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After my last relationship flatlined, I reached into my emotional junk drawer and pulled out a name I hadn’t deleted. A placeholder. A “just in case.”
We’d hooked up once, years ago, while I was dating his friend. We never talked about it, but we stayed in touch the way people do when they’re too curious to let go but too cautious to move forward. There would be birthday texts. A heart on an Instagram Story. The occasional rogue emoji. We ran into each other sometimes, always by accident, though increasingly it felt like fate. The tension between us hummed just below the threshold of language. It was a low-stakes danger, like driving with one headlight out.
He was always in a relationship, or I was. Still, I liked to believe I lingered in the back of his mind. I know he lingered in mine.
So when my relationship ended—quietly, abruptly, like unplugging a tired old appliance—and I was back in my room, blasting Lana, eating ice cream straight from the tub, trying to distract myself from the imminent pain of heartbreak, I texted him.
Drink?
Sure. Want to come to mine?
He told me he was “seeing someone.” Not officially dating, but it was probably heading that way. In boy-speak, that usually means they’re exclusive. Or close enough. I nodded like I cared.
The chemistry was, for lack of a better word, insane. He touched my wrist and my entire body lit up. He said things he probably shouldn’t have; the kind of things that sound hot in the moment and slightly tragic in the morning.
It was supposed to be a fling. A sexy distraction to keep me from obsessing over my ex. And it worked, at first. But then my brain did that thing it does, and rerouted the obsession—from my ex to him. I found myself spiraling. Wondering if he liked me. If the girl he was seeing knew about me. If he remembered the things I said in passing, hoping they’d land. I caught myself googling things like, “signs he’s into you but scared” and “how to tell if he’ll leave her for you”—searches no one makes when they’re fine.
But I didn’t want him, not really. I just wanted to be chosen. I wanted the redemption arc. I wanted the version where he reached for me with certainty, like he knew something I didn’t. The more he ignored me, the more I wanted him.
One night, in bed, he told me, casually, that he’d been with someone else the night before. I asked what this meant, this thing we were doing. He shrugged, “It’s fun. It’s sex”—words that land like a slap when you re naked and overthinking.
Then the kicker: “I know you’re using me. And I’m okay with that.”
I was sure he was wrong. What if I liked him—sincerely, inconveniently? I wanted to kiss him, and there were, objectively, several other people I could’ve kissed. Some of them even texted back.
At 1 a.m., in the black hole of my own thoughts, I read about limerence: the obsessive crush, the mental loop, the desire for reciprocation amplified by ambiguity. A psychological scratch-off with no jackpot.
He once told me that if he were obsessed with me, I’d send him away. Maybe he was right. That’s the thing about uncertainty: for people like me, it’s addictive.
But the truth of the matter is, tempting as it may be to believe in being on a level “beyond words,” you can’t feel safe with someone who won’t let you inside of their brain. It doesn’t matter how good they are in bed. If they can’t say what they want—or hear what you do—you’ll always feel like you’re alone, even when they’re lying right next to you.
Maybe I really did just need a body to make me forget about another one. But in hindsight, I know it was never really about him. It was about me—about trying to heal something old through something new. Trying to prove I was lovable by making someone choose me who had never really seen me at all.
Situationships are often this way: they’re about the wounds we carry, the attachment patterns we can’t unlearn, the parts of us still waiting to be chosen. I wasn’t in love; I was fixated. I was trading the pain of my break-up for the pain of something else. What I actually needed, though, was space to sit with my own mess for once, instead of handing it to someone else and calling it a connection.