Jealousy is often mistaken for love, but it behaves more like scarcity anxiety.

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In the gay world, jealousy appears early and often—not as a flaw, but as a credential. If you’re not jealous, you must not care. If you don’t monitor, you must not be invested. Surveillance is mistaken for seriousness.

This logic collapses under observation.

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There are, broadly, two kinds of men who arrive at jealousy. The first have never learned how to articulate desire. The second have learned how to suppress it. Both mistake vigilance for devotion.

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This is where openness enters the conversation—and where it’s most often misunderstood.

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I understand why people are open. Truly. Desire does not vanish because commitment exists. Fulfillment is not guaranteed by vows, labels, or shared calendars. When people say they’re open, what they’re often acknowledging is a quieter truth: there is something I need that this relationship does not provide.

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That admission is not immoral.

Silence about it is.

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The discomfort begins elsewhere.

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It begins when you meet a man who is already partnered—married, committed, stable—and unmistakably available in private. What initially reads as attraction quickly reveals itself as something else: envy. Not because you want him specifically, but because someone else already has what you’re looking for.

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Jealousy is rarely about loss.

It’s about comparison.

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This is also where the side-piece economy lives.

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I’ve noticed a pattern over time. When I end up in bed with married or open men, it is almost always the same explanation: their partner isn’t into the dirty stuff. That doesn’t mean they don’t love them. It means there is a part of them that remains unmet.

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This is where I understand.

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I once said I wanted to find a nice man I could do dirty things with. A friend replied, “How about a dirty man you can do nice things with instead?”

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That question never left me.

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Because monogamy—real monogamy—is the pinnacle. Not as ideology, but as outcome. One person who fulfills you completely. Or one person you love so much that what remains unfulfilled simply stops mattering.

 

That is the fantasy.
That is the hope.

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And when that hope is realized, discipline becomes effortless.

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This is where I part ways with jealousy entirely.

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When I commit, I commit. I can say, without hesitation, that I’ve never cheated. I’ve been dissatisfied, yes. I’ve stayed too long, yes. I’ve been in relationships where animosity set in—where resentment curdled into something close to hatred—and in those moments, temptation exists.

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But discipline is not repression.
It’s choice.

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When discipline is mastered, jealousy becomes obsolete.

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What frustrates me about many open arrangements is not the openness—it’s the rules. The strange, bureaucratic structures designed to quietly manage insecurity. The application processes. The disclaimers. The conditions under which one person may be secretly fulfilled while the other maintains the appearance of peace.

These systems don’t eliminate jealousy.

They formalize it.

They turn desire into paperwork.
They turn intimacy into policy.

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And this is where the connection to The Mile becomes unavoidable.

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Because what I see, again and again, is this: most people want monogamy. They want refuge. They want to come home to someone who feels safe, quiet, and honest.

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But they are too insecure to attempt it cleanly.

So they settle.
They outsource.

They take side roads instead of choosing discipline.

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Jealousy thrives here—not because love is absent, but because courage is.

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In the end, jealousy is not devotion.
It is evidence of a failure to choose.

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The side piece exists not because people are cruel, but because they are unfinished. Because they want the comfort of commitment without the sacrifice that makes it meaningful.

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And when someone does choose discipline—when someone gives up the dirty stuff not because they must, but because they’ve found something worth protecting—that choice reads as threatening.

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Because it exposes the truth:

Jealousy is not love.

It’s the fear that someone else has mastered what you could not.

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And that fear has nothing to do with devotion at all.