Auntie SparkNotes: The Dance of Jealousy

Dear Auntie,

I've been dating this guy for about a year and a half. He's wonderful and we make a really good match. However, he's leaving for college in a few days. I'm a senior in high school, and while I'll miss him, I'm extremely excited about spending a great year with my friends and making a lot of memories.

Anyway, one day we were talking about his move and the subject of school dances came up.

Obviously, he won't be able to take me, so I brought up that my friends and I were planning on asking guy friends to go to the dances. My boyfriend got really angry and said that he doesn't want me going to any of the dances because he doesn't want me to go on a "date" or dance with another guy. When I told him that we would be taking our dates strictly as friends and that he wasn't being fair, he said it was stupid for me to care about high school dances anyway. We've been arguing about it for days and he just keeps saying that he's uncomfortable with it so I should give them up. He says he trusts me but not my date. I do care about his feelings and I'm trying really hard to understand where he's coming from (he's sort of the jealous type, and I'm not at all.) And maybe it's immature, but I don't want to miss out on a big part of my senior year. What should I do?

Immature? Well, I'll tell you—there is, indeed, a person in this scenario who is acting extraordinarily immature.

But it's not you.

And before I go any further with that, let me just say this: nothing makes Auntie SparkNotes want to bang her face repeatedly against her keyboard quite like the phrase, "I trust you, I just don't trust other people." People who employ this idiotic argument in favor of jealous behavior deserve to be slapped in the mouth with the biggest, floppiest fish available—and if you ever say this to someone, please slap yourself in the mouth with a fish until you see reason. Because you guys, the whole point of trust—the whole, entire point—is that you don't need to care about other people's actions. And to demonstrate this, let's just take your boyfriend's fears through to their logical conclusion; let's imagine that one of your friends does, indeed, decide to crush on you, lust after you, or launch himself at your face with his tongue hanging out and his pants around his ankles.

...Okay, and if that happens? So what? It's not the behavior of this hypothetical dude that matters; it's how you react to it. And if your boyfriend trusts you, then he should by extension trust that your reaction would be nothing other than, "Sorry, I'm not interested."

And that's even before we get to the cognitive acrobatics involved in simultaneously saying that you're stupid to care about school dances, while also telling you that he nevertheless cares very much about school dances and you ought to respect his feelings. I mean, for the love.

And as far as what to do, these are valid points which you're welcome to make the next time you discuss it... with the caveat that it may not help much, because jealousy isn't based on logic; it's based on fear, insecurity, and the misguided belief that the only way to keep an S.O. from leaving you is to deprive her of the free will that led her to choose you in the first place. Which is why jealous control freaks are such sad, sad cases: they try to make themselves your only option because they believe that they'd never be your first choice. But sad or not, the solution isn't to placate him by missing out on your senior year social events; that way lies madness, resentment, and, "I trust you, but I don't trust male Starbucks cashiers, and if you really loved me you'd stop drinking lattes."

Instead, tell your boyfriend the following: that you love him, that you care about him, and that you have no intention of compromising the integrity of your relationship... but that what keeps you from doing that isn't the lack of opportunity (i.e. being at a dance with other guys) but a lack of desire (i.e. your personal decision to choose this relationship over the alternatives.) So yes, you'll be attending these dances with your friends, and yes, if he trusts you, he's just gonna have to... y'know, trust you.

Does this mean that he'll stop arguing and become suddenly comfortable with the idea? Probably not. But in situations like this, it's the jealous person who needs to adjust or cut loose; the alternative is submitting to being controlled, which not only sucks, but sucks all the romantic choice right out of the relationship until it implodes. So please accept, right now, that under another person's thumb is not a place you'd ever want to be—and then hold firm, stay cool, and stand your ground.

And if your boyfriend doesn't like it, feel free to remind him that there's one thing in this relationship he's got total control over: whether or not he stays in it.

How do you handle jealous S.O.s? Tell us in the comments! And to get advice from Auntie, email her at advice@sparknotes.com.

Related post: Auntie SparkNotes: The Having of Boyfriend