WTF is "casual?"

So many people loved this post on my Stories! It’s rare that I get so many hearts on one posting unless it’s a picture of my dog or my breasts. Joking. You can’t post breasts on Instagram. Speaking of breasts, the place where the word “casual” will probably pop up the most is dating, specifically online dating.

For such a casual word, it is a word loaded with meaning and significance; it is as heavy as “long-term” – although long-term sounds like you’re about to get a disease, so maybe it’s better to get a casual rather than long-term? I don’t know. Fuck words. I’m joking, words are very important. Which is why “casual” is a word that always gives me a pause. Before I turned 40, I organized myself a hot, casual buddy because I was curious how that would all play out, everyone was doing it; it was a sophisticated and cool and urban thing to do, having a hot buddy casually show up and then leave, after a short text exchange. But soon enough things got wonky and I’d get irritated me when he would occasionally text with a joke or ask what my weekend plans were, and I also hated seeing that he was getting his pilot licence, or that he made a film – in other words that he flourished somewhere in the world outside of our casual acquaintance. It was dumb to create a story about his life but there I was, doing it and threatening this to stop being casual. I didn’t want to have a relationship with this person and there was never any expectation of any sort of future, so the jokes and questions were irritating precisely because he was becoming too familiar to me, showing his funny side, something that I could potentially fall for, which would also threaten falling out of casualness. (And, of course, flying planes and premiering films were just cool things and I like being around cool things.)

The point of the story is that I learned then that I cannot really do casual because it’s actually too much work. It’s a waste of energy and time. Casual is small talk. Casual is posting things with captions like “Mondays, am I right?” Casual is drinks with co-workers you don’t like. Casual is plans that never materialize and friendships that live and die in the DMs. Casual is brunch. Casual is fine, I guess. And I am not fine – I am spiritually inflamed. I am not just talking about dating or relationships. I’m talking about my inability to not get deep with people – or activities – that I’m spending time with/ on. I am too sensitive, too mentally ill, too much, too naive, I don’t know but I kind of love it.

I used to be dead inside. It lasted a long time. Sometimes I would drink over it but sometimes I wouldn’t and that would be worse. The internal boredom stretched so wide and so deep; it was a perpetual, never-ending beige. It is absolutely possible to die from ennui – which is not an absence of things to do, but absence of feeling. And that’s what makes it so deadly – you can go about your days, your work, see friends, laugh even, and still be buried under layers of psychic frost. It’s like your soul is walking three feet behind your body, watching everything with mild disinterest, occasionally yawning or saying “meh.” When you come back to life after that – fully and authentically – it feels like every encounter is lit from within. You notice everything, every sparkle and intonation and music, and your own heartbeat, and conversations pick up where they left off, easily, as you stay in your own flow. Casual is the opposite of that.

Another thing I saw on social media was this line — “When you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything” and I thought how when you're always breezy, noncommittal, shrugging things off, never standing firmly for what you feel or want or love – you become too slippery. You lose shape. And when you're shapeless, it's easy to get swept up in other people’s desires, aesthetics, ideologies, Instagram habits. You say yes when you mean no. You laugh at things that bore you. You date people who treat you like a breakable object because at least it's something. When you refuse to go deep, and speak out loud about what matters to you, to plant a flag in your own emotional terrain, you do fall for anything that looks like substance. Attention disguised as intimacy. Aesthetic disguised as meaning.

Life is so short. And yet somehow, in that brevity, we’re given the ability to form bonds so rich and intricate they feel immortal. It’s astonishing, really – that we’re these flawed, soft creatures, all bones and meat, and we still manage to find each other, to hold on, to mean something to one another. When you’ve been hollow for a long time, you recognize the sacredness of a connection. And once you taste that, you can’t go back to small talk. You want soul talk, or nothing.