The Agony and the Ecstasy of Watching Your Partner Flirt

Five years ago, a writer friend of mine — we’ll call her Sabrina — got in a fight with her boyfriend after going out with a few friends. She’d partied; she’d danced; she’d accepted free drinks from strangers by giving them the impression she might go home with them. “I’m talking, like, sexy dancing, like, grinding,” she recently recalled. She came home late to her boyfriend of a few years and casually recounted her night. “I was dancing with a couple guys, and obviously nothing happened, but we were grinding and it was really fun,” she remembered telling him. “He was like, ‘What?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, are you not comfortable with that?’”

He wasn’t. You, reader, might not be either. Or maybe you are. Maybe you would have been comfortable with the dancing had it gone down in, say, a salsa class instead of a club? Or if it had been with someone of the same gender? How would you feel if it had happened not with a stranger but with a mutual acquaintance? What about if the partner in question had a history of infidelity? On Reddit, in group chats, and most definitely in couples therapy, everyone has a different opinion on what exactly is an acceptable level of flirting outside your relationship.

Thank you, Jimmy Butler, for delighting us with your services as a ball boy at the U.S. Open. Thank you, Selena and Miley, for dropping new music for us to listen to this weekend. Thank you, Billie Eilish, for flying coach like the rest of us normies. Thank you, Carly Rae, for dumping more fuel onto the dumpster fire that is Scooter Braun’s empire. And thank you, Friday, for finally arriving.

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