This is the fifth installment of Higher Gossip, an advice column on sex and love. Read previous installments here.

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Q: During the pandemic, I became involved in a tumultuous friendship with a polyamorous woman. She was magnetic, gorgeous, and brilliant, but she needed a lot from me. I also had a partner at the time. One night she invited me over, and we fucked. I immediately told my partner what had happened, and told this woman I couldn’t see her. She felt really rejected. She criticized me for being closed-minded about love and “not being open to multiple possibilities” because I’m not polyamorous. We would engage in long, erotic correspondences; they’d get too intense; she’d insist on asking, again, “What are we?” She told me she believed we were going to be together, and that I was hers. For a long time, I tried to communicate to her that our romantic relationship didn’t have a future, even after my partner and I broke up. But we kept talking and clearly had a connection. Finally, I wrote a long letter explaining we were only friends. It exploded, and she didn’t want to speak to me anymore. It felt very damning. She’s a person I admire, and she has a very wide, encompassing perspective on love. It just made me feel like such a straight, monogamous square.

Recently, she reached out to me and said I could email her again. Our emails immediately got long and involved. I don’t mind having an intense friendship, and it’s so nice to have her back in my life. But I also worry we’re going back to our old dynamic. Our letters have gotten longer and longer. We’re getting more and more intimate. And now there’s a long email from her in my inbox that I just keep avoiding answering. Am I being a narcissistic idiot for assuming that she’s going to bring that same romantic dynamic back into our friendship? Is it cruel to just… not answer the email?

A: I read your question to my friends Natalia and June, who frequently ask me if I’ve received any juicy questions for the column. They joked that the answer was simple. Your question couldn’t possibly afford a column. “You just don’t fancy her,” Natalia said. You feel like an asshole about either ghosting or leading her on—so what?

As a rule, of course, you should respond. Most of us, when we reach out to someone, would prefer any response to none at all, and any established relationship warrants that respect. I suppose the obviousness of this fact—and your own awareness that it would make you a bit of an asshole not to respond—is why Natalia thought this question so trivial. But personally I found it provocative, perhaps because I’m always interested in the asshole’s perspective. In our era there is too much dismissal of, and not enough interest in, the perspective of the purported asshole. Even Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole” forum is dominated by a strange false conviction that this is a role that belongs to other people: that most of us are not, and will not be, the asshole.

How often do we entertain, and agonize over, the desires of people we aren’t sure we fancy? The internet, at least the version of it that I’m served, is full of videos in which women warn each other against mistaking the continued—and yet inadequate—interest or responsiveness of men for an irresistible connection, a passion which winds its way through the obstacles of a girlfriend, crunch time at work, a lack of “readiness.” Everyone is mad about “breadcrumbing” and “lovebombing.” (Recently, after a friend was accused of lovebombing by a woman he had dumped, June remarked with disbelief at the sudden wide misuse of this phrase to describe something that we’ve always dealt with, that has always been a part of dating: changing one’s mind.) We are meant not only to know whether we want someone, but to convey it succinctly and kindly, and never to be so cruel as to send an unwise text in a moment of nostalgia or loneliness. These are rules invented to protect the fragile hearts of rejected hopefuls, and they are certainly well-meaning, though completely unreasonable.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’re one of those pathological demons that dating influencers warn us about. You accepted the interest of this magnetic, brilliant, polyamorous woman, even though you knew you didn’t want to fall in love with her. You cheated on your partner and slept with her. Then you turned around and punished her by immediately withdrawing the possibility of a sexual, romantic relationship. Even so, you continued to write her long, passionate emails, which even you could feel had an exciting erotic flavor. And of course you enjoyed that erotic flavor. It wasn’t superfluous. It was interesting, and a bit dangerous, in a pleasurable way. Since you’d been clear about what you did and didn’t want, since you’d set your boundaries and taken care of your obligations toward her, why shouldn’t you enjoy the desire of a person you admired, an extremely attractive person? Why shouldn’t you let her adore you? Why should you deny yourself a pleasure that was her responsibility to mete out? It was on her to cut your friendship off if she didn’t like what you had to give, on her to protect herself. You had no responsibility toward her, except perhaps as a responsive friend. And eventually she did have enough of it: fine.

This is certainly a framing I can imagine her, or one of her friends, taking—a punishing framing that we frequently indulge when we feel brutally neglected. But I imagine your experience goes something more like this: you accepted the interest of this magnetic, brilliant, polyamorous woman, whom you felt unable to resist. Your attraction and curiosity propelled you into bed with her, in a way that felt like an unanticipated submission to a larger force. You scrambled afterward to try to make it right: to be honest with your partner, to draw a boundary with this woman. Yet you felt it would be cruel, and against both of your interests, to shut off contact entirely. Of course you believed you could be friends, or wanted to believe you could be friends. You didn’t anticipate that each time you set a boundary, she would so stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it. It hurt and disturbed you that she seemed not to be listening to you when you told her how you felt, and that she blamed you for not wanting her or, in her terms, for not being on her level. When your friendship exploded, you respected her need for space, but you were baffled by the depth of the misunderstanding.

I imagine that you’ve considered both these interpretations, and that you’ve felt the ugly as well as the blameless emotions. You’ve arrived at a late-in-the-game decision about this relationship and your own entanglement in it. But of course you’re quite trapped. The compassionate, respectful thing to do is to respond, certainly not to ghost her; but the responses that you personally consider compassionate and respectful tend to piss her off in the long term, and make you feel unfairly maligned as selfish—a hot-and-cold lovebomber who has wasted her time and led her on. But I’ll bestow on you one of my more difficult and freeing beliefs: that, in general, we are not responsible for other people’s feelings (perhaps above all in our romantic entanglements) and other people are not responsible for ours. Of course there are instances when we are deliberately hurt or manipulated, when someone else is genuinely responsible for harming us, or we them; but much of what we resent and rail against, especially in dating, is the response we have produced in ourselves in reaction to the inconsistency or ambivalence of someone we’d hoped would like us. One of the realities that most confuses us, and that we have the hardest time wrapping our heads around, is that there is no moral valence to someone just not liking us. It does not make someone an asshole. Nor does it make someone an asshole if it takes them some time to realize they don’t like us enough. The pain we feel convinces us that someone must be responsible, and this is one of the most seductive groupthink delusions we encounter. You are not, in fact, responsible for this woman’s pain, much as she is convinced that you are.

Still, it can prove useful to look clearly, without guilt, at the fact that you like having her around—not merely as a friend but as someone who directs toward you an intense desire and excitement. I can’t be sure you still enjoy that, but I imagine that anyone would. And if you can be frank with yourself that you’ve always enjoyed the ambiguity and the eroticism of the friendship, you can more easily tolerate, as you continue your email correspondence, her frustration and anger—the ultimate consequences of that thwarted desire that has also given you plenty of pleasure and experience.

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Q: When I was a teenager, and very romantically and sexually active, I wanted to move to a city, write, travel and have a lot of romantic experiences with different people—things that all felt linked. The first three I’ve done or am doing, but the last has been thwarted. I’m 26, and I met my now-partner when I was eighteen.

I’m very much in love with him, and feel that so much of what I’ve wanted out of life I can do in our relationship. We’re both artists, we travel often, live in a big city, have a wide circle of friends, and I feel excited and fulfilled by the unexpected nature of my life in many avenues. But I’ve always had a hard time shaking the idea that I’m missing out on developing some essential part of myself by not experiencing more romantic and sexual entanglements. The narrative I’ve always had is that the exploration of the self and the world and other people through romance and sex is paramount. Sometimes I just think that we met too early.

Can I have everything? Am I too afraid to leave the comfort of a relationship? Am I holding on to a narrative about romantic experiences I’ve written in my head? I feel I can’t totally trust my own judgment, what’s been socially scripted, what’s projection or fantasy, and what’s a combination of all three. It seems silly to me to leave a developed, challenging, deep relationship based on these confused ideas. I suppose I’m looking for a way to think about the idea of romance as experience, how to exist in a long-term love.

A: Perhaps the passage that I return to most often, from any piece of literature, is from Sheila Heti’s Motherhood. It’s a passage that has a shimmer of instinct and obscurity about it; I sometimes have the feeling that it makes sense to Heti but isn’t necessarily meant to make sense to us:

The question you must always ask is, Is what I am suffering characteristic? For there are pains that are characteristic, and pains that are uncharacteristic—characteristic suffering and uncharacteristic suffering, characteristic loneliness and uncharacteristic loneliness. Some suffering feels characteristic, it’s deep and familiar in your bones. Other suffering feels alien, like it should not be happening to you. … We all know which suffering is meant to be ours. In every life, there is a quality of suffering. I have never before in any of my relationships felt such characteristic suffering as I do with Miles. With Miles, the suffering feels meaningful—like something of significance could be born.

Not only are we, as we suspect, unable to escape our deepest roots, but in fact there’s a goodness and richness in this sort of predestined suffering. I love the conviction that each of us has a characteristic suffering, a type that we recognize and are almost intimate with, because that intimacy means that something of significance can be born from it. You and your partner are both artists, so you know well the feeling of suffering in a meaningful way.

When I was a teenager, I had the same hopes and convictions that you did. I wanted to have lots of romantic experiences with many different people, and in the last decade, that’s what I’ve done. In that time, my three closest friends from college, the roommates that I lived with for four years and with whom I navigated the first years of adulthood, have all developed long-term partnerships (now celebrating their first decades) with the men they met when we were nineteen and twenty years old. All four of us had the same convictions you did. None of us dreamed of getting married young, of settling down, of coming of age with a partner. We had all come to New York at eighteen years old in search of adventure. My three former roommates all express shock and a sense of disillusionment with themselves when they discuss having spent their whole twenties in the same relationship, even though of course they have still had all kinds of adventures. Even from their seats of happiness and love, they feel the cognitive dissonance of having pursued a path so oppositional to what they’d initially dreamed.

Yet I, since I was 25 or so, have been having an uncanny, opposite feeling: the inkling that there is a quality of depth and richness to my roommates’ relationships that none of my passionate, more brief relationships have approached. In very dark hours it seems to me that all my entanglements are devastating examples of “powerful solitary fantasy systems” bumping up against each other, without any of the insight, compromise and texture that develops between two people after the early period in which fantasy is at its most mad—a sense of insight and texture that is so vivid to me in my decade-long friendships. It humiliates me to tell my roommates that yet another possible romance has ended before it really developed legs. Yet it remains true that I’ve learned a precious amount from these relationships—experiences without which I would be a very different artist, certainly—and, even more so, it’s obvious to me that this is the suffering that is, for me, characteristic. The type of loneliness I’ve felt in my twenties has formed the bedrock of my creative landscape.

I mentioned last month that I was raised by practical, cheerful people for whom there was no reason to disguise the essentially adaptive, conditional nature of healthy relationships; these were also the people who instilled in me the belief, described above, that we are responsible for our own feelings. My parents believed that only by training in independence and solitude could one recognize and befriend this essential conditionality. To need, rather than merely to want, another person was not really in our lexicon or frame of possibility. Whatever I feel now about this credo, loneliness feels familiar in my bones, as Heti puts it. Sometimes this comforts me, and sometimes it roars over me as the most disturbing, relentless fact of my life. I often wonder whether I should continue reinforcing the idea that this is “characteristic,” if what I want to find characteristic, in the coming decades, is the suffering of being with another person.

I assume that you and I, as artists in a big city, live within the same vague culture, in which there is enormous value placed not only on a variety of romantic experience but on loneliness. We hear constantly that to really know ourselves, as people and as artists, nothing is more important than the richness and the suffering of solitude. In some ways, our little culture insists that if you have any doubts about your relationship, it’s always better to break up, not because there is a promise of a better love, but because we alone are capable of offering ourselves an inimitable and rich life. We think that “I want to be alone” is a good reason to leave a relationship, and “I want to be in love” is a bad reason to enter one (the only good reason to enter a relationship is, of course, that you find yourself unable to resist the draw of this particular person, not the situation of companionship in general). I suspect these narratives are why you worry that you are afraid to leave the comfort of your relationship. But in fact it sounds as if you wish to leave the comfort of your relationship, and you’re afraid, rightly, of losing your great love.

Neither you nor I can trust our own judgment and disentangle the scripts to which we’ve given various names. But if there’s any way to understand this decision, I think Heti’s suggestion is the strangest and most compelling guide. We always fantasize that to make the alternate choice will exempt us from suffering. But rather than conspire to escape our suffering, we can give it a name and a color, and decide if it makes sense to us or if we would like to instead tolerate a different flavor of suffering. I think the suffering of being with your partner is characteristic for you. Just as my roommates’ relationships did for them, your relationship with your partner has surprised you by providing a depth and challenge that you had imagined you could only find while leading yourself through a romantic maze. But it doesn’t matter what I think. Does the suffering you experience with him—of mourning the version of yourself that you fantasized about when you were younger, of wondering what else might be out there, but more so, of course, of living with him every day, compromising with him, arguing with him, sharing your life with him—does this, when it makes you suffer, also make you feel as if something of significance could be born?