is necessarily the trait itself, or even the intensity of the attraction to the trait. Liking tall men isn’t morally purer than liking fat women. And because of that, I do not think that the object of desire is the issue. What matters is how that desire manifests in your relationship with someone, and how we treat one another because of our desires. A dating preference must make room for the whole person. It shouldn’t ask the person to disappear behind the thing they are being desired for. We need room for the possibility that someone can simply find fat bodies beautiful, the same way some people find toned bodies beautiful. We can, and probably should, interrogate our desires and think about where they come from. But doing so does not require us to assume that every desire that falls outside conventional beauty standards is inherently suspect.

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“That’s a lot of white people.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately, and it has brought me back to a woman I met in college, someone who, if I’m being honest, I was never particularly close to. We’ll call her Monica. Monica and I came from very different worlds, and yet we were thrown together by fate in the same hall of the same freshmen dorm.

Monica grew up in the rural part of our state, where her family had a lot of land, a hobby farm, and horses. I grew up very differently. I didn’t know much about farms or horses, and, much to Monica’s amusement, I didn’t even know that a pony wasn’t a baby horse. We were exactly the kind of people who might have become close friends because of our differences, perhaps because of how much we could have taught each other about the worlds we came from. And we did, sort of. But as I think back on my relationship with Monica now, with the perspective and experience I have in my thirties, I’m not sure we actually did.

Our friendship mostly existed in the orbit of the large group of friends we had made in the dorm, the people we went to campus events and parties with. We talked, we laughed, we liked each other well enough, but we didn’t have particularly deep conversations, I knew very little about her personal life or feelings, and we rarely spent time together one-on-one. At the time, I would have called Monica a close friend. But if I’m being more honest about it now, I’m not even sure.

She was someone I was friendly with, someone whose life happened to intersect with mine for a period of time, and maybe she was a friend, but we weren’t incredibly close. Which is why I was somewhat surprised when, at some point that year, she told me, point-blank, “You’re my first real Black friend.” She meant it as a compliment, or perhaps a confession, a way of telling me that I mattered to her. And at the time, I accepted it that way, with little more thought than, that’s kind of an odd thing to say out loud. But then she kept saying things that made it very clear she had likely never known many Black people, at least not closely.

One comment I will never forget came with the kind of earnest candor that made it clear she had no idea how naive she might sound. “I’m so glad I met you, bb well actually, because before I met you, I thought all Black women could sing really well.” Her only prior exposure to Black women, she explained, had been the artists she knew, the Black women she saw in media, and the few Black women she had encountered in passing, who apparently could also sing beautifully. So, from her perspective, the evidence was fairly compelling. I had once looked at a pony and confidently decided it was a baby horse because I didn’t know any better. Monica had apparently done the same thing with Black women and singing. Still, I knew instantly that she wasn’t trying to be offensive or reductive. She was simply telling me the truth about what her life had looked like up until she met me. It wasn’t her fault that she had never had a Black friend who could show her, actually, no, all Black women cannot sing. And I have heard many similar comments over the years.

“You’re my first Black friend.”

“You’re my first Black roommate.”

“You’re my first Black girlfriend.”

I have been someone’s first Black fill-in-the-blank more times than I can count, and I have also been the “only.” But being the first or the only Black person in a friend group, at a party, on a team, almost always comes with some level of discomfort for me, especially when I am also the only person who isn’t white.

Based on my experience, in social spaces that are all or majority white, there is almost inevitably some adoption of white supremacy culture1 in the way the group operates, even if subconsciously, or an unspoken expectation that race should become invisible within the group for the social connection to function. For now, let’s address the latter, which is more complicated than simply concluding that white people, even today, just don’t want to talk about race. Sometimes that is true. But, in many progressive circles, people are perfectly comfortable talking about race, so long as the topic remains safely abstract. They can talk about racial disparities in prison populations, environmental racism, race-based opportunity gaps in public education, or the even the lingering impacts of slavery and Jim Crow; but that’s the limit. Progressive white people tend to be really good at talking about racism as a system, a policy problem, a historical force, or essentially something happening somewhere else to someone else.

What becomes much more difficult, and for many white people much more uncomfortable, is talking about race when the conversation becomes personal. This is particularly true in progressive spaces, where people have adopted a comfortable identity thinking of themselves as people who understand racism and oppose it. Thus, the difficulty begins when the conversation moves from how race operates in the world to how race might be operating at home. When progressive white people are asked to consider not just how race operates in the world, but how race might be operating here, in this room, in this friendship, in the ways we relate to one another; it’s much more delicate. Because the conversation has moved from talking about race or racism as an abstraction to asking specific white people, “good” white people, to examine themselves in a way that can feel uncomfortable.

As one of the first or the only Black participants in a social or professional space, that distinction can feel palpable. It can feel as though everyone else has implicitly agreed that race is not something we are supposed to notice in one another, and certainly not something we are supposed to interrogate within the relationships we are actually having. The result is a strange kind of social silence. Race can be discussed, but it has to remain distant, othered. And I find this so fascinating.

If we want to understand where some of that pressure comes from, I think, like with many things, we can look to our media for some added clarity. Think about some of the most iconic friend groups ever put on our television screens.

• Friends, six white friends in New York City spending nearly every day together, dating each other, and building their lives around one another.

• Sex and the City, four white women in New York City navigating careers, love, and friendship over brunches and martinis.

• How I Met Your Mother, five white friends in New York City, packed into a neighborhood bar booth, telling stories about their lives and adventures.

• Girls, four young women in Brooklyn, messy and complicated, and still all white.

Each of these shows are set in New York City, one of the most diverse cities in the country, and yet their central friend groups are racially monolithic. And for years, this went without much critique from their largely white audiences, despite the obvious question raised: where is everyone else? And that is the problem. When whiteness is the default, it doesn’t have to announce itself. People are people. Friends are friends. A group is just a group. And the absence of everyone else doesn’t have to be explained because whiteness is rarely experienced as a choice that needs explaining.

Notably, television shows aren’t inventing this reality, they’re reflecting it back; and the data backs this up. A recent study found that white American’s core friendship networks are on average 90 percent white, a number that has barely moved since 2013 when it was 91 percent. In 2022, roughly two-thirds of white Americans reported having entirely white friend groups, meaning there is not a single nonwhite person in their inner circle. But this is not true across every racial and ethnic group. Black Americans’ friendship networks have diversified substantially over the same period, with the share of entirely Black friendship networks falling from 65 percent in 2013 to 46 percent in 2022. Hispanic and Asian friendship networks have also become more racially diverse. And perhaps most fascinating, the people whose friendship networks are the least racially diverse are also among the most satisfied with them. Nearly half of white Americans reported being very satisfied with the racial and ethnic diversity of their friendship networks, and felt that way despite the lack of diversity. It’s a pattern worth calling attention. Because it is often difficult to recognize what might be missing when you have never experienced its absence as a true loss. The data reveals that diverse friendships are not happening equally. But the numbers don’t tell us what happens to our lives when we do cross those lines of difference, or what remains outside our view when we don’t.

I know from lived experience that having friends who are different from you makes your life more expansive. You learn things you likely would not have learned otherwise. You learn to love music you might never have found, eat food you might never have tried, learn traditions and references and ways of seeing the world that expands your own. Your world gets bigger. When you are actually in relationship with some across lines of difference, when they are close, it becomes much harder to hold onto the assumptions you have about the categories they belong to, racial or otherwise. That is one of the gifts of friendship across difference. It can make you more empathetic, and there is something refreshing about being around people who do not share all of your assumptions, who have different stories, or who can introduce you to something you didn’t know you were missing.

If you are curious about your own friendships, here are some questions that might be worth sitting with: Who are your closest friends? Actually name them. How many are Black?2 How many are people of color? Are those friendships as deep as your friendships with white people, or is there a distance you have never really named? Do you see your Black friends one-on-one, or mostly in groups? Are they part of your inner circle in the way your white friends are? Would they call you if they were in a crisis? Would you call them? Do you speak to them about race at all, or is it something that goes unspoken? Are your discussions on race always with distance, in abstraction, and not personal? And if race never comes up, is that because neither of you particularly wants to talk about it, or because you are afraid of getting it wrong? Who does the emotional work of maintaining closeness? And have you ever asked your Black friend how close they actually feel to you?

That said, this post cannot become a rulebook, because Black people aren’t a monolith. Every Black person is different, and every friendship is different. Even as a Black person I cannot give you a checklist on how to know whether you really have a Black friend or even how to make one. There is no formula for genuine friendship, and there is certainly no way to perform your way into it. If you’re reading this post to the end, the reality is that you’re likely further ahead on the friendship diversity track than most, so perhaps you don’t need a checklist at all. Maybe what is more useful is simply taking a moment to look at the friendships you already have, and asking yourself what they reveal about the world you move through.

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“Sit. Stay. Down. Good boy.”

Imagine a close friend sitting you down. She’s someone you have known for years. She’s someone you trust, and she’s telling you about this new man she is seeing. This new man—he’s the one she has been cautiously optimistic about. The one whose story you’ve been following for months, possibly longer. And you are invested. You both are. You both are certain that this is THE man, her man, and that he’s the one who is different from all the ones who came before. And so she tells you, with a kind of tentative hope in her voice, that she thinks it might actually be going somewhere with him. She’s already told you about their chemistry and the way she feels about him, so you feel yourself relaxing into her happiness. And it is effortless, because you want this for her, and based on everything she has shared so far, it sounds like she might have actually found something good with him.

But then, almost as an afterthought, she mentions how everything came together, that after a few tough conversations, he has agreed to see it her way. He has finally agreed to commit to the official, public relationship she has been asking for. Whatever the prior issue, whatever the requesting or demanding or persuading or discussing that came before it, he has eventually come around. Sure, maybe with a little resistance at first, but at least now he says he understands. He says he gets why the label matters to her. And he wants to commit, and she is finally happy.

This hypothetical story could be about any number of situations in which we have watched someone we love become attached to another person and begin to take on a Herculean amount of work to control the outcome. We’ve watched our friends begin managing the distractions, eliminating potential threats, negotiating the circumstances, or trying to make the relationship more secure by making the other person behave in ways that feel safer. In fact, a conversation I was a bit cornered into recently got me thinking about the strange lengths we sometimes go to when we want a particular romantic outcome: the people we ask to step back, the behaviors we ask someone to change, and the circumstances we try to arrange in the hope that love will become a little more predictable. The issue is that our efforts are often in vain, because that level of coordination rarely works when there are underlying issues in the connection.

Try as we might to steer and manage anything we’ve determined is a threat to our desired happiness, the outcome is often unavoidable. A man whose head is always turning will likely end up with his head turned anyway; a man who has to be convinced to date you seriously will likely end up resentful; and a man who delays meeting you at the next milestone in your connection, even for a perfectly legitimate reason like prioritizing his career or his mental health, will likely find another reason to delay. Our attempts to control the outcome are often, at best, a way of delaying the inevitable. In these cases, when you’re dealing with the wrong man, there will always be another woman. Another disagreement. Another behavior that needs to change. Another conversation about respect, commitment, or what the relationship is supposed to look like. And at a certain age, we know this pattern, or at least we should. And yet, many women continue to believe that control works, so they’ll manage and hope and wait for him to provide what they want. Predictably, because the control tactic never works, the connection eventually begins to feel different.

And sometimes, because you are her friend, because you love her, you do not say anything when she shares. You nod along. You affirm her fantasy, and you celebrate the newly or nearly established boundaries. You help her keep the dream alive, because maybe that is what friends do and maybe it’s better to be optimistic about love. And more importantly, as it would turn out, you know someone who knows someone who knows someone whose relationship started out with complications and now they’re happy and together and married and parents and sitting on a nice amount of equity in their starter home that they bought last year. And maybe the same is possible for your friend, too, and maybe her happiness is genuine. We want to believe in the best case, and so sometimes we let ourselves or our friends get caught up in it.

Boundary setting is, of course, a good thing. But it’s important we do not confuse what a boundary is. On one hand, there is the kind of direct and honest communication in healthy relationships that allows two people to understand each other and to figure out what they want together. And on the other hand, there is the strategic game-playing or control that begins when we are anxious or afraid of what might happen if we stop managing outcomes. Put simply, there is a difference between telling someone what you need and trying to control the board to eliminate circumstances that might make you uncomfortable. We have to be careful that our boundaries are not slipping into the territory of control because we are afraid the other person might make a choice we do not like.

The problem is that control can create a false sense of security. If your boyfriend agrees to stop liking other women’s pictures, you have something tangible to point to. If he unfollows his exes, there is evidence that the conversation accomplished something. If he’s removed from the woman who made you uncomfortable, you can look at the situation and conclude that he’s yours. And maybe that’s true. But what happens the next time you feel threatened? Because the problem with using another person’s behavior to regulate our own uncertainty is that it tends to work only temporarily, especially with the wrong sort of man.

The unfollow gives you relief. The distance created with one woman feels like a win. But if the underlying issue is the man, and if it’s the wrong man, there will almost certainly always be another woman to worry about. Returning to the hypothetical where we began, I wonder if the better response would be to reframe. To ask ourselves or our friends whether, perhaps, the issue is not only about what is happening in that specific scenario with that specific woman, but also about what you believe control gets you. Because if what you really want is to know that he will not leave you or that he will commit to you or that he wants you, then there is no combination of unfollows, blocked numbers, location sharing, passwords, obstacles constructed, or promises made that can give you that certainty.

You can certainly make it harder for someone to behave badly. You can make your expectations clear. You can also decide what you will and will not tolerate. But you cannot force another person’s loyalty through oversight or strategy. That said, to me, it’s important that this observation doesn’t become another label we assign to women. Because when a woman becomes preoccupied with who her partner, crush, or potential romantic interest follows, or who he is talking to or flirting with, it is easy to tell her that she is simply jealous, insecure, or controlling. But she might be responding to genuinely troubling behavior. She might be responding to a history of betrayal, whether inside that particular connection or another one. She might be responding to a partner who has given her very good reasons not to trust him.

Or maybe she might have internalized the idea that if she is sufficiently alluring, attentive, discerning, and willing to fight for her relationship—even to ward off other women—she can prevent herself from being hurt by a man she probably should not trust in the first place. This last belief is especially enticing because it gives us something to do. And unchecked anxiety loves activity. There is a reason we reach for control when we feel unsettled. Control gives us the illusion that we are not powerless. It lets us feel as though there is a move we can make, a conversation we can have, a behavior we can change, or a threat we can eliminate to ensure our desired outcome in love occurs. It is much easier to believe that we can secure a relationship by managing the circumstances around it than to sit with the much more frightening possibility that another person is always free to not choose us anyway.

When you are the woman making the repeated requests, having months-long conversations about the next step in a relationship or situationship, or even basic respect, it likely feels really good when the other person finally sees things your way. But ultimately, boundaries are not enforced by patience, or by waiting for the outcome you want, or even by winning an argument. A boundary is a decision about what we will do when someone does not meet our standards. It’s why the most self-respecting way to establish a boundary is often to remove yourself entirely. And to certainly stop trying to control things, even if doing so means giving up the possibility of eventually getting the outcome you wanted. Because even if the behavior changes, even if you finally get the commitment, even if the woman is unfollowed and the relationship is made official, do you actually feel safer with him?

Oftentimes the thing we thought we needed was never really the thing we actually needed. We might think we want him to unfollow her, but what we really want is to feel secure. We might think we want him to stop flirting, but what we really want is to feel chosen. And we might think we want him to commit to a relationship, but what we really want is something we perhaps cannot have: the comfort of knowing that he did not have to be convinced to want the same thing we wanted. We have to be willing to ask whether we are trying to solve a relationship problem by changing a person’s behavior when the better solution might be changing our own circumstances. If we cannot trust him, perhaps we shouldn’t worry about how to make him more trustworthy. If we are constantly afraid he will leave, perhaps we shouldn’t spend our time figuring out how to make him stay. If we need elaborate rules or scheming or orchestrating to feel secure, perhaps we are not in a connection that is capable of giving us the security we are asking it to provide. And I understand it’s a tough reflection to sit with, because it might ask us to leave a situation or person before we are ready to do so. But that is what makes a boundary a boundary. The response our friend deserves is to ask her whether she even wants to remain where she is, despite how much she previously wanted to be there.

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“He said, she said?”

Recently, I was in the car with a couple of friends, driving back from a beautiful, but far too short, weekend trip to the Apostle Islands. I was the driver, which I almost never am, and even after a quick beach nap and a relatively early night, I was still pretty beat on the ride home. Thankfully, I had two of my favorite people, two of the best things that came out of law school, with me to keep me company. We began chit-chatting about pregnancies, one of my friends is expecting her first child, and men, and the law, and life generally. It was exactly the kind of meandering conversation I love. But, as tends to happen on a long road trip with friends, eventually we exhausted the usual rotation of dead horses to beat and stories to tell. At some point, one of my friends pulled out her phone and announced that we HAD to listen to this podcast: Love Trapped. So we turned it on, and it consumed us for the next several hours of highways and unreliable cell service.

Listen to Love Trapped on Spotify here.

For those who have not had the pleasure, Love Trapped tells the story of Clayton Echard, a former Bachelor lead who found himself at the center of a bizarre paternity saga that ultimately revealed itself to be a lie. The podcast had a lot to work with: at least one lawyer whose conduct raised significant questions about professional judgment, an outlandish ploy that somehow came dangerously close to working, and Laura, whose story became the subject of intense public fascination. From everything presented in the podcast, Laura appears to have lied, habitually, in her court filings, but she also appears to be someone experiencing profound and untreated mental-health issues, which, to me, makes her story more complicated than the routine villain story the internet seems eager to construct around her.

I often re-share a quote from Bryan Stevenson that I think fits here: “Each of us is more than the worst thing[s] we’ve ever done.” It is possible to be horrified by what someone has done, including what Laura has done, and still recognize that there is a real person underneath the behavior, a person whose life did not begin with the terrible decisions for which we now know them. At its worst, true crime asks us to forget that distinction. It gives us the facts of someone’s story in such certain detail that we can begin to experience the person as only a character.

Yet, with all of that in mind, like so many others, I was hooked. And not because I had any particular affection for Clayton or his romantic life as a failed Bachelor. I didn’t even watch his season of the show, and I probably could not have picked him out of a lineup of interchangeable male reality television leads. What kept me listening was the sheer volume of it all. We got the messages, the transcripts, the legal filings, the competing accounts, the bad decisions and, eventually, the fall out.

That said, I have spent enough time around courts to know that the law is a blunt instrument for dealing with the choas of human behavior. It can likely determine whether someone violated a law or breached an agreement or, sometimes, whether one party is legally entitled to something from another. But it often fails to answer the questions we actually seem to want answered when we become invested in these true crime stories: Why did they do this? What kind of person does that make them? Who is telling the truth? Who deserves our sympathy?

I know this acutely because, before Love Trapped, I had already spent hours participating in essentially the same phenomenon with the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni harassment and defamation lawsuit. And with that case, I wasn’t merely digesting commentary; I was making it. As a legal-education content creator, I posted dozens of videos about the case, broke down legal filings and judicial orders, and drew on my experience as a federal judicial law clerk to explain what I thought was likely happening behind the scenes.

And the more I listened to the Love Trapped podcast, the more it reminded me of the core dynamics at the center of the Lively-Baldoni lawsuit. There was, for example, a large amount of public information, or at least the appearance of it, and also a robust public curiosity over the case: legal filings, text messages, public records, competing narratives, everyday people flying across the country to attend court hearings, parents driving to courthouses after school drop-off to make public-records requests, and online commmenters poring over legal documents to breakdown what they believed those documents proved. And there was the Justice for Clayton faction, which mirrored a similarly vocal faction of the internet that began rallying around Justin Baldoni as the true victim in his dispute against Blake Lively. Like with Laura, Baldoni supporters began demanding not merely accountability for Blake Lively, but something closer to her complete annihilation. It seemed that very quickly, Lively, like Owens, became the woman the internet had collectively decided was the villain.

The internet loves to take-down a “bad woman.”

I understand the pull of these true-crime stories, especially when they involve fame, wealth, and power, because they offer us the chance to peer into the dark underbelly of human behavior without any of the risk. We get to feel as though we are seeing the unvarnished truth about public figures we do not actually know, and we want that. There is a genuine intellectual curiosity at play here, and perhaps a desire to understand how victims like Clayton end up in these situations. I do not think that impulse is inherently bad.

But somewhere around the tenth hour of Love Trapped, long after the road trip had ended and I was still listening, my discomfort with the storytelling began to grow. By the time the first season was ending, I realized the show had stopped being primarily about Clayton and what he, and, spoiler alert, others, had been through and had become increasingly about Laura in a way that felt wrong to me. We were no longer simply trying to understand her motives or reconstruct what had happened. Nor was the podcast attempting much meaningful discussion of the mental-health issues that seemed so plainly relevant to the story. Instead, the last several episodes focused on Laura’s punishment and her unraveling as a spectacle.

The tonal shift was jarring, in large part because the retributionist theory of criminal punishment always struck me as fundamentally wrong. I have never found the idea that someone should suffer simply because they have caused suffering particularly compelling. And yet, is that not, in some ways, where true crime inevitably wants to go? We begin by asking what happened, and eventually we want to know what ought to happen to the person who did it. The first season of Love Trapped could have ended, as many similar podcasts do, without a neat ending. Instead, it returned this summer with several more episodes that seemed designed to satisfy our collective desire for closure, and that closure came in the form of punishment.

Perhaps the impulse to see someone punished when they have done something wrong is rooted in the same primal need to reassure ourselves that the madness that we are witnessing could never actually touch us. And so, we watch, we judge, we label, and then we move on, having done nothing to change the circumstances that produced the story in the first place. And nothing good comes of it.

In fact the opposite is often true, stories like this are routinely used to undermine women who speak out against their abusers. Because when the public obsesses over the woman who is a liar, a fraud, or the “crazy ex,” we are not consuming that content in a vacuum. We are, in fact, reinforcing a set of archetypes that already exist and that can, and will, be used in the real world to discredit women who come forward with true stories of domestic violence and genuine harm. This is the “Amber Heard Effect” at scale. Every time a woman stands up in a courtroom or in a public statement to describe her experience of abuse, there is already a library of women to choose from to discredit her. Women who lied, women who were unstable, women who fabricated allegations, or women whose stories fell apart. And those few stories of “bad women” inevitably become hard evidence in the minds of people who want to believe that the woman now in front of them is another one of those liars. We have made it very easy to collapse the label “mentally unstable” into the label “untruthful,” but mental illness does not automatically make someone an unreliable narrator.

There is a danger in our growing appetite for stories in which we are reluctant to accept that maybe nobody is entirely innocent. We can become so interested in tidy stories of messy human behavior that we lose sight of complexities that might matter. Someone can be a liar and still experience violence. Someone can cause profound harm and still deserve grace. Someone can be manipulative and still be telling the truth about something that happened to them. We humans are capable of being many things at once. But, that said, our appetite for a satisfying, tidy narrative often demands that we choose one.

I do not say any of this to shame anyone, least of all myself, because I am as complicit as anyone in this consumption. I clicked play on that podcast, and I kept listening even after I started feeling uncomfortable. I have even participated in the very ecosystem I am now questioning with the Lively-Baldoni lawsuit. Sometimes I participated because I was genuinely trying to understand what happened (and explain what happened to my followers) and sometimes, if I am being honest, because I wanted to know what might happen next.

I certainly do not think there is anything wrong with being entertained by a compelling story. But understanding that story fully often requires us to tolerate at least some level of uncertainty. It requires us to resist the temptation to turn people into characters like we did with Laura Owens. And it requires us to acknowledge that knowing even an extraordinary amount about someone’s story does not mean we know that person or that full story. Laura has done some terrible things, and Clayton and too many others were victims of her schemes. But the glee with which some of us followed her take-down will likely not fix the issues with the family law system and will likely not make anyone safer. It gave us a story. It gave me something to talk about on a long car ride home. And that might be all the good that came from it.

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“My bed is not a democracy.”

If a straight woman refuses to date bisexual men, does that make her biphobic, or does it simply reflect a dating preference? And who, if anyone, gets to decide when a dating preference crosses the line into bigotry?

This question has taken over my social media feeds over the past few weeks after a number of bisexual men began…

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“A sign would be helpful.”

We talk about romantic relationships as though everyone eventually arrives at the same crossroads. Down one path is what we often dismiss as settling: choosing the stable partner, the decent life, and the sensible option in love. Down the other is risking everything for a great love—the kind that asks you to leap into uncertain…

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“Breaking news: women are not property.”

I came across a TikTok recently that has been sitting with me longer than I expected. The creator, remy, argued that men on the political right tend to treat women like private property, while men on the political left tend to treat women like public property. Different politics, same premise: women are still trea…

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“I got a text!!!”

A Note Before We Begin:

This piece does not contain finale spoilers. The observations that follow are based only on the edited version of events presented on screen, and I recognize that reality television gives us only a small window into who these contestants actually are. We do not know these people beyond what we have been shown, an…

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“I’m direct, so I’m a green flag?”

This one may be slightly niche, but stay with me. If you have not already encountered it, there is a voice note circulating online that has become something of a litmus test for feminists. No, I am not talking about the “This is Demitri” prank, or even the prank clipping Rob from Love Island’s sexy Quinn audio. This one…

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“Use code TRANSPARENCY for 10% off!”

Let me paint you a picture: you log into your favorite social media app and begin your scroll. The first video is from one of your favorite creators. She first became famous for her takedowns of entitled, misogynistic men, calling out body-shaming, sexism, and hypocrisy. That success became a podcast, a book deal, and…

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“The good girl’s guide to bad boys.”

Over the weekend, I found myself watching yet another recent romance release, only this time it was Your Fault: London, which felt like a noticeable departure from the kinds of romances I have been gravitating toward lately. Recently, I seem to have landed in a stretch of stories that are surprisingly invested in emot…

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“It finally ends!”

Last Friday, Judge Liman issued what will likely stand as one of the final substantive orders in the long, expensive, and exhausting legal drama between Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and Wayfarer Studios, a case which has drawn an ever-expanding constellation of followers—content creators, supposed “mommy sleuths,” and a small but devo…

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“Swipe right for summer lovin’?”

We’ve not hit the summer solstice yet, but up North the weather is finally getting nicer and, at least from my vantage point, summer has officially arrived with all its glorious heat and humidity. This time of year, my clothes are getting smaller, but my smile is much wider. To me, summer will always be a season of fun, p…

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“Happy Pride. Obviously.”

This year, Pride Month kicked off in one of the most unexpected ways possible: With a reminder from a recent New York Times guest essay that “There’s Nothing Wrong With [Women] Wanting Men.” Huh?

As a bisexual woman, I am arguably not the article’s target audience. Author Magdalene J. Taylor explains in the opening paragraph tha…

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“I was better on the page?”

A common criticism of male leads in romance is that they are unrealistic, or too idealized to be believable. The argument goes that these “book boyfriends,” written largely by women, function as fantasy fulfillment with little corollary in the actual world. But what makes the backlash to Belmont Cameli’s recent portrayal of Ga…

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“Wait. . . So, I’m the bad guy?”

I’ve written before on Substack about the strange structural similarity between a crush and a horror film, and how both depend on a lack of information to do their best work. The hidden monster and the unknown beloved each become a canvas onto which we paint our deepest fears or fondest fantasies. The obvious remedy for a…

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“A break? My ‘Dreamhouse’ mortgage says otherwise.”

I’ve always been a hard worker. Even as a student, I packed my schedule full with honors (and AP) classes, sports, jobs, leadership positions, and volunteering. And yet, I still found a way to excel at all of it. Predictably, when I entered the workforce, I quickly established myself as the reliable one…

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My lover says he makes bread.
But he doesn’t knead.
And he doesn’t wait.

He mixes flour, water, and yeast into a bowl with a fast hand,
but he’s forgotten the salt.

He’s rough.
He’s careless.
Still, it comes together.
Just enough to resemble dough,
and even that is too much time spent.

He shoves it into an oven cranked too high 
and pulls it out scor…

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“Decentering men was great, until one centered me.”

As I was editing this post, I learned, along with everyone else, that Megan Thee Stallion had broken up with Klay Thompson: the man who inspired her recent single “Lover Girl” or “my man, my man, my baby, my baby, my baby.” Despite what she wrote about him in her song, it turns out Klay Thompson cheated…

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“Everyone loves a mystery.”

A lot of you are here because, one random day last year, I started posting about celebrity lawsuits. Jay-Z had just been named in a Jane Doe sexual assault civil suit filed against Diddy, and he posted a “statement” on Instagram that, frankly, annoyed me. It was dismissive, which I understand on some level given the accusatio…

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