somewhere, in her handwriting, he’s inched his way in. the dots in the i’s and the crosses in the t’s. fluctuations in her verbal patterns, too. subsequent tics and subtle accents on words that never pre-existed him.

it is thievery masked as passion and vulnerability. it is the inescapable side effect that people like keats and fiona apple warned us of.

it is the culprit of tear-jerking, stuffy nose movies

and heart-shaped chocolates

and restaurants with a romantic ambiance

and long white dresses

and lavender roses

and every bad love song ever written.

the post-credit, big bolded question in a young woman’s life of whether she consents to being consumed whole and whether the person doing the consuming will still love her when there is nothing left.

for her twentysome years, without ceremony, she’s been forced to accept the strange bright silence at the center of said consumption. the way a body agrees — before the mind is able to arrive — to be a country another body is welcome to occupy. with crops she did not plant and borrowed vowels and emotions she’s never seemed to felt. the softness she catches in the eyes staring back at her in the bathroom mirror can only be attributed to the euphoria of being loved back.

as every young woman can relate to, she was told to build herself first. the assignment has always been solitude, because a woman who has not yet named her own values and marked her own perimeter of desire is a woman who would let a man be the concrete under her foundation and call the result a house. although her beliefs remain somewhat solidified, she’s come to find out that the concrete was never him. the concrete is, and has been, the slow patience of two people becoming, whilst being in the weight of each other.

it’s inherently embarrassing to be in love, isn’t it? to look at yourself and find a skill as simple as recognition to be this difficult. there’s a small loosening in the muscles around the eyes that used to, on a low subconscious frequency, brace for impact.

it knows trust and the act of surrendering oneself in a room.

it knows what it is to be looked at and valued on an ordinary tuesday with smudged eyeliner and stained sweatpants.

she always believed love in her twenties was distracting. in her mind, there’s no world where love could possibly be both all-consuming and foundational. but with him, she’s felt nothing but enlightenment. oh, how enthralling that i could possess a love and and a life outside of love. love in her twenties reintroduces a woman to the girl she used to be. the one who folded origami hearts under her desk in kindergarten and had designated pen colors for particular people. she would’ve adored how her present version composes his last name in gentle cursive letters. her state of mind is more foolish than she’d like to admit aloud, as if a small chorus of butterflies at the base of her throat sings before seeing him.

she sees him at every red light, at every checkout line, at every god forsaken dinner party he doesn’t accompany her to.

she sees him when the light on the corner of her block hits the specific gold that signifies an existence of a higher being. he is just further evidence of that case, and that mere thought sickens her as it infiltrates her brain.

there is a privilege in being permitted to a burning love. not everyone receives, in a lifetime, one person to whom the ordinariness is not a demotion. watching her mother and her aunt and her cousins and her dearest older friends navigate marriages and second marriages and near-marriages and love affairs of every quality makes her lack in gratitude impossible.

there’s no gentler word to describe her condition except possession. she is utterly possessed, under a spell of love and wandering a city that has begun to arrange itself around him. workings of ancient civilization have various explanations to this phenomenon and what happens to a body when another enters it on the metaphysical layer. mystics call it divine visitation, poets call it the wound, rumi wrote it as a broken jar leaking honey, the psalms wrote it as a hart panting after water, and the group chat that consists of her 4 best girl friends think she is being unwell about him. the room she lived in has been renovated by a stranger who somehow already lived there before birth. as if she’s being haunted by a ghost that’s still alive. yet, we know that she has no intention of leaving, and the idea of falling from her own version of cloud nine is unfathomable.

she’s back in kindergarten, crouching on her knees and elbows, doodling the soft edges of flower petals and the letters in his name in pink, thin-tipped marker.

she’s dreaming of the aisle she’ll one day walk down, with her father on her elbow and the love of her life shedding a singular tear as the pianos hum to the beat of their eternal love story.

she’s picturing suburban landscapes and two poodles and a minivan to fit their big, happy, and complete family.

what more could she ask for?

in the midst of modern culture, where online personalities like shera seven and wizard liz are preaching a version of radical feminism to a rapidly growing audience of women in their twenties and thirties, we are watching a real time shift in relational gender dynamics.

we have officially entered the era of feminism in which men are no longer merely tolerating a dominant woman, but seeking one.

now, before i provoke the short-dicked, black-pill chuds of substack again, i’ll acknowledge that what these women advocate for is substantially more radical and complex than the point i intend to make today.

the most flourishing relationships i’ve witnessed among my circles did not necessarily consist of women bullying their boyfriends into buying them a birkin, although content creators like melody show that might be proven successful in some cases. the key factor is unwavering confidence in self. it’s about being unafraid to set boundaries and vocalize expectations and refrain from diluting how you truly feel to please anybody but yourself.

because if your man refuses to meet your needs, that’s completely fine.

another man absolutely will.

since the dawn of my attraction to men, i have fallen victim to the widespread belief satirized for us by gillian flynn. i wasn’t always self-aware of my need to be the cool girl, which in theory, is integral to its point. you don’t even realize how much of your own will you’re bending for a man until the girl in the mirror starts to become unrecognizable. to a younger me, being a straight-identifying woman meant that in order to keep a man, i had to be irrevocably chill. low maintenance. agreeable. one degree cooler than the situation ever called for. it meant swallowing gut reactions to the errors of men in order to preserve their perception of me.

but the consequences of my decisions ultimately forced me to reevaluate my line of thinking.

where does my anxious attachment stem from?

surely if i pour my soul and worth into one person, the gesture will be exchanged one day?

why is it that no matter how much i put my partner first, i’m the one that ends up with a broken heart and complete lack of dignity?

these were all questions i couldn’t fathom answers to. seeing relationships where men shower their women in gifts and extravagant dates and grand gestures of love and affection were all once exceptional fortunes that i thought were granted to the extremely lucky.

meanwhile, watching the women in my life walk their men like dogs and maintain the most functional, long-term relationships i remain bearing witness to has forced a realization upon me:

men really do love bitches.

now, every time i refer to bitches in this article, it’s not in regards to the throwaway insult we’re all familiar with. a bitch is a woman whose center of gravity is inside herself rather than inside the man. i purely mean to reference a woman who stands her ground, respects herself deeply, and in the exact reciprocal arithmetic of adult attraction, receives that respect back from the men in her life.

active participants of book tok may have already sensed a reference to sherry argov’s why men love bitches from a mile away, which was, at its ripe year of publication, dismissed as anti-feminist trash by mainstream press.

there’s an irony to argov’s use of the word bitch, as if stepping into a man with a bruised ego’s brain after being taken aback by a woman setting strict boundaries warrants such a vulgar and emotionally charged title. as they say, there’s a power in reclaiming something originally meant to weaponize. but what i believe the book truly argues is that men are attracted to women who possess their own lives, their own opinions, and their own standards. bitch is merely punchy vernacular to contrast flynn’s cool girl, to emphasize that a bitch refuses to participate in the game that the cool girl tries so desperately to win.

stripped to its skeleton, argov’s thesis simply argues that respect will always precede love.

despite every ancient patriarchal myth that’s been sold to us, respect from a man is not earned by habitual compliance. it’s earned by standing on the things women have been taught are selfish to stand on in the first place.

while history tracks the conditional submission of women, it also determines the role that men play in a traditional relationship. the decision-maker. the breadwinner. the provider. the alpha. yet, existing research on decision fatigue proves that the average adult participant in our western industrialized economy makes a documented estimate of roughly thirty-five thousand small decisions per day. isn’t it safe to argue, then, that the men who spend all day making every decision in the room are almost invariably the men who most crave being told what to do in private?

we can see this visibly playing out in current day media, with an entire generation of men publicly stepping into relational positions that toxic masculinity would’ve never stood for a decade prior.

men used to go to war, but instead, modern man is now:

• complaining about you not texting first

• ordering a matcha or a coffee that is at least 60% milk and sugar

• picking a song for their monthly photo dump

• assuming passenger princess in your car

• hitting the tanning beds

• organizing their instagram highlights

• voting for a love island winner

• lining up at the goodwill bins

there’s also the sociocultural explanation to men’s attraction to an assertive woman and that is the popularly subjective attractiveness of a woman who has requirements.

we are living in an era of what i can only describe as the collective female emotional labor slump. ask your nearest female counterpart and they will report that the endless emotional accommodation of the average heterosexual relationship is not worth its return on investment. the woman who lacks the fear to walk away from a relationship that doesn’t serve her is still somewhat rare in today’s day and age. in reference to the dommy mommy tik tokker i mentioned earlier, it wasn’t brought up to prove that men enjoy being degraded by women (although that might be true in some cases). we don’t know if they ever fulfilled said luxurious date, but at the least, their interest was peaked because she wasn’t asking them for a date. she is telling them to take her out a date. a steak and lobster one, at that. she makes it evident that she could give a flying fuck if they accept or refuse, which is the exact scarcity that men can’t help but chase.

as a reformed cool girl, i could actively make myself throw up thinking about the embarrassing shit i’ve done to get a guy to like me. songs and tv shows i’ve pretended to like. tattoos i’ve gotten because i’d “look so much hotter with this on your body”. forced compliments and choked down opinions to compensate for their lack of self-esteem. identities and masks i’ve taken on because somewhere down the line, i’ve learned that guys like me better if i don’t give them a single reason not to. but after a while, you start to lose sense of yourself. a breakup felt like the end of the fucking world because i didn’t know who i was or what i truly enjoyed after leaving my decisions in the hands of my ex-boyfriends.

for those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading jem calder’s newly released debut novel, i want you to be happy, i’ll do you the favor and tell you to run, don’t walk to your local bookstore.

as a former joey-identifying woman, there’s no worse feeling than walking away from a connection with a man who was never technically your boyfriend and wishing you could take back all of the times you held back your tongue. reversing the belief that being blunt makes a woman unlovable would’ve saved you a whole lot of time and energy that has otherwise been flushed down the drain.

if you have spent any real time on this earth being a woman, you have at some point, shrunk yourself into a version of a woman that a certain man could handle and been dumped anyway. but i say all of this to conclude that the woman who is easy to be around is not the woman who turns out happy. she’s used or thrown out for someone that “keeps him on his toes”.

if you’re a woman who seeks to win in love, you must decide that your own opinion of your life is the only opinion that matters, and the men in your vicinity can either rise to meet you or quietly remove themselves.

so, in the interest of saving my own time and the time of every woman reading this: be a bitch. respectfully. lovingly. with grace and taste and the specific confidence of a woman who has already picked herself. the men who left were never going to pick you, but the men who stay were, on all honest readings, already waiting for you to hand them the leash.

as most true things do, the thought occurred to me in a rather ordinary circumstance where i felt particularly grounded in my state of mind. i had a candle lit in my room that smelled of clean linen. i listened to the hum of the city outside my window that played in harmony with the domestic rhythms of a quiet apartment. and almost in unison, i could hear the sound of my own thoughts, which, for once, didn’t conjure the feeling of loneliness.

in fact, i was in excellent company with the voice of the woman i had spent most of my life trying to drown out.

i used to be terrified of silence, and the idea of being alone with my own thoughts. so i filled the noise with any form of audible distraction i had access to. music. television. podcasts. people’s company. but it wasn’t until years of living in a busy household and overstimulating 9-5 jobs that i’ve become completely comfortable with sitting in the uncomforted feeling of stillness.

which then led ultimately to the deeper realization that there’s a variety of methods to harbor stillness in everyday life:

• taking the long way home, even if it means adding an extra 30 minutes to your walk or drive

• putting your phone on do not disturb

• investing in a slow read (bonus points if it’s secondhand and has thoughtful annotations from previous owners)

• writing handwritten letters to your loved ones

• cooking a meal that reminds you of home

• walking your pet(s)

• sitting curbside and people watching

• spending time in nature

• finding your favorite method of a physical activity

• starting a physical journal

• taking a pottery or a painting class

• collecting plants and flowers to nurture

even mentioning the idea of grounding hobbies and analog activities is difficult without sounding like a middle-aged woman who just discovered sound baths and iowaska. but thinking about how much of my life i’ve been living inside a noise i had built to protect myself is more than eye-opening. it’s revitalizing. to embrace the gratitude i hold deep in my heart and allow myself to sit with the good and the bad and the ugly. it doesn’t matter what feeling my thoughts invoke initially, because even the conscious acknowledgement that i’ve let myself feel is extraordinary. to have a mind that’s alive and a present soul run free, taking me wherever it’d like to take me today.

it’s hard to think about my family and not cry, who have (at various points in the last 25 years) seen me at my very lowest and refused to leave my side. they are the support system anybody would be lucky to have, along with my friends, who are much like my chosen family. my inner circle consists of a group of women i’ve been lucky to call my best friends for too many years to count. we crossed paths as girls and chose to stick around and watch each other become the beautiful human beings we were always meant to grow into.

it’s also hard thinking about how much of my early twenties that i spent convincing myself that i was unlovable, which happened to be the direct consequence of allowing the wrong people into my life. but it’s just as hard not to be grateful for the problems, especially when they led me to moments and affairs that i am most lucky for today. i am grateful for the specific grief of watching the internal clock tick, of realizing i am no longer a teenager, of understanding that years and memories have past me, and that the person i will become is now being formed by the decisions i can no longer defer. i am more grateful for the terrors of adulthood than i’d normally like to admit. the small daily weight of responsibility. the looming expectation of productivity that eats at me on quiet mornings like a cavity working its slow way toward the nerve. but it’s not only the outcomes of the bad that result in my gratitude. it’s the reminder that i’m still alive and still forming. still capable of hurting. still capable of comprehending and forgiving.

i’m reminded that stillness is acceptance, in its truest and most peaceful form.

once in my early childhood, i saw a hummingbird hovering outside my grandmother’s kitchen window. i was probably eight or nine, and she pointed to it, telling me how hummingbirds only live for a few short years, but they visit the same flower every morning of their life. i remember feeling sad for the bird, and the limit in obligation it’s given despite its infinite possibility. but for all we know, the hummingbird never mourned the shortness of her assignment. she simply arrived at the same flower that morning. and then the next. and the next. until, one morning, she didn’t. there was something grimly beautiful about her not knowing it’d be her last morning, nor could she even conceptualize the complexities of death and living life to its fullest extent.

on my most pensive days, i still couldn’t fathom why we inherit the human ability and privilege of counting our mornings. the fear of being nothing but a wondering soul or being reduced to a small figure soon to be forgotten is a thought that continues to visit me at 2am with the loyalty of an evil ex.

perhaps this is what the analog life really means. it’s not necessarily the absence of a screen or the specific fetish of putting pen to paper or nature or a candlelit bath.

it is the willingness to be present of the thing that is already happening to you.

it is to be eager to hear the hum of your own life without the need to drown it out. it is the ability to sit with your thoughts, even if it means letting the terrors of existentialism consume you for a moment, because wouldn’t you rather sharpen the wonder of being present in your body than diminish the mere thought?

all us are, at this exact hour, alive, and being taken down an exact path paved for us and us only. being granted a living and breathing body and a unique soul is to be many. to be brief. to be, in some quiet and terrible way, all of the girls she has been and will ever be, one walking behind the other, none of them able to hold the others when the light finally moves.

stockholm, 1978.

strutting in the cold that makes my teeth ache with every singularly lengthy breath, i immediately regret thinking that an xl leather jacket and close-toed pumps would keep me equipped for the trudge to the pub four blocks down.

it’s wednesday night, and my only two friends just spent the last hour convincing me to leave the flat. despite my hatred for a wasted night of getting pale ale spilled on my jeans and being subjected to shallow conversations, i knew refusal was untenable. so here i am in my patent ysl slingbacks and shitty-drawn eyeliner, seeing what the night has in store for us.

despite it being on the quieter blocks of östermalm, we walk into st. andrew’s, where we’re gradually greeted by the loud noises of live music and drunken exchanges. it reeks of cigarettes and vodka and the damp wool in a room full of coats. my friends order a round of french mules and i take in my surroundings. the walls are lined in dark wood, with a strangely discolored stain that look older than the group of drunken bookies sitting right below it. but despite them, tonight’s crowd looks fairly young, making me question if the uni kids are drinking themselves away through finals week. it makes me miss college. when the hardest part of my week was making it to my 9am lecture with a raging hangover. it beats working a dead end post-grad job and the looming fear of death before ever having lived through anything truly extraordinary.

i take a long sip from my glass as we hover in a corner close to the hallway leading to the bathroom. as one of my friends starts to complain to us about her boyfriend of four years, someone has flicked on a small stage light behind the bar, staining the opposite corner of the room where the next band starts to settle in. a bassist and a guitarist sit on stools, tuning their strings and messing with the amps, a drummer with a bandana in the back pocket of his ripped jeans is talking loudly to the bar manager, and a man walking center stage towards a standing mic.

he has floppy brunette hair and his eyes are the kind of sad that lives just north of pretty. green, i think, or possibly hazel once he stands away from the beaming light in his face. he’s in a gray joy division tee that has gone thin at the collar, exposing a peak of a chest-piece tattoo to compliment the dozens of tiny ones that cover the subtle muscles of his arms. they start playing power in the darkness by the tbr, and something about his voice makes my drink start to go warm against my palm. i take a quick glance around the room and it looks like i’m not the only attentive one, as i see a few college girls in the crowd giggling to their friends and making googly eyes at the lead singer. but i don’t even have it in me to care, because once they reach the end of the first chorus, he glances over at me, mid-song, and flashes a smile that makes my knees wobble.

the tortured musician, a trope produced by the yearning female mind and imagination since the birth of rock, offers a set of signals that every other man in her life isn’t trained to give: he articulates feeling. deep and shameless feeling in front of hundreds, at that. he is fluent in the language of longing and, most importantly, he will not be embarrassed by the depth of his own feelings in front of you.

it isn’t just about the man, as hot and talented as he may be. it’s about investing in a lifestyle. the reason why groupie communities and digital fan-fiction were invented in the first place was for women to feel utterly visible in a grander sense of the meaning. it’s about falling for a man who stands for something bigger than himself, and that as his partner, you’d be a part of something just as special.

the fantasy has a particular gravitational pull on women who, in their day-to-day lives, are ordered. for the girls with a 9 to 5 and a closet neatly organized by color and category of clothing. because if there was anybody that was her stark opposite, it would be the gritty drummer of a punk band with no working concept of a sleep schedule.

the travis barker to her kourtney kardashian, essentially.

there’s also a very specific compulsion of being chosen that draws in a targeted female audience that pamela des barres touches on in her memoir i’m with the band, which remains the definitive account of what it was to be a woman inside the music scene in 1970s los angeles. des barres wrote at length about the way being the temporary favorite of a rock star in your twenties felt like the only currency that counted at the time.

and for the women who long for an all-consuming connection, what is more attractive than a man whose two passions are creating gorgeous music & you?

camille paglia, a cultural critic whose 1990 novel sexual personae remains one of the most under-read academic treatments of rock and desire, argued at length that the male performer, from bowie to dylan, offers a woman access to a version of masculinity that has traditionally been reserved for the feminine. he weeps and confesses and pines and mourns and adorns himself, allowing fans the opportunity to briefly imagine what it would be like to love a man who is not ashamed of loving anything so deeply.

then, of course, she gets to sleep with him and find out.

the archetype has been curated across decades by a notorious rotation of men that inspired the trope of the tortured artist. a 1983 morrissey, spinning around a microphone stand with a gladioli in his back pocket, opened the door for nineteen year old girls across the globe who decided to ditch virginia woolf for alt rock. the lineage between morrissey and the tortured souls who followed was light as day. ian curtis in the years he was alive and writing before his death invented a similar register of dread and yearning with every album between 1980 and 1992 that the cure put out. r.e.m. carried the alt rock version of this trope throughout the 80s and into the college dorm rooms of the early 90s.

these were the men who taught an entire generation of women what to want, so that by the time that alex turner and matty healy were all the rage on tumblr, their elder relatives had been softened by this charming man a decade earlier. but what this entire apparatus rests on is not the music. it is the specific interior access the music seemingly grants to an influential audience. as if every lyric is a small window into a man’s private life and hidden emotion. american psychologist geoffrey miller argued that creativity itself, including music production, functions as a sexual display comparable to the peacock’s tail, which in turn, is a biological pattern that the entertainment industry has since learned to monetize on.

the trope has since then been extensively curated across decades of film, television, and literature. almost famous, a cameron crowe classic, based his own experience as a young rolling stones journalist touring with the allman brothers, in which his account birthed the cinematic template for the modern muse, miss penny lane.

one of my recently favored reads has been holly brickley’s deep cuts, which not only opened my eyes to new genres of music like deep indie from the 2000s and college rock, but to the reimagined wattpad toxic relationship trope between a normal girl and a rockstar. more than anything, the atmosphere of the book is what turned brickley’s novel into a small cult text among gen z women. it captures the exact texture of being twenty and simultaneously being both the muse and the audience to a tortured artist, all while slowly and messily falling in love with him.

i couldn’t help but feel like this category of media is having a big comeback, with chandler levack’s mile end kicks hitting streaming platforms this year as well. set in the montreal indie sleaze scene, the movie stars barbie ferreira and rodrick from diary of a wimpy kid and tells the coming-of-age tale of a love triangle between a girl from toronto and two boys in a band.

but what majority of the media also informs its audiences of is the brutal realities of dating a man who plays music for a living. it all sounds like a dream-come-true scenario, until reality sets in and you realize that the 29-year-old bassist you’ve fallen for hasn’t paid his phone bill in fourth months, sleeps on a mattress on the floor, and has most likely given you oral herpes.

or even if we’re talking about a respectably famous artist, let’s take all documented and nonfictional narratives from the mouths of their spouses.

angie bowie, for example, who spoke extensively about the particular loneliness of being married to a man whose entire day was structured around being adored by strangers, which ultimately ended in him cheating on her.

or the biographical topic of priscilla presley, who had her teenage years uprooted on account of elvis whisking her away, barely being present throughout the relationship, which ultimately ended in him cheating on her.

are we seeing a pattern here?

i talk a big game based on rambling stories from mutuals and mutuals of mutuals living in cities with big music scenes, but thankfully, the closest i’ve ever been to dating the tortured artist was my dj ex-boyfriend who made weird dark ambient electronic music. so instead of meaningful ballads and soul-crushing lyrics, all i got were some ominous ass beats with a distorted sza sample buried three tracks in.

but what most personal accounts of the muse arrangement eventually converge on is the realization that the man at the center of it is not actually interested in the love of a single woman. the entire architecture of the tortured artist requires witnesses, despite how much he may contest to the attention or the invasion of privacy. what the woman doesn’t realize she’s fallen for is a man who is more emotionally invested in the stroke of his ego than love in any monogamous sense.

the person that the tortured artist cares about the most is himself. the songs are the mechanism by which he is allowed to bathe in his self-obsession and his mental illness is his primary asset, as letting go of it would mean letting go of his whole personality.

it’s the kind of thing that lana warned us of in brooklyn baby and the satire of the exact new york hipster ecosystem she noticed had girls in their twenties foaming at the mouth. the tortured artist boyfriend who’s in a band and gets high on hydroponic weed is not attractive despite the toxicity. he is attractive because of the toxicity.

dating a tortured artist is, in the end, all fun and games. that is, until four years after the breakup, when you have finally gotten engaged to a man who treats you exactly the way you deserve to be treated, and you find out that your ex is on a stage somewhere in singapore, in front of ten thousand people, singing she was five foot seven and her name rhymes with heaven.

if devon were here at this very moment, she’d be telling us to ditch the fantasy too.

out of all of the subjects racing through my mind every minute, how do i decide on what to say out loud? how do i select just one topic that feels more pressing than the other millions?

the first thing gresia said she wanted to work on with me was my instinctual need to feel responsibility for the weight of the world. she seems to think i have a too-generous hope that people are inherently good and that if i bend my own will and wants far enough, the world will meet me somewhere kinder. but in turn, she’s worried that i’ve been suppressing my own emotional well-being in the process and mistaking that suppression for righteousness.

and as someone with a constant flood of thoughts, my brain went immediately empty and i had nothing to say. because to my almost twenty-five years of gathered knowledge, i thought this was just what it meant to be a girl.

on all accords, living with your best friends in your twenties is essentially what an unsupervised thirteen-year-old girls’ sleepover would look like on a permanent loop. the other month, my roommate and i decided to fulfill our recent fixation with slime tik toks and make a little trip to target for some very important supplies.

glue.

glitter.

applicator.

charms.

the obligatory sweet treat.

next thing you know, it’s one in the morning and we’re giggling over pink glitter slime oozing onto the kitchen counter and the fart sounds it makes when you pop its air bubbles. mind you, we’re both turning twenty-five, and neither of us have done anything more structurally responsible in those last seven days than track down the minion coco delivering our doordash order.

we sat in the kitchen with no makeup and stained tank tops, eating store-bought tiramisu from the container, slushy noobz playing in the background, watching the slime pool on the countertop.

i turn twenty-five in approximately four days, which means my prefrontal cortex is understood to reach full development. in a strictly neurological sense, it is the year that marks your complete formation of a person. it is also the time period i’m expected to be very close to figuring out the rest of my life. i’m almost at quarter age, and before you know it i’ll be ancient, which means i have to begin thinking about the big milestones: kids, husband, mortgage, insurance policy, roth iras, the whole nine. and yet, i cannot even bother to remember to book my annual doctor’s appointment. i have no working knowledge of what a deductible is. i have zero informed opinion about the trajectory of my own career. i still cry when i am away from my family for more than five days. the idea that i am halfway to any milestone that involves the phrase settling down is, at this exact juncture, hilarious.

twenty-five feels just like fifteen. i have the heart and internal monologue of a middle school girl, with the responsibilities that come with entering a new phase of life. it is a specific and unpleasant venn diagram.

i have been spending most of my free evenings this month with my friends, fighting to nurse the inner child that lives in my body. we play scary video games at midnight that produced two full days of nightmarish dreams. we commit the american sin of consuming desserts that only children, people unafraid of a clogged artery, and the actively stoned would consider viable at that hour. we collect fidget toys and any ugly-cute creature sold in a blind box. we exchange club nights for board game nights. even reminiscing of my memories in college takes me back to scootering around our apartment, drunk on a green biggie buzzball we bought at the liquor store down the block. all of us desperate to feed the version of the little girl in us that is still trying to claw her way out.

i’ve always felt as though my two brothers have been granted the gift of behavioral youth. even as a kid, i have never been allowed the same privilege to be young. not since i was at an age where i was no longer a first daughter, but an older daughter with a responsibility of behaving like an oldest child. which, in itself, is a full-time job with no scheduled hours and zero vacation policy.

being a woman means arriving to every room already having been doubted. it means preparing for a preconceived notion that i won’t notice the higher quote at the mechanic. it means being mildly misled at doctor’s appointments and a bizarre attitude from any older woman in a people-facing job. it means accepting the fact that i will most likely get talked over in meetings at work that i should be leading in the first place.

the older i get, the harder it is to pretend like it doesn’t accumulate. like it doesn’t boil in the back of my ribcage in a small, compressed weight that i haven’t yet learned to soothe.

i wish i was in love with roxanne gay’s bad feminist as much as my fellow gen-z feminist lit community. but after a long, hard read, i couldn’t shake off the author’s performative tone of writing and the feeling that she was trying a bit too hard to be relatable to a modern audience. what i couldn’t deny was the candor. because women are already expected to overcompensate our intellect, we are rarely allowed to be respectable figures the moment we contradict ourselves. as if we’re just never allowed to be wrong. and the reality is that being a woman is to be, in some deeper sense, entirely contradictory.

it is to want intimacy and independence.

to want to be led and to want to lead.

to want to be wanted and to want to be left alone.

how in the world am i to have a hundred thoughts a day that all agree with each other completely? how could all of that be respectable, and at the same time, coherent?

sometimes, i think the only way i can feel alive is by causing a wave of relevant discomfort. by writing something people cannot easily agree with as a means of reparation for all of the times i was too agreeable. like naming something that a room did not want named will solve the sadness i feel in my bones.

over the last two weeks, some of the comments and direct messages i have received on my recent essays have been horrifying, to say the least. the kind of foul and deeply misogynistic shit that i didn’t think could exist on a platform meant for voices to be heard. as if being open about my sex life makes my physical body public property and a subject of torment to the growing black pill incel community online. i should’ve known my words would enrage the specific population of men who have made the internet their emotional processing venue.

i am tired of being fluent in my own suppression. i say this as a woman who has spent most of her life learning the specific dialect of it.

for every word choked back with a generous smile. for every unnecessary apology i’ve muttered and every sorry excuse i’ve given to people who deserve less than less. for every woman who’s been forced into silence and suppression.

it feels foolish, almost. to admit that all this time, i’ve been seeking a solution to my own self-deprication, something that will lick my wounds, and the sheer axiom in it being the framework of my existence. merely a shift in mindset. but straying away from a language that was forced upon me early is a start. it also means an entirely new outlook on the way i interact with life.

maybe that’s what twenty-five really is. a life for me.

one without regret or hesitation or apology.

a guy who opens every single door for you without fail and tucks you into bed and treats you right in all the ways you deserve.

but with this specific breed of man comes a specific atmosphere that arrives at the bedroom the way a graduate student arrives at his thesis defense: over-prepared, over-caffeinated, and terrified of failing the woman in front of him.

there is nothing inherently wrong with giving a nice guy a chance. what i want to talk about is the specific pathology of sex with a nice guy and the ways that i’ve observed it tends to fall short.

the problem is that the nice guy always seems to arrive at the encounter under the assumption that he must, in the first four minutes, deliver a strong opening statement. some of them handle this by giving her what he considers making love. eye contact. slow strokes. whispers. the kind of ryan-gosling-in-the-notebook sex that whirls in female fantasies, but not the kind of sex that satisfies a drunken saturday night.

although it’s the version of sex most of us grew up thinking we wanted, romantic sex is only good with a man i am genuinely in love with, whereas having slow, worshipful sex with a man i have known for three weeks feels like eating a bowl of plain yogurt with no toppings. it’s nutritionally acceptable and gets the job done, but ultimately leaves you wishing there had at least been some honey or granola on top.

the frustrating part is that this same nice guy could, if he stopped being so scared, actually give her the best dicking down of her life. ryan gosling, for the record, did not treat rachel mcadams like a museum piece in the notebook. there was an implication of rough candlelit floor sex, leaving the both of them naked, winded, and reeling.

the other extreme is worse. some nice guys, having read online that women love being choked, having seen on a subreddit that women love being spat on, having understood at some vague level that women want to be degraded, have decided that the way to deliver on the last three dates is to give her the entire porn catalog on a single trial run. as if fucking her is his one hail mary, and if the last three dates were not enough to seal the deal, the dick, at least, will be.

in his defense, i’m not saying the entire fault is on the nice guy. peggy orenstein, in her 2020 book boys & sex, documents the way porn has become the primary sexual education of an entire generation of american men. the average age of first porn exposure in the u.s. is now under thirteen. by the time a man is old enough to sleep with a real woman, he has watched, on the average estimate, more sex than he has had by an order of magnitude. debby herbenick, the sex researcher at indiana university who has been quietly correcting the discourse on rough sex for over a decade, has found in her ongoing research that the incidence of choking during heterosexual sex among adults under thirty has risen so sharply since 2015 that it now qualifies as a normalized behavior. a significant percentage of young women report being choked without asking for it. a nontrivial number report it as a first-move.

in other words, the nice guy has been briefed, and when he gets her home, it’s his trial-by-fire moment. but with all of the nerves comes the awkwardness in a setting where inhibitions are designed to be at an all-time low. the quick thrusting is borderline robotic. the dirty talk is forced and just comes out flat out weird. most of the nice guys that i’ve ended up hooking up with slap your ass with an attitude of hesitation and with a quarter of strength needed for it to be qualified as sexy. like they simply cannot muster the action in a natural way.

what nice guys do not seem to understand is that the bedroom is the one place in the entire relationship where a woman secretly wishes to be treated like a goddamn slut.

she has been, for the rest of the week, a competent adult with a job and a linkedin and a subscription to the new york times. she does not, at 1 am on a saturday, want to be treated like a woman with a linkedin. we typically view degradation on a surface level as the stuff you see in porn, but what nice guys don’t understand is that in the bedroom, it’s less seen as degradation and more as a service.

let me be extremely clear about something before i say the next thing. consent is not optional, nor is it a preference. consent is the entire underwriting of the sexual encounter, and the men who do not ask for it in some form are the reason we are in this cultural mess in the first place.

that being said, there is a specific execution of nice-guy-coded consent that stops being sexy and starts feeling like a monthly performance review. every step of the way, at every escalation, the nice guy pauses to check in. is this okay? do you want me to keep going? are you comfortable? is that pressure good? do you want to move to the bed? is the bed okay? do you want to take your shirt off? do you want me to take my shirt off?

at the end of the day, being a consent king is not a bad thing. but by the fourth time he’s asked me for my preference on the next sex position, it does become vibe-murdering.

the research on this is, in fact, slightly more nuanced than the discourse would suggest. multiple studies on sexual communication and satisfaction have found that partners who communicate during sex report higher satisfaction, but that the communication most correlated with pleasure is nonverbal. sighs. moans. body positioning. the shift of a hip. the response to a hand. the kind of communication a man is doing when he is actually reading the fucking room.

sometimes you just want a man to feel the tension, kiss you mid-sentence, and take the hint that the fuck-me eyes you have been giving him for the last twenty minutes were, in fact, an invitation. i can acknowledge that by their nature, nice guys are overthinkers. they were raised by the right role models who have taught them to overcorrect into a sexual choreography that requires the woman to give a verbal green light between every eight-count. bottom line, i don’t wish to be interrogated, or assaulted at that matter. what i need is a man confident enough to feel a yes without needing me to say it in three consecutive sentences.

what a girl wants (based on not only my own preferences but the observances and conversations i’ve had with most women) is to be flung around and touched and fucked in all of the right ways without having to lift a finger. i do not want to be asked does that feel good. i do not want to be asked how does that make you feel. i want to feel like i’m getting fucked, not like i’m filling out a questionnaire.

justin lehmiller, the harvard-trained social psychologist whose 2018 book tell me what you want summarized the results of a survey of over four thousand americans on their sexual fantasies, found that a substantial majority of women fantasize about being dominated. the fantasy of surrender, in his data, is the single most common category of female sexual fantasy. lehmiller was careful, and correct, to point out that fantasy is not the same as consent. what it does mean is that a very large percentage of women are hoping, in the specific moment of the sexual encounter, to be led.

a nice guy will practically beg to go down on you.

they love it more than they love the sex itself. they love the specific texture of watching a woman unravel by mouth and they love that they are the reason for her pleasure.

the complicating factor is that going down on a woman will always feel ten times more vulnerable than the sex that comes after. any woman who has been exposed to porn or any weird discourse surrounding female genitalia has developed a very specific set of anxieties about being looked at closely down there. it takes a certain amount of trust to get eaten out and that trust is easier to summon when you are dating the man versus when you have known him for six days. but nice guys insist. they will do it on the first date and they will offer to do it every single time you take your pants off for the foreseeable future.

and there is, finally, a specific thing that happens after sex with a nice guy that i am not entirely sure how to describe without sounding maternal:

from my whirlwind experiences with sweet men, whether it’s in the casual dating stage or it’s a mutual one night stand, every nice guy wants to be held after sex.

it’s nearly immediate. the moment his adrenaline is at peak, the first thing his body wants is to be cradled. sweaty, naked, and vulnerable in the arms of the woman who made him finish. the head goes into the chest. the arm goes around the waist. it’ll be one of the more tender parts of the whole exchange. but it is, in all honesty, also a little bit sad. a grown man craving that softness so immediately from a woman he has known for six days is a form of unspoken confession. he is asking, in body language, to be reassured that he did well. that the woman he is currently sweating on will not, at 3am, disappear. much like the post-breastfed exhaustion from their newborn years, they always resort back to a place of comfort and peace from the loving arms of a woman.

sometimes, the specific horror of having a sweet man in your bed is the realization that you do not, at this exact moment, know how to teach him what you want without ruining the fact that he is trying.

having sex with a nice guy also means being in a room foreign to you at 2am that smells faintly of a candle he lit for me before we fucked, lying awake and looking at the ceiling and thinking about how much i want to be doing this with a man who is not, in this exact moment, so anxiously trying to do it right.

nobody said it was fun fucking the nice guy. but then again, everybody loves an underdog.

there is nothing more embarrassing than being emotionally attached to a man who is not, in any official sense, your boyfriend. despite the texts, the sleepovers, the investment, the joint netflix account, and the toothbrush he leaves at your apartment, you’re stuck with a glorified fuck buddy.

the worst part is having to explain your connection to anyone. someone at brunch casually asks who you’re seeing and you can’t help but hesitate and mutter, he’s my… uh… special friend?

it is an exhilarating experience that i simultaneously do not wish upon my worst enemy.

attached with no real label.

technically single while being functionally taken.

giving a real relationship’s worth of energy to a man who’s given you nothing but a vague impression of interest and standing permission to keep coming over.

i have been on the receiving end of the i don’t do labels speech more times than i’d like to admit. if i had a nickel for every time i got my feelings hurt in a situationship, i’d be writing to you from my hillside mansion. but in hindsight, although i learned valuable lessons from my years as a situationship veteran, i’ve also learned that being in one is a big fat waste of your goddamn time.

what follows is a field guide for those of you with a man that you’re currently, quietly, exclusively, non-exclusively seeing. if he checks more than three of the following, i would like you, with all of the older-sister energy i can muster from a distance, to get out. before it’s too late.

because i can ensure you, if neither of you have any future plans to even attempt to establish the connection, there is no version of this that ends with him marrying you.

i. he pursues you aggressively from the start and things start to escalate at a rapid pace

the fastest way to identify a situationship man is that he arrives at full speed. and who can blame us for swooning? rarely are we gifted with a man unafraid to quadruple-text so early on.

he takes you out within forty-eight hours of getting your number. he showers you with compliments and drowns you in all the right things to say. he tells you he has a feeling about you before knowing your middle name. but alas, this is not the behavior of a man who is interested in a real relationship. this is the behavior of a man in the early phase of a hunting cycle he has run several times before.

dr. ramani durvasula, the clinical psychologist who has spent the last decade explaining narcissistic and avoidant relational patterns to the internet, has been saying it for years:

the men who arrive with the most heat cool the fastest. when you think about it, it’s quite guy-brain coded. me like her, me get her.

on the second date, he tells you he has never met anybody like you. on the third, he introduces you to his best friend. on the fourth, he casually mentions his mother wants to meet you. which kind of makes you think, how many girls has his poor mother had to encounter? this is love bombing, and it is not, despite the discourse of the mid-2010s, a rare or specific personality pathology. it is the standard opening protocol of the situationship man.

the strategy is simple. flood you with enough attention early that when he inevitably pulls back (which he will), you are already emotionally invested in the version of him he sold you on. by the time that the boundaries dissolve, the pace becomes normal, and you clock that things are moving too fast, you have already given him a key to your apartment.

ii. your plans feel more like suggestions than commitments

“we should hang out sometime” vs “will you go out with me?”

“let’s do something this week” vs “i made us a reservation”

see the difference?

now, i’m not much of a stickler when it comes to the first few dates. i’m never opposed to being wooed or impressed, but as long as the setting allows for quality time spent, i’m good.

being invited at 9pm on a saturday night to meet him at a sticky, packed sports bar in a neighborhood he was going to be in anyway, watching a game he was going to watch anyway, with zero plans for what happens after the fourth quarter is so far from a date, i’m cringing purely at the thought.

the situationship man does not make plans. he keeps a running loose invitation and keeps the same schedule of a man who is expecting to see you in the same way he expects to see his roommate, without any of the ceremony of a man who has decided you are worth showing up for. a man who is genuinely pursuing you treats the date like a thing he wants to happen because he wants you to say yes to the next one.

there is a stark difference between being pursued and being penciled in.

iii. he rejects anything that ties you to him permanently

ironic that he has all of the time in the world to constantly tell you how hot you are when he sees you or texts you, but becomes suddenly radio silent in every other case. he does not comment on your posts. he refuses to meet your friends. he changes the subject when you say the word boyfriend in a sentence that has nothing to do with him.

i was, in 2022, in a situationship with a man at the peak of bereal, at a moment when the culture of casual online-couple documentation had reached its own baroque high. we were practically living together, and were in the unprotected sex and grocery shopping the next morning phase of a situationship. one afternoon, without thinking about it, i posted a bereal of us at whole foods. the photo captured, exclusively, his tattooed arm pushing a cart. no face. no identifying information. it could have been any man’s arm on any given wednesday. all of a sudden, my not-so-boyfriend turned into blake lively in a simple favor, demanding that i delete it immediately. i was, at that exact moment, standing in the middle of whole foods when the realization hit me like a goddamn brick.

all of the bullshit lies and long nights of hearing him say “you’re the one for me” were as real as my acrylic gel tips.

iv. things move fast, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making any real progress

in the specific horror of the dreaded situationship, the timeline appears to be racing forward, but you never actually arrive anywhere. you have been hanging out for eight months. you’ve met his best friends that he’s known since middle school, gone on two weekend trips together, exchanged christmas presents. and yet, at the eight-month mark, you are in exactly the same relational position you were in at the two-month mark. no title. no future plans. no answer to the question, if pressed at a dinner party, of what he is to you.

situationships specialize in a very specific kind of illusory momentum. a sense of forward motion produced entirely by the accumulation of small intimate gestures, none of which involve actual commitment. it is emotional inflation with none of the underlying assets.

and if a man cannot answer, at eight months in, the question of what you are to him, the answer is not that he does not know. it is that he does not want to.

v. you are always being put on the back burner

although this can be a pretty tell-tale sign of any generally toxic relationship, not being a priority has to be one of the biggest glaringly red flags for a connection where nothing has yet been established.

you cannot keep a man in your life who is comfortable ghosting you for a weekend and returning on monday with no explanation and a hey stranger. showing up an hour and forty minutes late to a plan you have had on the calendar for three weeks is the highest sign of disrespect, and if you would yell at a friend for doing the same thing, why would you take that shit from a man who doesn’t show up for you?

the situationship man is not treating you like a priority. he is treating you like an option. a very good option. he says he doesn’t want to lose you, but is also unwilling to fit you in his life if it means inconveniencing him in any way, shape, or form.

what a man chooses to do with his time and energy is telling, and if it’s difficult for him to squeeze in any time for you before you’re even his girlfriend, you can forget about expecting anything real from this loser.

vi. he never really lets you know him

brené brown, whose entire academic career has been dedicated to the empirical study of vulnerability, has argued across four books and one very widely circulated ted talk that the corollary is unavoidable. a man who refuses to be vulnerable with you is a man who is refusing to be connected to you. he can be around you. he can sleep with you. he can eat every meal in your presence for a year. but if he never lets you actually see him, there is no tangible relationship.

seeing a situationship for four months means you probably know his coffee order, his last three exes’ first names, what his parents do for a living. but do you actually know his opinion on anything? personally, or for better or for worse, politically? what he wants his life to look like in five years? what he is afraid of? what his traumas are and what triggers them?

every conversation about his interior life is a conversation you have to press against him for. every one is met with a small polite deflection. this is not, as he will tell you, because he is a private person. this is because he is running a specific defensive protocol.

vii. you feel more anxiously attached than usual

this is, precisely, the moment when the people around you start to notice a shift in your demeanor. and this, simultaneously, happens to be the moment where you neglect the opinions that the people in your life have about your situationship because they don’t know him like i do.

you have suddenly become the woman who checks her phone every fifteen minutes. the woman who reads back through the text thread looking for what she did wrong. the woman who cries in bathrooms. but even neuroscience has neglected this phenomenon from being coined as any regular-shmegular anxious attachment disorder. this is a rational response to a relational structure that does not provide any of the stability you need in order to be a person.

amir levine, the psychiatrist and neuroscientist whose 2010 book attached has become foundational reading for anybody trying to understand modern dating patterns, has documented the exact dynamic at work here. he calls it the anxious-avoidant trap. when an anxiously attached person (statistically, the woman) enters a relationship with an avoidantly attached person (statistically, the man), the avoidance triggers a specific stress response in the anxious partner. she becomes preoccupied with the constant worrying that the relationship is causing her and the avoidant partner reads the preoccupation as smothering, and pulls further away. the anxious partner reads the withdrawal as threat, and clings tighter. the loop is what levine calls activation. it is, in the clinical literature, measurable in cortisol.

the broader research on commitment ambiguity has been remarkably consistent for two decades. partners in ambiguous relational configurations report higher levels of anxiety, worse sleep, and lower overall well-being than partners in either fully committed or fully casual arrangements.

viii. he is dismissive of the emotional turmoil this is causing you

most likely, when you’ve come to this phase of a situationship, you are at your wits end. you’ve mustered up the courage to bring up the ambiguity and truly define this relationship, and he tells you that you’re reading too much into it. or that labels are too much pressure. or, my personal favorite, he’s really enjoying what you guys have going on right now.

for those of you caught up with this year’s season of love island usa, you’ve been one of many to witness kayda and zach, who have spent six committal (for the most part) weeks in the villa together, and with only days left until the finale, announced that they’re progressing the connection by labelling themselves as exclusive. when the other girls in the villa, trinity included, raised the obvious question (what the hell does exclusively dating actually mean when they’ve been acting like a goddamn couple this whole time and the season ends in seventy-two hours?), kayda began to spiral due to the lack of support she was getting from her friends. and what was zach’s response? a masterclass for dismissive and noncommittal men all around the world:

“we know what we have.”

as a woman, how can you blame kayda? not only have we all taken a turn in her shoes, but my girl was just happy to make some sort of stride in the villa while everybody else was getting cuffed.

but zach asking her to be exclusively dating was far from a label. it was a label-shaped placeholder for the label he did not want to give her.

the situationship is the only relational configuration in the entire dating economy that produces all of the emotional turbulence of a real relationship and none of the eventual return on it.

it is a two-year time-share you cannot get out of.

a bar tab you did not start.

it is a version of intimacy that consumes your calendar, your emotional bandwidth, and your best years, and when it finally ends (as it always eventually does), it leaves you with less clarity about what you actually want than you had at the beginning.

the healthy relationship, even the unsuccessful ones at that, will teach you something about yourself. the situationship will only teach you how much of yourself you were willing to sacrifice to a man who did not remember your birthday and never planned to remember your birthday.

again, if you find yourself in a situationship like the one i’ve been describing above, stop while you’re ahead. not next week. not after i see how he feels about it. not when the moment is right. now. block his number. return the hoodies. burn the toothbrush. and do not, under any circumstances, sleep with him one last time.

if i can promise you anything, it’s this: the man who is not going to marry you is not going to un-not-marry you if you give him one more month.

life could always be better. i could always want more or have regrets, whether it’s about the choices i made or the ones i did not. i could contemplate every small decision that led me to where i am at this very second, in my sober body with non-sober thoughts.

maybe i live across the country, where i ended up attending a four-year and working my way up to senior editor at my dream publication company. i could’ve settled down early with three kids and a man whose identity is the least familiar to me in this life. maybe i’m happier there.

there is a theory that is quiet, contested, and mathematically ornate, called the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. it was first articulated in 1957 by a doctoral student at princeton named hugh everett iii, whose thesis was received so coldly by his own advisors that he left academia entirely and went to work for the pentagon. his central claim, which we are only now beginning to take seriously, is that every possible outcome of every possible event actually occurs, in a branching structure of parallel universes that fan outward from the moment of each choice.

and if it’s true and if every choice really does spawn a universe in which the alternative was chosen, then another version of me is out there in another universe where i’m not writing you this letter. and it’s all because i’ve never met you.

how scary is that?

about half a century pre-everett, meteorologist edward lorenz was working on a computer weather simulation in 1963. he noticed that the smallest possible input change (a rounding error, three decimal places deep) would cascade, over enough iterations, into radically different forecasts, which most know now as the butterfly effect.

now even though the origins of his findings were rooted in the subject of weather, every romantic in the natural sciences since has been writing about lives.

the gathering you skipped. the text you did not send. the drink you had. the one you did not.

but if there’s one thing lorenz has taught us, it’s that there is no such thing as a meaningless decision or trajectory.

the physicist david deutsch, of oxford, considered one of the founding figures of quantum computation, has spent the last forty years arguing that the many-worlds interpretation is not merely a mathematical curiosity but the most parsimonious explanation for quantum phenomena currently available. what i love about deutsch is that he does not describe the multiverse as a source of unease. he consistently describes it as a source of consolation.

because in a multiverse, no possibility is lost. every love that could have happened and every reconciliation that did not occur in this universe, occurred in another. the mathematics of possibility is inherently generous. and infinite.

i’ve been reading blake crouch’s dark matter, which is about a mid-career physics professor in chicago named jason who is, by every external measure of an american life, unremarkable. he leaves behind his dedication to miraculous science to start a family with his wife, daniela, and his son, charlie.

after an abduction, he wakes up in a life curated by another version of himself. the version who chose science over the marriage and made life-altering breakthroughs that granted him wealth and success.

the rest of the novel is his return trip. crouch invents a device that lets him access, one at a time, the other universes his choices have spawned. jason passes through hundreds. in one, chicago is on fire. in one, a plague has emptied the city. in one, daniela never left wisconsin. in one, he did marry her but the son was never born. in one, they met and divorced. in one, they never met at all.

but what makes the concept of this book so special is the specific texture of the almost. jason keeps finding versions of daniela who are almost right.

same face, wrong marriage.

same laugh, wrong life.

daniela is his constant. every other variable can change. the room can be on fire. the city can be in ruins. as long as she is with him, the equation resolves.

but what makes any of this so specifically romantic is not the science. it is the theology hiding underneath it. the way that the theory of parallel universes resonates with society is not about math or probability. it is an equation about eternal yearning. it is the insistence that in every accessible fold of reality, the constant persists.

love, on the available evidence, defies physics only when there is a specific person on the other end of it. it does not defy physics in the abstract or for the reader who has not yet been shattered by somebody in a specific room. it defies physics in the small, non-negotiable, entirely irrational way in which a person you have loved starts to define the shape of every universe you would agree to live inside.

you left your paperback on my nightstand. i know what temperature you take your coffee at. you called my mother, whom you have never met, from my phone by accident when you meant to call yours, and she said your voice sounded kind, which is the highest compliment my mother has ever paid someone that she hasn’t been formally introduced to.

you are the constant.

every other variable in my life can change and in every other version of a universe where we’re gifted the presence of our love, i will remain inexplicably gratified.

there is a version of me who never met you.

but there is no version of me who has met you and would trade it back.

not one.

at seven a.m., i’m tossing and turning while the sun rises outside the window. the light on my body makes me feel like a pig rolling around in a stye, but i have no real reason to get up and so i keep attempting to find the perfect position in bed. i stretch hard on my back in a starfish position, praying to god i don’t get a cramp in my right calf. i grab my phone with one red squinty eye open and start scrolling on instagram.

i remember that last night, i had a very random and unprovoked wet dream about some niche character from middle school. boy whose existence i have not thought of in eight years and, in fact, have no reason to. he had briefly entered my subconscious and then left, the way that some people are written into your life just to exist momentarily, with some briefly insignificant appearance, and never come up again. with the residue of the dream still in my physical body, i go to his instagram. it looks like he’s taking over his father’s real estate group in orange county. he is an active member of the lds church, and him and his perfectly mormon looking wife are expecting their first baby in september. it’s a boy.

it is only wednesday, and much like the midweek blues go, i can feel the weight of my own energy holding me to the mattress. the internal compromising begins. what if i call out sick today? no, because it will be obvious if i show up to work tomorrow, seemingly fine. what if i ask to work from home? that could be it. except, what if something awful and unpredictable happens later this month and i need the work-from-home hours for an actual reason. i could just call out. eat the loss of a day’s pay. as if i can afford to do that. who the fuck am i kidding. get up, bitch. get up. i have this dialogue with myself for ten or fifteen minutes until i finally build up the courage to roll my lazy ass out of the white sheets, make my bed, and walk groggily to the bathroom.

in the bathroom i lift up my shirt and bloat out my stomach to see what it would look like if i were pregnant. except, it is first thing in the morning and i have what is colloquially understood among women as morning skinny, so even pregnant, i am thin. nice. exactly how i have pictured it. could be thinner though. i stare for a little too long. eight years ago, a doctor in a beige room slid a small piece of plastic into the underside of my left arm and changed the shape of my body and my mood and my appetite in ways nobody at the time felt the need to walk me through. i sometimes wonder, looking at the version of me in the mirror, what the version of me without nexplanon would look like. skinnier, probably. happier? mother of two by now, in a different version of my life, in a different house in a different city with a different man whose face i cannot picture but whose existence i sometimes feel pressing against the bathroom mirror like a draft. i lower my shirt.

i brush my teeth with squinty sleep eyes and a tiktok looping on the counter and i wash my face. the medicube peel off mask stares at me from inside the open cabinet, tempting me into working from home with a face mask on, and i shut the door before it can guilt me further. i pull my hair back and lightly draw on a thin brow. i think about how i used to crayon in thick laminated brows in high school. blush has always been my favorite step. being southeast asian, my skin sits on the warmer tan end of things and my undertones run more red than yellow, which means that finding the right blush to balance out a face that already looks flushed is something i’ve been working on for a decade. i smear toasted teddy it onto the highs of my cheekbones and blend it in with my middle finger until i look either rosy or mildly sunburnt. i smother my neck, shoulders, and chest in rhode glazing milk and spray jo malone on the lathered areas and get dressed and walk out the front door.

i fast step down the stairway and pick up the pace on my way to the elevator, praying i do not run into jeremiah. the last time i ran into jeremiah on his way to the gym i got concealer all over his white lululemon muscle tank. what does he do all day, anyway? gym, eat, nap, fuck bitches, more gym, repeat. the kind of life i am sure is sustainable for a man with no internal compromising to do.

my route to work involves thirty minutes of twists in the road and freeway entrances and freeway exits and side streets before i reach my neck of the woods. a new chinese restaurant that i am pretty sure is part of a chain just opened on our block, but of course in their first opening weeks, the city has decided to make some major sidewalk renovations directly in front of the restaurant, which i cannot imagine is good for business. today, driving past it, i notice a new big banner under the restaurant’s sign. it says something about a grand opening special and it makes me a little sad. i have always hated the idea of neglected places and neglected people. i used to be the girl who would spend a long time at the skincare mall kiosks that nobody else would stop for, who would strike up a conversation with the lady selling crystals at the farmer’s market and take a pamphlet for her aura reading services from a pile of pamphlets you could tell had been untouched for months. some part of that girl is still in me.

i walk into the office at eight thirty. the morning is overcast and the room is dark and the air smells like freshly brewed espresso and burnt toast. joni mitchell’s a case of you is playing from the communal speaker. i greet the handful of coworkers who get in earlier than i do and i slowly unpack what i need for the day. laptop. water bottle. glasses. bad feminist by roxane gay, which is my read for the week. i open every application i will need to be inside of for the next nine hours. chrome. email. slack. asana. hubspot. google calendar. whatsapp. i check every mode of communication a client could possibly use to reach out and prod me for a project update with the utmost urgency.

throughout the day i write ad scripts, organic social content copy, email invoices, take meetings on campaign performance updates, task out next campaign steps until my head feels like it is going to come apart. i am a cog. i am doing cog work. in between the cog work i solve sudoku puzzles and the day’s wordle and scroll substack and do anything i can to make the hours move faster.

around noon i take my lunch break. on the way out i put on my shades and my earbuds, less because i want to hear anything specific and more because i want to signal to the world that, for the next hour, i would like to be disregarded. on my way to the cafe downstairs, i wave hello to ray, my favorite worker at the bookstore next door. we do the shallow small talk that has held our acquaintance together for the last six months. the weather. plans for the upcoming long 4th of july weekend. the way the block has gotten quieter or louder since last we spoke. it is exactly the right amount of human interaction to want to have with a man i will never actually know. the coffee shop smells like fresh pastries and lavender. i say hello to the crew and order my usual, an iced oatmilk hazelnut latte, and joseph, who is working the counter, tells me today’s coffee is on the house. i thank him with a grin and take my drink to the corner booth and pull out my book.

i like to think that one day, someone will slip in next to me and ask me about the book i am reading. what i keep failing to account for in this small ongoing fantasy is that in any given month, i’m either reading something with a very threateningly feminist title or something with the word dead in it. neither of these particularly invite the kind of corner-booth encounter i continue to half-prepare for in my mind. i finish the coffee and the chapter and take a lap around the block.

it is perfectly cloudy today. the air feels brisk but refreshing, the way early june air in los angeles occasionally decides to feel. i walk past clumps of teenagers in insanely low rise denim, gossiping and giggling and mildly obstructing the sidewalk. i walk past joggers with their dogs. i walk past suited-up coworkers going out to lunch together in groups of three and four. maybe my problem is that i like being alone with my thoughts too much. even when i think about inviting my coworkers out to lunch with me, or texting a friend to see if they are free, sometimes it feels like it would just ripen my mood. i was not always this introverted. it is just that once you discover the comfort of hanging out with yourself, it becomes hard to want the opposite.

from my desk i can hear the dull, mildly loud buzzing of one of my coworkers rolling the knots out of his back with an electric massager. two others are discussing mexico's world cup progress over the sounds of the coffee machine. the tech team is on the other side of the room, testing microphones and adjusting camera gear for a podcast they are setting up for later. an office full of men is mundane, but peaceful. ignorant bliss, much like the brain of a man. my coworkers seem to like me enough, and i like them enough. i sometimes wonder, sitting at my desk, whether they would worry about what would happen if i were absent, or whether they would simply realize that the office had been a functioning office before me and could be one again after me. both possibilities feel equally plausible at certain times of the afternoon. i shake off the thought with the justification that i’m the last thing they’re thinking about, as the possibility of them ruminating over the morality of opening up a white claw at two in the afternoon or what their wife is cooking for dinner tonight is much higher.

by five thirty, i am in the car driving home to scorsese baby daddy on repeat. the internal compromising is back in full effect, except this time it is about the gym. it’s been an exhaustingly long day. what if we skip today? if i skip today, you will for sure not go tomorrow. which means two days. two whole days i am actively paying for a gym and not using it. granted, the gym is part of my apartment building. i get home and i fight the urge to flop on the couch. i pull on a free people sports bra and my gym shorts under an oversized band tee that i self-cut off the shoulder a few months ago when i was bored, and i walk down to the gym. i warm up with mild stretches and hop on the elliptical.

on the elliptical, my mind runs again. what am i going to eat for dinner? when do we pay rent again? what are my weekend plans? when did i last wash my bedsheets? does my family want to see me? what if i meet the love of my life on this elliptical? did i start my period? the mind moves the way feet move on a machine that does not produce any actual motion. i am paying for the elliptical and the most that the elliptical does is knock a couple hundred calories off of my iced latte.

i shower after the gym, towel off, and shut my brain off for whatever junky reality television show my roommates and i are fixated on this week. a few months ago, when we first moved, in it was a show about the drama between ten calabasas-based nepo babies. now it is the new season of love island usa. the three of us doordash takeout from the indian place a few miles from the apartment and sip diet cokes from the can and yell at the girls on the television about their bad decisions. we are very confident about how we would handle ourselves differently if we were in the villa for a group of girls who only leave the apartment if it has to do with new food spots or unpreventable obligations.

around eleven i begin to unwind. there is no sweet justice in the world like the sight of your own bed after a long day. when i lay down, i plug in my phone and go through the messages i missed during the day. text from my mother at five thirty: don’t forget to text your grandma happy birthday today. oops. text from a guy on hinge at two thirty: are you still free to hang out tonight? let me know. oh. did i say today? i have, somewhere in the running tally of internal compromises of the last several weeks, agreed to meet a man on a wednesday and then completely let it slip my mind. i feel a large general weight of every person i have similarly let down by not texting back in time, in the months and years before today, which is gravely overwhelming.

i close the phone.

i close my eyes.

and i let myself drift off into another universe for the next eight hours.

june, to me, feels like the secretly romantic eldest daughter of the months.

she oozes femininity. she is the shedding month, the defrosting month, the month in which you can finally take your hair out of the tight ponytail you have been wearing since march. she is the seamless transition from soft spring into vivacious summer. in los angeles specifically, june means the traffic has loosened, school is out, the breeze that arrives around 6pm has the exact temperature of an exhale. cool summer nights. windows cracked open. diet coke in hand.

i don’t know about everybody else, but june makes me want to do everything near a body of water. read a book at the beach. take a walk by the lake. grab a drink near the ocean. write substack articles next to a pool.

i know what you’re thinking: why is this bitch writing a listicle?

i publish personal essays on the internet for strangers, and therefore, i have very few moral arguments left to make about content. i’ve always felt too self-deprecating to write a piece that consists entirely of telling people what i think is cool. on close inspection, most of the things i consume are not meaningfully different from what every other 20-something woman in los angeles is consuming.

i mean, what can i say? you can take the girl out of la, but you can’t take the la piece of shit out of the girl.

but this month, i’ve been feeling an expansive gratitude that has, in turn, made me want to share. i’ve met so many genuinely intellectual and talented people in my (almost) two months on substack, whose work i get to support and who support mine back. this outlet, and this month as a whole, has made me feel very content with my state of mind and everything around me, including the small material things and places i have been encountering with the people i love.

it felt, in the end, strange to hold back on any of that. particularly given the fact that i have no hesitation writing about deep insecurities and my first time masturbating.

so, i am not, in any meaningful sense, profound in my tastes. in fact, you can fully skip this article and find 50 tik toks right now telling you to run, don’t walk to most of the things i’m about to tell you. i’m the last person to pretend like i’m turning anybody onto rhode glazing milk and bacari’s ninety-minute open bar.

anywho, here is what i loved in june.

music & albums

• cupid deluxe by blood orange: truly the essential no-skip, spring/summer album of the year. sometimes listening to this album makes me want to cry, it’s so beautiful and full of yearning and broken romance, all over luscious grooves and soho-at-3am. also, we’ve been blessed with not one but two caroline polachek features on this album… wake up, babe, it’s an avant-pop summer.

• in the aeroplane over the sea by neutral milk hotel: i can thank miss holly brickley for this one because do you ever just feel like you found something at the exact right time in life? neutral milk hotel is the musical equivalent of feeling-everything-at-once in your early 20s. this album is soooo good and will have you feeling like you’re simultaneously sexy and spiraling.

• you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love by olivia rodrigo: i mean… i’m pretty sure i don’t need to recommend this album to you. it’s gone fully platinum in my apartment, in my car, and in my head since it dropped. with hazy fuzzed-out guitars and sad ass lyrics, olivia just keeps outdoing herself. this album pays its debts to new wave gods and sonic easter eggs, nodding to post-punk icons like jack white, lily allen, robert smith, & ian curtis.

• bedtime stories by madonna: i can only really describe this album as madonna in her mother era? with velvety, r&b-leaning, candlelit slow-jam ecology inspired by björk, this album gives a very after-dark feminine warmth that gives the sweetness of spring and the sensuality of summer.

• do that again by malcolm todd: malcolm todd is literally that guy!!!! the newest indie nepo baby white boy on the block. most place him in a lineage of bedroom pop equally influenced by indie confessionals and r&b valentines, but i wanted to note one online critic calling this album “a honey-colored daydream, loose and sunlit, flirtatious one second and detached the next”, which is just entirely accurate. this whole album has me feeling breezy, slightly horny, and lovesick.

• sports by sports: you are the right one is one of those songs you hear exactly once and then it just kinda lives in your nervous system. the pure jangle-pop sugar rush. a very generally-loved, lo-fi, sun-bleached porch vibe. it’s uncomplicated and playful and a gorgeously easy listen.

books & literature

• deep cuts by holly brickley: my current read! it is sweet and chaotic and gives that summer fever vibe i’ve been craving in literature. the narrator is a little obnoxious (which i’m realizing is just the modern female literary protagonist convention) but she is cool in her own way. a big win for fans of the 90s/2000s indie music scene. it is the first romance novel i have read in months that has not induced a reading slump. also if i haven’t sold you enough yet, picture drew starkey as the hot lead singer in an indie rock band…

• just kids by patti smith: bought alongside deep cuts with the explicit intention of blessing (or should i say bothering) every person in my immediate vicinity with my newly extensive music knowledge and sudden revival for the taste of romance. also reminds me of when i, too, fell head over heels for a boy with a film camera and a dream.

• i’m thinking of ending things by iain reid: my freak pick of the month. i spent april and may inside the back catalog of karin slaughter, which has produced a kind of recalibration of what counts as disturbing. this book left me deeply confused, deeply anxious, and deeply anxious. i tried watching the netflix adaptation first and fell asleep in thirty minutes. i say: read the book, skip the movie.

• yesteryear by caro claire burke: i do not care what anyone says, this book was lit. the narrator is, again, intentionally unlikeable, but she actually made me laugh for the entire length of the book. imo, natalie is what ottessa moshfegh tried to do with my year of rest and relaxation. the premise is genuinely clever and i fully expected to be let down by the ending, but i was, against my better instincts, very satisfied with this book.

movies & television

• girls (2012-2017) shoshanna remains the patron saint of every gen z girl in her mid-20s. also lena dunham is absolutely my bitch. obsessed with her mind.

• janet planet (2023) this movie feels like the stepsister of ladybird. another funny and beautiful coming of age from a24 set in the 90s. anything with complex female relationships in media… i expect at my desk by the end of the day.

• the simple life (2003-2007) what says unserious girl summer like ‘03 paris and nicole, knee-deep in arkansas soil in low-rise apple bottoms and von dutch trucker hats? i watch this when i need a pick-me-up, whether it’s for a laugh or to remind myself that even if you put a diva in rollerskates and a sonic uniform, she still shines.

• obsession (2026) this movie spoooooked me when i saw it in theaters. i haven’t seen a scary film with jumpscares this unpredictable since talk to me. unhinged women in horror is forever my shit!!!!!

• empire records (1995) liv tyler, renée zellweger, robin tunney… damn the man. save the empire. this movie is so whimsical and reminiscent of high school relationships and the bonds that working a minimum wage job can create. it holds such a special place in my heart and is the perfect movie night watch with a group of your closest friends.

• can’t buy me love (1987) so, this might actually be my favorite rom-com of all fucking time. a wimpy ass, yearning patrick dempsey? this movie is dead classic. i did my 84th rewatch this month and it just proved that this movie never gets old.

apparel & beauty

• milk by dedcool: everybody talks about xtra milk but nobody wants to talk about milk. extremely understated and subtle. soft, delicious, fresh, slightly milky. the perfect scent to wear on a light summer day.

• the st. george quarter sleeve top: jane birkin started this god-forsaken trend and it’s just perfect in a dangerously universal way on every body type. cou cou intimates dupe. cute as hell with a mini jean skirt. also, if you live in la, the brandy, st. george, and chill since ‘93 trifecta at the grove is a diabolical move for the summer.

• saie super gel luminizer: this, combined with rhode glazing milk, has retroactively justified the years i spent insecure about my oily skin type and my inevitably sweaty nature. glowy, as it turns out, is back. it’s clearly going hand in hand with this summer’s iteration of the clean girl and the new combo is bare-faced/minimal plus actively glowing skin.

• sol de janeiro 68: arguably my favorite SDJ scent of all time. the wear-time on any of these damn body sprays needs to be studied. milky with the smallest possible hint of tropical. if i’m feeling crazy, i’ll do the body lotion/spray combo and i smell like amber vanilla all day long.

• an exposed balconette bra: this trend is so cunty minimalist moody art gallery/rooftop bar night in a very serious way. the easiest and sexiest way to elevate a night out look. catch me doing this through the entirety of summer with a low-cut tank and my little black kitten heels.

places & activities

• cafe tondo (chinatown, ca) that wine bar where tame impala hosted his secret show and debuted deadbeat. without me??? fucked up. but the bar itself is small, intimate, moody, with a justifiably limited drink menu and a dj playing chill house music. it is the performative-male’s version of a new york dive, complimentary with red neon lighting and a small outdoor patio.

• slow jamz (silverlake, ca) r&b and jazz collective that hosts stargazing and live jazz nights at sunset triangle plaza. i went last week with friends and had the best time. i actually spent most of last week in silverlake and did not, on the record, have a bad time once (please forgive me for being, briefly, a silverlake apologist.) but i can’t deny, it was a very cute and rare communal time. and it is, conveniently, right in front of the win-dow. so… double score.

• a good used book (echo park, ca) i love a bookstore. i feel, structurally, safe in a bookstore. you’ll find an interestingly artsy crowd in this particular curated vintage bookstore, but it’s a cozy spot in echo park, nonetheless. take your friends here, or a first date, if you’re feeling wild this summer.

• point dume (malibu, ca) for those who get overstimulated at a regular beach, point dume is just among a string of secluded beaches in malibu. the beach is tucked away behind the cliffs. you park at westward beach and walk up to find a quiet stretch of sand. bring a book, a speaker, a charcuterie board, and the people you love. so peak.

• a peach in the park: this activity is broad and not specific to socal residents (sorry to anybody out there who deemed this entire section useless). peaches are, in fact, my fixation fruit of the month, and there’s just something incredibly freeing about taking yourself to the park alone. spread a blanket on the grass, pop in headphones, and lay back on a tree stump with a book and fruit of choice. you’ll thank me later.

there are arguably more ways than one to be considered broke.

the most commonly discussed version is, of course, the financial one. the version with the overdraft notification, the version that includes splitting the check at dinner, and the version that dating apps have, in theory, attempted to filter out via the strategic placement of job titles.

yet, i have dated men who were broke on paper and still possessed the behavior of a dignified human being. but even after dating men whose salaries were not the issue, i’ve noticed they can also be broke in personality, broke in dignity, broke in taste, broke in love.

being a bum often has very little to do with money because being a bum is a mindset.

a bum is a man who has, somewhere in his early twenties, made a series of small concessions to his own laziness that have ossified into a complete personality. the likelihood of you having romantic relations with a certified bum is higher than any of us would like to admit.

here’s a list of signs that the man you’re seeing is a bum. if he possesses at least two of these qualities, i advise you to leave before it’s too late:

i. he is codependent because he has no life

the most identifiable feature of a bum man is that he has nothing going on.

he has no impressive hobbies, no friends he sees regularly, no routine he is loyal to, no relationship to his own body that involves moving it for any reason other than survival.

a bum man’s life is a holding pattern and it consists, almost entirely, of you.

in my early twenties, i had a boyfriend who was unemployed in the way that some men are religious: devoutly, regularly, and with a sense of personal mission. he got fired from minimum wage jobs the way people lose pens. during these jobless stints, he’d hold me a little tighter when we woke up in bed together in hopes that i’d decide to take the day off. “just one day”, he’d whimper. he’d tempt me with breakfast and marijuana and television shows created to kill whatever was left of my prefrontal cortex.

here i was, patting myself on the back for being the most supportive girlfriend alive, when in fact, i was being dragged down into the same hole he couldn’t claw his way out of.

i revised his resumes, applied to job interviews, and even wrote some of his essays for school. i did all of this work, just for him to stay unemployed, continue to flunk out of his classes, and learn that a girlfriend could be deployed as full-service emotional infrastructure.

when i left his place each morning, he would wait, like a dog, for the entire duration of my shift. when i returned, he would still be in the same position on the couch, watching the same show, alongside messy coffee table leftovers from the same deli he always doordashed from.

by his third unemployment, i realized i was witnessing the visual definition of a man for whom getting up and doing something had ceased to be a viable category of activity.

on the rare occasion that his ass would separate from his couch, even what he considered to be his casual hobbies added absolutely no substance to his life or could be deemed beneficial in any sort of way. in fact, most of the time, his hobbies were more harmful than anything. so as his girlfriend, i would often respect his couch habit over the drugs, alcohol, partying, and vandalism.

it took us breaking up for me to realize that the correct partner is one who enables the best version of you. a bum man provides the opposite effect, which is in constant competition with your potential.

and he is, in most cases, winning.

ii. he reeks of self-esteem issues

there is a new variant of bum man, encountered with the most regularity by women in our current dating climate, coined the performative male.

the silverlake-native, tame impala-listening, tote bag and carabiner-wearing, sproud matcha-drinking, lolita-reading male serves as a walking red flag to heterosexual women because they are leeches in the form of human moodboards.

what the performative male is actually performing, on closer inspection, is not a personality. it is a rejection. he hates anyone and anything considered that could be categorized into a “top 50”. he hates any show that most people are watching. he hates bars that a ton of people frequent. if he’s dedicated to anything, it’s hating things with mass appeal. what looks, on the surface, like discernment is the inability to commit to any taste he did not first vet against the average. he has built a self entirely out of refusals, which happens to be the same thing as not having built one at all.

in reality, the man who loudly and outwardly rejects everything mainstream is not, in fact, more secure in his identity than the man who simply likes what most people like. it actually makes him less secure.

the loud rejection of the popular is a confession dressed up as a personality. he cannot stand mainstream taste because he cannot stand the version of himself that would land, by default, in it.

he hates everything because he has not even began to meet himself.

the post-breakup personality theft is, somehow, worse than the breakup. all of a sudden, he takes your advice to cut his hair and wear his jeans baggier. he posts an instagram story to north by clairo, which only you know is a song he would not, in any alternate universe, have discovered without you. he begins watching the movies you told him about, on the hulu account you forgot to remove him from. he posts the picture of himself in said baggier jeans and said haircut, at the small cafe you used to go to together, drinking your usual coffee order.

he has, somehow, managed to take pieces of you that are now in active circulation on the dating market. some other woman is, at this moment, encountering a man who has been pre-loaded with your interests, your lingo, your offhand recommendations, and is forming a crush on the version of him that you, structurally, built.

in other words, a bum man will cop your swag with absolutely no delay.

and this, in the end, is the giveaway. a man with a stable internal sense of who he is does not need to absorb the woman he is dating. he can take her recommendations without deploying them as his own. he can encounter a piece of culture through her and not have the urge post it to instagram as if he discovered it.

if it’s not clear enough, i have no real objection to people growing. what i object to is the timing. the timing reveals that the growth was, in retrospect, possible the whole time.

he simply did not feel like accessing it until it proved to be useful to him.

iii. he contributes less than you do and you’ve somehow “made peace with this”

there is a specific kind of woman who has, over the course of her early-to-mid twenties, become accustomed to doing too much in her relationship.

she’s the one who handholds him through dinner with her friends, makes every single reservation, remembers the birthdays of his loved ones, sends him links to apartment viewings, sits him down to have the conversation about his career.

at this point, she might as well be breastfeeding her own boyfriend.

for my readers who are simultaneously fans of bravo tv, you’d know that the og cast of vanderpump rules consists of young hot women in los angeles silently bankrolling their boyfriends’ arrested development. the show’s resident crazy, kristen doute, had a reputation for financially dominating all of the men she dated. katie maloney spent a great chunk of her first few seasons getting her boyfriend a job at sur, just for him to have a panic attack on his first shift due to the sheer pressure of working a real job.

i personally believe a man should pay for most things. i do not believe this because i think women are decorative, or because i think women cannot. i make my own money. i pay my own rent. i have, on multiple occasions in my twenties, been the higher earner in my own relationship. this is the precise reason i feel qualified to write this paragraph.

the argument that modern feminism means women should be relieved of the expectation that men contribute financially in romantic contexts is, on inspection, an argument that primarily benefits men who would prefer not to. the women i know who hold this position the most loudly are, almost without exception, dating someone who is taking advantage of the position.

the women who pay for their own dates, again and again, are not being liberated. they are being charged.

what feminism, in its actual historical form, fought for was the option. the option to work, to earn, and to refuse marriage as an economic transaction. it did not, on the record, fight for the right to subsidize the dating lives of men who could afford to pay and simply preferred not to.

and to that, i pose the question: if you cannot afford to take a girl out on a date, have you ever considered the fact that you might not deserve to take her out at all?

my mom has, throughout my entire life, told me stories about my dad wooing her in the early eighties. in high school, my dad had no car and no driver’s license, but what he did have was fifteen dollars in his pocket and an idea: borrow his friend’s car for a single night, pick up my mom from her parents’ house, and take her out to an in-budget restaurant that she’d like.

don’t you just love when stories of your parents’ romantic history remind you of the fact that chivalry has, since then, completely vanished?

in a dating nightmares segment of the upstairs neighbors podcast, a listener called in to describe her first date story where the man, for their first ever in-person meeting, invited her over to his apartment. to her dismay, when she arrived, the apartment contained a single-person armchair with no television and no dinner because, as she discovered, he had assumed she would cook.

in his kitchen, mind you.

in retrospect, what is most clarifying about this configuration is that the imbalance of a relationship does not feel imbalanced when you are inside of it. it feels like being a supportive girlfriend. the language of modern relationships and partnership is structured in a way that, for many women, makes it nearly impossible to recognize the moment at which she has stopped being a girlfriend and started being an unpaid life consultant.

iv. he has big dreams and no plans

among the various qualities i have considered attractive in men over the years, the one that has gotten me into the most trouble is my documented weakness for the creative type.

i mean specifically the kind of man who, on the first date, mentions that he is working on something. whether it’s recording an album, writing a book, directing a short film, producing a podcast, he is building a brand. he uses the word projects. he says he is, technically, an artist.

what i did not understand, in the early innings of my dating life, is that there is a meaningful difference between a man with a creative life and a man with a creative aesthetic. the man with the creative life has some sort of evidence to show for his work, even if the first draft isn’t perfect. the man with the creative aesthetic, however, has none of this. he has a record collection that collects dust. he has a copy of the new yorker on his bedside shelf, unread. he has, somewhere in a drawer, three lines of lyrics he wrote in 2021. he is going to finish the EP (or at least he’s been saying that since you started dating.)

what i learned, eventually, is that the gap between dreaming and doing is not a resource problem. it is a drive problem.

you cannot give a man your drive or loan it out at favorable terms. you cannot transfer your ambition across the relationship like a venmo request. drive cannot be outsourced, or girlfriended into existence.

oliver burkeman, in four thousand weeks: time management for mortals, makes a case that has aged into something close to a dating advisory:

this line of research also tends to go hand-in-hand with the bum man who continues to live under his parents’ roof.

now, for the record, this doesn’t include the man with feasible savings for a down payment or the man staying home to take care of an ill mother. i am talking about the man who lives with his parents at twenty-nine with a million invalid reasons to cover up his commitment to comfort. with this form of bum man, it’s always rent is expensive, i’m figuring things out, my parents don’t mind.

pew research center has, over the last several years, repeatedly documented that the share of young american adults living with their parents has risen dramatically. in 2020, more than half of adults aged 18 to 29 were living at home, the highest share since the great depression. some of this is real economic pressure. wages have not kept pace with housing costs. the math of independent adulthood is, in 2026, mathematically more difficult than it was for our parents at the same age.

what is also true is that, in the absence of either a real economic constraint or a real care obligation, a man who is twenty-nine and living rent-free in his parents’ guest room with no exit plan is communicating something about his capacity for adult life.

he is communicating, specifically, that adult life is something other people do, and that he intends to opt out.

a bum man is not lazy. he is, on his own report, waiting. he is going to get serious about it next month. he is going to launch the project once a few things settle down. he is going to move out eventually.

in reality, he is not going to do any of it. the time is not the problem. he is.

bell hooks, in all about love, wrote that there can be no love without justice.

i have, over the last several years, come to read that line as something close to a dating advisory. love in the absence of justice (that is, in the absence of a fair distribution of effort, care, ambition, and contribution between two people) does not register as love.

as i’m writing this, i can’t help but wonder what it would feel like to be loved by someone who was, structurally, equal to me.

someone who is constantly striving for better and who has tastes that pre-exist me.

someone whose ambition is not a thing i have to feed.

someone whose life will never be my problem to manage.

in the meantime, if you happen to encounter any of my exes in the wild, you will notice that they’ve all become slightly worse versions of me. my male counterparts that exist without the income, the routine, or any meaningful grasp of what a savings account is.

until then, i intend to remain single, employed, and increasingly picky about who gets to be in the room when i am operating at full power. because if there’s anything more attractive than a man, it is a quiet apartment, a fully paid invoice, and a calendar that does not require explaining.

for the readers familiar with my work, you’ll know that refraining from participating in any sexual activities felt like a deeply unusual and defining development for me.

but that year had been deliberate because somewhere in late 2024, i reached a point where the energy that being sexually active required started to feel pointless. the time, the energy, the emotional bandwidth required to be repeatedly vulnerable with men in my dating pool had begun to feel disproportionate to whatever was being produced on the other end of that transaction.

i longed to feel like i was in my own skin again. to spend a year feeling grounded in my own body without giving anyone else access to it. i wanted to know what i wanted before letting somebody else want me.

what i had assumed was a privately neurotic personal decision of mine turned out to be, on closer inspection, a fairly common one among the general consensus.

a phenomenon has been quietly documented, across nearly every dataset that tracks american sexual behavior, for the better part of a decade: americans in their twenties are having significantly less sex than americans in their twenties did twenty years ago.

but the disagreement among researchers is not whether the decline is happening, but rather if the decline is an indication of our generation’s inability to connect deeply.

in 2018, the journalist kate julian wrote a cover story for the atlantic titled “why are young people having so little sex?”; a piece that has since become the foundational text on today’s subject. julian opened with a sentence that has, by now, aged into a kind of cultural shorthand, which said:

yet, seven years later, this recession has not lifted, and by most measures, has only deepened.

the general social survey has been measuring american sexual behavior since the 1970s. long enough, statistically, to have outlasted free love, aids, the clinton administration, and the marketing of the playboy bunny as both an erotic and a feminist icon. they reported in its most recent waves that approximately one in four men under thirty had not had sex in the past year. that figure has more than doubled since the late 2000s. the equivalent rate among women under thirty has also climbed, less dramatically. the cdc’s most recent national survey of family growth found that the median age of first sexual experience among american women has continued to rise. the american teen sex rate, by 2023, was at a historic low.

every methodologically serious instrument measuring this agrees with every other methodologically serious instrument, which is an outcome sociologists generally encounter once or twice per career.

the first cultural explanation, which just so happens to be the obvious one everybody uses at dinner parties despite its evident incompleteness, is the birth of the smartphone.

the smartphone became widely available around 2007 and the first major dating apps followed shortly thereafter. the thinking, most prominently articulated by the psychologist jean twenge in her 2017 book iGen, was that screens had simply replaced the in-person experiences that historically led, eventually, to sex.

the smartphone theory has the seductive quality of being roughly half-right, which is arguably the worst kind of right. screens have absorbed the hours that once produced sex; this is, on the data, true. but the smartphone explanation cannot, on its own, account for the entire phenomenon — because dating apps, marketed explicitly as friction-reducing technologies for finding sexual partners, failed to produce the explosion of casual sex they promised.

although the invention of tinder, hinge, and bumble were widely expected to accelerate hookup culture, the data proves it did quite the opposite.

match’s annual singles in america survey has found, over the past five years, that the share of active app users reporting they had not been on a single in-person date in the previous year has climbed steadily. hinge, which was famously marketed as “the app designed to be deleted,” has produced, in practice, a generation that matches prolifically and meets almost never. thinking back on my own ratio of dead-end hinge conversations to followed-through dates, it’s rare coming across the latter.

the deeper explanations pursued increasingly (by sociologists like lisa wade at tulane, by demographers tracking the longitudinal data, and by therapists working with the affected generation) cluster around several reinforcing causes that almost nobody on the panic side of the discourse appears interested in.

the first is economically rooted. 20-somethings now, on average, live with their parents longer than at any point in modern measurement. it is, on reflection, structurally difficult to have sex when there is a non-trivial chance your mother will hear it. rents have outpaced wages and the cost of an in-person date (including dinner, drinks, and the sweet treat if it’s going well) has become a quietly measurable expense for a generation that has, statistically, never been broker relative to their parents at the same age.

the second is psychological. gen z is, by every measurable metric, the most anxious generation in the history of mental health research. the 2023 surgeon general’s advisory on social media and youth mental health, the rising prescription rates of ssris among adults under thirty (which carry well-documented libido suppression as a primary side effect), the dramatic increase in self-reported social anxiety: all of it converges on a cohort that finds it harder to meet, flirt, and pursue another person than the generations that preceded it.

the third is political. post-metoo, post-dobbs, post-2024-election, the question of whether to have sex with this person right now has become a meaningfully more complicated calculation than it was for previous generations. the manosphere has radicalized a measurable percentage of men in their twenties and its parallel female celibacy movement has done a similar thing on the other side.

in other words, it’s a lot harder dating a man you suspect listens to joe rogan unironically.

and the fourth, which is the cause most consistently underestimated by the male-dominated panic discourse around the recession, is that an increasing number of women in their twenties are choosing celibacy on purpose.

a comedian who launched the boysober movement in early 2024 by the name of hope woodard has built a substantial cultural footprint around the proposition that women in their twenties should consider a deliberate, year-long break from dating, sex, and romantic men. the movement has produced imitators, podcast episodes, a penguin book deal, new york times coverage, and a steadily growing tiktok and substack subgenre of female celibacy content. the south korean 4b movement, which encourages women to refuse four specific things (marriage, childbirth, dating, and sex with men) has been the subject of growing american media coverage, particularly in the months following the 2024 u.s. election.

the cultural framing of the recession has shifted, in real time, from we are not having sex because we cannot get any to we are not having sex because we no longer want to.

esther perel, in describing the broader pattern of modern intimacy, has offered what may be the most useful frame for thinking about this honestly, saying:

the modern romantic partner is now expected to be friend, lover, therapist, co-parent, financial partner, intellectual interlocutor, and gym buddy, which is a configuration of demands that no previous historical model of romantic partnership has ever supported. the partnership is now expected to deliver the social infrastructure of an entire village while also producing, on the side, regular sex.

under those conditions, opting out of the search (at least temporarily) begins to read less as failure and more as risk management.

what is most striking about the contemporary discourse on the recession is its bipartisan emotional flatness. conservative commentators read the data as civilizational decline: young men have been emasculated, the natural progression of meeting and partnering has been interrupted, and something has gone deeply wrong in the architecture of young adulthood.

progressive commentators read the same data as either a public health crisis or as a reasonable response to a dating economy that was never structured to serve women’s pleasure or safety in the first place.

both readings are partially performative in their own respects, but are also mostly being used as ammunition in a culture war that has, increasingly, very little to do with the women and men actually deciding, on a given saturday night, whether or not to fuck.

what the data actually shows is that a generation of women and men, raised under historically novel conditions, are making historically novel choices about what to do with their bodies. they are doing so simultaneously, across nearly every developed country, nearly every income level, and nearly every measurable demographic.

what it is signaling about the next decade of american sexual life is the question the data cannot yet answer.

it is, however, no longer a question that can credibly be avoided by conservative panic or by the women in their twenties for whom the recession has stopped being an abstraction.

jane is a 20-something woman working a graphic design job with a small but charming apartment, a sourdough starter she has not killed yet, and a habit of curating playlists for emotional events that have not yet happened to her.

last weekend, at a wine bar in los feliz, she met a man named joe.

joe is, in jane’s words to her group chat, “kind of perfect.” he pulls off backwards baseball caps without looking like a total douchebag. he has a job in business media that is both real and cool, which is increasingly rare. he listens to cigarettes after sex in a non-pretentious way and his favorite author is albert camus, but he never once felt the need to mansplain the stranger to her. he is a perfect combination of aloof and attentive, in a way that almost felt vaguely european.

jane has, by every available metric, a crush. and the event of said crush, as we are about to demonstrate, is the apex of jane’s life because over the next two weeks, jane will look better than she has looked in months.

her skin will clear up. she will start running again. she will book a haircut. she will start wearing perfume to walk her dog. she will be, in her own assessment, hot and insufferable. she will be friendlier to the baristas at philz and she will proceed to walk into the office with gusto. she will be, briefly, the most powerful woman in the western united states.

experts in the field of early-stage romantic behavior, from anna machin’s work at oxford on attraction and bonding to match’s annual singles in america survey, have documented that women in the talking stage of a connection spend significantly more time on grooming, exercise, and overall self-presentation than women in committed relationships.

this is, of course, because joe has done absolutely nothing.

despite a brief exchange of vague texts and small talk since the day they met, joe has, at face value, done less for jane’s actual life than her morning coffee. but the idea of joe is doing something so structurally important to jane’s nervous system that the rest of the world is beginning to bend around her glow.

there is an unexplainably spiritual euphoria you get when a man has done the bare minimum to suggest he might one day like you back.

it has all of the energy of being newly in love and none of the actual interpersonal cost. it is, structurally, the morning after breaking celibacy of the soul.

many of you are probably familiar with theories of limerence, coined by psychologist dorothy tennov in her 1979 book of the same name to describe this exact state of intoxicated infatuation. her research found that women in the limerence stage of an attraction report a heightened sense of well-being, increased self-confidence, and a generalized feeling of being more capable of being a person than they have felt in months. she also found that the entire limerence experience can be triggered, in some women, by a partner who has done effectively nothing.

three months later, jane and joe are officially dating.

jane has gained eight pounds.

not because anything is wrong. she is happy. she is in love. she is, by every external metric, doing exactly what we were all raised to do: building a partnership with a man, sharing meals, integrating families and social circles, finding the comfort that bridal magazines have been promising her since she was fourteen.

it’s just that every date for the past three months has been an opportunity for the two of them to be extremely big-backed together.

they have been to every restaurant in their two-zip-code radius. they get takeout four nights a week. she has begun, in small and incremental ways, “letting herself be herself,” which is a phrase used in defense of relationship weight gain since the beginning of time and which means, in practice: i am no longer being looked at by strangers, so i have decided to eat the bread.

her skin has gotten worse. she is not sure why. she is using the exact same skincare routine she used in her crush era. but something (joe’s bedroom air? his pillowcases? the residual stress of being in a committed relationship while still trying to maintain a coherent sense of self?) is breaking her out in a way that no korean skincare product can rescue her from.

she looks at recent photos of herself with joe and pauses.

did i always look like that?

a 2002 study in the journal obesity found that couples gain, on average, significantly more weight in the early years of a serious relationship than their single counterparts. researchers attribute this to a variety of factors, almost all of which can be roughly summarized as: people eat more when they stop performing for somebody else, and being with somebody is that permission slip to stop performing.

if you have spent any time reviewing the recent ramblings of dating forums on reddit or tik tok, you have probably encountered the phenomenon of boyfriend air, which is a widely accepted theory that the mere proximity of a man makes you chopped.

the theory, which started circulating in viral content around 2022 and has not really left the discourse since, goes something like this: the air inside your boyfriend’s apartment is, somehow, fundamentally hostile to your skin, your hair, and your overall physical attractiveness. you sleep over once and your hair is greasy. twice and you have a pimple. five times in and you no longer recognize the version of yourself who first walked in.

mentally, jane is in a relationship. which is to say: she is in a low-grade form of mania.

one day she is incandescently happy. the next she is convinced he is about to break up with her. one minute she is planning a wedding. the next she is wondering, with chilling clarity, whether she is in fact the problem.

she is asking herself, at varying intervals throughout the week: am i a good girlfriend? am i doing too much? am i doing enough? is he treating me badly? what does it say about me if he is? what does it say about me if i’m staying? is this normal? is this love?

then, one day, jane and joe break up.

and within two weeks, jane starts to find herself again.

her skin clears. she rejoins her old workout class. she dyes her hair. she reinvests in expensive makeup products. her old friends start hearing from her. she’s tan. she gets rid of all of her sleep debt. and then she looks at a photo of joe on instagram, the first one she has allowed herself to look at since the breakup, and a strange and irreversible recognition moves through her body.

was he always... like that?

was his smile always slightly off? did his face always make that weird grimace when he laughed? did he always have stubble that remotely resembled pubic hair growing on his chin?

it is in this moment that jane begins to understand the central, mostly-unsaid truth of female romantic life, which is that jane was at her highest before joe. she was at her lowest with joe. and she is now rapidly returning to her highest in joe’s absence.

i like to call it the boyfriend disease.

celebrity culture runs almost entirely on the post-breakup glow up as a pr opportunity. modern pop artists like sabrina carpenter, tate mcrae, billie eillish, taylor swift, and selena gomez have built global empires off of breaking up with a man and being better for it.

gary lewandowski and colleagues at monmouth university published a 2006 study which found that the dissolution of a romantic relationship is, on average, accompanied by significant “self-concept reclamation.” put simply, people regain a clearer sense of who they are after a breakup. they report feeling more independent, more focused, more like themselves. they take up old hobbies. they reach back out to old friends. they remember, in some structural sense, what they used to be like, as if being in the relationship meant also being in a state of comatose.

the research shows that breakups, particularly the ones we don’t initiate, often triggers the recovery of a coherent self.

which raises a question worth sitting with:

if a relationship is blurring the edges of who you are and the dissolution of that relationship is returning you to yourself, is it possible that the mere proximity of a man is the thing actually doing the damage?

now, i wouldn’t be able to coin terms like the boyfriend disease if i wasn’t, naturally, a victim of this epidemic and if i wasn’t going to share it with you all today. looking back at a relationship i was in seven years ago, my experiences were somehow far worse than the obligatory bad acne and weight gain.

i was frequenting urgent care for chronic uti’s at a rate that, in retrospect, should have alarmed somebody on either side of the operation.

let me clarify, because this is exactly the kind of detail that opens you up to internet diagnosis: we used protection. there are, medically, a number of perfectly reasonable explanations for why a woman might develop a recurring uti pattern. but even with the array of probable causes, i chose to endure because i was nineteen and i had decided that going to urgent care once every three months was simply one of the small costs of being in love.

i have not had a single uti in the four years since we ended things.

not one. not the faint suggestion of one. the entire monthly cycle i had been quietly enduring simply, and inexplicably, ended the moment that man was no longer in my body. it’s like my insides had been internally rejecting him since the beginning of our doomed relationship.

so what is it, exactly, about having a boyfriend that makes a woman both physically and spiritually chopped? lack of cortisol? high levels of stress?

there’s a number of possible components: the way committed relationships quietly absorb the energy women would otherwise be spending on themselves. the slow erosion that happens when you are seen, repeatedly and unglamorously, by the same person at close range. the simple fact that men, on average, do not return the level of effort women put into their appearance, and so women’s appearance regresses to meet the man’s, because what would the alternative be?

looking sexy and irresistible next to your loser boyfriend who is wearing the same crewneck he wore on tuesday?

all in all, joe is gone and jane will be fine.

the cycle, for most of the women i know, will repeat itself a handful of times throughout her twenties. that is, until, she meets the man who encourages her to be the best version of herself instead of, intentionally or not, the worst.

it’s all inevitable, in the most mysterious and unfortunate way.

so if you’re reading this from your boyfriend’s apartment and you’ve been wondering why you’ve put on a few pounds or you’ve been breaking out for no logical reason, just know you’ll find yourself again sooner than you know it.

being fresh-faced and fourteen when i first witnessed this masterpiece of a film, by the time the credits rolled, this film had performed open-brain surgery on every romantic instinct i had not yet developed.

the movie opens with a montage. women, all over the world, are being broken up with, ghosted, ignored, mistreated by the men in their lives. on cue, friends surround them and share words with a wisdom that is supposed to read as maternal: “it’s just because he likes you so much.” another woman is being told her boyfriend hasn’t called her back because “he doesn’t know what he wants.” another is reassured that the man who has just told her, in plain english, that he is not looking for a relationship is, in fact, “intimidated by her professional success.” the voiceover from ginnifer goodwin comes in, saying:

“most women, by the time we reach maturity, are so well trained that we can come up with five different reasons why he didn’t call last night.”

i wasn’t even dating yet, but somewhere in my still-forming brain, i absorbed the central premise of the film, which is also the central premise of this essay:

he’s just not that into you.

it seems to me like there is a specific epidemic, older than any of us, of women making up excuses and overcompensating for men’s lack of communication, lack of commitment, and overall, bullshit behavior.

culturally, women are conditioned to seek connection, whereas men are conditioned to perform autonomy.

esther perel, the psychotherapist whose work on desire and commitment has become canonical in this conversation, has written extensively about the gendered asymmetry that produces this. the script for being a “good woman” and the script for being a “good man” have, until very recently, asked these two groups to want fundamentally different things from love.

there’s also the hot topic of who actually initiates. relationship researchers and couples therapists have documented, for decades, that women initiate relationship-defining conversations at significantly higher rates than men do. “are we exclusive?”, “where is this going?”, “what are we doing?” men, on aggregate, are content to coast in undefined arrangements for as long as the arrangement remains comfortable, and to interpret pressure to define it as the woman becoming “too much.”

in an episode of sex and the city that has aged into a kind of generational scripture, miranda (the cynic of the four and the resident voice of realism) explains her theory of men:

the taxi cab theory has, in the twenty-plus years since its original articulation, calcified into folk wisdom among sex and the city fans. and the reason it has lasted is because, structurally, they seemed to have gotten it correct.

it seems like most men do not, on the whole, commit to a life partner based on whether the woman is right for them. they commit based on whether the timing is right for them.

the woman who happens to be in the seat when the light goes on is the one who gets the marriage, the kids, the house in the suburbs. as the theory goes, she could have been any of fifty other women. the only difference? she just happened to be the one passing by.

women on the other hand, who are raised on a steady diet of movies in which the entire plot is find the prince, tend to fall in love with specific people no matter the timing. the timing is incidental, fated even. what really matters is the who.

on top of this structural mismatch, the apps have turned the entire dating ecosystem into a parade of alternatives. men, statistically less inclined to commit even in conditions of scarcity, are even less inclined to commit when the algorithm is dangling a fresh batch of new options in front of them every time they open the app. women, knowing this, or learning it the hard way, have been quietly lowering their standards in increasingly creative ways. yearning is functionally dead. waiting is considered, by most corners of the internet, to be old-fashioned.

and we have, collectively, gotten very good at coming up with reasons why this is okay.

a few months ago, i set my friend up with a guy i knew. she’s the friend we all have: heart of gold, head in the clouds. has been mentally planning her wedding since she was sixteen. falls head over heels for any man who is moderately decent to her, and a few who, by any reasonable standard, are not.

i had a guy in my orbit who i thought might be a good match for her, so i set them up.

the next day, i got two completely different accounts of the same date.

her version: “it was incredible. he was so sweet. he kept telling me i was beautiful all night. we watched a movie at his place. we slept together. in the morning he gave me his coziest sweater and a forehead kiss before he called me an uber home.”

his version, delivered in one of those typically clipped male debriefs that women have to mine for meaning: “sweet girl. great in bed. don’t know if i’ll hang out with her again though.”

for a brief moment, i felt an intense anger and regret as i realized that i had accidentally pimped my friend out.

i spent the next two weeks consoling her as she grieved a one-date soulmate, generating in real time the entire cinematic universe of breakup clichés i had been raised on. “he probably knows he couldn’t handle liking someone this much.” “he’s intimidated by how beautiful you are.” “he’s not ready for what you have to offer.” i meant all of it. i wanted, badly, to soften the landing.

a few months later, she started telling me about a new prospect. he was a man younger than her who, in the first three weeks of their flirtation, had already flaked on three planned dates. and i found myself, mid-coffee, opening my mouth to give her the next round of soothing language.

but a different thought came over me.

because what i had been doing, week after week, with the most generous and loving of intentions, was actively reinforcing the exact pattern that was keeping my friend in a perpetual loop of disappointment.

i was babying her. i was sugarcoating. i was reaching for the same lies my own friends had reached for, on my behalf, when guys had done me dirty over the past decade.

he’s just not that into you. that is what i could have said. that is what any honest friend, at any point in the last fifteen years, could have said to either of us. but it would have required being the bearer of bad news, which is a role that women are never conditioned to fill when it comes to being there for your friends.

there is an entire architecture of comfort-language that women have developed, generationally, to soften the blow when men disappoint us.

he is going through a lot. he is just stressed at work. he has commitment issues from his last relationship. he wasn’t ready for someone like you. his mother was emotionally unavailable. he is afraid of how much he likes you. the timing was just bad.

every one of these phrases is, in some specific case, true. men do have commitment issues. timing matters. trauma is real. emotionally unavailable mothers exist. but the cumulative effect of this language, the constant baby, it’s not you, it’s him, has been to teach women, for generations, to read mistreatment as a problem in the man rather than as a piece of information about the relationship.

it has also taught us not to listen when men actually tell us who they are.

maya angelou, before her death, said it best:

this is, structurally, the opposite of what the comfort-language script teaches us to do. the script teaches us to assume that what he is showing us is not what he actually means and the modern dating ecosystem has only enabled this way of thinking.

ghosting, which was once a relatively rare social offense, is now the dominant breakup mode of our generation. a 2019 pew research study on dating in the digital age found that nearly half of u.s. adults under 30 have been ghosted, with women reporting it at significantly higher rates than men. the open-endedness of a non-ending is, for any woman with even moderately overthinking tendencies, a form of slow psychological torture. and into the silence ghosting creates, the comfort-language rushes in to fill the void.

maybe he died. maybe he had a family emergency. maybe he is going through something. maybe he is just bad at communication.

he is not bad at communication, he is just bad at treating you with respect.

whether it’s silence or topical avoidance, it’s a choice that a man is making to indiscreetly let you know that empathy for your feelings is not in the cards for him.

because the comfort-language is older than any of us, it’s just not some that can or will be fixed overnight. women have been comforting other women through male disappointment for so long that the practice has become a form of love. but i think we can gently, slowly, and lovingly start being honest with each other.

what i have come to believe, the older i get, is that most men are not particularly mysterious. they are not hiding deep wells of unprocessed feeling about you. most of the time, what looks like mixed signals is, in fact, a relatively unmixed signal that we have been trained, since girlhood, to misread.

it is not our job to translate a man’s bullshit.

your boyfriend is not too stressed at work to text you back. he just does not want to. your situationship is not too scared of commitment to define the relationship. he just does not want to define it with you. the man on hinge who hasn’t asked you out a second time is not too busy. he is not in a weird headspace. he is not going to come back around when he has “figured himself out.”

he is just not that into you.

he is going to be that into somebody else, eventually, when his light goes on. and you can be in the cab, or you can be doing something else with your life.

we all know that hinge differentiates itself to its competitors by leaning into branding that encourages long-term compatibility, with robust profiles, conversational prompts, and an emphasis on knowing somebody as a person before deciding whether to meet them. in theory, this is meant to weed out the casualties you’d find on tinder and bumble.

but in reality, the men on hinge are, with very few exceptions, the same men who are on tinder except they reek of le labo and bring their 35mm to bar stella.

as a hinge veteran myself, i’ve always treated it as less of a dating app and more of a digital, low-stakes game of hot or not. a means of futile validation from the freaks of the los angeles area. a place to see if momma’s still got it.

this is, statistically, not the universal hinge experience. according to the knot’s 2025 survey, 36% of newly engaged app-couples met on hinge, which is to say, the app is, by every meaningful metric, working. somewhere out there, couples are matching. beachy engagement photo “thank god i swiped right!” captions are populating instagram on a weekly basis.

it could be, by all accounts, working for somebody out there reading this as i speak.

one time, i agreed to a hinge date with a guy who took me to round one for drinks and arcade games. he was at least two inches shorter than his profile had claimed and was, of course, a film bro. an aspiring director who thought he was going to be the next spielberg because he watches artsy parisian movies and takes his letterboxd very seriously. he talked endlessly about his need to capture the “beauty of life at its rawest form” as he proceeded to get tipsy over two black cherry white claws. we played air hockey and the jump-rope arcade game, and every time he jumped, peeking out from the bottom of his armpit-stained t-shirt was the rigorous happy trail he was growing over a small but very present gut. by the end of the date, he had somehow coerced me into the backseat of his car, not to hook up, but to watch unedited footage from his most recent short film about the dangers of social media on society. yawn, and yuck.

having my fair share of misfortune when it comes to online dating has forced me to become fluent in red flag detection at the profile level.

“looking for: short-term relationship” “my biggest fear: women” “occupation: musician” “my ideal type: girls on prozac”

some of the warning signals appear a bit more subtle, engraved in the selection of photos they choose to present themselves.

the pic at the rave = his entire personality revolves around being in the 0.0001% of fred again spotify listeners

the gym mirror selfie = will look at you sideways for craving in n’ out past 8pm

the twelve-person group photo = knowingly chopped

the pic that crops or blurs out the women in it = congrats! you’re on a 30 count roster

there was another guy i went out from hinge with that was older than me. he was in the cigar business and had a knack for things that profoundly performative men normally did. he insisted on canyon coffee for the first date and took me to a bookstore in echo park after, where he rambled on about how charles bukowski continues to be the greatest poet of our generation. he was into stuff like that. carhartt. foreign indie music. luxury stationary brands. crossbody messenger bags and cologne that smelled like he just rubbed tree bark against his skin. looking back now, he might have been on the spectrum or he might have just been the kind of man who liked strangely niche things and whose conversational affect has not been meaningfully touched by another human being in a long time. but beneath all of that, he was really smart and seemed sweet enough. on date two, we went night fishing, which ended up being romantic, in a way i did not expect to be romantic. on our third date, he took me out to dinner. we came back to his house. and he led me, immediately, into his garage, which was unfinished and dim and lined with maintenance tools.

i couldn’t help but think, this is where i die. this is the garage where i get murdered, all because i took a chance on the artistic guy with autism who took me fishing.

i did not die, clearly. but we did start making out, standing up, against a workbench. there was nearly a full foot of height between us, which made the entire enterprise mechanically impossible. he reached up under my shirt and cupped my breast in a way that felt less like attraction and more like a child handling a piece of fruit at the grocery store. i gently pulled away and suggested we go inside, but he said he didn’t want to wake up his parents. so we ended up having car sex, which unfortunately, was just as bad as it sounds.

there is an additional layer to dating strangers online that you only get to enjoy if you happen to be an asian-presenting woman. i have a type, and unfortunately for me and the entire racial discourse of modern dating, that type is predominately white men. i want absolutely zero oxford study comments under this article because, clearly, i’m aware of the implications that come with an immutable sexual attraction. i didn’t ask to like men who don’t possess a culture or who start balding in their sophomore year of college or who instinctually compare me to vanessa hudgens or beabadoobee purely off of the fact that i’m a filipino woman.

which means every potential match has to go through a second additional and internal filter:

does he have an asian fetish?

it’s always so damn predictable. “dream travel destination: japan”. “looking for a girl to: watch anime with me”. “first date meal: sushi”.

the algorithm, doing its best to serve my stated preferences, has therefore curated for me a roster of men who have, statistically, probably typed “asian girl” into porn hub at some point in the last calendar year.

my most recent situationship from hinge was a 30-year-old white man who lived with his grandma. exciting. some would say he was finance-golf-bro adjacent. equipped with the short shorts, no-show socks and vans default fit. the entire visual and physical vocabulary of a frat guy who had peaked in his sophomore year of college. used the word “goated” unironically. his most-used streaming platform, which i learned the first time i went to his place, was crunchyroll — which, in retrospect, i should’ve clocked prior to our time together with my knack for spotting asian-fetishizing white men.

but his banter was, against all odds, charming. almost endearing, in a strange way. and the sex was, against further odds, not bad. i let it run.

what it became, over the next month, was a strange domestic routine that resembled a relationship without ever being called one. we spent late nights drinking at sports bars in different parts of the valley. we would hold hands, as we picked out new clothes and popmart blind boxes for each other at the glendale galleria. we would end long days together watching love is blind in his bed, cuddling with face masks on. we would go out with his friends, so much so that they’d make up cute pet names for me. “gweniepoo’s coming, right?”

things were proceeding in a direction that almost made me want to ask the dreaded question. but i didn’t. instead, i made what i thought was a low-stakes suggestion: “we should go bowling sometime.”

he looked at me, paused, and said: “isn’t that a little date-y?”

yuck. absolutely yuck.

it just goes to show that you could come across an online dating profile that passes all of your internal tests and the outcome will still disappoint. they could be smelly. they could be weird. they could be performative. they could be obnoxious. but if there’s anything i’ve learned from dating of all mediums, on all fronts, there is just nothing ickier than a guy with deep-rooted commitment issues.

i do not have a recommendation for my friends still on the app, nor do i have a recommendation for myself. i have not deleted hinge, even after writing all of this down, because hope is a small, embarrassing thing and it does not respond to data.

what i know, after three years and god knows how many matches, is that finding my husband on hinge may not be in the cards for me.

it’s more of a fun way to pass the time. a chance to be a romantic prospect, in which i am the protagonist, but also the audience, but also the writer of the eventual open journal entry. or a casting call for character study. or a meet-and-greet site for the pioneers of chopped city.

maybe hinge is, for some women, the app you delete. it certainly was for some people i know.

for the rest of us, it appears to be the app you keep open in the background of your twenties.

collecting bad dates like trading cards and accumulating stories you will dine out on at brunch for years, while quietly, somewhere in the back of you, hoping that the next match is, against all odds, the one your friends keep swearing you’ll eventually meet.

but trust and believe, when it happens, you will all be the first to be informed on how my wide arrangement of disastrous dates led me to finding my perfect match.

ah, yes. the gut-wrenching trope and cultural shorthand for romantic grief.

it’s in the script we hand each other after every breakup that feels too big for the language of “just not meant to be.” the relationship was correct, but the universe simply got the timing wrong. somewhere, in some parallel version of the story, the two of you found each other at the right age, in the right city, in the right configuration of life circumstances, and the love was the love it was always supposed to be.

but somewhere along the way, after using the phrase to reassure a heartbroken friend or justify a movie’s sad ending, the framing stopped fitting.

some loves are not interrupted by the timing. some loves are, in fact, right on time, and so is the ending.

there was a boy i’d known since middle school.

we were always acquaintances, nothing more than a passing hello in the hallways. it wasn’t until senior year of high school that we reconnected by accident, and within months, our innocent reunion turned into a deep relationship that neither of us were expecting. he was sweet. secretly funny. artistic. had a deep passion for music and art. socially comfortable but not the center of attention. school was easy for him in the way it is easy for boys who are not particularly committed to it. he glided through middle and high school without ever really trying, and he was happy in that way.

before him, i’d never met someone who simultaneously made me feel the giddiness of a schoolgirl and the confidence of a woman. he always knew what adorably cheeky compliment to give me at any given moment and always had his hands all over me in some affectionate manner. we had sex like rabbits, equally sweet and feral, as if every sexual encounter between us was our first. we just couldn’t resist each other. like moth to flame, i was addicted to us and our loud expressions of love.

what i remember most is the specific sounds of us at our happiest. it was muffled giggles coming from his room at 3 in the morning. a private register two people slip into when nobody is watching them, as if we had our own morse code of inside jokes and a sense of humor reserved between the two of us. it was dancing in the kitchen the morning after a late night out — him in his boxers, me in one of his sweatshirts, the less i know the better playing on a speaker, pancakes and bacon, the specific gold of the morning sun through the blinds. it was weekend road trips up north. waking up in a cabin by the lake to nothing but the sound of birds chirping and trees moving in the wind. the way the silence between the two of us in those moments did not feel like silence at all.

he was the first real story of love written in my book of life. before him, love had been a theoretical thing that was borrowed from movies, borrowed from songs, borrowed from older women describing it in voices that felt slightly out of reach. with him, it became something i could measure in the small, private cadence of the way we existed together.

going into my first year of college, everything was a blur. all of a sudden, my social circle was expanding by the day. i made friends in classes and at parties and at jobs i was suddenly good at. my career began to feel like a real thing i could touch.

and somewhere an hour away, my boyfriend was quietly coming apart.

he was stuck in a never-ending loop at our local community college, switching majors every semester and flunking out of general ed courses he’d already taken twice. he was being fired from a series of minimum wage jobs he could not bring himself to care about. he was in his childhood bedroom, suddenly forced to deal with the specific demons he had been carrying around since he was thirteen. the ones he had been able to outrun, for years, by staying inside the simple rhythm of a small town.

for normal people fans, i had become, structurally, the marianne to his connell.

the physical distance began to feel more prevalent and, simultaneously, our emotional differences got harder to ignore. he’d struggle mentally and i was always there for him, but there was a weight to that arrangement, a quiet asymmetry, that i did not have language for at the time.

i loved him but i was also, suddenly, a little uncomfortable telling him about all of the happy events happening in my life when he wasn’t having any.

as comfortable as we became with each other, the incompatibility between our lives started to poke at the seams. we would argue about missed calls and forgotten plans and the small ways one of us had not shown up the way the other needed. but underneath every fight was a quieter, harder thing: the slow, mutual recognition that neither of us actually had any more to give. we had engraved each other into our lives, mapped out a shared future, made promises we had completely meant when we made them. but the further along we grew, separately, the harder it became to keep believing in the version of the future the two of us had built when we were seventeen.

we ended up breaking off the relationship the summer before my junior year of college. i’d finished school with a degree in journalism and moved back home to write for a small newspaper. i reconnected with old friends and was more than happy to be with my family again, but i couldn’t help but feel like there was a piece of me i’d left with him back in our hometown. i had no idea what he was up to since the breakup. we weren’t keeping in touch, for the better, and he wasn’t the type to share his life online.

while finding things to do in a flighty, post-college era, i started vending at flea markets and selling secondhand vintage. one day, i was manning my booth when i hear a familiar voice call my name.

my ex-boyfriend, smiling from cheek to cheek, looking sweet-faced as ever.

we hugged and caught up briefly. he looked just as handsome as when we first started dating, had a new job, and seemed to be doing much better mentally. we exchanged nice comments back and forth and parted ways.

a month later, he texted me and i agreed to a drink. he took me to a dive bar in town, where we fell back quickly into a familiar flow of flirtatious banter. after a couple rounds of cosmos and beer, we wandered the streets aimlessly. we almost ran out of things to talk about, but it was clear neither of us cared. we were just trying to prolong the night, one way or another. we ended up stumbling upon an abandoned hillside mansion. it was taped off for renovation, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me past the door, as we sneaked our way onto the side patio. it overlooked the entire town, the shadows of hills, the twinkling street lights. the place where our story started. i looked over at him and we shared a kiss that tasted like coors light and nostalgia.

the second shot we gave our relationship was, in some ways, better than the first.

it felt like this time around, the future we once saw for ourselves had more potential. in the time we spent apart, it seemed like we both grew so much. the people in our lives — our families, our friends — were somehow even more in our corner than they had been the first time around, which is something that almost never happens with second chances.

we were picking each other up after long work days and grocery shopping like we were an old married couple. getting tattoos together and stamping forever marks of love on our bodies. going on morning hikes with the dogs and attending dinners with our families. we had become slightly different people, grown in a way that still preserved the love we shared when we were in high school, and there was a strange, hopeful permission in that. like maybe the two of us, finally, had walked into this relationship the right way. at the right time. that our re-connection was fated and even the universe was on our side.

four months in, the fights came back. but they were different.

what i remember most is the specific sounds of us at our lowest. the muffled sobbing and despaired voices between us as i hold my head in my hands. the drowned out background noises of cars rushing past us as we sat parked on the side of the road. my voice, tinged with a particular exhaustion of fighting with somebody you love and being unable to figure out which version of you is the one supposed to win the argument, quietly suggesting we end things. his voice, frantically promising me we wouldn’t have to. “we’re going to make this work. i can fix this. i love you. there’s nothing we can’t get through.”

both of us, i think, were furious at the fact that this was not going to be the redemptive arc we wanted. that the growth had not actually fixed the structure. that the dynamic — his version of intimacy, my version of needing to feel chosen, the way the two of us asymmetrically held each other — was still, after everything, the same. we could have spent another five years trying to dismantle it. we could have stretched ourselves into different shapes to make it work.

but in the end, what we were really doing was understanding that we were the same two people who hadn’t survived the relationship the first time around.

we broke up right before my 23rd birthday.

the seasons and the holidays were incredibly tough. there were entire afternoons where i was somewhere between wanting to call him and wanting to punch him and wanting to kiss him one last time, sometimes in that order, sometimes all at once. i stayed in touch with his friends, in the hopes that i would get minor life updates and feel my presence in his life from afar.

yet in the time that i wanted to so desperately run into him and be granted a third shot at our love, i never saw him again.

we lived in basically the same hometown. we frequented the same grocery stores, the same banks, the same restaurants. at one point i heard that he had taken a job down the street from mine, and a small, completely involuntary spike of fear moved through my body at the thought of him walking past my place of work. but i worked there the entire year, and still, nothing.

since july of 2024, i have not, even once, run into the person i once thought i was going to marry.

i don’t know what to make of that, exactly. i am not a particularly mystical person. but there is a quiet, almost embarrassing part of me that has started to believe the universe was being clear with me about this one.

that’s when it hit me: “right person, wrong time” my ass.

it was always the right person and it was, more importantly, the right time.

and the ending was, somehow, the most generous thing either of us could have done for the other.

he taught me how scary it is to be in love. how vulnerable it is to share that much of yourself with another person, knowing that everything you have offered could be retracted in an instant. he taught me what it feels like to be in a relationship that operates as a secret language. he showed me what i wanted from a future love story, often by being the version of the love story that almost worked. i don’t know who i would be if i had not known him.

he also taught me that what i seek next is a grown love. one that does not run on the engine of who can survive the longest in the codependence. one that does not require either of us to become smaller to make the other one feel safe. and most importantly, one that does not have an expiration date built quietly into its architecture, the way our love always had.

i hope he gets that one day, too.

love island is not a dating show, but one of the most elaborate and psychologically twisted modern social experiments on television.

i saw an ad for reality tv betting on my instagram feed this week.

specifically, betting on love island usa season eight, which premieres early june. you can now wager actual money on questions like who will cry next episode. who will be the cause of the first major fight in casa amor, will this couple recouple by the end of week three, or break up first. the platform was advertising it the way sports books advertise the nfl in september: live odds, predictions, and betting markets on the turmoil and emotional breakdowns of the romantic lives of strangers.

much like everyone else, i loved season six of love island usa. i was sick from the trainwreck of season seven. i made it halfway through beyond the villa before giving up.

and i am sitting my ass down on june 2nd at 5:59pm with a glass of wine in hand for season eight.

so before any of us go into this new season with our pitchforks and online opinions, let’s break down what this show has truly evolved into.

the architecture

“islanders, welcome to the villa!”

ten attractive strangers in fiji. their phones, taken. their contact with the outside world, severed. their only path to winning, falling in love with one of the other strangers in the room.

“now let’s couple you up with the hot stranger you’ve known for less than an hour!”

they’re encouraged to “build a connection,” even as the cameras catch every micro-expression, every confessional, every flicker of doubt.

“and don’t forget — you’ll be sharing a bed with him starting tonight!”

they’re sent on dates with bombshells, made to kiss strangers during challenges, ranked on physical attractiveness in front of each other, and asked to gossip about their fellow islanders in confessionals.

“be more genuine. we need the audience to think you came here for the right reasons!”

and looming over every decision, every recoupling, every fight, every kiss, is one hundred thousand dollars on the table. oh, and the post-show influencer career sitting right behind it.

“remember, hated islanders do not get brand deals!”

with the odds of each presented decision, every aspect of the show’s format is set up to be a behavioral experiment more than a romantic one.

every mechanic of the show is engineered, with frightening precision, to disrupt connection. bombshells are designed to test loyalty and oftentimes force a recoupling and recouplings happen so often that any sense of stability is structurally impossible.

but let’s not forget about casa amor.

casa amor is, in my humble opinion, a form of psychological terror that only a true spawn of satan could have ever devised.

midway through the season, the boys and girls are separated. one group is sent to a second villa filled with new attractive contestants. the other stays in the original villa and is sent its own set of bombshells. for several days, both groups are encouraged to explore while considering whether their original partner has stayed loyal. they then return to a reunion where each person must announce, in front of the entire cast, whether they have remained with their original partner or coupled up with someone new. no couple is granted the opportunity to inquire or communicate or apologize. at that point, everybody is relying on pure trust that their plan matches their partner’s from across the waters.

then they have to live together for the rest of the show. share a kitchen. share a bathroom. share the bed they used to share.

more than a dating show, it is an endurance test designed to maximize the production of conflict, betrayal, and crying-on-camera footage.

and just when it couldn’t get more antagonizing, the show-makers present movie night.

where the producers compile confessionals, side conversations, bts from challenges, messy secrets and actions of casa amor and force the entire cast to watch. together. which, if you ask me, is structurally a public hanging.

and at one point, as a viewer, you realize you start feeling strong emotions that differ from the emotions you normally feel watching reality tv.

anxiety. rage. disgust. discomfort.

it almost makes you sit back and wonder: where did the love in love island go?

the motive

love island is sold as a dating show. and to be fair, every season starts off feeling almost just as wholesome as traditional reality dating tv. everybody’s giddy to be there, nobody’s hooked up yet, nobody’s cried yet, and they all look like they’ve collectively won a vacation with new friends.

you see that energy seep through during short moments of the season. when islanders are encouraged to talk about wanting to find love on camera, using the language of connection, of compatibility, of feeling something real.

but the odds of every islander joining the show with the intention of a long-lasting relationship are constitutionally built against them because what the show structurally rewards is not the most loving couple. it is the most legible one.

the couple the audience has decided to root for.

islanders who figure that out early are statistically more likely to win, because they have started performing for us before they have started performing for each other.

think about it. imagine if serena and kordell had never had their iconic post-casa amor argument on the dock. imagine if kaylor and aaron had been a healthy, drama-free couple from week one. imagine if huda and jeremiah had been a normal pair who was quietly figuring out their relationship.

the season would’ve tanked.

if every single participant had the intention to find love organically, the show’s formula would make no sense.

why else would somebody with the sole intention of romance willingly pour the remnants of their paycheck into a year’s supply of bikinis and heels? give up the luxury of privacy and fall in love in front of a camera for millions of people to tune in?

even with the inescapable drama that comes with communal dating, love island would just be a bootleg version of the bachelor.

which is to say: the producers do not actually want a happy couple to win. they want a story. they want a record-breaking season.

and they have, by now, figured out that we will give them our entire summer for as long as the islanders have more than love on the mind.

the audience

love island is, by a wide margin, the most participatory piece of mass media that i, at least, have ever opted into.

we’re not just watchers, we’re voters. we vote on who is least compatible. we vote on which couple has the strongest connection. in recent seasons, we’ve even been able to decide who couples up next.

i will never forget the full body chill that ran through me when iris and jeremiah were coupled up based on america’s vote to separate him and huda. while they were still actively exploring their connection. i remember being a part of that vote, too, and thinking to myself, it doesn’t matter if i vote for iris to match with jeremiah, the producers would never let that level of chaos ensue.

but to my bewildering surprise, it happened. we effectively wrote huda out of her own storyline. the love island show makers saw the potential of haywire that could happen if they let america have what they voted for, and it blew up the villa.

for anyone out there who’s watched the movie nerve, it’s quite reminiscent of the role of the watchers.

the producers do not have to manufacture all the conflict alone if they have a merciless audience.

now, imagine being well-liked in the villa. unproblematic. loyal. playing all of your cards correctly.

just to enter the twitter challenge and find out that one of the viewers took the time to say this about you online:

“leah on love island usa is so toxic! not a girl’s girl, criticizes male vulnerability, dramatizes people’s words to get others on her side, has a sense of entitlement, the list goes on.”

what. the. fuck.

they cannot use their phones. they cannot text their friends. they do not know if anything’s happened to their families. they have no idea why one of their cast members suddenly disappeared from the villa overnight. they have no clue which of them is being adored by the audience and which is being dragged on twitter.

every season, the producers reintroduce a sliver of that information back into the villa, usually in the form of a challenge that turns audience opinion into a weapon.

season seven had the ranking challenge, where amaya, who was treated as a nuisance by the male islanders in that season, found out she was actually america’s sweetheart in the eyes of the viewers. genuine. unhinged but lovable.

chelley, on the other hand, was the social queen of the villa. deeply liked by her own clique. completely beloved by her own ecosystem, but ranked low extremely low by the love island audience. she was bewildered by even the mere thought of getting torn apart online and had no idea that viewers thought that miss girl code could ever do wrong.

what those challenges actually do is reset the entire social order of the villa using information the islanders had no other way to access.

which raises an interesting question: are the producers shaping the audience, or is the audience shaping the producers?

in the traditional reality tv model, production gets to pick the underdog and who gets the unflattering edit. but love island responds to us in real time.

love island is not just a social experiment on the participants. it is a social experiment on the audience too. we are the test subjects of what happens when a piece of mass media becomes structurally responsive to the worst impulses of its viewership in real time.

it shows us exactly how sideways things can go when the audience is given the level of influence producers normally keep for themselves.

the etiquette

inside all of this, the islanders are still expected to behave as if they are in a real relationship.

couples on love island, with very few exceptions, do not become official until literally the final week of the show. they spend most of their time talking about the strength of their connection rather than doing anything that would actually deepen it. and they are explicitly encouraged, by the format itself, to “explore” with new contestants, which typically means going on dates with strangers while their partner is asleep in a bed thirty feet away.

jeremiah in season seven faced major backlash from his fellow islanders for coming into the villa with incorrect intentions.

he felt strongly for huda since day one, determined the relationship was quickly becoming toxic, was paired up with iris by default, realized him and iris were better off as friends, and just began to explore his connection with andreina before his so-called islander homies voted him off the show.

viewers took to social media with opinions about how it would make more sense if the islanders voted him off due to their own personal interests in pursuing andreina or eliminating threats prior to casa amor, but according to them, that wasn’t the case.

they voted jeremiah off because they felt as if he was playing a game.

that he wasn’t “navigating his romantic connections correctly”, as if there is an implicit rulebook on how to be the perfect islander.

the audience took a similar dislike and judgement towards rob of season six, who left fan favorite leah for bombshell, andrea, and then a string of other new girls that would come in week after week. most of the hate had to not only with leah bias, but with the fact that he hadn’t been “intentional” with the way he was moving in the villa.

although i will always be the first person to criticize a man, it makes you wonder what exactly these implicit guidelines are to maneuvering love island in the right way.

so what does loyalty mean here?

does it mean refusing to be sent on a date? does it mean not participating in a kissing challenge? does it mean reporting every flirtation back to your partner? does it mean giving every bombshell the cold shoulder? does it mean the refusal to partake in casa amor while your partner is, in another villa, being explicitly encouraged to explore as well?

the truth is that unlike how you’d navigate relationships in the real world, the rules of loyalty don’t exist on this show. they physically can’t, as long as islanders are encouraged to be open to new connections every week.

the show is, in many ways, a hyper-concentrated version of how dating in 2026 already feels. unlimited access to romantic options. the constant temptation of someone newer, hotter, and more interesting being one swipe away. infidelity rates at historic highs and monogamy starting to feel like a fantasy we were sold when we were younger.

on top of trying to be the “model islander” and navigating the show’s confusing definition of loyalty and intention, you’re in a constant state of surveillance.

it’s big brother for people who peaked in college, if you will.

the islanders are constantly tracking which connection is “genuine,” which is “strategic,” who is going to slip up first, who might cost them a finale spot. they are simultaneously monitoring and being monitored by their cast mates, by the producers, and by us.

being purposely recruited by production for a failed love life, each islander is almost structurally led to fail on this show.

honestly, this formula has been quietly taking over the netflix library for years. too hot to handle, married at first sight, temptation island, the ultimatum, age of attraction. they even came out with perfect match for washed-up reality tv stars looking for round two of public matchmaking.

love island is just the most extreme version of it.

and as we keep getting season renewals, i keep thinking about how love island feels less like reality television and more like a black mirror episode that has accidentally been running for ten years.

it’s like the show is holding up a slightly distorted mirror and showing us, with uncomfortable clarity, how willingly we have agreed to participate in a format that takes real people and turns them into characters we feel entitled to comment on, vote on, and shape from a distance.

i think a lot about why we love love island. we are given permission to participate in something that, in any other context, would qualify as a small and invasive psychological experiment.

love island feels like the perfect cultural artifact of our current relationship to entertainment, to intimacy, to other people, to ourselves.

it sells itself as romance and operates as surveillance. it asks twelve strangers to figure out what loyalty means inside a system that has structurally removed any possible definition of it. it lets the audience play producer, and then watches what the audience does with the power. it converts every casualty into content.

with all of that being said, love island production has made an embarrassingly loyal spectator out of me and i’m extremely curious to see what they do with this season.

i don’t think they will ever be able to find a cast stronger than season six and i don’t think they will be attempting to replicate the amount of drama they stirred with season seven’s islanders.

but then again, both seasons drew crazy viewership numbers.

so, the question i pose: what does love island have in store for us this summer?

i didn’t know what the goal of this action was. anything i knew about female sexuality at that age had come from a semester of health class where kids giggle through the part about periods, taught by adults whose silence around the subject functioned as its own kind of teaching. what i had absorbed was simple:

figure it out yourself, but figure it out alone.

in theory, it seems like that sentiment has dissipated a bit. the internet has spent the last few years in a fever pitch of women openly sexualizing hot public figures.

so much so that female-led thirst content is its own genre now. women are exchanging smutty book picks over tik tok and digitally cat-calling public figures in their comment sections.

female sexuality has had something of a cultural rebrand in prestige media, too. sex and the city gave us samantha jones, whose sexual identity is a structural part of her character’s personality. bridgerton gave us regency romance dressed up as softcore p*rn. girls gave us hannah horvath, who portrayed her own sex life like a humiliation field study. pen15 gave us season 1, episode 3 (i won’t elaborate further, iykyk).

women have been radically open about their sex lives in novels, interviews, essays, and characters that were thinly veiled versions of themselves.

so why is it that sexual desire in women is still — quietly, persistently, often in the language of psychology — treated like a character flaw?

we all know that the orgasm gap is real. a 2018 study published in archives of sexual behavior found that roughly 95 percent of heterosexual men report usually orgasming during partnered sex, while only around 65 percent of heterosexual women do.

the gap closes almost completely among women who sleep with women, which suggests the gap is not biological, but cultural.

daniel bergner’s what do women want?, published in 2013, gathered years of research suggesting that female desire has been chronically underestimated by both science and culture. the research showed women’s physical arousal patterns were more “intense” and “promiscuous” than long-held assumptions allowed. the canonical wisdom (that female desire is gentler, more contextual, and more romantic than male desire) was, as the research suggested, mostly a story we had been telling ourselves because we needed it to be true.

a researcher at queen’s university whose work bergner relied on, known by the name of meredith chivers, found something even more disturbing. female arousal patterns frequently did not match what women reported wanting. women were physically responding to a range of stimuli they would not admit to consciously desiring. her interpretation, in part, was that women had been so culturally conditioned to deny their own desire that they had stopped being able to accurately report it.

taken together, these are not three different findings, but three different angles on the same story: that the gap between what women’s bodies want and what women have been allowed to admit they want is not a coincidence by nature.

which is why structural intervention forms of media like sex and the city, when it premiered in 1998, play a big role in reshaping the norm.

before the era of samantha jones, the cultural archetype of the sexually frank woman was almost always a punchline, a cautionary tale, or both. sex and the city did something almost no piece of mass media had done before. it sat four women at brunch in manhattan and let them talk about sex the way men had been talking about sex in mass media for fifty years. casually, specifically, often graphically, without an underlying moral.

the show was treated, at the time, as scandalous. and it was scandalous. it was also, in retrospect, the closest thing my generation has ever had to a permission slip for a culturally sanctioned female sexual conversation.

it’s a deeply relatable format, more relatable than outsiders would like to accept, as the women in my own life talk about sex in a similar script. we are open about what we want, what we got, what we did not get, what is going on with our bodies.

all before 11pm over a chicken ceasar salad wrap at dialog cafe.

trends in modern media, like “spicy booktok” in particular, have been a more recent development. once relegated to forbidden bookstore corners and e-reader anonymity, literary smut has become a new genre identity, made popular by a new generation of readers. by any measure, this is progress. women who once would have hidden the cover of a paperback at the airport now film themselves giddy about a chapter.

and yet, even with this generation’s progressiveness, the cultural assumption on female desire has barely moved.

there’s still this underlying tone to the entire vocabulary used by the smut community (lingo referring to spice level and nsfw reads), which is more than just a means of being able to monetize the content.

it’s all engineered to let women express sexual desire without ever quite naming it.

women have been sexualized since the beginning of recorded culture. the female body has been the central object of artistic, religious, and commercial obsession for thousands of years. in renaissance paintings, in greek sculpture, in the entire visual vocabulary of mass advertising. the british film theorist laura mulvey gave a name to part of this dynamic in 1975, with her concept of the male gaze. the idea that cinema, and most visual culture along with it, has been structured around the assumption of a male viewer looking at a female body.

what the conversation tends to skip over is that being sexualized and being sexually empowered are not the same thing. they are, in fact, frequently opposites.

women have always been objects of desire, but what we’ve rarely been permitted to be is the subject of desire. the person whose hunger is acknowledged as a structural fact rather than a moral diagnosis.

there is a well-documented body of research on what is sometimes called attractiveness privilege, or pretty privilege. attractive women, on average, earn more, get hired more, are perceived as more competent, are treated better in social and professional settings. the so-called halo effect, or the the cognitive bias by which attractive people are assumed to be smarter, kinder, and more capable, has been documented in psychology for decades.

but the privilege works in only one direction. an attractive woman is rewarded for her body when it is, structurally, available to other people’s pleasure. the moment she claims it for her own, the reward is revoked.

if a man sleeps around, he is just a man. if a woman does, there is, by cultural reflex, an alterior motive.

daddy issues, seeking male validation, unresolved trauma. she is either exchanging sex for wealth/material goods or performing a kind of empowerment she does not actually feel or is just broken in some way that needs to be diagnosed.

maybe she just likes sex?

i do not know why this option is treated as the most outlandish of possible explanations. as if the mere speculation of women being able to gain gratification from sex has been taken away from us.

in hindsight, there is a specific power that comes with being a woman comfortable in her own skin in this way.

and if there’s anything society likes to rebuke in a profound manner, it’s women in their power.

the conditioning runs deep. there’s a certain sense of shame in admitting that i think about sex and wanting sex. that memories of a previous sexual encounter i experienced are often treated like small fantasies in my brain that move the day along.

it was, after all, the first lesson that influenced my repressive guilt. figure it out yourself, but figure it out alone. it’s almost like no amount of visibility or research has had the ability to overwrite my guilt.

but we shouldn’t have to figure it out alone. or be silent in fear of judgement.

we shouldn’t have to take the hardcover dust jacket off of fifty shades when we’re reading it in public. we shouldn’t have to lower to a whisper when talking about s-e-x. we shouldn’t have to lower our screen brightness when a shirtless jacob elordi edit pops up on our fyp. we shouldn’t have to wear our shame when sharing our kinks or body count. we shouldn’t have to feel wrong for openly desiring an act of human nature.

as the great samantha jones once said:

“i will not be judged by you or society. i will wear whatever and blow whomever i want as long as i can breathe and kneel.”

they say it like it is a compliment. and it is, mostly, meaning that my dating life has been varied, dramatic, and statistically improbable enough to be an entertaining point of conversation at brunch.

what they do not say, because they are good friends, is the more accurate version of the joke: i should write a book about my exes because i have been cheated on by more than half of the men i have dated.

ironically, it’s hard for me to even speak shamelessly on the topic because there’s still a fraction of shame that comes with the admission. like there was a version of me that was easy to cheat on and leave and lie to.

but it took years of emotional turmoil and inner healing to realize that it wasn’t because of me at all.

it was for me.

so. as per the requests of my friends, here’s an interlude to the future novel slash exposé i’m writing on my dumpster fire of a love life.

act one: the origin story

we were introduced by a mutual friend in the fall of freshman year.

he was the cute new transfer on the football team that all the girls in my grade were drooling over and i felt, for the first time in my life, the specific intoxication of being publicly chosen.

after a handful of flirty passing encounters, a cheeky movie date, and a slow dance at homecoming, i developed feelings hard. and fast, at that.

we made things official within weeks. and before i knew it, the honeymoon phase was over before it had really even started.

he had a knack for telling me, very gently, that my friends were not good for me. but soft warnings would escalate into these elaborate stories about things they’d do behind my back with (fabricated) details and (false) witnesses, and over time, i started to believe him.

at fifteen, i had been quietly isolated from almost every friendship i had built in high school and without my direct knowledge, he had gained full control over big aspects of my life.

he had access to my social media accounts and would be monitoring my activity on a consistent basis. we would facetime every night and each call would last hours, almost all of them involved him sobbing about how much he hated himself. his looks, his intelligence, his image, his family, his future.

i was young, and i thought love was the act of being the only person who could hold him up.

while i was spending my summer vacation in hawaii with my family that year, we had one of our biggest blowout fights ever. over what exactly? i can’t even recall.

that whole trip and the rest of my summer was completely stolen from me, as i spent the next few months being called horrible slurs and getting relentlessly terrorized over the phone by my sociopath of a boyfriend.

turns out that sometime in the few months he didn’t spend calling or texting me in a blind rage, he had been getting cozy with a girl on my cheer team.

i entered sophomore year in a depression i could not quite name. my friends took me back, mostly out of pity for what i had been through, and i was grateful enough to take whatever shame came with that. i quit every extracurricular i had once cared about. i was replacing meals with nicotine.

what i felt most, in retrospect, was bigger than heartbreak. i felt sad because i never would’ve guessed that’s how my first relationship would play out. i felt stupid for being manipulated into leaving my friends for this boy i just met and for giving up my freedom so easily.

it was the first time i was grieving a version of myself.

act two: the situationship from hell

going into my third year of college, i had just gotten out of a long-term relationship that started senior year of high school. it was the first time i was single in college and while mourning that relationship, i was simultaneously seeking any means of distraction from the reality of my love life.

it comes to no one’s surprise that my distraction was 1) two years younger than me and 2) in a fraternity.

unlike my first relationship, there was no honeymoon phase into the realization that this man was a walking red flag. the first time we hooked up, it was in a drunken haze the night of a cinco de mayo party. i woke up the next morning in horror to find a bright necklace of hickies covering my entire neck.

so that everybody knows you’re mine, he explained.

there was a dark energy that was rooted in our connection. sexual aggression aside, some might say it was due to our hidden intentions. women’s intuition was reminding me of a certain familiarity i had with narcissists.

we started talking more over break. he was from northern california and was staying back home for the summer, so the entirety of our beginning stages existed purely over text threads and facetime.

though it started off as a fling that was “so unserious” to initiate myself into the college dating pool, nobody could’ve prepared me for the turmoil i was about to experience.

after months of being told i’m “wifey material” and that he’s “never felt this way for another girl before”, i considered his offer to be exclusive.

that was, until, one night. we’re on the phone talking for hours about how our days went and how we can’t wait to see each other in person again. i hang up around midnight, and an hour later, a mutual friend of ours texts me a screenshot of his close friends instagram story. a story that i’m not added to.

it’s a mirror selfie of him hugging a girl with pink hair from behind, nuzzling his face in her neck while she takes the photo with his phone.

it was hard to convince myself of what i was seeing. my brain went straight to the logistics. i mean, we were facetiming less than an hour ago. was this a friend i didn’t know about? a sister or a cousin he’s just really close to?

what kind of psychopath has the time to lovebomb a girl over the phone and then invite a completely different girl over to his place in the same hour????

but this was only the beginning of me uncovering the truth behind his extensive roster, because for the ongoing months, i proceeded to find out about what felt like fifty more girls he’d been talking to in the duration of our situationship.

girls from his hometown, girls from his classes, girls he met at parties, girls he met online, girls that he met at his job, girls that he met at our cafeteria, girls that he met in the dorms. it didn’t matter how they looked, how they met: if she identified as female, chances are, he’s made an introduction.

i would find out about new girls constantly and confront him with an anger i’d never seen in myself. he would always deny everything and make me feel like i was crazy for even thinking he would jeopardize our connection. that he would never hurt me and that i’m the problem for believing he’d do something like that.

somewhere along the way, the relationship stopped being a relationship and became something else. a kind of slow, low-grade self-harm i was convincing myself was a sick version of love that i deserved.

i was already a woman who had been cheated on by then, but the more it hurt, the more i felt like i had something to prove. that i could be the one who finally got him to stop. that i had access to the version of him that these other girls hadn’t seen.

i had become delusional in his game of manipulation.

in the midst of us being on-and-off, over and over again, he would come by my apartment and demand i make him food, like a guest who had been invited and also wronged. he would be warm over text and cold the second he saw me in person. i would flirt with guys in front of him at parties we were both at, which would result in him yelling obscenities in my face and then us hooking up in a fit of rage.

this cycle would go on for a year before i managed to cut things off entirely.

by the end, my self-esteem was lower than it had been at the start. i was exhausted. but more than exhausted, i was enraged at the fact that i had somehow let someone disrespect me worse than my first boyfriend did. a man that was never even officially my boyfriend.

act three: the one i didn’t see coming

he lived next door to the situationship from hell in the frat house.

i had started hooking up with him in a state of revenge that i knew would hurt my situationship from hell, which quickly (and embarrassingly) became something more real than i had planned.

he was kinder. smarter. artsier. more of my type now, on paper.

i would sleep over at his place often. he had this big and important engineering job that required him to get up at 5am every morning, so he would wake up before me, and i would lie there with my eyes closed and feel him tuck the blanket back over me. he kissed my forehead before he left for class. he stayed up late telling me about his family and his fears.

not only did feelings develop quickly, but a codependence i was familiar with began to form. we were attached to the hip. a package deal.

one of us was always there to greet each other at our respective houses after a long day of work and school. he’d hold my hand in public and put his arm around me when we’d hang around town, which sounds like normal signs of affection, but never happened with the situationship from hell and his fear of being tied to any girl in public.

everything started to seem like it was falling into place again. like this man was the solution to years of hurt and trauma caused by those of my past.

until november rolled around and thanksgiving was coming up.

he begged me for days to spend the break with him at the frat house, since him and his family were on bad terms and he had no plans to go home. but as much as i wanted to stick with him, i had my own family to see.

while i was gone, i would text him to let him know i missed him and that i wanted to check in on how he was doing. if the frat house was feeling lonely. but to my surprise, i didn’t receive a text back from him at all. extremely odd, considering we were in constant contact for well over three months.

instead, i got a text from one of the guys in his fraternity that a girl i was close with had been sleeping over in his room. the entire weekend.

all i remember about that year’s thanksgiving is scooping myself a plate of mashed potatoes in a state of shock.

i was appalled. with my other two exes, i can admit to seeing the glaring red flags early on, but i had felt completely blindsided. it was the first time i really felt forced to doubt my instincts.

i felt every negative emotion rush to the surface in a manner so overwhelming that all i could do was laugh. like my body had run out of the capacity to feel any more sadness and anger it could possibly continue to feel over a man.

because despite not anticipating any red flags beforehand, how could i possibly blame myself for this one?

tell myself that i shouldn’t have gone home for thanksgiving?

somewhere in the wreckage of him, after years of being slowly worn down by the two before him and running out of versions of myself to hand over, i finally heard it.

the only person you can ever really, fully trust is the version of yourself who decides to leave that bullsh*t behind.

i’m the most single i’ve been in years right now and i’ve never been happier.

i used to think being alone was a holding pattern. the agonizing limbo between a relationship that ended and a relationship i was waiting on. it’s only now that i recognize it as a luxury.

nobody is cheating on me or monitoring my social media or demanding i make them food or ghosting me on thanksgiving. the only people who currently have access to me are people who love me back: my friends, my family, the small, well-vetted circle of people who respect me deeply.

after years of mistreatment, here’s what i’ve learned:

men who treat you badly do not, in the moment, teach you what you are worth. they teach you to settle. they teach you to apologize for things you did not do. they teach you to wait for them to change. to forgive and forget until their empty promises start to sound like love.

that is, until you finally start to hear yourself again.

none of the three exes deserve credit for what i’ve been taught. i learned from what was left when they were finished with me, which was me. just me.

i grieved every younger version of myself who handed her worth to people who did not deserve it. i loved her enough to let her go and become somebody she would have been proud of.

so yes. being cheated on did, eventually, make for great character development.

but no man cheating on me made me a better woman.

i did.

golden hour is almost year-round. the freeway starts to sound like an ocean. the palm trees are moving through the breeze in a real way. and then somebody behind you in the grocery line is talking obnoxiously loud on the phone about how he was at dinner with taylor and gaga last night, and you remember exactly what city you are in.

nobody is ever just living here. they are on the way to a meeting, a coffee that is functionally a meeting, a callback disguised as a brunch.

los angeles has the hustle and bustle of any other big city, except in places like chicago and new york, not everyone longs for visibility and an acknowledgement of their constant busyness.

the city moves like an industry because it is one. and the industry is everybody.

i grew up in a suburb of los angeles that sits just outside the canyons, close enough to bleed into the rest of the city but far enough that most people wouldn’t be able to point it out on a map.

nonetheless, even the people on the outskirts of LA knew somebody in the industry.

the kids i went to school with were all aspiring creatives, but not because they had a calling. their fathers ran indie labels. their mothers were talent managers. their grandfathers had directed a thing in the seventies that was still paying residuals.

the entire architecture of childhood in los angeles is access because everybody has at least one weird connection with a c-list celebrity. who do you know? who can you get to do that? who can get you in here?

by the time i was sixteen, i had more contacts in my phone than i have had at any point in my adult life. club promoters. friend-of-friend bartenders. classmate whose dad owns a boat. an adult in somebody’s life who could be quietly convinced for a smirnoff handle. or a fake id. or a vape.

as an LA kid, born and raised, you were made to feel invincible.

we hiked to the hollywood sign in the mornings and went to brunch afterward like we were thirty. if our weekly allowances weren’t funding our nightlife, we were taking workout classes because we all saw kendall jenner do yoga on instagram once.

we attended parties thrown in the hills when parents were out of town and treated nicotine like it was an elevated version of caffeine.

kids would hang out after school at hookah bars and rooftop lounges on hollywood boulevard. we’d get dinner reservations together for a group of eight at nobu and then carpool to in n out after the ridiculously tiny sushi portions.

birthdays meant a suite in vegas or palm springs or somebody’s family beach house because we always had to “get away”. boys were always invited — any boys we could find who were cute and down. that was the only criteria, and it was sufficient, because everybody was always cute and down.

my friends and i would find boys on snapchat maps to crush on. go to knotts or six flags and end the weekend with boys we met at the park on our hips. in the following weekend, we’d beg our parents for a hotel room and sneak them in.

i did not know, for a long time, that none of this was normal.

a number of my previous schoolmates have paved their way into the modern LA prototype. she has a title that does not technically describe her job. wellness enthusiast (fitness influencer), creative director (photoshoot assistant), founder (owns an instagram account). she is always working on something and nobody knows when it will be finished.

she is tired from coachella, even though it was well over two months ago. she’s on a calorie deficit (ozempic) or doing 75 hard (california sober) or some variation of the sort. she gets invited to work out at the alo gym. she has thoughts on the gut microbiome. she will share them with you, unprompted, at brunch.

her sunday routine is doordashing erewhon hot bar food and a tumeric juice before splurging the remaining bits of her paycheck on lip filler and lisa says gah. a perfect encapsulation of her april whereabouts are compiled into a 16-slide instagram dump with a $7 boothbybryant thumbnail photo and an empire of the sun song to top it off.

underneath all of it is a tinge of insecurity that the city never lets her name out loud.

once you’re here long enough, you can start to feel the performative requirement of being a los angeles resident.

i rent a place in hollywood now, but my roommates and i spend most of our time in parts of the city that have learned to be quieter.

there’s small corners near my hometown that i’ve learned to adore, with coffee shops and dog parks and record stores walking distance from my office. the version of los angeles i love most also lives in the empty sidewalks of larchmont on a hot wednesday summer night, with gelato from jennie’s in hand and an inside joke my friends and i can’t seem to exhaust.

los angeles is insanely overpriced. in order to get any sort of bang for your buck out here, you’re either stuck in 30 minute traffic at minimum to get anywhere or you’re waiting in some unreasonable line for a diner that’s been overhyped on tik tok. it is overstimulating. gas is way too expensive. anywhere that you’ve heard is worth a visit is most likely overcrowded.

and then it is august, and the heat finally breaks, and i am coming back from the amc at the grove or bar hopping in echo park with the ones i love, and it hits me that i’ve learned to feel like an invincible kid in LA in a completely different way.

ironically, unlimited accessibility is what i believe to be the cause of a tainted city, but it’s also one of the things i love most about being from here.

in a single afternoon, i can grab a coffee modified to the gods, visit a small bookstore, walk to a museum, have italian for dinner, order a cosmo at a dive bar, and end the night at the beach under the stars. all of it being on the same street.

we live in a city of stages, stacked next to each other, where you can step from one into the next without ever leaving the script. the diversity is real. the community is real. the people who actually stay here, who are not just passing through to make it, build something out of all of it.

you do not get bored in los angeles. you can get tired. you can get depleted. you can get sick of yourself. but bored is something you never get to be.

i love this place.

i am also, quietly, planning to leave it eventually.

those two things can be true at the same time. they probably have to be. you cannot be from los angeles and not hold both: the wanting to stay and the wanting to be somewhere with fewer cars and more sky.

i’ve spent my entire life here, among the chaos of this city, and i think i’m finally ready to ditch the feeling of invincibility and invite monotony.