Op-ed: What your views on violence reveal about your character

For years, I was in a situationship with someone I thought I understood. He was a political science major. He read the foreign-affairs pages I skimmed and could explain coalition and international politics over dinner, and I was entertained. I mistook his fluency for worldliness, and his worldliness for wisdom.Bewitched, I sat through plenty of conversations so ordinary I almost didn’t notice what they revealed. My body noticed, though: a recoil here, a tightness there, signals I soothed and talked myself out of. It took the Cornell case, long after we’d parted ways, for me to finally understand what truths those conversations had been telling me.One particular moment was a dinner at Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn in September 2025, in the middle of the mayoral race. A close friend of mine, who happens to be trans, was telling us why Zohran Mamdani’s platform gave them hope, at a time when trans people’s healthcare and safety were being debated in statehouses across the country.Out of habit, before any consideration, he started arguing, the kind that has nothing to do with listening and everything to do with showing off what you know. My friend responded patiently, point by point. He doubled down anyway. By his expert analysis, Mamdani would be terrible for the city: too young, too radical, with promises the budget could never pay for. (The implication hung over the table: the safe choice, apparently, was Andrew Cuomo, who, as governor, was found by the state attorney general to have sexually harassed multiple women, findings Cuomo denied.)When pressed after dinner, he said, "I was just playing devil’s advocate."I remember sitting at that table thinking, Why is he doing this to my friend? Nothing was at stake for him; he could lose the argument and go home unchanged. He didn’t even live in New York at the time, whereas my friend and I had lived here for more than a decade combined. My friend would carry it home, cortisol still regulating long after the plat