haha well i can hardly claim to be the most unbiased person in the room as i clearly have my main agendas but i will try to answer this as objectively as possible. while op and i seem to have quite fundamentally different interpretations of the dynamic this is definitely not the first time i’ve seen this take! i suppose i can attempt to reverse engineer how they might’ve come to that conclusion. it’s kind of like, socially jeno can play well with anyone and has a wide range of options to entertain while jaemin largely sticks to the people he knows he already likes, and perhaps this seeming disparity makes it seem like jeno could be with anyone while jaemin only has his faves and therefore jeno must not like him as much as he likes jeno..? perhaps it’s also the comparative lack of skinship initiated toward jm by jeno in comparison to his other ships (markno, jenle etc); however, more than a lack of interest on jeno’s part i believe that this reflects jaemin’s aversion to touch/initiation that’s not on his terms, like the perceived relative “lack” of skinship/visible cues is the result of jeno accommodating jaemin’s control freak tendencies perfectly. and tbh what could be more romantic than that.

i’ve also answered the question of “why jaemin” for jeno a few times in the past so i’m loathe to repeat myself too much, but like you’ve mentioned, jeno has constantly and consistently time and time again chosen to be with jaemin and do things with just him out of everyone else. i feel like comparing jaemjen’s relationship to any of jeno’s other relationships to use as a metric for how “into” the other person he is falls short in that it fails to consider how 1) jeno is the type to meet people where they’re at, every relationship is going to look different in terms of outward expression/skinship because jeno generally accomodates the other person 2) it follows that the nature of jaemjen’s relationship would constitute a more subdued outward appearance despite all the egregious social media couple posting—jaemin is SoFuckingComplicated after all, so jeno is not going to be pushing his boundaries full throttle 24/7 even if he technically does have the privilege to.

im also admittedly amused by this interpretation of their dynamic because oftentimes i actually get completely opposite vibes from them. like i know and trust that jmjn is mutual, but jaemin is so blasé about things sometimes i feel like they come across as jeno being the one who’s constantly initiating while jaemin spaces out/retreats to the hidden mountain lake in his mind palace, and i think this was particularly obvious and true during like 2020-2021, when jeno was doing a lot of the hard carrying in terms of outwards signs of cp fanservice and interax for jmjn. but i digress, and jaemins certainly been a lot more active as of late.

markno as a point of contrast is also interesting to me because the obsession is mutual to me, not different in magnitude, just different in method/understanding. like mark is just as obsessed with jeno as jeno is with him, but because they are fundamentally different people and mark is sooo boy of the world protag, he can’t fully get the nature and scope of jeno’s infatuation with him and that’s not anyone’s fault. i don’t particularly see the reverse of this dynamic reflected in jmjn; markno is a type of psychosis that manifests when you put a boy and his dog together but the boy doesn’t even know that he’s not a dog he just thinks that they’re two dogs together. jmjn is that one crazy codependent couple that everyone knows has been together since middle school.

haha anyway sorry for the months long wait, those are about the extent of my thoughts on the matter! please excuse the egregious rambling anon i hope this answer suffices 😭💖🫶