Shit Straight Men Say: The yellow pillow
And the curse of trying to shed the 'just in case' mentality.
Surprise! Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.
The other day I saw a tweet that went viral about the ‘yellow pillow’. The guy said his girlfriend had discovered his yellow pillow and was (rightfully) mad.
I was almost instantly transported back to college days, because boy have I seen that yellow pillow before. I can’t say I’ve seen it in years, which is probably because I’m not fucking 23-year-old backpackers in Coogee.
There was a lot of support for the yellow pillow in the Twitter thread. The best sleep of people’s lives, they say. Some have parted with their own yellow pillow after 12 years and miss it immensely. Some say they haven’t slept properly in three years after saying goodbye to their yellow pillow.
It got me thinking… deep down, are straight men in their 30s yellow pillows? Is the yellow pillow a metaphor for them and how they behave romantically: existing doing the bare minimum, trusted because they’ve been around a long time, but barely able to put in the effort to look presentable?
I’m just kidding.
I have nothing to say about the yellow pillow other than the fact it’s fucked and if I saw it on a 30something-year-old’s bed I’d be calling the police.
I joked to a friend recently that I was due for my next romantic implosion. Historically, the September - November months for me are prime situationship territory but this time I’ve navigated it unscathed. It’s nearly made me slightly nostalgic, but I’m ready to take it as a sign that maybe, just maybe, my situationship years are done. I came (rarely), I saw, I conquered, and while I’m sure having a crush on anyone would be fun again, I have to say keeping my peace has been more fun.
In keeping my peace, I’ve also learned this year to keep my actual real love life more under wraps. I started to feel that people equated me to dating apps, to being the ‘single one’ who always had to provide some story, or give some sort of advice, or rant and rave about the latest fucked thing a man has done. Of course, I write a dating app newsletter, so it makes sense, but even in my everyday life, I’d start to give those pieces of myself away, mindlessly, as though my own value lay in what entertainment I could bring others through my dating adventures and woes.
I try to make a point of publicly not writing about romantic situations in my life while they’re happening or when they’re still relatively fresh in my mind. Sometimes months later I’ll touch on them, sometimes not. This year I’ve had IRL romantic situations that have distracted me a lot from dating apps, proving for me that people I meet in the wild end up being my strongest connections. They’re not connections that have, or will, work out, but they’ve taught me a lot: the importance of communication, the power of owning your own feelings regardless of the outcome, and what it feels like to actually set boundaries. It might be small steps for some, obvious steps for others, but for me they’re steps I’ve learned to take that I never could before.
It’s like how this guy said:
I was talking about the “you won’t feel real love until you end all inner conflict” but I gotta say, he’s also right about wooden cutlery.
On the ‘just in case’ mentality
Still, earlier I sat here grappling with the need to download Hinge again because I had taken Bumble off pause when I went to Canberra last weekend, and back in Sydney I was once again bored and wanted a new selection of people to peruse.
Just in case. Just in case I matched with someone this time, that I had missed all those other months and years, and just in case a conversation actually flowed for once, and just in case the first drinks wasn’t an awkward job interview of two people trying to force a connection.
Just in case.
So I tried Bumble speed dating, just in case:
Never mind.
And I tried Bumble in Canberra, just in case…
Fascinating stuff.
Then I tried matching with potentially fictional men, you know, just in case…
I saw some TikTok comments earlier that summed it up well.
“I don’t want to date as an activity. I don’t want to meet people by dating. I want to meet someone and THEN date them.”
You’d think it shouldn’t be this hard. But I think I’ll still try and stay off Hinge for now. Because over time, the ‘just in cases’ get smaller and fainter. And also because I now have no free weekends up until 2024, so when would I even have the time to date? Weeknights? Get real!
In saying that, please keep continuing to send your screenshots to Shit Straight Men Say over on Insta so I have things to laugh at and include in my next entry.