To everyone in a romantic relationship,
Trust me, this letter is the last thing I want to be writing in a place like this with its fluorescent flickering lights, the radioactive colored jello, and this prickly rag of a blanket. But alas, here I am, wasting away in this reclining hospital bed, forcing myself to write this letter because it is one of urgency. Why is this so pressing you all may ask? Well, because it’s only you all who can cure me—by breaking up. It may seem drastic, but my doctor’s diagnosis is that I am terminally repulsed by your sickeningly sweet relationships.
Every day I wake up and scroll through my TikTok or Instagram feed and every day I am bombarded with new videos, trends, and creators rubbing their joy and love-dovey happiness in my face. My love. My everything. My person. Love is in the air and I am suffocating.
My feed is incessantly inundated with heart emojis and highlight reels of the best moments from your relationships—the Gen Z equivalent of holding a boombox and declaring one’s love from the rooftops. As friend after friend enters new relationships, I feel like I’m sinking deeper and deeper into the lonely depths of the ocean.
There are so many fish in the sea, you’ll eventually find one.
Trust me, I’ve sunk so deep the only fish around me are blobfish. But if I know I don’t want a relationship, why do I still feel like I’m drowning, flailing to grab onto my person, my metaphorical buoy, the Jack to my Rose? Who do I grab onto now that all my people have a new person? Who is my person?
Now my request for you all to break up may seem selfish. Call me bitter, call me childish, call me a lonely crone—although I’d be surprised if you did unless you’re from the 18th century, please at least try and keep your insults in this century. Anyways, call me anything you want, but know that I only ask this because I want my friends back.
God, I miss them. I miss skipping down JPA on the way back from a house party or facetiming to show each other new unboxing hauls from impulse purchases we forgot about. I miss their random texts that they’re about to “shit their pants” or that they've just “tripped on Newcomb bridge and face planted in front of a huge group of shockingly white frat guys.” But now, all of their embarrassing texts just go straight to their god forsaken significant others.
Maybe I am a bit lonely now that my phone is drier than Queen Elizabeth’s skin, but even so, why do you all who enter new romantic relationships surrender the loving platonic relationships in your lives? Are we not worth fighting for? The expectation in our society is that you must sacrifice old love for new love, but why is that? Why do we not demand the same level of effort from our platonic and romantic others?
So I hope you’ll understand that this demand is my last attempt to win my friends who have been stolen from me. Please, wake up and break up. Or at least give out your love more generously, it is not a finite resource, so why restrict it to the capitalist Wall Street rules of supply and demand. We all have boundless love to give, but we’ll only be able to give it more freely when we demote the status of romantic relationships in our society.
Okay fine, so maybe we’ll compromise and you don’t have to break up with your partner—although that would guarantee a speedy recovery for me. Then instead, at the very least, please reflect on your relationships and who you give your love to—what incredibly witty, devoted, and hilarious friend of yours who may currently be chained to an incessantly annoying BP monitor have you been neglecting?
Sincerely Yours from the Emergency Room,
Jasmine Wang
