9 Reasons To Text Your Insignificant Other
By Chad Hensley
For a very long time, I had a type — tall, older, scruffy, charismatic, and notably detached. The kind of man who would love you on a Friday and forget you by Sunday. He didn’t want you, but he didn’t want to lose you. The type of relationship that forces you to sugarcoat, decode, and sometimes even fictionalize that with enough time invested, eventually you’ll move past this temporary speed bump — the pendulum will shift, and he will love you back. Needless to say, that never happened
Leaving this kind of relationship is like getting an adjustment to your eyeglass prescription — people and objects lurch into almost painful focus, crisp and unnerving. I’ve only had my heart broken once, and loving him was like walking through a spider web — his beautiful, thick strands of silk woven carefully into my DNA. No matter how far I travel, I swear that sometimes I can still feel his lace spinning circles around me, which, despite my better judgment, is when I find myself reaching for the phone, to see where and how he’s been.
They say that nothing surpasses the beauty and elegance of a bad idea. Without question, there are plenty of reasons to text your insignificant other. However, very seldom are they good reasons.
Here are a few examples I’m sure you can relate to.
Because you’re drunk. That’s the only reason the thought ever crosses anyone’s mind.
Because you butt-dialed him. How convenient. Might as well send him a text apologizing for the disturbance, fumble through painfully artless small talk, and then become irrationally upset when he does the both of you a favor and stops responding.
Because you’re horny. You’ve already seen each other naked. No need for unrealistically flattering angles, dim lighting, or Instagram filters. He knows your flaws, freckles, and shortcomings better than anyone else. It’s easy and effortless. You were never ashamed to share his by-the-hour bed before, why start now?
Because you’re a masochist and really like sabotaging your own happiness.
Because you’re sorry for all the hiccups and fender-benders. Because after all this time, you just want to add up all of the errors and miscalculations and divide them up even. Let bygones be bygones. The past is prologue and you’re completely capable of being friends.
Because you have good news that you’d like to share. Not to brag, of course — the last thing you’d ever want to do is have him witness how well you’ve been doing without him — just because you think you should, you know, “touch base.”
Because a U2 song just played at some shitty bar on Lexington and it took you back to a very brief time when you were happy; when he incandescently occupied your outer and inner space. Because thinking about him somehow makes you happy and sad at the same time. Because your whiskey-and-red-wine daze thinks it can reclaim that feeling of infinitude the two of you shared.
Because you really like the skepticism in his hello.
Because maybe if the weight of the constellations would’ve stopped pushing down on us for a second, we wouldn’t have been crushed. Love is a destroying force, an impetus for flamboyancy and humiliation. I know that loneliness fabricates significance from simple moments, but the static between us was incomparable and held the kind of meaning that exists beyond language. Beyond sex and basic needs, beyond anything science will ever know.
But mostly because you’re drunk and you need to sleep it off.