spring break

The worst part about getting better is realizing who had to suffer for it.

No one wants to admit this, but it’s true. Every relationship is a trial run. You fumble, you learn, you refine. By the time you figure out how to communicate, how to be softer, how to let someone care about you without recoiling, it’s too late for the person who needed you to be that way. They got the beta version.

And someone else—someone new, someone undeserving—gets the upgrade.

It should feel like growth. Instead, it feels like guilt. Because no one consents to being your practice run. No one signs up to be the person who teaches you how to love properly, only to be left behind while you take those skills to someone new. If relationships are self-improvement projects, then every ex is an unpaid consultant—a person whose suffering, patience, or quiet resignation made you a better partner for someone else.

And what do we owe them for that? An apology? A letter of recommendation? Financial compensation?

I was thinking about this—about the ethics of emotional evolution—on a night that should have been easy. The kind of night that, for a fleeting moment, makes you forget that modern dating is just an elaborate humiliation ritual designed to keep women in a state of perpetual over-analysis and men in a state of permanent adolescence.

We had been at a bar, playing pool. Between games, we’d step outside for a cigarette, stretching the moment like a dwindling luxury. The air was thick with damp pavement and exhaust fumes, the neon bar signs reflecting off the rain-slick sidewalk. The flirtation felt effortless. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about him, but there didn’t need to be.

And then, as we were leaving, he reached for the car door.

My stomach dropped before I could process why. A déjà vu so sharp it cut through the warmth of the evening.

Suddenly, I was on a date with two men—him, and a ghost.

Another night, another car, another version of myself watching a man do the exact same thing. But last time, I had shrugged it off. Oh, you don’t need to do that. A throwaway line, the kind you say without thinking twice. A correction I never should’ve made.

And I realized, with a sick feeling, that I had done to someone else exactly what had been done to me.

I had trained a man out of care.

Maybe I had made him feel stupid. Maybe I had planted the first seed of indifference in someone who, years from now, would refuse to open the car door for someone else—not out of thoughtlessness, but because the last girl made him feel like an idiot for trying.

And suddenly, I wasn’t in the car. I was inside an existential audit of my past behavior. Had I made my ex feel small for trying? Had I taught someone that softness wasn’t worth the risk? Was I personally responsible for the mass radicalization of men into gym bros who only communicate through Andrew Huberman soundbites?

Meanwhile, the guy I was actually with had no idea I was spiraling. He was probably thinking about what song to put on, maybe wondering if I’d kiss him again before getting out of the car. And I was sitting there, completely consumed by the guilt of getting better.

Because the worst part isn’t just realizing that you did this to someone—it’s realizing that someone probably did this to you, too.

Somewhere out there, my ex is probably being everything I once begged him to be. Maybe he’s pulling his girlfriend closer instead of checking his phone. Maybe he’s listening instead of waiting for his turn to talk. Maybe someone else is benefitting from all the patience, all the emotional labor, all the softness I trained into him.

And there’s nothing I can do about it.

Because modern dating is a series of test runs. A capitalist hellscape where love is just another optimization project. You get into one relationship, you fail, you iterate, you move on. Fail fast. Move on.

But what happens to the people left in the wreckage? The ones who only ever got the flawed version of you? The ones who loved you before you figured out how to love them back?

Maybe nothing. Maybe they just move on, carrying a version of you that no longer exists. Just like I do.

Because I’ll get better. I already have.

And someday, I’ll meet someone who gets the version of me I was never capable of being before. Someone who gets the softness, the patience, the ability to let them open the fucking car door without turning it into a micro-tragedy.

And I won’t be able to stop myself from wondering: who did they have to hurt to get here?