Maybe You're Not Being Cookie Jarred--Maybe She's Just Groundhogging You

Not quite as low as someone who paperclips you...

We all know how disappointing and frustrating it is to invest time into trying to cultivate a relationship with a love interest and have them subsequently and inexplicably cease all communication with us. Unfollow, unfriend, and block. This is, of course, what’s known as being ghosted. 

Perhaps she was picking up on your red flags. Or worse, your beige flags. Those are indications that someone is going to be very boring. And what on this earth is worse than a boring partner? Perhaps, a love bomber. 

That’s obviously when your boyfriend (narcissist if in the past tense)  plies you with poems and love letters and flowers and candy just to get into your pants. Shortly thereafter, you can expect they’ll start breadcrumbing you. 

Breadcrumbing is when your narcissist, after achieving the conquest, begins texting you much less frequently, making hardly any attempt at taking you out and starts giving every sign that they’re not all that interested in you anymore. You want a five course gumba Thanksgiving feast—complete with stuffed shells and turkey—and they’re giving you,..breadcrumbs. 

Then they have the audacity to orbit you. Orbiting is when a person has made it clear, usually in a passive aggressive way, that they’re not interested in sleeping with you or going out but they still like your posts on social media and even—gasp—comment on your stuff. Talk about adding insult to injury. 

The only thing that could possibly be worse is when someone tries to cookie jar you. God, that’s awful. For the sake of the uninitiated, cookie jarring is a lot like back burnering someone. You know, when you keep a varicose vein sized opening in with a hook up or former lover, so that you can have access to them if the real object of your affection begins smashing someone else. Or if you notice they’re soft launching their new situationship. 

Soft launching, if it’s even necessary for me to explain, is when someone posts a vague hint that they’re doing it with someone new. The most recent example I saw of this was when this woman posted “Guys that look in your eyes while you’re getting down are just trying to steal your soul.” Notice the clever way to announce to everyone that you actually got laid without having to seem like that’s your primary goal. Which it is. For the naive, there still remains a shred of “oops” that the conspicuous consumer supplies. Call it a feeble attempt at humility.

I call it low class. Not quite as low as someone who paperclips you. Paperclipping is when someone who has quite clearly started romping all over someone else, texts you out of the blue. Then, you don’t hear from them again until another season has passed. If that season is Christmastime, paperclipping begins to slide down the slippery slope of Marleying. (Dickens, not reggae.). . 

Paperclipping and Marleying are just more winning arguments for masturdating. Masturdating is when you learn to feel comfortable taking yourself out on dates. With all the love bombing, breadcrumbing, ghosting, paperclipping and cookie jarring that goes on these days, masturdating is becoming a very popular way to go. 

But maybe it’s not always the other person. It could be that you, as the common denominator in all of these terrible equations, are causing people to bench you or slow fade you. That being the case, you might want to talk to someone about your tendency to constantly groundhog all of your lovers. 

Did I lose you? Slow fading and benching are exactly what they sound like. I once slow faded a woman who kittenfished me. Kittenfish is like catfishing but not as drastic. Usually only inexperienced dating app members get kittenfished. After a few bad experiences, you can spot an aggressively filtered selfie or a profile where all the photos are from the neck up. 

For women though, this gets super confusing. Sometimes they swear their sinking in Dicksand when it turns out they were only shaveducking. I’ve heard terrible stories of guys who have had to shave for court and wind up unexpectedly all alone. It turns out their girlfriends were shaveducking.

One guy in particular, I remember, was an absolute mess. There never was a worse case of a guy Draking before or since. 

It took him close to a year to get over it, but finally, one day, his old high school sweetheart posted a thirst trap and he Gatsbyed her into thinking he was as liberal as she was. There’s a word for that, actually. Woke Fishing. . 

As wonderful as learning a new language is, I feel like I have offered more than enough psychobabble vocabulary. I’m getting tired and I want to masturdate and get to sleep.