I am, by nature, that friend that everyone goes to for advice. Advice on life, friends, school, fashion, and relationships. How my friends see me as a capable person to trust with their vulnerable romantic feelings, enough for me to form an opinion and proceed to tell them what I think they should do is beyond me. As well as being that friend, I’m also the friend who hides their true feelings, masking my emotions with my people-pleasing tendencies, the friend who seems to be talking to someone new every week but has only been “official” once. I guess that’s why they say coaches don’t play. But I do consider it, playing I mean. I offer up my emotions to people who are unavailable in that way, and maybe I secretly know that. I get myself into these “situationships”, whatever that means, because I’m too afraid to commit to the legitimacy of the real thing.
Recently though, I told myself that I was just going to freefall, I was going to let it come naturally and allow myself to like the person who came along, I would be honest not only with them but with myself, and it would be great and I wouldn’t be that friend anymore. However, as horrible as Tinder is, I can’t keep myself from what I like to call “window shopping”. I will sit on the app for hours and hours contemplating someone’s entire personality based on a curated set of pictures, witty bios, and disclaimers of their exclusive search for hookups. So, I shouldn’t be surprised that the person I’m meant to be with is not the guy holding up a picture of a fish on a boat in the middle of nowhere, right?
Except there are some people who surprise me and put on the façade of having the same intentions as me, and because I am that friend, I don’t have enough experience to know when a flag is pink or red. So, I ignore these ambiguous flags and let myself fall, always “just this once”, just to see where it goes. It turns out it doesn’t go that far if you actually begin to care about your situationship, which no one told me was not allowed. No one told me that while we can text all day, call each other constantly, send posts that remind us of one another, we can talk about the future, and our fears, and everything about ourselves that makes us human, caring about the other person intimately, is not allowed.
As I mentioned, I have only ever been “official” with one person and I can safely say that my heart has been broken once before. My heartbreak after my first and only “official” relationship had nothing on the heartbreak I felt after my situationship, which was never going anywhere, ended. Nothing hurts more than being left with a million unanswered questions after putting all your walls down, making them the only exception. After this specific situationship ended, I realized what hurt the most was the fact that it felt like I had made the whole thing up. I spent so much time investing in this person, I allowed them to break down the walls I spent so long constructing, and at the end of it all, I had nothing to show for it…
Situationships, at least the ones I’ve experienced, have all left a void afterward. Like everything I had experienced wasn’t real, the feelings that I had weren’t real, which is a blatant lie. It was real, and it made me happy to feel actual feelings for someone, something that I forgot I had the ability to do.
So to all the situationships I’ve had before, thank you for reminding me that I love myself and that I am capable of feeling real and true feelings for others. Thank you for reminding me that I am giving, caring, and nurturing and that I am worthy of being cared for. I resented you for so long, for convincing me that I was crazy for having feelings, but in reality, this was never about you. None of this was ever about you or your red flags, it was about figuring out the kind of person I am and realizing my worth enough to let you go. While I don’t regret experiencing these so-called situationships, I do regret not realizing how important I was in the process.
P.S. I deserved closure.