This article is part of a series in which I address criticisms of the Split Attraction Model (or SAM). See the masterpost for my reasons writing this series, and a brief discussion of my issues with the phrase “split attraction model”. In this article, I address one of the most common arguments, which is that the Split Attraction Model is harmful to youth who are still exploring their identities.

Commonly this argument is expressed in the form of an anecdote, saying that when they were younger they were convinced that they were such-and-such-romantic and such-and-such-sexual, and it really messed them up. I’ll take these anecdotes at face value–perhaps these people were on Tumblr when they were teens, and were reading Tumblr advice blogs, which had a known tendency to impose prescriptive identities on askers, much to our dismay. That sucks and I’m sorry to hear about it.

I know…