Review Mode: Should I Not Out You as Having Kissed Me?

Welcome to Review Mode, a biweekly newsletter where I mark up my social interactions, mining my, like, medical-grade self-monitoring for your reading pleasure.

I’m not one of these queer people whose entire social circle is made up of exes, but I do have a few friends I’ve kissed.1 That comes with some gray areas. Well, one main one: How much are we allowed to talk openly about the fact that we did that?

That’s a conversation that you should have with your friend BEFORE introducing them to another friend with, “Hey Avery, meet my friend Micah! Oh, you two actually both met me the same way!”

That wasn’t great. There was definitely an awkward silence for a sec after I said that. Later that night, I texted both Avery and Micah to apologize. They were cool about it, but they didn’t have to be.

But how much is it okay to say? Obviously, the best case scenario is to check in with your friend before the subject ever comes up, so you know what their boundaries are, but if you haven’t done that, what’s safe to assume?

Avery (a pseudonym, because they’re not a very public person) is a friend I met a long time ago on a Tinder date. They’re not really part of my social circles, but they have met a lot of my friends, and I’ve met a lot of theirs. Every time someone asks, “How did you two meet?” I wonder how honest I should be. I imagine the answer changes depending on the number of people in the conversation, the chill-ness of the people in the conversation, possibly the queerness of the people in the conversation, and probably some other factors.

I don’t really know how to do that kind of algebra. I was once good at math, but then I went to college, where all the humanities people had to pretend we were terrible at STEM, and then we all forgot all the math we’d ever learned.

Point is, I don’t think I’ve ever nailed the level of honesty. But that’s just with Avery! I have other friends where the calculation is much simpler: go for it.

Take Micah, for instance. Micah is not a pseudonym. Micah is the comedian Micah Eames (follow him on TikTok and IG), whose name I have included in this Substack with express, enthusiastic permission.

Micah and I met on a date months before he’d ever done standup. We got beer, made out, and then neither of us ever texted the other. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme. Then he started doing comedy, and we became friends. At that point, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to pretend that first part had never happened.

Over time, we started occasionally alluding to it, but I still didn’t know if I should generally be discreet. Then one day, I was hanging out after a standup show that both of us had performed on, and I spotted Micah chatting with a couple of audience members.

“Yeah,” I heard him telling them. “Carson and I made out, and now we’re good friends!”

Phew! I thought. So we’re doing the being-totally-honest thing. That’s gotta be one of my favorite things.

Keeping secrets/talking around stuff stresses me out in a way that’s almost certainly related to whatever neurodivergence I’ve got going on. It’s nice to know I don’t have to avoid the subject.

Also, there’s another reason I like getting to be open about the fact that I’ve kissed a few of my friends. Pardon me for a sec while I grab my soap box:

I think people (especially straight people) put sex and romance in this special, separate category a lot of the time. I feel like that contributes to amatonormativity, the idea that exclusive romantic relationships are everyone’s goal and must matter more than other kinds of relationships. I imagine that talking about the ways those lines between dating and friendship can be blurry helps to nudge romantic relationships off their pedestal a little. They’re not some isolated thing. It’s all connected.

In other words, when I drop the fact that I’ve made out with my famously hot friend into a Substack, I’m not doing it to brag. I’m doing it to make the world a better place.

But while that’s all well and good, people are still entitled to their privacy and are allowed to make their own decisions about how much people do/don’t get to know about their personal lives. So:

The Lesson I Should Probably Learn from This: If you don’t have time to check with your friend about their comfort level, err on the side of caution. Even when it’s way less fun.

Carson’s Life Updates

• Just eight days until the NYC Review Mode live show 4/29 at Club Cumming! Tix “going fast,” according to Eventbrite.

  • In the show, comedians will be riffing on your botched social interactions. If you want to submit a tale of social woe in advance, regardless of whether or not you’ll be able to make it out on the 29th, you can do so here! Excited to read ‘em.

• I took a trip to see my friend’s dissertation defense, and it rocked. People from all parts of her life were there. Her family was there. It was so cool to celebrate a big life milestone that wasn’t a wedding. Invite me to more life events that aren’t weddings.

  Nothing against weddings. Invite me to weddings, too. I love celebrating my friends. It’s just fun to have some non-amatonormative2 ways to do that.

• I did not blaze it on 4/20; no one invited me to do so. I’ve gotta start wearing more tie dye.

The Boilerplate

Carson Olshansky (still they/them, despite the haters) is a Brooklyn-based comedian and writer. You can follow them at @carsonolshansky on Instagram and TikTok and at @carson-olshansky on YouTube.

Join their mailing list to find out about shows near you (which helps us all be less reliant on social media technocrats).

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Using the word again makes me feel like we’re doing a Word of the Day. Elmo wants you to know that platonic intimacy is valid! Elmo thinks support systems should be made of many people, not just one romantic partner!