The Situationship of 2022: An Exposé on Myself
An in-depth look into the Rise and Fall of Version 2.022 of Myself
The New Year is around the corner. Christmas has come and gone, and this year I couldn’t help but be semi-sad as I sat at my sister’s kitchen counter. “I need to say this out loud, and I need you to listen to me say it.”
“What?”
“Last year at this time, I felt so calm and confident. I felt so proud of myself and what I had done. I felt like by this time this year I would at least be celebrating the holiday with someone I was seeing for a few months.”
“What do you mean? You have a lot to be proud of.”
“No, I messed up this whole year, and I’m starting to think, ‘Next year maybe I’ll have someone—’ but then I have to stop myself because what if it doesn’t happen again. Like I’m scared that wanting a healthy relationship is too ambitious for me.”
By writing this blog post, I know I am shooting myself in the foot. I am sealing the door closed on people, but I should have sealed the door closed years ago. So I’d like to expose myself: I am the only one responsible for where I am at right now.
Let me take a breath. Okay. I’m ready.
December 2021: Christmas with my mom’s side of the family is in full-swing. My cousins, sisters, brother-in-laws, significant others…everyone between the ages of 24-34 are having a huge slumber party in the basement. We drink beers while catching up on what’s going on in our lives. We talk on blow-up mattresses in the dim light of the stairwell light or we just simply fall asleep to the sound of the others talking. Life is so good for me right now. I finished my first semester of grad school while keeping my full-time job. I feel like I am actually getting a hold of my life. I’m working on music again, and I am becoming the type of person I want to be: calm with a good heart and a good sense of self. I start to think that now I’m ready to start trying to date again.
I pull up Hinge on one of the nights before Christmas, and I come across a profile of someone that oddly stands out to me. I’m not sure what about him stands out, but I like his profile. He sends me a message, and soon we’re chatting. He makes good conversation, and I’m trying to keep it going. It’s the holidays so it’s not exactly Earth-shattering when there’s hours that go by without a message. But he replies and I’m intrigued. Then suddenly we have a date planned for right after the holidays when I go back to work.
He seems really sweet, confident, and attractive when I first meet him. I immediately pull back because that’s what I do when I want to gauge how a person is. I want to observe what they talk about, how they talk, what they do. I want to feel it out cautiously. I think he thinks I’m standoffish, but I’m just observant with a dash and a half of nervous and shy. I’m fairly confident in how I look and who I am as a person, but it doesn’t make it easy when the person you’re on a date with is just…unbelievably charming on your first date.
I’d like to take a moment to say that I am an extremely hard person to kiss. Or to do anything with. If I am questioning a kiss, I don’t do it. And that’s how I felt a lot this year…so I didn’t kiss many people in 2022. I feel like I have high standards or I can let you make that decision. By the end of this you’ll probably disagree, and that’s okay. My intention is to be honest, not to convince you of a narrative that didn’t exist. Anyway, he offered to walk me back the fifteen minutes to my car, and he asked if he could kiss me; there wasn’t a bone in my body that second-guessed it. I was excited for him to. I wanted him to. And I wanted him to keep kissing me, but I also wanted to not do it in front of my work. Anyway, I drove home at midnight, smiling, because I was smitten. Then I texted him.
January 2022: So here I am, smitten with a guy that I’ve just met and am starting to text. I had spent New Year’s with some friends, only going in for hugs when midnight came down on us. The Guy-from-Hinge had texted me a little earlier that night, but there was also someone else who popped up to comment on my Instagram story. This guy—uh let’s call him FH (after the place I had met him)—I had such a crush on him in college. He starts a conversation by commenting on the dress that I wore. We exchange some messages. I’ve known for years that he has a fear of commitment and uses my feelings for him as a way to come back into my life for one reason. So we call each other, and I spend the first hour of 2022 crying on the phone, telling FH to stop humiliating me. I wasn’t interested in being a discard to anyone.
And that is the omen for 2022.
I don’t speak to FH for another month after this phone call. I’m okay with this because This-Hinge-Guy that I’ve had such a crush on…well, I continue to have a huge crush on him. And I continue to harbor feelings and hope for what will happen when I see him. I think it could potentially develop, but I see him so infrequently. My friends are trying to keep me hopeful, but I feel less confident as two weeks turn into three weeks. Tale as old as time. It only is better and justifiable when you’re together in person and can literally feel the chemistry or tension or whatever exploding. Or I did. Or he did? We did? Maybe. At the end of January, we had a nice week stint where I saw him a few times until POOF, he’s aloof.
February 2022: I hear from That-Guy-From-Hinge less and less. However, he responds to my stories with questions, and he actually sends me a really nice message about a song I wrote. So boom. Back at Square One with the intense feeling I have for/about him, but it was only a few days earlier where we have the conversation where we acknowledge that we are looking for different things. I am absolutely devastated by this. I state what I want. Then I take it back. The one thing you should never do is set a standard to only retract it so that they are more comfortable with staying.
March-April 2022: These are the two most depressed months of the year for me. I went through a lot with school, my personal friendships, my self-esteem, my confidence in my future, but the situation with the Hinge-Guy was really unsettling to me. I’m going to sound like an egotistical maniac; at 26, I thought that I knew myself very well at that point. I had worked hard to have my good traits and accolades far outweigh my flaws. I could not understand why someone wouldn’t want me. So everything that I was self-conscious about or that I used to be self-conscious about started to seem like the most defining things about me. I spiraled so hard. I just wanted to see his name pop up on my screen so I started feeling really desperate when I would craft reasons to get him to respond to something. I felt cheap. And it never worked. So it made me feel cheaper. And the times it did work, I never really got the full fulfillment that I could from his reaction. I was depressed. I didn’t know who I was anymore.
I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I liked someone else for a really short time then too. Also emotionally unavailable, but he had the energy that I was always drawn to when I felt my best in November/December 2021. So I latched onto that, and I never found it fully again during that time. I then reached out to FH to talk about all of this, because at one point he also had that energy that I was drawn to.
May-September 2022: I hate myself for what I’ve accepted this summer. In terms of traveling, I had the best time alone. I met many great people, traveled to many unbelievable places, and had experiences that I will cherish. I loved that part of my summer. Those are the memories I look back this summer on fondly.
This spring/summer I was involved with FH, who wouldn’t even admit that we were involved unless he felt threatened by someone else. Then he would come at me with the excuse that he should know what I’m doing because we’re “mildly involved”.
He messaged me back in April at the stupid hour of the night when only drunk guys send Discard Girls a message. And it doesn’t matter how many times you ask them to stop or say no, they will wear you down and crawl back into your life.
So he crawled back in under the pretenses that he was changed. That it wasn’t just about THIS, it was now about THAT. It was about ME. And who I was to judge? I, too, was also a selfish girl in college. I would want someone to give me a second chance. But this was about the 1 trillionth chance I had given him; so I put on my clown suit, let him paint the clown makeup on my face, and I held the door wide open as he used me as a place to wipe off his feet.
It truly wasn’t bad.
At first.
Then he got comfortable with me. One day it seemed like things were good, and the next we’re fighting about labels and that he would only say “no” to a girl if he was uninterested in her. He wouldn’t say he was seeing someone, although it’s been three months into THIS/THAT. I saw him multiple times a week. Many days, we would be in each other’s company. He would look at me while I cooked, and I would look at him while he finished up with work. We would watch movies, listen to records, talk about music, talk about college memories, etc. He would call me on his way home from work several times a week, and it came to the point where I expected my phone to ring at 6:15PM. There were even times where we’d be talking on the phone for hours…sometimes we’d be in silence, just taking comfort in the fact that we were there on the other end of a quiet line. I’d listen to him type on his laptop and he’d listen to me chopping up vegetables. He would let me borrow his shirts to sleep while also blaming me that I needed to set my alarm at 4:25 AM in order to get to my first job for grad school before my second full-time job started.
But he was always adamant that we were somewhere in the middle of more-than-friends and friends. He’d say, “isn’t it supposed to start with a friendship?” And every time we were about to call it off, forget it all, there was the reason not to.
So me…with my incredibly high standards…had basically deconstructed every part of myself that I worked for. Everything I thought was so great about myself became a point of contention.
I got into grad school and work hard for my grades. = You wake up too early and I can’t sleep in.
I work full-time in tourism, which means I give up my Saturdays because I love my job. = You work on a Saturday so I can’t sleep in so you should come here, and travel twice as far to work.
I want a healthy relationship and want to talk about miscommunication and other issues. = I don’t want to talk about it. This is why this is your fault.
I don’t want to do anything tonight. = I’m going to leave.
What are we? = You know what we are. Stop asking.
Why do we always do this? = You’re the one who keeps doing it.
I don’t want to do this. = You know that you do.
April-October 2022: So my self-esteem and my self-value had decreased dramatically. It’s only when I’m not around him that I feel happy, but I struggle with the pattern of needing to know that he’d be there to talk with me. So we fight some more. The red flags become more evident, and I keep ignoring them until I feel so bad about what I have become that I can no longer stand to even be with myself. I know what I could offer someone, so why was I settling for people who didn’t care about those aspects of me?
Why was I accepting people who only pointed out things I wore or how I looked rather than take note that I love my family, I try to have a good heart, I’m passionate about my job, I work to be better at my hobbies, I’m smart, and I’m worth more than how I had let him treat me?
Why can’t anyone see this?
Because I kept shape-shifting myself so that I wouldn’t lose people. I became this version of myself that felt so inauthentic at times in order to keep people around. Whatever the base-level things they noticed about me, I would play up to them. Whatever they wanted became my personality. To keep the attention, connection, and validation.
November/December 2022: I’m tired of it all.
I feel like I have wasted months of this year on making the time and effort into FH worth something or even trying to get the Guy-from-Hinge to notice me. I had a Guy-Who-Comments-on-my-Instagram-Story ask me out in order to give me a dumb reason of why he has to cancel twice, and a Guy-from-College-When-I-Was-20 ask to be in a relationship only to be told that he going behind my back and telling other girls I knew that same thing he was telling me.
Even if I was not responding to all of this, and even when I had the standard and self-respect to say, “no”, why was there even a route, a window, a door, or a crack in the wall to shimmy through and get to me in the first place?
Because I built those cracks in my foundation to keep allowing them in.
My sister said that it was good that I gave FH those months because I had been curious for years about him. But now, I have quenched that curiosity; I’m no longer attracted to anything about him. He is gone from my life. So are the other boys: the boys who only saw me as an object, who would confess their feelings when it was convenient at 3AM, and who would only ask me out through DMs when they liked something I wore.
And as much blame as there is to go around, I blame Version 2.022 of Me. The version who accepted all of this treatment as attention and validation. The version who felt the need to respond in order to keep a friendship or potential alive. The version who would give second and third chances for dates when they would cancel on me, and the version who took everything I was proud of and turned it into an apology.
It took some work to get out of that mindset. Ding-Dong Version 2.022 is Dead!
Now, FH is blocked. If you cancel on me, once—have a valid reason. If you cancel on me twice, we’re done. If you text me at 3 AM, you’re out. If I feel like I have to chase you to get your attention, I don’t want it, and you are dead to me if you make me look like a fool in public. I have already made myself look like a fool enough this year.
With that, I’m excited for the New Year. Not even. I’m excited for tomorrow.
Here are my standards. If you cannot meet them, you are free to lose me.