Dear Freak of the Week,
I started seeing this guy while I was studying abroad in the winter, but we haven’t put a label on our relationship yet — I thought I was fine with that. However, he’s recently been talking to me about other hookups and I’m starting to realize that I don’t want to continue this kind of relationship with him. But, I also don’t know if I’m ready to date — I’m also still not totally over my ex. What should I do?
Sincerely,
Urgent Care
I’m just going to be blunt — there are many red flags here. Let’s go through them together.
First of all, you started seeing this person in the winter. Babe, it’s summer. We could easily be dealing with a six month long situationship here. The situationship max for me is probably around one to two months — three months maximum. The simple fact is that if the relationship isn’t developing, it likely isn’t meant to be. What adds insult to injury is the fact that you are wasting precious time that you could be investing in other people. That brings me to my second red flag — other people.
Unless you’re into it and it’s an explicit choice, there is a major problem if you are seeing someone exclusively while they are seeing other people. You may not be the type of person to hook up with multiple people at a time. That’s fine. But an arrangement where the other person feels otherwise is inevitably going to breed resentment on your end. The worst part of this whole situation is that you can’t even be mad at the person fueling this resentment. While it is kind of an asshole move to talk about other hookups in front of someone you’re hooking up with, they are simply doing what a non-committed relationship allows them to do. At the end of the day, this only ends up making you isolated, crazy and hating this person. I’m glad we’re out of any denial stage, though — the fact that you’ve admitted to yourself that you are not happy with this situation is the first step in changing it.
The fact that this person is talking about their other hookups to you is a massive red flag. It could mean a couple of different things. Maybe this person is super into you, and this is some strange effort to make you jealous; it could be that they simply don’t realize that it might make you upset, although this seems unlikely; it could also mean that they don’t care enough about you or your feelings to realize that it hurts, and that they should stop.
The final red flag comes with your feelings. The fact that you’re not fully ready because you’re not fully over your ex is an automatic and absolute disqualification of the potential for a relationship. You shouldn’t put you or this person in a position where you might hurt them. I also think that any weird middle ground thing like an “exclusive situationship” (what even is that?) is a bad idea under any circumstance. It also doesn’t seem fair to ask this person to stop seeing these other people without an explicit development in the relationship, especially since you’re not over your ex.
There are two options left. Either you can ask this person to stop talking about their hookups and be content knowing that they probably are doing it anyway, or you could end it. We have enough red flags here to construct a golf course, so I absolutely think you should end it. Trust me. There are better things waiting for you. Stay strong.
- Eli
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He studies government and creative writing. He publishes various personal work under a pen name on Substack (https://substack.com/@wesmercer), and you can find his other work in various publications.
