The Twitter Crush
A story about love on social media
I joined twitter in August of last year, for weeks I would write jokes and send them into the void, no followers to speak of. Soon I began submitting to tweet calls, would be call outs for funny tweets. People started retweeting me and before long I started gaining followers. One of those followers was named Emma.
In Twitter parlance there are abbreviations for all sorts of things. TL is short for timeline, GC for groupchat, DM for direct message and, perhaps most precarious, TC for twitter crush. The running joke about twitter crushes is that they’re hot, burn brightly for about a week and then fizzle out, everyone’s had one and many have more than one at a time, some people even have TC’s when they have spouses at home. Fidelity and exclusivity seem to be foreign concepts on Twitter in that, for all my time there, it never seemed to appear that flirting with someone besides your significant other raised even a hair on any respective eyebrows. It was rampant, and sometimes very heavy. I suppose that on a platform where another long running frustration for both sexes was frequent unsolicited dick pics in direct messages, flirting was, for all intents and purposes, entirely harmless.
I asked Emma to be my TC a couple days after she followed me. She was cute, she was hilarious, she was smart and she was established, and the thing that got me most about her was that we VIBED. The chemistry was off the charts, constant jokes, every reply sarcastic, building up and up until one of us would break with a long string of hahaha’s. The most intriguing thing about her though was the fact that neither of us felt the pressure to make it anything other than fun.
It seems like most new relationships require a bit of reassurance from both parties for at least few weeks that the reason one of you didn’t respond was because you were busy and not, as is the most common spiral of worry, that you absolutely hate them and you are now ghosting them. With Emma, that didn’t exist, we could go days without talking to each other and then boom, joking and messing with each other like we had never skipped a beat. She could disappear in the middle of a conversation for days and for some reason I knew she would be back in my DM’s with an “Ahoy Captain”. Eventually the heart emoji’s would be overflowing in our messages and we’d be shouting each other out on the timeline and calling each other ‘bb’ and ‘babe’. It was effortless and it was free.
During all this I saw a quote from the author Monica Drake that said “The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your ‘soulmate’ you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.” Me, being the nervous wreck that I normally am, I looked at this and thought, holy shit, maybe this is real.
A couple weeks later, Emma stopped responding.
Eventually, after a few repeated attempts on my part to initiate, she wrote back, “I’m sorry, I’m not ghosting you, I just met someone in my town and we’ve been going out.” I was stunned but I played through with, hopefully, the right combination of disappointment and longing, saying “Cool, I’m here for you if you need anything.”
A month went by and we didn’t talk.
One day, on the verge of deactivating twitter I looked at her timeline, liked a couple tweets and then thought “fuck it” and messaged her. “Hey bb” I wrote. She wrote back a couple minutes later and we talked for over an hour about the fact that I was thinking of leaving twitter and that if I were to stay, I’d need a reason to and how I wanted that reason to be her. She responded saying she was still seeing this guy in her town but she’d be happy to be my reason. After that I let it cool. I was ok with being friends, just as long as I’d still get to talk to her and for some reason, i had the feeling it wasn’t over.
Another week or two went by and we didn’t say much until she messaged me about a week before valentines day. She said the guy she had been seeing got wasted and started having a tantrum at her house about her apparent dislike of his mom. She said she ended it and was pissed because she had made reservations for a hotel on valentines and that if wanted his place i could take it.”If only I could” I lamented citing our distance of three states and two days on the road. That valentines day I sent her an electronic gift card to Chipotle and she sent me lingerie pics.
Things were strong again, heart emoji’s and jokes pouring out of our messages, bb’s and babe’s and love you’s being thrown around like they meant nothing. it was fun again, we were free again. We enjoyed each other’s messages and hilarity and it was as if nothing had changed. Unfortunately, I was falling in deep.
One night about a month later we got drunk together, as in, on our respective sides of the screen. and I asked “Does this mean i get more pictures?” She responded by saying “not tonight, i feel like a beached whale.” I spent the next several messages trying to reassure her that she was amazing and beautiful and sexy and i was incredibly into her and that the pictures never mattered to me, she did. She didn’t respond.
Several days passed as I worried I had said something wrong, I didn’t want to push anything, but she didn’t write, and I all but resigned myself to the idea that I had somehow fucked it up. Finally I wrote again “Hey bb”. My heart about jumped out of my chest when she wrote back saying she was so sorry, she had written a response all those days ago but Twitter had glitched and it never went through, she hadn’t noticed until I said hello. We spent the night making each other laugh and then that was that.
I was used to the several days passing between talking at this point, it was easy, fun and I knew she’d be right there if I needed her. I like to think she thought the same. One afternoon, I reached out and she responded, but this time it was different. It was more formal, it didn’t feel as familiar and because I like to worry, I did what came natural and started to worry. A couple messages later she said she had met another man on Tinder and she didn’t feel right about also talking to me. Again I was stunned but I said, “Ok, I’m always here for you, I hope you know that.” I wanted to believe that this would be like last time and she would be done with him in a month. I vacillated between that thought and marveling at the audacity of myself for thinking I was so much better than this other guy. She would be back though, I told myself.
Three months later, she was still with the other guy. I had tried reaching out a number of times just to say “I miss you” but each time the message fell on deaf ears. No response. She was still liking my posts on twitter though so that had to mean something right? Not long after, I woke up one morning, looked at twitter, ventured over to her page out of some last ditch hope, and it was gone.
Emma had made her choice, I don’t know why I tried to hang on so long but I can only hope that I didn’t make her choice easier for her by doing something stupid. That night I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept saying in my head, she made her choice, let her go, she made her choice, let her go. The quote I held onto, that idea that it was real, and that because it was so easy we were meant for each other, that had dug its way deep into my brain and made me think that for some reason it would work out. I’m hopeless though, I know this. I have to erase the vision I had in my head of me and her standing outside the house we owned welcoming family for Sunday dinner. It was so clear, but honestly who was I even kidding? I shouldn’t have expected this much from a simple Twitter crush.
There’s a danger in getting excited about things that are intangible, things that may never pan out. It’s taken me most of my adult life to understand that people are imperfect. Internet love is one of those things you can’t take seriously. I know that now. I have hope though, I’m happy with myself, and I know that one of these days things will eventually work out, they always do.
