When you like someone it should be obvious to everyone in the vicinity that you’re making each other feel sensations you didn’t even know were possible. Electricity when you touch. Melt at their smile. You’re supposed to let the person you like know you’re into them. Drop hints. Send them “Do you like me Y/N?” texts. Otherwise, we will drive ourselves wild analyzing every text message our loves and lusts send, everything they’ve ever said, every innuendo they ever gave.
The fool-proof, human-emotion science of it all is, the more you pull away, the more we chase. Chasing after someone who doesn’t love you anymore or isn’t into you “like that” is the worst. You’re the one sitting by the phone, waiting for them to respond to a text you sent hours ago. You’re the one debating whether you should re-text them first, throwing a tantrum where you’re all, Fine. If you’re not going to text me back then I’m going to turn my phone all the way off for the rest of the day so that when you finally do decide to text me back I don’t text YOU back for hours, too. You’re the one who invites them over to “watch a movie,” the international sign for let’s make out and dry hump on the futon, and when nothing happens, you’re the one who comes away feeling like a desperate idiot. But you’re not desperate — you’re just really in-like.
You broke my heart and I let you. We were one, but somewhere, something went wrong. You stopped trying. You stopped texting me cute, funny stuff throughout the day. The sexy pics stopped. The dates stopped. You stopped and the excuses started. The writing was on the wall as they say, but I looked away from it even though I should have known better. I chased you anyway.
But why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we let people break our hearts when we always know better?
We want to feel loved — by you. It’s scary because we feel this intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and physical connection to you. And we’re lucky to ever find even two of those connections in a single person, so having all four feels like hitting the jackpot, which probably explains why the sex is so good. That’s why we keep chasing, that’s why we keep hoping. Our rational brains and BFFs tell us NO, NO, NO, but our loins and emotions tell us that you feel so good.
No matter how much our loves and likes hurt us, we always imagine that they will wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly realize what a hot titty we are, that they will come to their senses and bring us a bouquet of roses and our favorite chocolates, just like the last scene of every movie. So we keep hoping, we keep chasing. And sometimes they do come around, and if they don’t we have to learn to stop running and give it a rest. Emotions like jealousy, anger, anxiety — these are all ways our bodies tell us that something isn’t quite right. But sometimes, we want this person to like us so much that we toss all rational thought and human warning signs aside in hopes that things will be different, that one day they will come around, because you really hope they will.
I once heard in a Sex and the City episode, which is where everybody should go for relationship advice, that there can only ever be one “star” in the relationship — the person who gets tended to, celebrated and, well, chased after. The star/person being chased gets to just sit there and enjoy the adulation. But that’s not fair. There should be mutual chasing, and maybe if there were, our hearts wouldn’t get broken so often.
By Madison Moore
