Chick Habit: Max
WORDS BY Max Van Hosen & Dalton Feldhut
My first initial understanding of love was contorted and stretched like the Silly Putty you lose underneath a couch cushion. Looking back, I’ve been trying to understand love’s complexity and purpose since the day my ten year old self was asked to choose which parent I liked more.
For a lot of my life I dreamt of love as something that purposefully happens out of the blue. An inevitable phenomena strategically placed by the laws of the universe bound by molecules patiently waiting for the correct time to shine. For the longest time, I only saw love as something that guaranteed stability and security on demand (both parents remarried during middle school).
My 479th attempt at solving love was like when your favorite childhood dog ends up finding that Silly Putty you shoved deep down in your couch to forget about. But then he spits the putty into your hand. Covered in hair, dust, and a mysterious third substance, you briefly remember all the times the putty was stretched, pulled, smashed, plucked, and played with. But then your dog tries to eat the putty and immediately chokes to death. Your left hand trembles as your right hand squeezes the remains of the slobbery, hairy chunk of putty that just killed your dog. That was getting cheated on by my first girlfriend with one of my closest friends in high school.
I thought love needed to hurt. I thought love was a two ton weight kicking gravity’s ass that plummets down the bottomless pit of the human soul.
I tried a spin on the great wheel of love again when I asked out a girl I met on Hinge back in February of 2023. Our first date was getting Boba in Chinatown, New York. It took me an incredibly long time after this to figure out how confused this blind pursuit of affection had been, but I didn’t know that then.
We ate ramen and drank wine in the East Village that night for dinner. We talked about her experiences of growing up on the opposite side of the world while we sat on the swings in Tompkins Square Park. I remember the orange glow of nearby street lamps illuminating the kinks of her face, distinguishing her warm silhouette against the dark black sky. I walked her back to her place and ended up spending the night. That’s what I thought love was supposed to be like for a very long time.
Ideal.
She and I split up near the end of that spring semester. Fully-bloomed April flowers danced in the air as I told her I needed time for myself for the soon-to-be summer at her pissed face. I did not. About a month before all this she asked me to be in an official relationship with her––which I was totally down for. That was, until a week later, when she made out with a “friend of hers” at a party. A week after that, she asked if I was cool with being a part of a three-way couple with the girl.
So there I was with her under a tree, watching her get pissed at me for something she did. Honestly I thought this story was going to go somewhere fun or enlightening but now I’m ruminating on the whole maddening ordeal. Oh yeah, Hinge. I don’t know, the app can be fun. I never take it seriously. Something about apps pulling the strings in a relationship’s fate feels morally wrong. Kind of.
Love is a word easily too short and too brief to encapsulate the power and potency it deceives us with. It’s a word I might not fully ever understand, but one thing I know is that it’s real and exists. I feel love everyday. It’s not hard. You just gotta dig through all the other mess, like Hinge, first.
Dalton’s Commentary:
Mr. Van Hosen’s heartbreaking romantic endeavors bring to mind another sore spot for me, albeit with the roles most definitely reversed. You see, Winter 2021 brought with it one of the longest droughts of positive emotion I have ever claimed to have experienced. My girlfriend of almost three years and I had recently split. In my (not much) younger mind, a pain known only by the star crossed youth dominated my brainwaves; I was utterly inconsolable. It was in this clear and healthy headspace that I decided salvation could be found only in the land reserved for the desperate, horny, and just downright deplorable: those apps.
That brings me back to the moment I found my hardly-functioning spectacles. With my vision acutely adjusted, I recognize myself to be back in room 704’s notorious megabed, next to the feminine yawn that led to this spiraling thought of a story.
It was my first real experience using a dating app, yet I feel it only halfway counts. I was more than familiar with the lady I had matched with at the time, which was the only reason I had any semblance of confidence to finally reach out to someone after my phone alerted me to the new match. With that familiarity came a sense of ease, even comfort.
As much as I hate to say it, I am more than sure that this was due, in large part, to the gaping hole of emotion I had felt and lost after the breakup. So, however unfair it may be, I knew that I had no objections to the time I was spending with the lady, but at the same time, could not honestly say I could see it turning into anything more than a fledgling fling.
Unfortunately, my lack of communication skills in tandem with my degenerate-level enjoyment of the Wingstop which the lady would ever-so-kindly order to my dorm room – a figure that made me question if her doordash account was funded by oil baron money – made me have to come to terms with some of the more unappealing aspects of my character that dating apps bring out of me. On that day, and seemingly ever since. Here I was wasting this poor girl’s time to ignore dealing with my own unresolved issues; the beginnings of something, I hear, is referred to as a “pattern”.
Upon some reflection and major deliberation over the years, I believe Miss Hinge and I have finally come to a mutual understanding; our love with one another is always bound to be fruitless, so long as I continue to ignore the need to know what I want before I go demanding the commitment of another. Or the apps are evil and out to get us all.
Either way, I have got to lose this chick habit.