Amanda writes a weekly column on sex, love and everything in between. Check the Life & Style section each week to see your questions about romance at NU answered.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard “I mean, it just sort of...fizzled,” my Starbucks fund would be filled for the year. And we all know chai tea lattes ain’t cheap.
“Fizzle” ... what a fucking weird word for a fucking typical scenario. It’s when that elusive “spark” igniting/sustaining the flame of a relationship (however casual or serious it may be) starts to fade away. It’s when you leave a bottle of seltzer out on the table, and then the bubbles are gone, rendering it flat and undrinkable. It’s when the washing machine has sucked away the bright colors from your favorite pair of rainbow boy shorts.
There are a few different types of “fizzles”: The Great Start Fizzle, The Almost Serious Fizzle, The Long Distance Relationship Fizzle, The Friendship Fizzle; the worst part of all of these aforementioned fizzles is that, no matter how you slice it, there never will be a specific breaking point or reason for why it fails. It just sort of ... fizzles. And yet another dollar, into the fizzle jar.
The Beginning
What I’ve seen from both from personal experience and careful conversation/observation is that the Great Start Fizzle is by far the most common fizzle around Northwestern. The story is always the same: you meet someone at a party or by way of mutual friend - they pique your interest in a big way, you have a few follow-up encounters with increasing amounts of flirtation, you go out for Andy’s on a Monday night or maybe pre-game together once the weekend comes. You may hook up, you may not (and what constitutes “hook up” is entirely up to your personal discretion).
Things are looking promising, and you wish you could slip this person one of those notes that says “Do you like me? Check yes or no.” You may verbalize this note’s sentiment at a certain point-of-no-return state of inebriation. You wait for things to take off like a rocket ship to Mars - but sadly, the rocket ship never even leaves the launch pad. And there’s no game-changing change to cause the failure; you aren’t even close to the point where fighting happens, and there’s only minimal, solely plan-based communication via cell phone.
Dropping subtle hints of your continuing interest seems like the best plan of attack, but subtlety usually does not do the trick in this scenario (or, really, ever). To get to the bottom of the Great Start fizzle, either ask point-blank what happened and break social standards of early-stage dating, or build a bridge and get over it. Which would be shitty, but we’ve all been our own architects and construction workers of self-reparation. Because there can only be a few reasons: 1) the interest is not as mutual as you thought, 2) there’s someone else, or 3) there’s an underlying mental issue that is beyond your diagnosing skills gained from that brief stint as a psychopathology student.
Serious
Once your relationship has progressed past the Great Start, it can stay Great for a while; many call this the “puppy love” stage. Awww, puppies. People around you either comment on how cute you two are, or they run their bitter selves away from the cuteness. You eat dining hall meals on an almost-daily basis with this person (the true mark of a relationship in college). You score the last scoop of hot cookie bar for them. You cannot get enough of each other, and you are fully aware that you’ve been shirking responsibilities and re-prioritizing your social life. But you DGAF because you are getting laid.
Still, every honeymoon has an ending; after a month or two, things can go one of many ways. Here are two: you may get real serious with the significant other - like love, marriage, baby carriage-serious - or it can go south and suffer the infamous Almost Serious Fizzle.
The Almost Serious Fizzle is less common, since the longer two people are together, the more that specific problems can arise. However, it is a definitive point for many, the point where they recognize that they are “going nowhere.” Or “going in two separate directions.” This is usually where someone throws around “it isn’t you, it’s me.” It’s both of you, let’s be honest; you both have trouble navigating the darker, post-puppy love world, and to put that much real-world pressure on yourselves to get Serious and deal with each other’s shit in your formidable college years seems unfair. You may think of this person as your first love. Or you might have just gotten to the point of possibly considering that they could have probably been your first love, maybe. Either way, it was Almost Serious, and that’s a feat in itself. Granted, we don’t go to one of the top schools to meet a future spouse, but we do have a campus full of stand-up gentlemen and ladies who are restricting themselves to singledom because of the notion that the all-encompassing hook up culture will swallow them and spit them out faster than the Cinnamon Challenge. Because who gets Serious at NU? You can count ‘em on one hand.
Interstate Love
The Long Distance Relationship Fizzle exists because long distance relationships exist; the concept of being away from your significant other (and being away from the pheromones that they secrete that form feelings of love/lust) for extended periods of time makes you slowly lose 1) your mind and 2) the flame keeping things alive. The person you’re in a relationship with does not go here, and that just sucks all around. Yes, there is video chat (and video chat naked timez, for which I salute you if you’ve had success with). Yes, there are a few breaks from school to torture yourself with happiness over (read: three).
If you can survive the first year, many say that you can survive the rest of college. Long distance people that cut things off from the span of Thanksgiving to Spring Quarter of freshman year are a dime a dozen, though - they feel less and less invested in the relationship, and they take action after careful evaluation (read: alcohol and crying). The person on the receiving end of the breakup knows that it is coming, as things are falling apart from their vantage point as well. This situation occurs when the only culprit of the relationship failure is the fact that it went on for that long whilst miles apart. Because fizzles often happen across time zones.
Just a Friend
The worst kind of fizzle is the kind that happens to you and someone close to you who you are not romantically-involved with (or at least, don’t have a physical relationship with). This is called the Friendship Fizzle. Maybe you’ve known them for a while, or maybe you started becoming Norbucks buddies every day after Spanish class. Think platonic friends with benefits, the benefit being that you stimulate each other mentally. You may have harbored some more-than-friendly feelings for this person, but then quickly learned that they were 1) taken, 2) not your sexual orientation or 3) just not for you in THAT way.
You value this person a great deal, and even go on platonic dates because sometimes, you’re talk-horny (a.k.a. craving conversation). Things can start to deteriorate for a ton of reasons, but often it’s because the friend is consumed with something else that is pulling him or her away from you: a change in intensity of their own romantic relationship, academic issues, family issues, etc. All relationships take some work if they’re longer than, say, a week. We all have a shit ton of work on any and every given day, and if being someone’s exclusive platonic person is overkill, it’s understandable why things may taper off into ex-friend territory. Why the sudden jump from great friend to ex-friend? It’s hard to go from great friend to sometimes-there friend. It’s exactly like real, romantic relationships: there rarely is a middle ground after a break up, because you’ve already gotten to know the person on an entirely different level than their sometimes-there friends and acquaintances. Because there’s no going backwards - you have to either be fully theirs or not there at all in order to properly carry on with both of your lives.
So, to all the people who have suffered from a fizzled-out relationship: You are not alone. You did not do anything wrong. Go out and buy a freshly-bubbling bottle of seltzer, a new and brightly-colored pair of boy shorts. Go find someone who really lights your fire and keeps it burning. And please excuse the millions of ridiculous metaphors used - there’s a reason for them! As author Milan Kundera once said, “a single metaphor can give birth to love.” Preach.