One Friday morning, I was having breakfast with friends near campus when, just as we were about to head out, I saw someone I had been seeing sitting across from another person. As I approached them, it became clear they were on a date.

After a quick hello, I pulled them aside and asked directly about the situation. They told me we weren’t exclusive — and they were right. We’d never had a conversation setting those boundaries.  

Walking away, I wasn’t angry. Maybe because, to me, exclusivity felt inherent. Seeing someone else would have been like forcing my luggage into an airport sizer: There was simply no room. Emotionally, mentally, logistically, I was already too full of one person to make space for another.

In my last column, I wrote about what it means to be enough for yourself in a world built for couples. But in the weeks that followed, my curiosity began tracing a different pattern — one that seemed to come in threes. 

A threesome, if you will — a set of three elements where the third complicates what might otherwise feel like a pair. After all, if you look closely, our lives can be organized into threesomes: Eruta Nature, Cafe Dulce and Ministry of Coffee; hot, iced or cold brew. In my own case: me, the person I was seeing and someone else. 

After noticing the frequent pattern of threesomes, I began to wonder: are we ever meant to be with just one other person?

But that question, I’ve since learned, is a distraction from a harsher truth: you can be enough for yourself and still not be chosen by someone else. These two facts can, and often do, coexist.

Oftentimes, we talk endlessly about relationships, yet the proliferation of language often produces ambiguity rather than clarity. French philosopher Michel Foucault argued in “The History of Sexuality” that modern society has not silenced desire, but rather created an incitement to create discourse around it. 

This is a core contradiction of our romantic era. We have more words for our romantic experiences than any generation before us, and yet we understand each other less.

Even when only two people are in the room, there is often still someone else: a previous relationship, an open-ended possibility or another person. In that sense, the idea of a threesome is less about physical proximity and more about emotional overcrowding.

Similarly, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in “The Ethics of Ambiguity,” wrote that the human condition is fundamentally ambiguous because we are both subject and object, freedom and facticity. Every person you date is both a free consciousness — a subject, like you — and a body existing in a social world — an object, like everything else. The anguish of emotional overcrowding is simply this ambiguity made visceral.

De Beauvoir argues that to choose one’s own freedom is also to choose the freedom of others. Your freedom to seek exclusivity conflicts with their freedom to keep the door open for someone else. Neither freedom is inherently more moral, they are simply incompatible. Perhaps that is the cruelest part of modern dating: not that someone is wrong, but that two truths can collide and still leave one person hurt.

De Beauvoir would call this the ambiguity of human connection — values are not fixed in advance, but created through our projects and engagement with others. The pain of unrequited exclusivity is not the pain of a broken universal law, but is rather a project that you invested in alone.  

Later that night, alone outside amid the ceaseless motion of Los Angeles, I realized that in a place often defined by infinite options, what I truly craved was certainty. What unsettled me was not that they had chosen someone else, but that I had mistaken my own sense of closeness for something mutually understood.

British philosopher Margaret Gilbert, who writes about collective intentionality, argues that a shared understanding between two people doesn’t form through unspoken feeling — it requires a “joint commitment.” 

You can feel full of someone else. That doesn’t mean they’ve agreed to be full of you. At its core, this is the difference between intimacy as emotion and intimacy as agreement: one can be deeply felt, while the other must be explicitly made.

Standing alone under those streetlights made me realize how often I confuse emotional investment for mutual agreement. So, I did the only thing that made sense. I called someone I have written about before — not because I had grand answers. After spending weeks caught in patterns of three, I found myself craving the comfort of something I understood, someone I knew would keep it just two.

I’m still learning something we rarely practice in a city of infinite options: to ask for clarity. Because exclusivity is not a feeling. It’s a conversation you were brave enough to start.

Andrew Cardenas is a junior writing about love in all its forms in his column, “No Straight Answers,” which runs every other Wednesday. He is also the DEIA director and Talkin’ Troy editor at the Daily Trojan.