commitment is luxury, love anyway

eating the shit sandwich that is the pursuit of love without demonizing situationships

Since July began, I’ve embarked on a journey of chronicling some of the past situationships I’ve had in auto fiction, mostly to process how I felt. I also got on and off Hinge after noting the app really yields imbalance and uncertainty of expectation with new connection. I met someone I liked who asked very intentional questions about me, and realized there’s a thru line of people from my past who were worth loving who’d had similar behavior. I finally stopped thinking about my ex after accepting I’d always known he didn’t care about me as much as I wished, and that’s why I didn’t define things. I had enough casual sex to realize I’m probably not open to more friends with benefits with people I know I don’t want to get to know. I got feedback and stories from my last post about people relating to the ambiguous zone. And I came to a key realization:

Situationships are just a fucking realistic part of modern dating now, yet no one wants to admit this. No one has fully accepted this because they think love shouldn’t be complicated. Because they haven’t understood that other people aren’t being irresponsible and ignoring the default. Everyone is scared now, everyone is overwhelmed now, and this is the reality.

Everyone ridicules situationships, belittles them as if unnatural, shames others for “settling” for them, when situationships are literally an effect of culture today. The sooner we understand that, the better we can handle that.

Commitment — the right kind — honestly is a luxury.

And I’m tired of us pretending it’s the default. Times have shifted.

I’m tired of being scared. I’m tired of waiting for external validation. And I think I’ve figured out how to detach: by steeling myself for and even enjoying the shit sandwich of the messy, dating process.

Not saying, “It’s supposed to suck, but it’s worth it once you find the right person!”

Ask yourself this instead: “Even if you never were official ever with anyone, even if no one ever committed to you and it broke your heart to feel so unwanted… would the pain of loving anyway be worth it?”

I am that bitch — I’ll say, yes. Connecting is still worth it, especially once you surrender that expectation does not always bring you a 1-1 result.

I don’t think accepting situationships as a part of dating makes you “disrespect” yourself. I think it empowers you to not move in the name of fear.

Everyone you’ve ever loved — whether or not they were official — deserves to be reflected on and cherished not just through the lens of fiction, but in a radicalization of an approach to heterofatalism.

My friend Elaine told me, “You know, you have a lot of insight into how people work and attachment styles, despite not having any official relationships. Don’t you realize how much dating experience you do have?”

Well, shit. What have I been missing while blindly denigrating myself about being “uncommittable”? What power am I giving away when I think about giving men the key to my “femininity” based on whether they are brave enough to commit?

I don’t have to accept shitty treatment or stay around in situations I know are bad. But I also choose to no longer regret any of my situationships.

Even if I’m trying to avoid more of them, and am fully committing to being honest, how I memorialized the ones I’ve already had is 100% affecting me today as I navigate dating.

The more we demonize situationships, the more we reduce people to checkboxes of, “this guy’s good because he committed” and “this guy is a coward because he couldn’t ask for what he wanted.”

Do people not look back at those lost loves who never committed, and feel your chest tighten at what could have been? That’s not just your ego being upset — that’s also grief for something that had potential and that, more often than not, was felt both ways.

Bravery is a proper requisite for life, sure, but I’m realizing that the expectation of it to a toxic degree is really inflaming gender relations right now.

Accepting situationships as a form of love doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to say what you want — but it does free you of the attachment to the outcome.

****

The closest perspective I’ve seen to mine is something like, “nooo enjoy dating because you get to learn about yourself, and meet other people and get to know them! It is light and fun! It’s fun to expand your —” Okay, even as a huge extrovert, I think that the way this perspective is phrased is quite reductive, especially if you’ve had a good amount of pain in your psyche from all the lost connections. Literally, how can someone handle all that and still find the dating experience fun and enjoyable?

In modern dating culture, everyone has scars from relationships or low self worth. Everyone ghosting, being avoidant, saying rude things, or robbing each other of their humanity is smarting from the same wound. Everyone is looking for the “next option” because they’re unable to enjoy the process they’re in now, unable to savor the connection they have in front of them, because of some terrible feeling inside they’ve wanted to ignore. Knowing everyone you meet has some PTSD more or less that is very untouchable isn’t fun, because if you want a real life partner, then you’re usually already being hit with repercussions of baggage without the agency or prerogative to fix anything.

Everyone’s on the apps huddling together for warmth after being shipwrecked, as they wait for the next lifeboat to take them to relationship and happy ever after land. Everyone’s running for cover from the storm of uncertainty, taking shelter under the roof of one building while being afraid of it collapsing and soaking them again. Why would you be able to enjoy anything under these circumstances?

But I think we all suffer from this type of disillusionment that I can’t fault any of us for anymore: We all had this idea that dating was going to be easier. We were pitched this idea of the world being simpler, lost love and sexual partners not piling up as time went on, not wistfully yearning for the faraway day we could maybe have kids into our mid 30s. This idea that “love should be easy, you should be able to click with someone so magically and fast” looms over all of us. Even if we intellectually know it takes work, we don’t find meaning in the work itself.

I’m guilty of thinking if I niche down, I’ll find my ideal audience (men) out there. I’m guilty of thinking if I just settled more, I’d magically feel good once someone gave me the time of day I was looking for (well, I got taken for granted for 7 months instead). I’m guilty of thinking everything revolves around this result that I and everyone around me wants to feel worthy of, but none of us can embrace it.

So what’s next?

Author Mark Manson writes about the question that matters the most — in life, which shit sandwich are you willing to eat? In other words, what pain are you willing to handle? For what are you willing to suffer and say every day, “It’s worth it anyway”? What will make your life meaningful isn’t 0 pain, but the right sort of pain, customized to you.

Over the years, this question has brought me things that have given me much joy. It helped me leave a toxic career that’s gone downhill even more since, make a home in Los Angeles, leave Los Angeles to come to New York, and pick good friends. I would make decisions by comparing the cons and tradeoffs of each, by steeling myself to remember that everything has a cost, but it isn’t even about whether you can practically “afford” the cost, but about whether paying that cost yields back your investment 10 fold every time.

And yet, I recently noticed that I would always enact the “what shit sandwich?” question when it came to choosing between options I already had/were within reach. I never thought about how choosing to eat one type of shit sandwich is found in the process of striving for something you don’t have yet or may not get. It’s not just a litmus test for examining the things you are willing to keep in your life or not.

Today, I realized that the answer to my previous blog post — should I take the blackpill and give up on finding a boyfriend? — was found in this: am I willing to eat the shit sandwich of the awkwardness, the heartbreak, the humiliation, the uncertainty, to continue the search for love?

I always picked ideal partners or people I wanted to date on the basis that I could handle the shit sandwich that is them and their personalities: their flaws were tradeoffs to the amazing qualities they had. Such as my propensity to go for guys who are considered “too blunt” but who I knew as a result were thoughtful and caring in their commitment to honesty; guys who were “too solution oriented”, but who as a result bullshitted less the average person; guys who “asked the hard questions”, but who I knew would always pay attention when I needed to be seen; guys who were workaholics, but who I felt were independent and principled in their own sense of self.

But I realized I was missing an essential component with each connection I’d had. I would always have this subconscious idea that it should be easy, that if a guy really cared about me, it was on him to pursue me and ask me for clarity. If I waited around and he didn’t pop any questions of commitment or volunteer any of his feelings, I was as good as delusional for caring. “If he wanted you, he would,” was the toxic brainworm I heard over and over. While it’s true that sometimes a lack of effort is very indicative of the person’s level of investment, I also repeatedly went for shy introverts who might not have the courage to initiate or even the energetic capacity for repeatedly checking themselves.

I assumed that love should feel painless, and maybe that’s true. But at what point is a boundary of leaving something that hurts too much, also inviting a messy tangle of anguish and villainization — “you screwed me over and wasted my time, fuck you!”

Today, I woke up and said: NO. I’m done with memorializing situationships by their failure to be their opposite: relationships. I want to instead memorialize them as bittersweet yearnings that didn’t come to full fruition, sure, but nevertheless incredibly meaningful and amazing moments that taught me about life and other people. If he didn’t commit to me, does that cheapen our entire connection? Cheapening what happened between us is a way to also cheapen myself.

The thought of, “what if I end up alone?” has always trended as humiliating more than sad. Because to me, it’d be humiliating to be a barren woman without children, and the idea is that I hadn’t had enough love in my life.

But what about, in that scenario, I focus on the idea that I could remember the amazing sex, love, and interesting moments I had with various amazing people? What if I realized I know so much more about life, authenticity, and attachment styles because I let myself fall again and again, get hurt again and again? What if I never choose the idea of “ending up alone” by seeing that I was never alone the whole time?

I’m sure this take is going to be met with controversy — I hear people’s misguided advice of noooo don’t settle for less than you deserve or don’t be irresponsible with your partners and let them stay in situationships with you wtf!

And I’m not taking back that I want a boyfriend.

But what I’m saying is — attachment to outcome will fuck you up. “Settling for less than you deserve” makes you idealize relationships and discard the person in front of you as the stepping stone to a goal. Being focused on “being responsible” might make you stilted, anxious, intense. What are you avoiding when you accidentally burden other people with needy expectation too early on What about flow? What about acknowledging fear without letting it drive your actions IF I end up alone?

How will I memorialize those I loved so deeply? “Oh they were too cowardly to commit” no longer feels sufficient. It is true that “cowardice” is often a failure mode of reasoning and circumstance.

But what if I FELT love there? What if it even trumps the love I might feel later in a “proper” relationship? What then? Will I let it be cheapened by what it wasn’t - a commitment - or let myself see what it was - genuine connection anyway? I no longer want to cheapen the people I CHOSE to love. 

Society will tell you that you imagined the connection, that you didn’t value yourself. If they cared, they would.

And even if that isn’t true — I think to discern the right way to think, we must remember that love isn’t the same as courage. We shouldn’t just turn our backs on the love that didn’t have enough courage in it for people to stay. Lots of people have stories of people that were “almosts” but one or both weren’t brave enough. Does that mean it wasn’t something that mattered anyway?

I must now ask: how will I STAY with the feeling of love before you’re even mine, even if it hurts? Because if I can stay with that, it can help me be brave.

How will I not focus on “whether you’re brave or secure enough” to be with me? How will I focus on loving you? Making you irreplaceable because you’re just another human, without completely damning myself to only focusing on you as a way to reach an end goal?

You can replace people in roles, but you’ll never replace the people themselves. I believe this now.

***

For me, I’m choosing to focus on the shit sandwich of my choice to keep dating.

The thing about shit sandwiches is, you have to choose to ask every day: Is this shit sandwich still worth it?

If employed properly, you’d ask this for a job, for a lifestyle, for any of it. “Is this still worth it?”

When LA stopped being worth it, I left. When I broke up with G in June, I felt the desire leave my body because he’d fucked up that bad.

When the choice to deal with the dating process feels not meaningful, I’ll listen. But often, it creeps up, and I’m reminded that my own strength, acquired over time from trial by fire, is something I admire.

I’ll quit idealizing the process as anything less than painful, uncertain, fear-ridden, but rejoice in the idea that the process itself feels rich in its own way in refining me.

The pain of getting into the relationship is normal. I trust that one day, I will wake up and know if the shit sandwich of figuring out the other person is no longer worth it. What if it is worth it today, however?

Because what if the worst result of you leaving is, I have so much left that I learned from you. I have so much to give, and what if the worst result is I got to give it?

How do you make the FACT that you’ve connected with someone the best result? How do you realize you’ve already won?

I’m excited to remind myself : What kind of person do I get to be WHILE pursuing a guy? What kind of trials does love yield for me?

How does how I behave teach me about who I am? So I can be authentic?

How do I make this meaningful even if it doesn’t work out? How does loving someone make me want to love myself more?

***

Single and Taken are all looked at as stagnant statuses. We never talk about what happens in between, how it’s a long field, and there’s not always a linear path. The shame of being in this stage is terrifying. The fear is even more so.

Like I said earlier, everyone wants a relationship to feel safe. To run toward each other to avoid the storm.

But at the risk of sounding cliche… for fuck’s sake, maybe our culture is ridden with situationships now because we are being called to dance in the rain.  

I will not stop trying to be honest when it calls for it, but I will also stop demonizing the grey zone or rushing the process. I will stay with love groundedly no matter what, not assuming the other person needs to be brave too.

I will dance in the rain now until the sun comes out.