I think I experience less romantic jealousy these days than I used to, and I was thinking about why that is.
I remember when I was younger, I would get really upset if, say, the person I was dating liked a selfie posted by some other girl. I would spiral into despair thinking about how he probably thought that other girl was more attractive than me and he’d rather be dating her. And … I don’t think I was being totally irrational? I was recalling one specific instance of this and, you know, I bet he would rather have been dating that girl. I think that she was more his type and they had more in common.
And I think what’s changed is that over time I’ve just gotten better at dating people for whom I’m–if not the optimal person, at least close to some kind of Pareto frontier. And then when this happens I can think, “actually, no, here are the reasons why he’d be better off dating me than her.”