A short, five-second clip from an account on TikTok that goes by @intellectual.thinking has stirred up major controversy after touching on a subject that most people who have been in a relationship are likely to have felt — jealousy.
It’s a completely normal, and surprisingly common emotion that comes with being a human being. Of course, the stigma surrounding it is often negative, since the feeling itself isn’t exactly fun to bear.
But while the onus typically falls upon the person who is feeling the emotion, the TikToker took the opposite route of placing the blame on a partner.
The text in the short clip reads, “Reminder that men don’t like when you’re friendly with other guys [because] you’re supposed to make other guys jealous of your man, not your man jealous of other guys.”
His TikTok page is full of these kinds of videos — there are likely hundreds of them — and they all pull a pretty substantial amount of views. This one in particular hit 1.3 million views while his other videos may average out to around 10,000 views.
Over a thousand comments poured into this clip with most people simply sharing their opinion on this specific take — creating a dialogue seems to be the theme of his account. Others tuned in to share their anecdotes and personal experiences
To the man’s credit, he didn’t say they “shouldn’t” be friendly, but that men don’t like that they are friendly for this reason. However, that still places the onus on women to stop themselves from being friendly because it might make their partner jealous — which shouldn’t be the case.
“I’m getting tired of saying this every single time,” one man wrote, likely referring to his partner and how she continues to make him jealous.
Someone else wrote, “put this on her [For You page] not mine,” saying that she’s the one that needs to hear it. A third claims, “she says I’m toxic and controlling for saying [that],” and that’s probably because it’s closer to the truth than anyone who agrees with this has gotten.
One person wrote, “Look there’s a threshold on how friendly you can be to other people, I don’t think it’s fair to block them from having friends unless you both agree,” and they are pretty close to the reality of how jealousy should be handled and the barriers that exist between friendly and disrespectful.