Cuffing Season Casualties: My friend has a boyfriend, now what?
When I’ve engaged in the camaraderie of being single, with a friend or even parasocially with a content creator, something within turns amiss at the revelation of them seeing someone. It hits me like a stubbed toe. Even though I know it’s on the list of things that could hurt, I’m always slightly dumbfounded by its occurrence—particularly, how I didn’t see it coming. My internal monologue is as follows: Yes, I knew there was someone. Didn’t know it was actually something. Technically, there’s always a theoretical person; there have been dudes before. Are they gonna be a recurring character now? I honestly wish I were just jealous, so I could easily sort through my emotions. How, I would love to diagnose myself with a simple case of bitter envy, and chuck the instance into my well-kept box of self-loathing, insecurities, and other things that fight to keep me up at night. However, I do exhibit some form of compassion, happiness, or maybe it’s empathy when the news is revealed. With a friend, it’s probably more earnest because I actually know the person, and with an influencer, it’s kind of just a blanket best wishes—although I would say some of the lifestyle girls I’ve watched for years evoke similar emotional responses from me. So, I recognize it would be too melodramatic to call it betrayal. It’s just, I guess, the human mind hasn’t quite evolved, so I can tell the emotional difference between being abandoned in the wilderness and my friend telling me she has a boyfriend now.
It’s weird noticing a change in the relationship before the other person does. The emperor has no clothes, but should I be the first to call it out? At first, I felt a bit silly sitting with my emotions. I am not new to this, I thought. In the ever-evolving spreadsheet of who’s in a relationship and who’s not, I’ve had friends who’ve zigzagged across the columns, ones who stayed content on whatever side of the aisle they were, and ones who’ve been temporarily sorted under the precarious talking-stage label. Life happens, things change, I know the deal. But being the first to notice that a previous version of our relationship is over does suck. When every other conversation used to be punctuated with the idea or just the assumption of being single, I find myself needing some time to adjust to its newfound absence. It's not that every exchange was a disgrace to the bedchel test, but that singleness acted as a shared lens to dissect the world, anywhere from politics to pop culture. In the case of an influencer, I think it just manifests as a kind of rebranding. The new information could be dropped casually in a vlog, or in more extreme cases, we get a full-on hard launch. Before the audience knows it, the small quips about being single that were littered throughout the content become a distant memory. Overall, I feel like I’ve woken up to a new software update on my phone, where the sacred things, like the family WhatsApp group chat, and the less important, but familiar things, such as visual evidence of my existence from the ages of 12-16, are all still present, but the layout has changed.
In the end, I want to attend a bunch of weddings in the near future and hopefully be a bridesmaid at a couple, so I’ll get over this bump. But in all seriousness, I am invested and rooting for my friends’ long-term happiness, so if a guy has to be in the picture, so be it. I’m just grateful to have been present in a previous chapter and hopefully play a supporting role and receive support in our unfolding stories—It just has to be slightly awkward now.
