You’re out one night and you meet someone. They’re fairly good looking and they don’t wear Nike High Tops.
You’re instantly besotted.
Maybe you have a cheeky disco pash. Maybe you sleep together. Either way, the night ends with an exchanging of digits and a friendship on Facebook.
You text back and forth a little. Their banter is fantastic. Cue:
The weeks go on. The frequency of texts diminishes.
They don’t message you for three weeks. At first, you’re a little butthurt, but you eventually go “oh well” and move on.
And almost riiiiiight at that very moment, they FB message you a YouTube video of the Crack Kid and it starts up all over again.
cheers, cunt
New York Magazine writer Jason Chen calls this “textual limbo”, and it’s a key feature of the “new” dating phenomenon he calls ‘benching’.
It’s the modern day, technology-enabled version of leading someone on. Basically, the perpetrator isn’t really keen on your bodacious goodies, but they don’t wanna let you go. They’re keeping you on the sidelines in case the main player gets hit in the noggin with a big ol’ runaway baseball.
They might keep you on that cold, hard bench for selfish reasons, like wanting to feel in control without commitment. Or, they might have lost interest but are too polite to tell you straight up that you’ve been dropped from the team.
It’s saltier than the tried and trusted ‘ghosting‘ method, ’cause it taps into our species’ propensity for hope. Keeping the benchee in a state of perpetual emotional purgatory means they can never be totally sure that the other isn’t into them.
And if you find yourself in this very situation, Chen has some wise parting words:
“No successful relationship was ever born from a situation in which one person strung the other along until — in a moment of epiphany — he realized everything glorious and noble and luminescent was in front of him all along. When benching happens, the old maxim is true. He’s just not that into you.”
Source: NY Mag.
Photo: Benchwarmers / Pedestrian.tv.
