Things Girls Do After Graduation: Define The Relationship

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It’s been two months now. Todd, while being a stand-up guy, still hasn’t taken any initiative to make things official. “Between his incredibly busy work schedule, his pick-up hockey league, and constantly being out of town for bachelor parties, I shouldn’t expect much right now,” she justifies to herself.

But deep down, being 24 and constantly in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, her biological clock is already ticking. After all, Caroline and Katie’s boyfriends both made it official with them after just a month. “I wonder what Todd’s deal is?” she questions while reading Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari on her couch with Netflix softly playing in the background.

“Is it me?” she wonders as her emotions begin to build. Morbid thoughts slowly begin to race through her head — her age, her weight, her obsession with Sperry, her family, or worse yet, her looks. After contemplating whether or not bangs would help the situation, she stops herself.

“Alright. Fuck. This.” she declares, turning off The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt as she tromps to her dining room table to sit down and hatch a plan. And right there she decides: Friday night, after work, at dinner with him, she’s going to bring it up. “This relationship is getting defined.”

With a Limitless-like determination, she spends Friday at work planning her outfit with Caroline on gchat. Caroline, content with her own relationship, clearly doesn’t care and feeds her “you’re so right” and “omg, love” in hopes that she could skate by without truly putting any thought into her responses. After settling on a romper and heels, she signs off and heads home to put her face on and have a glass of sauvignon blanc liquid confidence before meeting Todd at the sushi restaurant they went to on their second date.

Upon showing up at Umi, Todd is already sitting at the bar having a Sapporo when he peers over with a look of, “Is she wearing a fucking romper?” Confident in her sartorial choices, she approaches him and gives him a side hug followed by a “Hey baby, you look great.” Todd kisses her on the cheek which prompts her to think, “What the fuck? Why didn’t he kiss me on the lips? Does he hate me?”

They sit down and order a sake flight and edamame before engaging in casual conversation about work, weekend plans, and how Katie and Tyler may break up, at which point Todd checks out of the conversation while trying to figure out which pile of edamame is fresh and which has already been eaten. Thinking that the Katie/Tyler situation is somehow a good segue for the reason of this dinner, she says those shock-and-awe inducing words:

“Todd, what are we?”

Blindsided and feeling attacked, Todd nearly chokes on his sip of sake. His face turns beat red, but no one can tell whether or not it’s because he’s scared, or he’s just hammered. After all, “defining a relationship” is normally a one-sided venture that’s confronted with extreme reluctance, so one can’t be all that surprised by his emoji-ghost reaction.

“Uhhh, whaddya mean, babe? We’re great, we’re just having fun… right?” he mumbles hoping that his half-hearted response will nip the conversation in the bud before his yellowtail sashimi comes.

“No, Todd. What. Are. We?”

Sitting back in his chair and almost falling over (again, no one is entirely sure if he’s just nervous or completely obliterated), he’s shell-shocked. He can see it in her eyes what she wants — a relationship — but he hasn’t dated anyone in like, four years. Taking another sip of sake, before nervously running his hands through his remarkable flow, he responds, “Well what do you want to be?”

Sternly, she looks over the table pissed off that he even had to ask. “I want to be your girlfriend, Todd.”

Still not coming to the realization that he’s 100 percent going to leave this sushi place in a full-blown relationship, Todd has a couple more hard, panicked swallows. He’s sweating bullets while simultaneously having fever dreams of monogrammed towels, cooking classes, and above all, meeting her parents. But what’s he supposed to do, remain wishy-washy and have the dinner end in a scene?

“Well yeah, you can be my girlfriend,” he blurts out in a moment of weakness, soon followed by a look of, “Oh no, what have I done?”

But across the table is a smitten, smiling, giggly, 115 pound ball of elation who just landed her first boyfriend since Phi Psi Phil who dumped her the night before Spring Break ’09 in Destin. Not gauging Todd’s emotional state in the slightest, she has one thought running through her head: she’s someone’s girlfriend. .

Image via Shutterstock

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Will

Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.

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