The Erotics of Almost Hating Someone

We were 17. We’d snuck out of our houses while our parents slept. In our town in the foothills of Colorado it felt like if we drove deep enough we might steal a little freedom. We took a few switchbacks up an unknown dirt road, parked, and settled into a secluded patch of trees. We hunched over our knees and passed a handle of offbrand cinnamon rum back and forth. Cloaked in the darkness of the woods, it felt like a safe space to taste a little rebellion.

By daylight we’d discover that we were actually in someone’s very manicured back yard, sloppy and cackling just a few feet from a Little Tikes Playset.

The boys watched, eyes wide, as Katherine and I smashed our faces together, letting our tongues explore each other’s mouths.

“I’m usually better. I’m so sloppy right now.”

We had a crush on the same boy, but hadn’t admitted this to each other. We knew each other well enough to know. Kat once dragged Sean across the middle school library by his hair. Their kind of love doesn’t ever truly fade.

We kissed to show off for the boys. To show off for Sean. To show off for each other. Apologies to Kyle, the other guy with us that night. That poor fuck just along for a wild ride.

More time passed. We got to the bottom of the rum. Things started to blur, and I’m not really sure what all transpired before I giggled and asked Kat to take a walk so I could have a moment alone with Sean. “Take a walk?! Take a fucking walk?!”

It was rare for Kat and I to fight. The alcohol brought alive what little resentment there was between us. The insults we launched at each other in that fight didn’t even make sense. It was a mess of teenage aggression and fierce female competition. Kat and I so rarely fought because we loved each other with the intensity of twin flames. If we had dated we would have destroyed each other.

To this day, there are very few people on the planet that I know better and love more than her.

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I am a competitive person. It’s a trait I’ve spent most of my life working to dismantle. I used to be the kind of kid who took a soccer ball to the face without crying, doggedly gritting my teeth and fighting through. These days I better understand this conditioning, how I’m inclined to equate personal value with achievement. And how I implicitly understood from a very early age that there was currency in “beating” other women, other people. Because we live in a domination culture, a patriarchy, a late-stage capitalist hellscape where I unfortunately have to know the meaning of words like “mogging.”

Competition is so prevalent in our cultural climate that it seems like we’re past the point of healthy engagement with it. Jia Tolentino’s recent piece on the plastic surgery arms race gets at this: when appearance itself becomes the primary site of competition, “everyone is hot and nothing is erotic.” And somewhere in that shift actual desire gets lost in the scoreboard.

The ways that competition sneaks into desire is endlessly fascinating to me. I’ve been grappling with this for years, especially as a queer woman. When patriarchy inherently pits women against each other, what that sometimes means is that I might meet a woman I find attractive…and there’s a whole mess of feelings that show up before I’ve even gotten to know her. There’s an inherent threat I’m aware of, something deeply programmed. I’ll spot traits that I admire and/or envy, and I won’t quite know how to interpret those observations initially.

(And there are plenty of men who grapple with this too. Even the highly homosocial manosphere man unknowingly engages this.)

Sometimes when I’m shopping online I can’t tell if I like the product or I’m just attracted to or feel some kind of aspirational, competitive impulse towards the model and the carefully curated aesthetic she lives inside. Do we all do this?

It’s wild to confess, but these impulses, in part, prevented me from embracing my queerness for way too long. I misunderstood what I was experiencing. It’s the classic dilemma: do I want to fight her, fuck her, or become her? Girl, it’s all three.

Entire genres of literature and entertainment are built on this ambiguity and these power dynamics. “Enemies to lovers” isn’t just a trope, it’s an industry. And its popularity says something about how a lot of us actually experience desire - as something that can initially show up as rivalry, envy, jealousy, a chase… The specific charge of a person who is not on your side, until suddenly in the narrative, they are.

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Well obviously any excuse to feature these guys. Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams for GQ.

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And then there are people who have what to me seems like a cognitive superpower: the ability to transmute jealousy and competition directly into erotic drive. Often unconsciously. Sometimes knowingly, deliberately. Sometimes it’s a quiet spark that can be gently stoked into flame. For many of us in nonmonogamous relationship, there’s a natural mix of jealousy, compersion, and eroticism when we talk about and experience our partner’s sexual activity with others. I’m talking about cuck stuff, hotwifing, and a whole spectrum of different ways that jealousy itself can become the thing that’s turning someone on, not just something they’re managing.

If this is you: incredible. Congratulations. God’s chosen. Bless.

This is actually a documented phenomenon, not just a horny theory of mine. My friend and colleague, Dr. Marie Thouin, who wrote the foundational academic work on compersion, has spent a lot of her research pushing back on the assumption that compersion and jealousy are opposites that can’t coexist. Her research, with Dr. Joli Hamilton, even coined a term for the messy middle state: “comperstruggle”. When you’re feeling ache and angst and joy at the same time.

Thouin also hosts a great talk with another friend, Ally Iseman, about alchemizing jealousy into something erotic. They speak to the kind of jealousy that isn’t so mononormative. That instead, when handled with intention, jealousy can actually generate a charge instead of cause damage.

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