I’ve been thinking a lot about “the talk” lately. For anyone not fluent in fourteen year old girl, by “the talk” I mean “the conversation you have to turn casual dating into a relationship, like, you know, where you change your Facebook to In A Relationship and everything.”

I, like every member of the human race I’ve ever encountered, am extremely bad at “the talk.” The last time I participated in one — when I dated David, the first time around, my senior year of high school — it went something like this:

Me: “So…”
Him: “You’re quiet today.”
Me: “Yeah…”
Him: “What’s on your mind?”
Me: “Well…”
Him: “…yes?”
Me: “Um…”
Me: “Do we want to… um…”
Him: “Yes?”
Me: “…define us as… something?”
Him: “You mean, a relationship?”
Me: “…yes?”
Him: “Okay.”

The conversation took place in a Starbucks, an hour before my admissions interview with an alumni representative of the University of Pennsylvania. Anyone overhearing it must have assumed that I’m either autistic or the most inarticulate person in the universe, two qualities which obviously point the way to Ivy League acceptance. Although, when it comes to emotions, I kind of am.

The problem I have with “the talk” is twofold. First, there’s my standard inability to talk about emotions without wanting to throw up, kill myself, or, in a very efficient combination of the two, choke to death on my own vomit. This extends beyond just romantic relationships and into almost every aspect of my life. A few examples:

In high school, a friend became absolutely irate with me over my refusal to use the word “love” to describe my feelings for her. Obviously, she was aware of the fact that I wasn’t physically or sexually interested in her, and understood the nature of our friendship (which I considered quite close) — but she couldn’t get over my refusal to say “I love you.” We haven’t spoken in three years, with the exception of an e-mail I got from her this term asking me for a copy of a paper I wrote in high school about Taiwan.

This issue cropped up again in college, where a number of close friends were unsettled by my inability to use the word “love.” Fortunately, I’ve begun to Get The Fuck Over Myself, and am now more willing to meet the rhetorical needs of my friends and tell them what they want to hear. The point is: it’s not that I don’t love people, or that I wasn’t close enough with my friends to describe my emotional attachment to them as “love,” but rather that I have a strong, instinctual repugnance to using the vocabulary of emotions. I cannot talk about my feelings. It makes me sick.

Most recently, my inability to talk about feelings — positive or negative — has turned into a tendency to resort to passive-aggression as my primary means of expressing what’s going through my head. Am I attracted to you, but worried that you don’t feel the same way? The obvious solution is to ignore your text messages. Have we gotten in a trivial fight that could be resolved by a ten minute conversation? Clearly I should pretend you don’t exist for two weeks. The list goes on, but my original point stands.

Second, and possibly relatedly, my issues with “the talk” are, I think, connected to some misguided fear of rejection that I can’t seem to shake. There are a handful of identifiable reasons for this, including but not limited to:

  • The fact that I spent two years at Swarthmore being rejected by various men, or, at best, dating someone even more emotionally incompetent than me. Along with giving me an education in politics and film, Swarthmore has also exposed me to a whole slew of new and exciting personality disorders that render otherwise available and attractive men uninterested or unable to do more than glance awkwardly in my direction in the cafeteria.
  • The fact that I have no faith in my ability to read people or situations, despite the fact that I’m pretty well attuned to emotional nuance in others. Even my gaydar, which is insanely accurate, is rendered useless by my lack of faith in it. You literally have to be wearing a t-shirt with rainbows, unicorns, and Miley Cyrus on it before I’ll identify you as a ‘mo, and even then, it’s iffy. This, also, may be the product of attending Swarthmore.
  • The fact that most of the men I’m attracted to are, in some way, “complicated” by issues that range from being straight (or “straight,” as the case may be) to being in relationships (a frighteningly common problem for me; I have some magnetic draw to the Occupied).
  • The fact that I assume the worst in any situation until I am provided with incontrovertible evidence of the contrary. If someone is five minutes late for a date, I assume I’m being stood up. If I get a headache, it might be a brain tumor. I need someone to follow me around and be like, “IT’S NOT A TUMAH! HE’S NOT STANDING YOU UP! NO ONE WILL NOTICE THAT TINY STAIN ON YOUR JEANS!” so I can function like a normal human being.

Accordingly, “the talk” is the single most terrifying thing I can possibly encounter over the course of a relationship. In an instant, in the fucked-up world of my head, it’s possible to destroy a perfectly functional pre-relationship condition of dating by asking one simple question. “Do you want to be exclusive?” can either be the gateway to happy monogamy, or to a month of listening to “Single Ladies” on repeat.

The reality, of course, is that the odds support the hypothesis that if I’m thinking about “the talk,” he probably is, too. But, in the grand spirit of leading a frustrating, unfulfilled life, I would rather listen to Lykke Li’s “Little Bit” a half-dozen times and leave the question of a relationship open than face down the uncertainty of “the talk.” I guess everyone has their cross to bear.