That Fickle Little Bitch Romance

In preparation for this post I have been researching pseudo-dating.  It’s a concept I feel familiar with, but I’m not sure I’m even using the right word.  Should I be using secret dating?  NO, as this apparently isn’t even in the Urban Dictionary.  Secret sex is defined, but it’s so tawdry.  Anyway, in an effort to come up with a working premise for this post, please consider an as of yet uncoined term that blurs the lines between pseudo-dating, secret sex, and keeping things on the down low…

Recently Lucky 10-Key became involved with a coworker.  They spent time together outside of the office, but upon his insistence and her mutual agreement, they declined to share their relationship with their officemates.  For a while she’s been feeling the flames fizzling, so she gave him the brush-off.  No harm, no foul—right?  It was his idea to keep things casual.  So she uninvited him from a concert they had planned to attend together.  He had not offered to buy the tickets, so she did.  He did not offer to pay her for his ticket, so technically he has no right to it.  After reading her cordial e-mail (it was much more tactful than a Post-It) he responded in the strangest way ever.  I did not make this shit up…(punctuation errors, fragmented sentences and all):

“Dear Lucky 10-Key,

Well I have to admit that I am a little surprised, and even a little disappointed at this sudden change of heart.  I’m also a little upset that you couldn’t call me, you had to e-mail me to tell me this.  I thought we were tighter than that.  Little inconsiderate too, especially since you now have arbitrarily decided to cut me off from the concert, which is literally the day after tomorrow.  I actually had to move some things on my schedule so that I could go with you on Saturday, but I guess that doesn’t matter to you, does it?  Don’t I at least deserve a phone call or some kind of feasible explanation, instead of a cold, callous e-mail like this?  I can only speculate on why you have decided to do this–my intuition tells me that someone at work told you something about me that you blindly believed without question, and accepted without first asking me and confirming the facts.  Also, just to clarify, I never thought we were officially “seeing” each other.  I’m pretty sure I mentioned to you that I recently got out of a serious relationship, so I am definitely not ready for anything else besides a casual friendship.  I apologize if I led you on, but I am pretty sure I said this at the onset of our encounters.
–Chuck”

Lucky 10-Key called me late last night and we stayed up laughing for a good twenty minutes.  When I spoke to her throughout the day we couldn’t stop howling.  I told her to take a copy of his e-mail to the concert as a reminder of what a good use of $30 looks like.

The language throughout the e-mail is a laugh riot!  The word onset should be reserved for discussing bouts of VD or other diagnoses like male patterned baldness and diabetes.  For a guy who only wanted to date causally, he sure sounds upset.  Chuck—as she’s aptly dubbed him (it can refer to “Up-chuck” or “I want to chuck this piece of trash”)—needs to stop being so crazy and get over himself, or else I’m going to march up to their office and give him a bruising.  No one treats my Gal Pals like that and gets away with it!