Low Fidelity
Jealousy, Ownership, and Categories That Can’t Hold Us
Between 1780 and 1850, the English rewrote what it meant to be a decent human being, and they did it to serve empire, industry, and class anxiety. Restraint. Domestic piety. Sexual suspicion. Encoded into moral law, then retroactively edited to look ancient and natural. Two hundred years later, we’re still living inside that code, thinking it’s instinct.
There are people in my life who know me well enough to be unsparing. We look at each other when we talk. We interrupt. There’s a good amount of teasing. No one is protected from being slightly exposed. Conversations wander and then land somewhere better than where they started, which is the only kind of conversation I have patience for.
I’m a toucher. I lean in. I hug. I throw an arm around someone the same way I do with my kids. I’ll find myself twisting a piece of my bestie’s long hair mid-sentence because my brain wandered and my hands followed. I talk with my hands and it feels strange when they’re not in motion. Italian runs deep.
A few people have had a problem with this.
One woman who dated someone in our circle was sharp, funny, and easy to be around. I ran into her a few months after they broke up. We got drinks, played pool, and the night slipped sideways in the way good nights do. She destroyed me at pool. After the second drink, she said she always felt like she was competing with me.
I laughed. “You just kicked my ass.”
She shook her head. “Not at pool.”
That stayed with me. I never once recognized the competition. I’m me, she’s her: two entirely different people who bring completely different things to the table. That’s just how people work. She’s gorgeous. I hugged her. I apologized for making her feel anything less than good. She laughed and said she loved hanging out with me.
I’ve turned that over more than I expected. She wasn’t wrong that something felt like competition. She was wrong about what she was competing for. It wasn’t love or loyalty or even attention. It was a particular frequency of exchange. She was measuring herself against something that wasn’t measuring her back.
A newer girlfriend thinks I’m disrespectful. To her. To my husband. To some moral order she’s been appointed to defend. There’s no lingering. No suggestion. Nothing that could be mistaken for anything beyond being fully present with whoever I’m with. After that first conversation, I started paying attention to how I move around new people. The ones who stay, get it. Get me.
One of my closest friend’s girlfriends is one of my favorite people. And yes, I twist her hair at trivia. I smack his shoulder when we’re laughing too hard. I love them both in a way that doesn’t divide cleanly, because this is my chosen family, and chosen family is rarely neat. More women than men, collectively a little off in ways that make things more interesting. People drift in and usually stay. The more strange, the better.
But yes. I take up space in a room. I don’t do it on purpose. It just happens.
That might be the problem.
Jealousy is difficult because it arrives dressed as something reasonable. A boundary. A principle. A complaint about someone else’s behavior. Which, in this case, means talking, laughing, being equally engaged with whoever is in front of me. I’m not circling one person. But if you’re looking for a threat, you only need one focal point.
I started gently avoiding this friend, keeping distance when we were all together. Waving instead of hugging, while he became the only person in our entire group who didn’t get one. Eight years of history reduced to strategic distance. And I was told I was being good and correct for it, as if I had stepped back inside some hidden line. As if I’d accepted the terms. I see him less than I used to by design, and when I do, I try to remember to treat him like a construction site.
Underneath all of that is something simpler. Fear.
You’re not enough. He’s going to leave you. The person you love is getting something from someone else that you can’t give, and eventually, the math will stop working in your favor. These aren’t small fears. They’re old and efficient and very good at finding crime.
What’s striking is how easily confidence can be performed alongside all of that. Saying all the right things about trusting your partner, not being the jealous type, knowing your worth. But if you actually believed you were irreplaceable, you wouldn’t need anyone else to be weirdly contained. Real security doesn’t require containment. If another woman’s presence destabilizes you, the confidence was never real. It was just a sweater with another cardigan on top of that.
We’ve built systems that make this worse.
Social media turns every passing interaction into something that can be examined in high resolution. Someone laughs at your partner’s joke at dinner. Later, you can find her profile. Study her angles. Obviously, her taste in books is eclectic and interesting and she travels effortlessly everywhere. How does she have 12k followers? Twenty years ago she would have been gone from your mind by the end of the week. Now she lives in the interwebs. The comparison is available at any hour, in unnecessary detail, often at two in the morning when nothing good has ever been decided. And the mythology of romantic completeness is more aggressively marketed than it has ever been in history. Someone on Pinterest has a 200-page wedding vision book for some guy she met six weeks ago.
And all of this is happening while we are still insisting that one person should be everything.
Underneath it sits a belief we rarely question. That a person belongs to you. Not in the sense of choosing each other repeatedly, which is the only version that holds up under pressure. The proprietary sense. Their attention as something to be allocated. Their interior life as something you have a claim on. Their laughter, their focus, their curiosity at a table that includes other people, as something that should be filtered through you.
Ownership dismantles love more reliably than almost anything else.
My second marriage has made that unavoidable. We have not stayed the same long enough to pretend this is one continuous relationship. There have been versions of us that would not recognize each other now. Periods of distance that felt final while we were inside them. Tentative returns, then ordinary, then intimate again. We have broken this apart and put it back together enough times that calling it one marriage feels slightly inaccurate. A couple of divorces. Currently working on another remarriage. Same two people. Together six years and counting.
We didn’t arrive at compatibility. We built it with the same toolbox we each brought from past relationships. The person who fits is not the one who mirrors you. It’s the one who can sit across from your differences without trying to neutralize them. Someone who can negotiate taste, attention, pace (all of it) without turning it into a moral issue. Someone who can argue and still find the humor in it. If you can’t laugh in the middle of it, it’s probably already off the rails.
Compatibility is something you construct over time. It should never be a prerequisite.
The couple-centric model we’ve been told to aim for is a recent invention. Stephanie Coontz has written extensively about this. Marriage, for most of history, was economic and political. Emotional life was distributed between friends, kin, and your community. The modern expectation that one person should be your intellectual equal, emotional center, sexual partner, financial ally, and existential mirror is not ancient wisdom. It’s a modern experiment, and the results are mixed at best.
Across cultures, the arrangements humans have actually lived look far more varied than the model we treat as default. That’s not a license for any particular structure. It’s a reason to stop mistaking inheritance for inevitability.
I heard Dr. Kim TallBear speak recently about kinship and the way intimacy has been organized. The nuclear couple as the primary unit of loyalty isn’t neutral. It was very much designed. It structures power. It determines who matters and who’s peripheral.
Within that structure, a woman who is fully present across different kinds of relationships becomes difficult to categorize. If she is warm, she’s suspect. If she is engaged, she is crossing a line. The norms don’t have enough resolution to hold her without flattening her into something simpler.
So the language shifts to morality. Respect. Disrespect. Right. Wrong. It sounds cleaner that way. Less embarrassing than saying I am afraid.
What they’re actually asking for is smaller and less visible. Don’t be so available. But this has nothing to do with respect.
We have been told that if your partner lights up with someone else, even without a sexual charge, something is being taken from you. Their attention is finite and should be concentrated. Two people as a closed circuit with everything routed internally. The idea feels clean, but it’s not how people work.
Different people activate different parts of us. It’s how a full life distributes itself. Some conversations pull something out of me that wouldn’t exist otherwise. That version of me is not in every room. And it doesn’t make it less real.
My husband reaches many of my parts. Some of my favorite ones. Not all of them. And I don’t touch all of his. We’ve tried. I notice jealousy when it comes up. Sometimes I let it pass quickly. Sometimes I don’t. Why build an unnecessary case and loop something in your brain that could just as easily be acknowledged and released? We started making agreements that matter. We chose them with open eyes. He didn’t want an open marriage. I agreed. I still agree.
What took time was something else. The understanding that I don’t belong solely to him. Before we married, I insisted on living separately. Second marriage. I need some autonomy. Realistically, we all do. It wasn’t the easiest adjustment, but it keeps us whole. And it keeps us honest. We choose each other without removing everything else.
We still get it wrong. We react. We circle back. We’re learning how to locate the feeling under the reaction. It’s hard. Yes, there are therapists involved. Nothing about this is elegant.
I’m approaching fifty and the male gaze has lost most of its authority. I still like makeup. I like a good heel. I am also rarely without a trucker hat; it takes the edge off in a way I appreciate, and it narrows the field. When I’m with someone, I’m with them. The rest of the room falls away. There isn’t much left over for tracking who might be watching.
I’m also more comfortable with what I’m not. There are things I don’t have. A certain softness. Patience doesn’t come naturally. Specific knowledge I haven’t accumulated. Other people bring those things into my life. None of it reads as a threat. It reads as expansion. They make me a better human. They all make me laugh, which might be my only prerequisite for friendship.
Other people’s strengths stop feeling like a subtraction once you stop treating them as a comparison.
I care deeply about the people in my life. The ones who push a conversation further than I would have taken it alone. Who are curious enough to follow something past the obvious stopping point. These people are not organized by gender and never have been. The ones who shaped me share the same quality of presence. They are in their bodies and in their ideas at the same time.
When I find that, I’m all in. I still make new friends in the wild. My newest finds are two fantastically brilliant women: one I met at a cocktail party, the other at a fashion event. Both are now on monthly dinner rotation. My personality is not a setting I can reduce for someone else’s comfort. The eye contact, the physicality, the attention. I’m out here just disarmingly winging it. It’s how I move through the world.
Women are taught to read that as a threat. The competition for male attention is embedded early and reinforced often enough that it stops feeling like a learned behavior. It becomes our truth. Biology dressed up as morality.
I understand the feeling. I’ve felt it. The quick calculation of where I stand relative to someone else. The search for the variable I’m missing. Fear always finds a target.
Dr. TallBear uses a phrase low-fidelity society. Categories too blunt to hold the actual texture of human experience, so everything gets compressed to fit. Women against women. Attention as currency. Morality as a cleaner way to talk about fear.
If you don’t locate the thing underneath, you’ll keep finding new reasons to justify the feeling. New rules. New problems to solve that are not actually the problem.
The framework we inherited doesn’t have a word for a woman who is equally lit up by different kinds of people, across different kinds of relationships, and without hierarchy. So it reaches for something familiar.
And it tends to land in the same place every time.
Truly beautiful!