Move on
No.
You saw me naked. Body and soul. And now you want to move on. Sure. Fuck you.
If you are as chronically online as I am, you must have seen that one snippet of Penn Badgley—a textbook Scorpio man, love him—talking about casual dating or casual sex on Call Her Daddy. “Is it ever casual?” No, I think not.
Earlier this year, I went on a few dates with this one guy, and as close-to-30-year-olds do, we wanted it to be “casual.” We never sat down and talked about what “casual” meant for either of us. Yet, for some reason, we associated it with lending the other person the right to leave your side for the next shiny thing whenever that thing shows up. Were we even by each other’s side? Or was I just by his side? I’m not too sure about him, but me? I knew how I felt.
Without going into the details of this relationship, I know he would not have called it that; I was the casualty of his casual dating.
We met randomly on a Saturday night, shared a kiss as strangers. And the next thing I know, I was laughing in his car, listening to my Laufey playlist, telling him about the reasons for my tattoos and why I want red rose petals in my wedding curtains. He told me about his dreams and why he keeps suitcases under his bed. We did not know about each other’s stories, but we knew about each other. I knew him. Past tense.
A week after our dates, we barely texted again. I have not seen him in months. And just like that, we cut off our ties like nothing happened. I was inside the room where he kept his brightest treasures; he was on the balcony of my mind, where I keep my hopes. We saw each other’s walls and tore some down just for me to build mine up again après-him, stronger this time around.
Kept it casual—I certainly did.
Casually, we abandoned how we got to understand the other person so deeply. Casually, we disown the memories of us kissing for as long as the traffic light was red, hoping it was 45 minutes instead of just 45 seconds. Casually, we cast aside how both of us wanted to see the other person laugh. Casually, we dated just to ditch our feelings and efforts and anything good we had, so we could find something else. Not better. I know you wouldn’t find better; this I know. You told me. But, maybe like every other time, you lied; and I did, too.
I lied to myself that it was casual. It was never casual.
“Whatever”—that’s what I told my friends after 30 minutes of crying, chugging Riesling from the bottle, and telling them about the way you pulled your hair back whenever you turned the steering wheel. I, too, was so casual about being hurt and carrying that load of emotion with me like a pregnant seahorse. Yet, this story was not just mine. It was just a remix of all of my girls’, gays’, theys’, and guys’ stories of their casual dates. Casually, we’re all knee deep in the passenger seat. Casually, we are all in the disillusionment of how feeling deeply is no longer cool. Casually, we are all losers trying to convince ourselves that it is unattractive to want. How the fuck did we get here?
When did love become something we pretend that we don’t want?
We are starving for connection, and yet we are denying ourselves food. Actual nourishing food that are deep and meaningful relationships, and not those “snack” dates kind of bullshit.
The dating population, single or not—yes, I do acknowledge non-monogamists, is undergoing a “double burden of malnutrition” moment. As much as I hate bringing my academic, public health side into this, this is a moment where that analogy is more fitting than ever. If you have at all studied the subject of food in policy, whether it is sustainability or nutrition policy, you must have come across the idea of the double burden of malnutrition. This is the coexistence of overnutrition (overweight and obesity) alongside undernutrition (stunting and wasting). DBOM (da-bomb? Maybe that’s why people have never used its acronyms when referring to dying children in the global South) is having its moment in every facet of human existence, and dating, or human connection in general, is not excluded.
I won’t pretend that this has nothing to do with social media and how we feed ourselves ideas and visions of other people. I am sick and tired of the same old songs of “oh, we are doomed because of social media and online dating apps,” but we are. We are constantly being flashed by the “what ifs” that exist on a screen attached to a box full of stuff. “What if my boyfriend does not treat me this way?” “What if she isn’t as freaky as this one OF model?” “What if his best friend is hotter?” “What if I don’t like how he holds his iced coffee?” Hoes, who cares? We ask ourselves so many questions about what if without (1) understanding our own true needs, and (2) knowing how to focus on the here and now.
Surely, everyone has their own “I fumbled that.” Not me, but I digress. There are men in my life that I believe I would have had a future with if I did not have other priorities, but those, too, are fleeting. We so often tell ourselves that we do not owe anyone anything, just for us to count ourselves in that, too. We forget that we owe ourselves the right to be seen by people by walking into the light and by reflecting off the lights that people shine on us. We forget that we are humans after all, and our relationships don’t just inform who we are; they sometimes define us, and that is okay.
Both of us, in this story, denied ourselves the chance to see it through. What through? I don’t know, but I can describe it to you. It is the deep sigh smelling your laundry detergent on someone else in public. It is reaching out to close the door on the passenger seat in my car, trying to see how you did it for me. It is going slower than the speed limit and obstructing traffic when I pass where we first kissed. It is the knot in my throat when I say your name out loud in front of the people who are actively in my life. It is trying to find pieces of you in the life I have now. It is how loud both of our silences are.
I did think of the off-chance that you were just not that into me. Surely you aren’t—not from how you’d spend 2 hours researching a question I asked you on a whim, nor how you’d listen to the album of the songs I randomly post on my Instagram story. I cannot tell you how to feel or act, you are a grown ass man. Yet, I do wonder if you’d let yourself wander into the possibilities of being in love. Have you?
I need us to remember that we don’t meet someone we can dive headfirst into every single day. That in itself is a miracle—this I promise you. Of course, some things and situations make you see more miracles than not, but absolutely nothing is casual about finding comfort in someone else’s body and soul.
There is nothing casual about knowing someone.
There is nothing casual about loving.
I would be lying if I told you I know what to do about this or if there is a concrete CTA for this subject matter. The truth is, I don’t. I, too, am both the villain and the victim in this story, and thus to myself. I, too, am just another person looking to be loved while doing my best to preserve what’s left of my hopes for a romantic love that is voided of all social expectations and cynicism—or at least I naively want to think so.
I, too, participate in this volatile market, and I, too, have sold my heart in a bear market. But that does not deter me from investing in this thing because someday I will find an index fund that can actually grow steadily without giving me the “casual relational” whiplash. In the meantime, let me reassess my assets and wait for an investor who’d want to invest in me the way I do them.