Dating is hard. It’s not easy to continually throw yourself out there, politely laugh at jokes that aren’t funny while nodding your head at long winded stories that are about banal shit like “wow, your coworker said what?” or “I can’t believe the child under 10 years old you’re paid to watch made a mess! What a surprise!”
It’s not a surprise. I don’t give a fuck about your coworker. I masturbated before I got here, so honestly, the poison’s out. Why am I here?
But it’s not all bad, every now and then, you click with someone and you get that feeling. You know that feeling. It’s the sensation of being found. The planet is a perpetual enigma and each person is a puzzle piece. There’s someone out there for all of us, I’m certain of it. But when searching for that life altering needle in the haystack, you find beautiful little distractions that make you momentarily forget all about the loneliness, meaningless sex and sadness that defines the bulk of our love lives in the postmodern era we exist in. And for each mismatched piece we try to fit into our lives, the hole in our hearts grows a little larger, and our matching puzzle piece seems so far away that continuing the search begins to look like a fool's errand forged in futility.
The internet has changed the way we date. We don’t just find someone randomly in the town we grew up in. We have options. Endless fucking options. Every type of person at all levels of society are online trying to find love, or at least trying to find something to temporarily rub their genitals on. Which is fine. Friends with benefits are fine. Having a significant other is fine. But more recently, a new thing has come into existence that takes both of these things and combines them together. This Frankenstein’s Monster of modern mating is called the “situationship.” I have been in one and honestly, they are the worst.
There’s a reason why they’re the worst. They tend to combine all the emotions of a relationship with all of the instability of a fling. It’s destabilizing, and while they don’t end typically in heartbreak, they can leave you in a state of dull and painful confusion.
A lot of situationships are relatively short term; one or two months typically, but it isn’t unheard of for them to last up to a year or more. During these prolonged durations, this person becomes part of your life. Oxytocin starts to fuse them to you. You miss them beyond sex, you miss their smile, their touch, their voice, their insufferably boring stories. You never fully let your guard down, so it’s not as earth shattering as the heartbreak you get from a long term relationship, but when they end abruptly, you are likely to feel sensations similar to that of heartbreak.
Let’s call it heartbruise. You’re definitely not heartbroken, but your heart certainly took a hit. You don’t completely break down when they're gone, but it’s entirely likely that their memory can bring a tear to your eye.
Fuck buddies are fine. Relationships are fine. Dating is fine. But casually letting ambiguity rob a potential partnership of all its meaning seems… cruel.
Heartbruise. Sigh