“You’re a F*ck Boy”

“You’re a f*ck boy.”

No I’m not.

“Yes you are, look at how you dress!”

What’s wrong with my clothes?

“F*ck boy clothes. Look at your shoes, man.”

What?

“And your drink, that’s a f*ck boy drink.”

Oh, okay then.

“I’m still not decided. I can’t decide if you’re a f*ckboy or not.”

Cool.

These are snippets of conversations I’ve actually had in the past. These instances ae usually unprompted,but probably motivated by my inability to express emotion in an obvious way in person. I understand why that might happen. It takes A LOT for me to get overly excited. and so people assume that if I’m not outwardly excited, then I’m not excited at all. This isn’t true. Still, replace the words “f*ck boy” with “slut”here and it’s offensive, and sexist, and horrible. It has the same meaning,though. What even is that?

Being single brings with it the notion of casual relationships. They’re necessary in order to gauge whether this person, the person you are seeing now, might be the right person to be with long term. This isn’t to say that casual sex is a characteristic of all of them (some of them, yes). I mean, sometimes a casual relationship might end before even meeting up. It might exist solely across social media platforms,and then fizzle out because it wasn’t a good fit. That’s okay too.

However, the zeitgeist of casual, single life is commitment-phobia. The terror and anxiety linked to committing to one person, to THIS person. It’s something I struggle with quite extensively. To be clear, this has very little to do with the person you are seeing (at least in my case anyway). It’s just a ‘the grass is always greener’feeling. Although the going is good right now, and right here, there’s a gut feeling that it’s not exactly right for you, and so the excited feeling of liking someone diminishes. You’re left feeling confused, irritable, and if it’snot checked, you end up hurting a person you had no intentions of hurting.

It’s definitely not a good thing. It causes you to always be on the look-out for the next thing,never truly appreciating what’s right in front of you. I guess it’s part of the reason you might be called a f*ck boy, or a slut. It’s not that I sleep around,because I really don’t. It’s more that the relationships I do begin end quite abruptly, as I don’t feel like this is right for me right now. It’s nobody’s fault, but I can see how it would be very easy to blame yourself if a person you liked just dipped out of nowhere.

There’s also the aspect of becoming so comfortable as a single person, that you forget the importance of actually having that other person in your life. It isn’t a necessity in your life, and so when it isn’t as you’d like it to be, it’s very easy to bail. It’s easy to leave and go back to your single life, because you know how to do that,and there’s no pressure or expectations.

I can’t say it’s a choice to be this way either, because it’s not. It’s happened so often, when I’ve thought I really liked someone. The switch flips, suddenly, and the feelings are gone. The desire to be in that situation fades out. It’s never an outcome you’d want, but you can’t numb those feelings either.

I understand why you might mislabel someone like that as a f*ck boy. I can understand why you’d be annoyed by someone who seems really into you one minute, and is out the door the next. I can understand why you might not understand a person like that.

But there’s a marked difference between using a person, and having an intense anxiety induced by a feeling of being trapped, or suffocated. They’re not the same.

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