Page 11 of A Solid Guide to Surviving a Situationship

Mel sat down on the bench across from me.

“So if someone got past all that,” she continued, “it means you believed them.”

I looked down.

“They didn’t just flirt with you,” she said. “They convinced you.”

My throat tightened slightly.

The gym noise crept back in—plates clanking, someone jogging loudly on a treadmill, music thumping faintly overhead.

Mel knelt and rested her hands on my knees.

“You built a routine with him,” she said. “Your brain got used to him showing up. Messages. Calls. Seeing him. That’s not just feelings—that’s conditioning. Your nervous system got used to it as a reward.”

That word stuck.

Reward.

“When that disappears,” she continued, “your brain doesn’t go, ‘oh well, that was only three months.’”

She tapped my knees lightly.

“Your brain goes, ‘where did the reward go?’”

I leaned back slightly.

“So what,” I said. “I’m emotionally addicted?”

Mel smirked.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re human.”

I snorted and shook my head. “Did the gym start offering emotional seminars between squats?”

Mel rolled her eyes, grabbed her water bottle, and stood up.

“Podcasts,” she said.

“You gave me advice from a podcast?” I asked.

“Yup!”

“It’s like the modern way of saying you got your sources from Wikipedia!”

“Also therapy,” she added.

“You go to therapy?”

“Yes, James,” she said flatly, taking a drink from her water bottle. “Some of us believe in preventive maintenance.”

I pointed at her. “That sounded suspiciously like something a life coach would say.”

She shrugged. “You hang around enough emotionally unstable people, you start doing research.”

“What the f—” I said, my jaw dropping.

“You basically started this conversation with ‘it was only three months.’”