Three times this week. Men and women. The same core question arrived.
It always sounds like this: My partner told me something about their past — a story, a name, a detail I didn’t ask for — and I was fine. I was so fine. And then an hour later I was trying to breathe.
Sometimes it’s so small - a funny story about a connection that never materialized, something that happened twenty years ago, something that technically meant nothing. But a charge comes through.
If you are heavily therapized, you take this on with ease. Laugh in the right places. And then often later, when you are alone, feel your chest tighten. Start realizing the air in the room isn’t enough.
Another example. A man. Perhaps he listened to his girlfriend describe a trip she took with an ex — things they’d experienced — and he nodded through it and then couldn’t sleep for two nights.
The third sat across from a partner who kept comparing. You kiss like this. My ex used to do that. This reminds me of when…
They all came to me with the same posture. Head down. A little ashamed. Convinced that what happened in their body was evidence of something broken. Their discomfort must be a sign of a wound.
I want to tell you what I told them.
Every single person who has ever asked me this question — and I have been asked this question for six years, across hundreds of sessions — shares the same profile. Every time.
They have a high sex drive. Not performative, not compensatory. A sex drive that lives in the body, not in the visual field, not in fantasy. They need to feel safe for it to come online or stay online. Jealousy is about this safety.
They can attach. Fully. In a super rare way. They don’t have a long trail of encounters that meant nothing to them. When they’re in, they’re in. Their attachment system is online. This is really cool.
What they’re experiencing is not a wound. It’s a graduation.
Modern therapeutic culture has gotten this exactly backwards.
We live inside an ideology right now that rewards radical oversharing and pathologizes discomfort with it. The good partner, we’re told, receives everything. Every story. Every comparison. Every detailed memory of someone else’s body. The evolved partner doesn’t flinch.
The secure “evolved” partner has no edges and no feelings. Jealousy, a very human emotion, is somehow obsolete in this sanitized green flag inner world.
And if you do flinch — if something lands in your chest and stays there — then you must be anxious. You must be jealous. You must have work to do. It’s your wound. Hold it alone. It’s your projection to heal through millions of hours of penance.
I don’t buy it.
Here is what I believe after six years of sitting with this question: the flinch is the health.
