#30: Why do people in open relationships look like THAT?
When appearance is used as a weapon against lifestyle choices
Valentine’s Day alert! Even if you’re not about this holiday, February in NYC can feel particularly lonely and cold. So let’s be in community and get cozy together. I’m co-hosting a singles/open to dating soiree on Friday 2/14 with my friend Mama D at her secret speakeasy in Ridgewood (like an actual speakeasy, this place is not on any maps). It’s the neighborhood’s best kept secret— a house transformed into the swankiest lounge, replete with a stage, open kitchen, grand piano. There’s art, drinks, smokes, and media. Mama D and I have dreamed up some actually fun get-to-know-you games that won’t make you want to crawl under a table. Open to people of all sexualities— at worst you make new friends! Sign up here if you’re interested, and please do me a favor and help me spread the word to your single/open to dating friends. Would love to fill the space with cool people!
In the waning hours before we all thought TikTok was actually getting banned, my FYP became a particular flavor of unfiltered. Among the usual videos I watch about working out or NYC humor, I kept seeing stitches of this one guy who boldly declared “why do all people in open relationships look like THAT?” He didn’t specify what “THAT” meant, but the comments section sure did, turning into a dunking session on polyamorous people’s appearances.
Louis, watching me fall for this rage bait, suggested I make a response video to prove them wrong. I couldn’t imagine a cringier thing to do, and also, there’s nothing TikTok hates more than someone who dares think they’re attractive. What would I even say? “So hey, look at me, let me just disprove your theory real quick!” Hail no.
It’s interesting how common it is to see people correlate appearance with relationship choices and orientation. The comments section was full of sentiments like “poly people are only poly because they’re too ugly to keep one partner” or my favorite, “the attractive poly people are classy and keep it to themselves,” which feels very reminiscent of people who say things like “I don’t mind gay people I just don’t want to hear about it.” I think it's so narrow minded and there is literally no correlation between someone's lifestyle choices and how they look. It's like saying that all vegans are ugly. At least if being in an open relationship required people to get reconstructive surgery or a face tattoo you could make a causal argument for why everyone has a phenotype, but this argument makes no sense.
I will grant you this…looking at all the Tiktok stitches to this video, there was a non-zero amount of fedoras, purple hair, and D&D players defending themselves. And? People love pattern recognition, even when those patterns are meaningless. You could just as easily make sweeping statements about how everyone in Bushwick has bleached eyebrows. The question isn’t just whether poly people fit a certain aesthetic, it’s why that aesthetic is being used to invalidate their relationships.
These comments reek of the kind of resentment that comes from having to justify your own circumstances. Like when you buy tickets to a concert and you have nosebleed seats and you tell yourself “we didn’t want to be close up anyway, this is a better view of the stage” as you squint and crane your neck to see. They’re desperate to convince themselves that their situation is actually superior to the thing they’re secretly envious of. They’re probably projecting. They want to feel like they chose the ‘right’ and ‘moral’ path so they need everyone else’s choices to be wrong and tragic. Like maybe if you convince yourself that all non-monogamous people are unattractive, you won’t have to examine your own relationship choices too closely.
Some of the responses I saw addressed toxic behavior among people who claim to be polyamorous and a lot of it was valid. So many people in traditional closed relationships will declare themselves ‘ethically non-monogamous’ the moment they develop a crush on a coworker, while somehow finding ways to ensure their own partner can’t date anyone else. Or they’ll use it as a thin veneer to justify cheating or to manipulate people into situations they’re not comfortable with. They’ll announce that they’re polyamorous, while having zero interest in doing any emotional work or building actual ethical relationships.
But people act like these toxic behaviors are unique to non-monogamy, as though there isn’t so much toxicity and manipulation in monogamous relationships. As if having one partner makes you immune from pressuring people into relationship structures they don’t want or lying about your relationship status.
Attacking someone’s appearance is often the last refuge when you can’t actually critique their choices or lifestyle. It’s so much easier to say ‘poly people are ugly’ than to examine why other people’s relationship choices make you so uncomfortable or to look at why you might be staying in a relationship structure that doesn’t suit you.
I always find it fascinating how much attractiveness is not only social currency, but it’s also used as moral currency. If you’re seen as hot enough, your lifestyle choices become more valid, but also only if you keep quiet about them. “Attractive poly people are classy and keep it to themselves” is such a telling comment tbh. It’s basically saying that your choices are only acceptable if you feel ashamed enough to hide them. I see this played out all the time. Multiple times a week, when Louis and I meet new people they immediately grow confused about why we don’t live together or aren’t working toward marriage, and then when we explain, there are a lot of people who receive it as something we’re shoving in their face when we’re just answering their direct questions about our life.
I do think that people who have chosen to divest from societal scripts about how we should live are often more likely to also not perform gender or ‘beauty’ within the narrow bounds of what society has set for them. It’s not because non-monogamy makes you alt-looking, but because once you start questioning one societal assumption, you usually start questioning others too. I’ve written before about being trapped in a cycle of beauty maintenance that society demands of women The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel, and the undeniable privilege and power that comes with conforming to beauty standards. I think it goes to show that the idea that ‘attractive poly people should keep it classy and keep it to themselves’ is not really about looks at all. It’s about wanting people who could ‘pass’ as conventional to stay in their lane and not challenge the status quo.
There’s a need to believe that people who make different choices must be damaged or deficient in some way. It’s the same impulse that makes people assume single cat ladies must be bitter, or that child-free people must hate kids. There seems to be a belief that if you’re ‘attractive’ enough to succeed at the traditional relationship escalator, (dating—> exclusivity—cohabitation—>marriage—>kids) then choosing anything else must be a moral failure. Because why would you choose something different if you could succeed at the default?
Whether the attacks are about looks or morality or both, they seem to come from the same place as the person in the nosebleed seats desperately trying to convince themselves they didn’t want to be closer to the stage anyway. It’s not really about whether non-monogamous people are attractive or not (just like it’s not about whether vegans are hot or not). It’s about people trying to justify their own discomfort with choices different from their own. The people who try to shame non-monogamous people for how they look or saying the ‘acceptable’ looking ones should keep quiet about it, are revealing their own insecurities. It’s like when people are confounded about how im in a long term relationship but choose to live alone. I think many of them are uncomfortable with the idea that there might be other valid ways to build a relationship beyond the template they’re following.
It’s not really about looks. It’s about the discomfort that comes from seeing people question one societal script, whether it’s about relationships, beauty standards, or any other norm we’re supposed to follow without question. No TikTok response video from me, we’ll keep it to Substack. But the people who look like THAT and thrive anyway are the ones really terrifying the status quo. Nothing scares conformity quite like visible proof that you can break all the rules and be happy doing it.
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Q: Do you ever let people assume you’re a traditional couple?
A: Lou and I can ‘pass’ when we want to. We’re normie presenting and straight passing (I think) and have been together for years and also have couple’s privilege (the societal advantages and benefits that couples automatically receive over single people). We’ll sometimes quickly check-in with each other before entering certain spaces about how we’ll handle the inevitable questions but like 99% of the time being truthful leads to interesting conversations.
I have to acknowledge the privilege of living in NYC, and in 2025, moving in open-minded, educated circles, benefitting from all the work that people before us did to make it possible to live this way openly. What we’ve found over and over is that just answering questions casually and truthfully opens up some great conversation about what actually makes people happy versus what they think they’re supposed to want.
There was one time we attended a religious wedding in the South where we didn’t know anyone except the groom where we told each other we’d dodge the relationship questions. But then we ended up sitting next to a cool, young (and hot!) non-monogamous couple at our table and had this moment of like, oh yeah, we’re literally everywhere. Sometimes the places you think you are going to be judged at end up surprising you.
Dystopian article in The Cut about the loneliness epidemic and how a bunch of tech start ups are swooping in to profit off people’s loneliness.
Youngmi Mayer’s videos pretending to be an Asian person in a White restaurant saying all of the casual racist things White people say in Asian restaurants but reversed made me laugh a lot during the pandemic. She wrote this great article in WaPo about going viral on TikTok. I’m going to pick up a copy of her memoir soon.
When something goes viral, the notifications are so frequent that the unassuming rectangular bubbles popping up one by one mutate into an endless string of segments connected by an invisible spine, like a grotesque digital centipede. There was something monstrous living in my phone now. A mysterious and terrifying insect. A toxin. Every once in a while, one of the notifications would bear a hateful comment. Sometimes it would be the worst thing I had ever read about my physical appearance, thoughtlessly left by an unloved, neglected 13-year-old somewhere in Indiana. These were like the segments bearing venom-filled pinchers of the evil centipede that had infected my phone. I became afraid of the relentless notifications that crawled across my screen at all times of the day and night. I turned them off for TikTok, and I posted maybe one or two videos a month, afraid of going viral again but also strangely hoping for it to happen at the same time.
Responding to the critiques of the bralette Lauren Sanchez wore to the inauguration, Naomi Fry writes about what it says about the times we’re in when vocal attention is paid to breasts in the public sphere.
The long-held hemline index, a theory that correlates the strength of the economy with women’s skirt lengths—minis in a bull market, midis in bear—doesn’t quite fit our current sociopolitical moment, but it could make more sense to consider what might be called the boob index. What does it say about the times we’re in when vocal attention is paid to breasts in the public sphere?
Embarrassingly little to report on the food front lately but check out these chocolates and chocolate sculpture from the Louis Vuitton cafe. Only procured to appease my family for Lunar New Year cause my Asian family loves gaudy shit. What could be gaudier than this?
