Comment of the Week: Fantasizing Is Human. Get Over It.

I feel the same way about the guys that hold this double standard [when a guy looks at other women but gets jealous if his girlfriend ogles men] as the girls who read romance novels and watch chick flick marathons and freak out when their guy uses porn to masturbate. It all boils down to insecurity. The problem here isn’t with the girl who looks, it’s the guy who can’t handle her looking, just like the aforementioned problem isn’t the guy who uses porn, it’s the girl who can’t handle the guy looking.

Everybody has fantasies; some people just try to make themselves feel better by pretending their partners don’t. From a rational standpoint, the idea that you can fantasize about someone else but your partner can only fantasize about you is patently ridiculous, but so many people, men and women, adhere to this kind of faulty double-standard. And they only do it because they can’t handle knowing that they personally are not the be-all end-all of their partner’s existence. It’s selfish, childish and extremely insecure; guilting your partner into not looking only makes them less likely to share themselves with you, it drives a wedge of delusion between yourself and your partner. That’s the kind of wedge that grows with time, and I would bet has ended many promising relationships. All because one person couldn’t recognize that the other one was human too.

I wish people didn’t just assume that thought — that everybody is human — was common sense. Although, perhaps I just wish this common sense were a little more common.

— Doug, commenting on the post “Wise Guys: He Looks at Other Women But Gets Jealous If I Ogle Men”