Ep 53: Breakups
SARAH: Hey what’s up hello. Welcome to Sounds Fake But Okay, a podcast where an aro-ace girl (I’m Sarah. That’s me.)
KAYLA: And a demi straight girl (that’s me, Kayla.)
SARAH: Talk about all things to do with love, relationships, sexuality, and pretty much anything else that we just don’t understand.
KAYLA: On today’s episode: Breakups.
BOTH: — Sounds fake, but okay.
*Intro music*
SARAH: Welcome back to the pod.
KAYLA: (sighs) The tea, sis.
SARAH: The tea, sis.
KAYLA: That's the tea, sis.
SARAH: Yes, Kayla?
KAYLA: Guess who's single again? (laughs)
SARAH: Okay, here's the thing. I had this idea of doing an episode about breakups because I realized I just don't have a concept of them. I understand on an intellectual level what happens –
KAYLA: Yeah, but –
SARAH: But I don't really have any comparison in my own personal life, and so we were going to do this episode a couple of weeks from now, and then – (laughs)
KAYLA: And then a bitch decided to - It's me, I'm the bitch - to go make it relevant.
SARAH: So, that's a thing.
KAYLA: So, here we are.
SARAH: Here we are. For those of you who are still confused, (whispers) Kayla just broke up with someone.
KAYLA: I broke up with my boyfriend, five days ago?
SARAH: Yeah, it was Thursday, wasn't it?
KAYLA: It was Thursday.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: I thought today was Thursday, because that's how shit my week has been already.
SARAH: Today's Tuesday.
KAYLA: But it's only Tuesday, my dudes.
SARAH: For those of you listening, it could be literally any day.
KAYLA: Perhaps Sunday.
SARAH: Perhaps Sunday.
KAYLA: If you're an avid listener. If not –
SARAH: Could be –
KAYLA: Could be –
SARAH: Next year.
KAYLA: Years from now.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: How wild to think that perhaps someone years from now is listening to this, when we're famous. You know what's not related to this topic at all, but a story I want to tell?
SARAH: Okay.
KAYLA: Is the mystery mail.
SARAH: Can we tell the mystery mail at the end?
KAYLA: Fine.
SARAH: Okay. Stay tuned to the end for Kayla's story about the mystery mail.
KAYLA: Okay, if you follow me on Instagram, which I know a couple of you do, you been knew.
SARAH: It's there.
KAYLA: And you're missing a wild ride, but anyway.
SARAH: Yeah, okay. Anyway, breakups. So, I realized that – Because I don't think you have to have romantic attraction people to – Whoa.
BOTH: (laugh)
KAYLA: It is only 9:30pm, and this is how it be.
SARAH: Oh my God. Sorry in advance for this. You don't have to have a romantic attraction to people necessarily to understand a breakup, or to experience something similar, because there are plenty of people who do have friend breakups. Things blow up, and they properly break up, but I realized that that has never happened to me. I've only ever had just a sort of, okay we drifted, and I kind of realized that if you're in a romantic relationship someone – I keep skipping prepositions.
KAYLA: This is –
SARAH: I'm skipping prepositions.
KAYLA: Incredible.
SARAH: If you are in a romantic relationship with someone, you can't just drift –
KAYLA: You shouldn’t.
SARAH: Communication is necessary. Yeah, so I realized I don't have a comparison within my own life to what it's like to experience a romantic breakup.
KAYLA: It sucks, but first –
SARAH: Seems to be the case.
KAYLA: What do you think it's like?
SARAH: I mean, I think it sucks.
KAYLA: Mm-hmm. I mean, you've seen me through two breakups now.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: So, I mean –
SARAH: And I've experienced other people’s breakups, although not necessarily to the same extent.
KAYLA: Yeah, I mean you've lived with me for two of them, literally.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: So, you saw it. Not all of it, but –
SARAH: And I've also seen how they were different.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: Because they were very different.
KAYLA: Mm-hmm.
SARAH: I don't know. I think it's like a – It is this weird thing because as they say, every romantic relationship either ends in marriage, or you break up, or you –
KAYLA: Or someone dies.
SARAH: Yeah. And so that's daunting, and we don't think of friendship that way.
KAYLA: Uh uh.
SARAH: Friendship is the same way.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: You probably won't get married, but – (laughs)
KAYLA: I mean, friendship's the same way. It either lasts forever or it doesn't.
SARAH: Or it doesn't.
KAYLA: Maybe there's more of a chance of you just drifting apart, which I think is perhaps what happens with the majority of friendships, especially as you get older and you stop being a dramatic 13-year-old.
SARAH: Right.
KAYLA: But no one thinks about friendships that way.
SARAH: Right. I mean, you can think of them that way. I usually don't. I try not to.
KAYLA: Yeah. Also, we've talked about before, the ways in which friendships and relationships are different, because friendships, they don't require a hard label. You don't all of a sudden one day say, you are now my best friend.
SARAH: Right.
KAYLA: Whereas relationships, they're usually more clearly defined, and so the ending is also more clearly defined.
SARAH: The ending is clearly defined. Yeah, because I feel like, to me, a breakup is just a really formal way to end a relationship.
KAYLA: Of any kind.
SARAH: Of any kind. Yeah. It's just really formal which, I don't know, I feel like communication is necessary in any type of relationship, coming from someone who's not good at that.
KAYLA: We been knew.
SARAH: But, for some reason, just because there's this one, or maybe two extra layers of whatever it is in a romantic relationship, suddenly it becomes so weirdly formal and systemic.
KAYLA: I also think that in a friendship, there's no – Communication is good, and if you're truly friends with someone, you're going to talk to them a lot, but there's no requirement.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: It's not weird to go a week without talking to your friend.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: If you're in a relationship and you were to say, I haven't talked to my boyfriend or girlfriend in a week, people are going to say, you have a problem. So you also have these expectations of how much you should be communicating. And every relationship I've been in, it's daily texting throughout the day. So, a breakup is basically a formal agreement that –
SARAH: To stop doing that.
KAYLA: To stop doing that. To stop seeing them so much, and that's what, for me especially, not this most recent breakup but my last one, which this podcast has also seen me through.
SARAH: Yeah, if you want to run –
KAYLA: If you remember, it was almost exactly a year ago.
SARAH: I also remember because we had talked about online dating –
KAYLA: Right, so –
SARAH: And we had literally, the previous episode, talked about how you met your boyfriend.
KAYLA: The previous episode was online dating, the one before my last breakup, and I was talking about how I met my boyfriend on Tinder.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: My boyfriend at the time. And then the next episode after that, I went on and I was like, I take it back, online dating isn't good.
SARAH: Yeah. And then that's how you met –
KAYLA: My most recent one also.
SARAH: Your most recent boyfriend.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: Also on Tinder.
KAYLA: Yeah, I don't know that I'm doing. Especially my second to most recent relationship, it was a year and a half long. So, it was a year and a half of talking every day, all the time, and so then, to me the biggest impact breakups have on me is that, when you're used to talking to someone every day, then things will come up in life, and you'll go to text someone. You'll go to text this person and be like, oh wait, I can't do that.
SARAH: I just text that – Okay, I was going to say I just text that shit to you, but that's not true. I have multiple people –
KAYLA: You do, depending on the topic.
SARAH: Depending on the topic –
KAYLA: It goes to.
SARAH: It goes to. Yeah.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: So it’s like, I'm not bothering all of you all the time, I'm just bothering all of you some of the time.
KAYLA: That is how that works. I do get a lot of random texts from Sarah.
SARAH: Yeah, you get all the ones if it's like, I don't know who to send this to, I'll send this to you. (laughs)
KAYLA: Wow. Good to know I'm last on the list.
SARAH: No, it's like I have the things that I send specifically to you, and then anything else –
KAYLA: Anything else that's not for a specific person.
SARAH: No.
KAYLA: So I get things that are specific for me, and everything else that doesn't go to a specific person.
SARAH: Yes. For the most part, I would say. Yeah, see. You went from being offended to being honored.
KAYLA: Maybe you should work on your communication, and I wouldn't have gotten offended in the first place.
SARAH: Maybe you should not get offended so easily.
KAYLA: And that's the tea.
SARAH: (laughing) And that's the tea.
KAYLA: Our new podcast. That has to be a podcast that exists, right? “And that's the tea?”
SARAH: There's got to be.
KAYLA: If there's not –
SARAH: What are you doing, humanity?
KAYLA: We need to make a new podcast. But yeah, the thing that is hardest for me about breakups is that lack, or is that very formal cutoff, because it's not drifting away, it's one day you're talking to someone all the time, and the next – Maybe it's not as sudden as that, maybe you've been fighting for a while and so communication maybe has been lacking for a while, but it's still like, you have this person that is a very big part of your life. You see them often, you talk to them all the time, and then the next day, they're gone from your entire life. They're gone.
(10:00)
SARAH: And that's such a weird thing to me, because it's just so formal. It's just such a formal way of saying you are, or you are not welcome in my life. That's why I feel a lot of times people are like, oh, we're going to stay friends. Everyone's like, no you're not. Because from what I understand, it's very hard to stay friends with someone when you've broken up, just because you have this formal end to your relationship, but then you don't.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: And that, from what people have told me, is a difficult transition to make, because it's very hard to just change the nature of your relationship very quickly, in the opposite direction.
KAYLA: Yeah. What I think is probably the hardest part about that, is that you have formally ended the relationship, but your feelings don't formally end when you tell them to.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: So, if you're going to end your relationship, that doesn't mean your feelings are necessarily gone, and so then if you're going to continue talking to someone and having them in your life while you still have those feelings, I think, for me it would be harder –
SARAH: Makes it worse.
KAYLA: For my feelings to go away, if I continue spending time with someone, or keeping up with them.
SARAH: Mm-hmm.
KAYLA: It also sucks though, because if someone has been in your life for years or months, and they've been a huge part of your life and then you are cut off from them, you're kind of like –
SARAH: What do I do?
KAYLA: How are you doing?
SARAH: What's going on?
KAYLA: My biggest thing is wondering how people are. When I knew you, you had these hopes and these dreams, and this was your plan. Is that still your plan? What's up with you? How are you doing? I'm curious. As a human, I'm just curious how you're doing as another human.
SARAH: Yeah. I feel when you drift from friends, there's a certain grace period where it's still okay to just text them and be like, hey, what's up? How you doing? What's going on with your life? And obviously it's a lot easier with social media now, because you don't necessarily have to directly talk to them. But also, if you drifted away and there aren't necessarily any hard feelings, it's just different worlds, different lives, whatever.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: You can always still just text them, and maybe it will be a little weird.
KAYLA: But if there's no formal ending, then there's no reason to not. There's nothing keeping you from doing that, but with a breakup – And I know a lot of people that are still friends with their exes, and –
SARAH: It can be done.
KAYLA: That's great for them. That has never been my experience.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: Because, I don't know.
SARAH: Yeah. I also just wonder, because it's so formal, and if you are the kind of person who, I understand that remaining friends with an ex is not something that works for me, for my own personal sanity. I also feel that just makes breaking up harder because I know that right now I'm just drawing a line in the sand and it's probably not going to get crossed. I think it's just for me, the thing that I find difficult to understand is just – Not difficult to understand, but difficult to relate to, is the formality of it all.
There are plenty of friends who I was friends with, whether it was when I was a kid or who I was best friends with in high school, who I don't talk to anymore. If I tried to talk to them, I don't think it would get very far. It's just we're different people now, but I also – It's sad, but it's not that bad, because it didn't happen all at once. It happened over time. I think that's the big difference. I know how it feels when it happens over time. I don't know how it feels when it's just, yank the rug out from under.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: I don't think I ever want to know what it feels like.
KAYLA: No. It sucks pretty bad.
SARAH: Yeah. I'm fine not knowing. But some people, just by virtue of their personality, have a lot of friend breakups.
KAYLA: Oh yeah, if they're a dramatic person, they go through that all the time, which I can't imagine.
SARAH: I just can't imagine doing that to yourself.
KAYLA: I don't have a big enough arsenal of friends to begin with to afford to just toss them out. Then I would be friendless.
SARAH: Yeah, and also just, I don't know, if you're the kind of person who blows up at people all the time, to the point where your relationships are just ending constantly –
KAYLA: That sounds like a personal problem.
SARAH: Yeah. It seems like – I mean, I wouldn't want to be friends with that kind of person, and that's probably why I haven't had those experiences, because I don't befriend those kinds of people.
KAYLA: Yeah. I think I've only had one maybe, and it was in middle school. It was transitioning from middle school to high school, and like, woo.
SARAH: Right.
KAYLA: But that was also one that it was a friend breakup, and then four years later these were people that I still talked to casually, because I was involved with them in clubs, and we just acted as if it never happened, because it was four years ago and we were in middle school, so we were like, it doesn't even matter.
SARAH: You were 12.
KAYLA: We were all like, we're not going to acknowledge it. We have a separate, whole new relationship now, it was like whatever.
SARAH: Yeah. I've also had this situation happen where I drifted from a person just because that's what happened, but then something else happened with that person that made me not want to be friends with them anymore.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: I view it different because yes, we did drift just naturally. It wasn't a friend breakup –
KAYLA: But also, you're definitely not going to go back.
SARAH: But also I'm not going back to that. Yeah. That's kind of a weird situation, where it kind of happened for me. I don't know if these people realize that, but it doesn't matter because –
KAYLA: Because you don't talk to them.
SARAH: I don't talk to them. Yeah. What a weird thing. Human relationships, we make things so complex.
KAYLA: If you think about it though, with a romantic relationship, what else are you going to do? How else could you do it where it's not so formal?
SARAH: That is a thing.
KAYLA: What else is there to do?
SARAH: I think it all just comes back to the fact that we are such a group that is so reliant upon monogamy for life, and so if we were less reliant upon monogamy, if that was less of a cultural requirement, then I don't think it would be as big of a thing.
KAYLA: Mm-hmm.
SARAH: But, because we are, there has to be a certain level of formality with a romantic relationship, so that you are able to remain monogamous because you know what's going on.
KAYLA: Yeah. Also with monogamy, it's you and one other person, so obviously – Not to say that people that are in polyamorous relationships, those relationships aren't intense, but if you were in a polyamorous relationship and you had two partners, if one of those went away, you would still have the other one to pour your affection into, to spend time with, to talk to.
SARAH: Your world would be different and your relationships would be different, but it's not like it was a complete cut off from any romantic –
KAYLA: From any – Yeah, so it's not like you're leaving a void there because there is some outlet for a romantic relationship still. Obviously there's still a loss, but it's not a complete cutaway from that part of your life, whereas when you're monogamous, you break up, that part is just gone, no matter what the breakup was about, that part of your life is just swept away.
SARAH: Yeah. I wonder, I'm just trying to think of potential equivalents that I might understand.
KAYLA: Someone dying?
SARAH: I guess. Yeah. That sort of makes sense. If I were to end up in a QPR with someone, that could potentially happen, but for some reason I just think about it differently because with a QPR, because it's not romantic, I view it more like a friendship where yes, maybe there's a label on this, but it's also not – I don't know, it feels less formal to me.
KAYLA: Yeah. I also –
SARAH: Even though it isn't necessarily any less formal.
KAYLA: I also think because it's a QPR, it's inherently platonic, but it doesn't keep you from having other platonic relationships.
SARAH: Right.
KAYLA: When you're in a romantic relationship and it's monogamous, that keeps you from any other romantic relationship from anyone else, unless you're cheating, or doing whatever. Even though you have one platonic relationship that’s different from the others and maybe more solid and formal, you still have other outlets.
SARAH: Right. It's weird.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: It's all weird. Why do we make our relationships so formal? I get it, but I don't.
KAYLA: There's certain rules to it too, just inherently. Like, you should unfollow your ex significant other.
SARAH: You should delete pictures.
(20:00)
KAYLA: Or you should delete pictures, or you shouldn't reach back out to them. My ex that I broke up with a year ago, I thought a lot about just reaching back out to him and being like, hey, how are you? Or his friends, because I was really good friends with his friends. But it’s like, how long of a time are you supposed to wait? How unacceptable –
SARAH: There's some sort of social taboo.
KAYLA: Yeah, how unacceptable is it for me after a year to be, out of the blue, hey, how are you?
SARAH: It also depends on how nasty the breakup was.
KAYLA: Right.
SARAH: If I'm thinking about the exes of people I know, I am still Facebook friends and follow on Instagram and like their posts, and they like my posts, of the ones where the breakup went – I mean, no breakup is going to go great, but the ones where the breakups went better. And then the ones where the breakups didn't go so good, it's like I'm completely cut off from them now.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: Or maybe I'm not cut off from them, but everyone else is, and so they're just like, hey, what's this person doing now? And I just send them lots of screenshots. (laughs)
KAYLA: Yeah. It's also weird though because if you are dating someone maybe you were already friends with, or you become friends with someone’s friends and your friends become friends with them, then you're cutting – Also, at the breakup you're cutting off all of those relationships.
SARAH: It's like, who do you get in the divorce.
KAYLA: Right. Your friends could still be friends with whoever, but it's like, are they going to be, or are you completely severing a bunch of ties that you had created over the years or months because of the relationship, and now you're breaking up a bunch of people because of it?
SARAH: Well I think that's what makes it – Because people always talk about the danger of dating someone who is in your friend group, and I think that's what it is, because you're taking an informal thing and you're formalizing it, and so if things go poorly in an informal thing, it's informal. If things go poorly in a formal thing, that is a –
KAYLA: If you're dating someone in your friend group, you're forcing everyone else in the friend group to also become more formal.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: Instead of just having your casual friend group, now not only just you and your significant other, now everyone in the group has to be aware of what's going on, and everyone is more involved.
SARAH: And their relationship to you as an individual might not change, but their relationship to you and your new partner is going to change, the group dynamics change.
KAYLA: Right.
SARAH: And they're made, in a lot of ways, more formal just because of this one thing that got more formal.
KAYLA: Because of other rules and things. It's like, if your two friends are dating and they go on a date, they're your friends, so you can't go out with them anymore, because now you're intruding on their date?
SARAH: Right. Is this third wheeling, or is this friends?
KAYLA: Right, so you just add of these weird rules and social norms, that beforehand it was like you could just do whatever without thinking about potential consequences.
SARAH: Yeah. Dumb.
KAYLA: Yeah. It's just weird because no one talks about it, but when you sit down and think about relationships and breakups, there are inherent things that everyone knows, or everyone who's been through one knows that this is how you have to dance around it, but no one talks about it.
SARAH: Yeah. And that's not even dipping our toes into legal marriage and divorce.
KAYLA: That's a –
SARAH: And separation. If you want formality, that is systemic. There are hoops you have to jump through, and that's wild.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: That's also why to some extent, getting divorced is so much worse than just breaking up. Or like –
KAYLA: Well yeah, because there's so much else to disentangle.
SARAH: Yeah. It depends on the levels of formality. You have breaking up partners versus breaking up fiancés –
KAYLA: And then breaking up someone you live with.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: That's a whole –
SARAH: That's a whole shenanigans.
KAYLA: Because whose house is this?
SARAH: Yeah. Do you have a pet together? Whose pet is this?
KAYLA: Do you have a pet together? I've seen that before, of people that got a pet together and then it's a weird – Who needs to find –
SARAH: Joint custody.
KAYLA: A place to live. And then you have married people with kids, and then –
SARAH: And then it fucks the kids up.
KAYLA: Joint bank accounts, assets, and that you have to move all of that apart.
SARAH: (singing) We want prenups. We want prenups. Yeah.
KAYLA: Thank you for that.
SARAH: You know what is does remind me of? And this isn't necessarily something I can relate to either, but it does remind me of when families have falling outs, because this is a more formal institution. There are more formal lines between these relationships, and there are tiers and there's a system, and if you're going to leave that system, it's a thing.
KAYLA: Yeah. I guess the best way I could describe how it feels would be to imagine that we all of a sudden were just never going to talk again.
SARAH: Weird. But good, I hate you.
KAYLA: Okay. But after three and a half years of living together, after –
SARAH: Yeah, we've lived together for – Except for some of it.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: (laughs) Good description.
KAYLA: But, daily communication. We're living together, we see each other all the time, we have this podcast together.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: Think about –
SARAH: You broke our snapstreak, so that's not something I would have to consider losing.
KAYLA: Anyway.
SARAH: Several times she broke that snapstreak.
KAYLA: I'm not good at snapstreaks.
SARAH: I don't have snapstreak with her anymore.
KAYLA: I'm just bad at them and I know it.
SARAH: Yeah, she's the worst.
KAYLA: And I told you.
SARAH: I have six snapstreaks, and you're not one of them.
KAYLA: What are you? Born in 2000?
SARAH: No.
KAYLA: I met someone, I know people that are born in 2000 now.
SARAH: We go to school with people who were born in 2000. It's terrifying.
KAYLA: It's the worst. Anyway, it's like imagining if we had a three-year relationship, which we have, and then we were just like, alright, bye. Never going to talk to you again.
SARAH: Yeah. But it's still just hard to fathom if you haven't done it.
KAYLA: It sucks. It sucks.
SARAH: (singing) It sucks. It sucks. It sucks. It sucks. It sucks.
KAYLA: No one asked for this.
SARAH: Amazing. I'm just trying to think of other situations where you'd have a breakup. For some reason, the thing I keep thinking of is if you're writing a thesis (laughs) and you're working with a professor and then you're like, you know what? You suck.
KAYLA: One thing I can think of is maybe you're at a job and you really hate your job and then you quit.
SARAH: Just suddenly.
KAYLA: If you were –
SARAH: No two weeks’ notice.
KAYLA: Well, yeah. All of a sudden you can't take it anymore, and you just quit.
SARAH: Yeah, that makes sense, but also – Or you just get fired.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: Because I feel like that's just being dumped versus dumping.
KAYLA: Also, breakups is either you're being fired, or you're quitting, or you're mutually deciding to part.
SARAH: Or you're mutually deciding that the best thing for both the company and for you, is to resign.
KAYLA: Resign. Yeah. I mean, those are the three –
SARAH: Got to through an impeachment process. (laughs)
KAYLA: I will say though, I had never, until five days ago, it had always been either mutual or me being broken up with.
SARAH: Mm-hmm.
KAYLA: [I] Got to experience breaking up with someone.
SARAH: How was that for you?
KAYLA: I realized that – It was fine, but I realized, thinking back to the conversation that lead up to us breaking up, I was trying to convince him to break up with me.
SARAH: Interesting.
KAYLA: Because I didn't want to do it.
SARAH: Retweet. See, as I was thinking about this, I was like – I mean it's probably a good thing that I’m aro-ace.
KAYLA: Because you’re so unconfident, you would never be able to break up with someone.
SARAH: I would never be able to break up with somebody. Imagine trying to be in a romantic relationship with me.
KAYLA: You would be the worst.
SARAH: It would be horrible. It would be truly awful.
KAYLA: You would have all of those really passive aggressive fights, where you would be like, no, it's fine, I don't want to talk about it. You would obviously be angry. I'm sorry, you would be a shit person to be in a relationship with.
SARAH: Oh, I'd be horrible. They would be like, I want to be emotionally close to you. And I was like, I don't want to be emotionally or physically close to you.
KAYLA: You would be so bad in a relationship.
SARAH: You can sit on that side of the couch.
KAYLA: Even if you were okay with physical contact, you would still suck.
SARAH: Oh, I'd be the worst.
KAYLA: Yeah, I realized –
SARAH: Don't date me.
KAYLA: I realized, I consider myself a pretty confrontational person, and I speak my mind fairly often.
SARAH: That's true.
KAYLA: But I wouldn't – Because the biggest thing to me with this breakup was a loss of security, because so much is changing in my life right now. It's our senior year, I'm trying to get a job, I'm probably going to move. It was a loss of something regular and something stable, and so I was so afraid to lose that. I'm crying.
SARAH: You know what's stable?
KAYLA: A table.
(30:00)
SARAH: I was going to say a table, but the table that we have in front of us is really not stable at all.
KAYLA: First of all, it's two tables. They're like the pop-up TV dinner kinds because in this house –
SARAH: We're fancy.
KAYLA: We have zero dollars.
SARAH: No, I was going to say, this podcast.
KAYLA: Is it though?
SARAH: We do our best. I'm going to have a heyday editing all of my coughing out of this podcast.
KAYLA: Yeah, I'm glad I’m not editing this one.
SARAH: I can't stop coughing.
KAYLA: Love that for you.
SARAH: Yeah, it just seems like I'd be really bad at breaking up with people.
KAYLA: Yeah, you would suck.
SARAH: For some reason my instinct is telling me that if I were a person who did relationships, for some reason I feel like I would more often be the person who would want to be – Who would just be like, yeah, no, I'm done with this. But I would be worse at doing it.
KAYLA: Yeah, I can see that. I mean, I think that would be more in mild conditions. You've also been witness to some pretty bad relationships, so I feel if someone was treating you –
SARAH: I have.
KAYLA: You really have.
SARAH: I didn't really realize that til you said it just now.
KAYLA: So, I feel if it was a situation where you were not being treated well –
SARAH: I would fucking kill them.
KAYLA: That you, in that situation, would leave quite easily, but if it was a more mellow thing, I think you would just stay and be sad forever.
SARAH: You are not wrong.
KAYLA: Yep.
SARAH: Staying and being sad forever, the Sarah Costello story.
KAYLA: Sad, sad.
SARAH: Sad, sad.
KAYLA: A sad, sad one.
SARAH: Sad, sad. Oh man. Yeah no, I just can't stop thinking about the fact that I'd be a horrible girlfriend. I don't even like calling myself – That made me feel uncomfortable.
KAYLA: Yeah, I don't think you would – No. You are a good friend.
SARAH: Nice.
KAYLA: But that is only because it is informal and is okay for you to go off into your own thing
SARAH: Run away.
KAYLA: It is more understandable that you would not want to share your emotions.
SARAH: We don't.
KAYLA: It's not –
SARAH: In this house, we don't share our emotions.
KAYLA: We really don't.
SARAH: That's not true. In this house in general, that's not true.
KAYLA: In this house though, you know what we don't do? Me and Sarah live with our two other best friends. What we never do, is show affection for each other.
SARAH: No.
KAYLA: Which is interesting, because if you look at other people that are best friends, they constantly talk about how good of friends they are.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: We don't do that.
SARAH: I touched Evan’s hand today and it was weird.
KAYLA: Which is for me, often not great, since I usually think people hate me anyway, so then I'm like, well these people didn't say they liked me.
SARAH: See, I get uncomfortable when people tell me they like me too much. We have a friend who just constantly compliments people.
KAYLA: Yeah, Sarah gets very uncomfortable with people like that.
SARAH: I don't know what to do about it. I know that I should just say thank you, but I feel the need to reciprocate, but then it feels not genuine. It's not that it's not genuine, it's just that's not how I usually – You said this, I think last week, is the better friends I am with people, the less nice I am to them.
KAYLA: Yeah. I'm the same way.
SARAH: So as I'm getting to be better friends with her, I feel more and more uncomfortable with returning a compliment.
KAYLA: Yeah, but it was just a weird thing I realized the other day, is how unaffectionate the four of us are towards each other.
SARAH: I think it's just me and Evan, and Miranda's not super affectionate.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: And me and Evan are so anti-affectionate, it's just how it happens. (laughs)
KAYLA: Yeah. It's just funny to think about that none of us are willing to admit that we're good friends.
SARAH: Yeah no, Evan literally will not call us friends.
KAYLA: That's kind of a shtick.
SARAH: It is a shtick.
KAYLA: But also, it's kind of true that none of us are willing to put that out there.
SARAH: I don't like you.
KAYLA: I know.
SARAH: I'm looking her in the eyes as I say that.
KAYLA: She has the glow of the red light of our microphone on her. It's very spooky.
SARAH: Spoopy. Yeah. I think that's also cultural. The American culture is a weird one because there are cultures in the world where you do not display affection. But in the United States, people give out affection like it's candy.
KAYLA: Well –
SARAH: Traditionally –
KAYLA: I would say depending on gender.
SARAH: Depending on gender. I would say –
KAYLA: Female friendships, it's usually –
SARAH: Women are expected to.
KAYLA: Right.
SARAH: Yeah. Because if I look at my other friendships with women, I definitely am – I don't even like to use the word affectionate, because I don't think it's the right word. I'm just less mean to them. (laughs)
KAYLA: I feel like there's more overt feelings involved.
SARAH: Yeah. So even with my own relationships, those relationships are treated differently. This is a tangent.
KAYLA: Yeah, this isn't about breakups at all.
SARAH: No, but it is true that in the United States, women are expected to just kind of give out affection like candy, and be constantly telling people – I've heard people say that they are comfortable saying, I love you to people in English, but not in their native language because it –
KAYLA: It bears greater meaning.
SARAH: It means something, it means something different. In German, there are two different ways to say I love you, one of them is more platonic and one of them is more romantic. It's not inherent to the language or to the words, it's just those are the cultural connotations. And so it's a thing to go from “hab dich lieb” to “ich liebe dich”.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: That's a thing. You normally wouldn't say “ich liebe dich” to a family member. To a family member you would just say, “ich hab dich lieb”. It's the same words, but it means something different. The weird thing about American culture is that on one hand we throw out affection like it's candy, but then on the other hand it's kind of socially acceptable, especially for young people, to convey your affection to the people you care about by being mean to them.
KAYLA: I mean, I will admit that's my main way of showing affection to people.
SARAH: Yeah. That's a thing in our culture, and I don't know how different that is in other cultures.
KAYLA: Yeah, I know. It's almost like we will throw around affection until it's very real, and then we feel self-conscious and it won't be reciprocated, and so we feel too vulnerable to actually say it.
SARAH: Yeah, because we're Americans and as soon as things get real, we freak out.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: Yup.
SARAH: That's probably it.
KAYLA: And that's the tea, sis.
SARAH: But it's also, there are definitely rules about who you can and cannot be mean to.
KAYLA: Mm-hmm.
SARAH: Because it's like, if I just met someone, I'm not about to be mean.
KAYLA: Oh no, you have to be good enough friends with them.
SARAH: You have to be good enough friends with them, you have to be within the same generation as them. If there's someone who's my grandma's age –
KAYLA: You know you can't do that.
SARAH: I don't care how close I am with them, I'm not going to be mean to them.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: It's a thing, but I feel – I don't know, if I feel comfortable being mean to you then we're better – I don't know. I feel much more comfortable being mean to the people that I am closest with, than being nice to them.
KAYLA: Yep.
SARAH: America.
KAYLA: I need to tell the mystery mail story.
SARAH: Oh my God. Okay, fine. Tell us the mystery mail story, Kayla.
KAYLA: Listen, you know it's good.
SARAH: It is, I've just heard it so many times.
KAYLA: Listen.
SARAH: And it's unrelated.
KAYLA: It is, but this is a big part of my life, and I feel like they need to know.
SARAH: Oh my God.
KAYLA: On Thursday, I received a package that I did not order from Amazon, and it was not ordered from my account, which I share with my family, so it wasn't someone that ordered it to the wrong address. It was a notebook that was a planner for this year and next year. I was like, "I didn't order this", and we came to find out that it was also printed wrong. It's printed –
SARAH: It was printed backwards and upside down.
KAYLA: It's printed upside down and backwards.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: So I was like, the fuck is this? I checked my Amazon account, I asked a couple people, did you randomly send this to my house on accident? And I called Amazon and I was like, I got this, can you tell where it's from?
SARAH: Wasn't it also kind of open?
KAYLA: Oh yeah, the package was kind of ripped open when I got it.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: So I was like, that's –
SARAH: Weird.
KAYLA: Okay. So I called Amazon and I was like, can we tell where this is from? I was on the phone with this lady for a long time. We were typing in numbers. She couldn't even find the order, which was weird because I had tracked it with UPS. I looked up the UPS tracking number and I saw it, it just didn't tell me anything except where it came from, from Amazon.
SARAH: Yeah. It came from Amazon Fulfillment Services in Lexington, Kentucky, which is where everything from Amazon comes from. At least to us, everything comes through there.
KAYLA: Yeah. So, I was very confused and we had Snapchatted some of this ordeal, and I had mentioned that the woman – So, the joke came about somehow that it was the Canadian –
SARAH: I'm writing something.
KAYLA: The joke came about that it was a spy agency trying to recruit me.
SARAH: Yes.
KAYLA: And then Sarah is writing something that involves the Canadian CIA.
SARAH: The Canadian version of the CIA is called CSIS [pronounced see-sis].
KAYLA: So, on Snapchat, Sarah was joking, CSIS is trying to recruit you, you should try to decode that notebook. So yesterday, I received another package that I had not ordered. I don't even know if this one came from Amazon, I need to relook at the package, but I don't think it did.
(40:00)
SARAH: Really?
KAYLA: I will need to relook, but I don't remember Amazon being anywhere on it. And what was it, but a Canadian flag.
SARAH: It was a really shitty –
KAYLA: Very shitty, cheap, Canadian flag. So obviously someone that I'm friends with saw my Snap story and was –
SARAH: Also the woman who you were talking to at Amazon –
KAYLA: She sounded Canadian.
SARAH: She sounded Canadian.
KAYLA: Which is where part of the Canadian joke came from. She sounded Canadian. She's like, sorry, I don't know where your package came from. And I was like, whatever lady. I don't know where the notebook came from, but I'm assuming that this Canadian flag is a friend thinking they're funny and was like, I watched your Snap story. I'm going to send her a mystery Canadian flag.
SARAH: Yeah. Now we have a Canadian flag, and one of our roommates is Canadian.
KAYLA: So it works out. So basically, I'm just in limbo, waiting to see if I'll receive another package. It's a whole highlight on my Instagram.
SARAH: I was telling her that she should try and plant something, like say something when she was posting about it that was really specific that only a certain group of people would get, to try and narrow down who's doing it.
KAYLA: Who it is, yeah.
SARAH: But we couldn't really think of anything.
KAYLA: No.
SARAH: Yeah. Unfortunate.
KAYLA: But clearly this is someone who knows our address.
SARAH: Right.
KAYLA: So we live in a house that's like a Quidditch house for our team.
SARAH: So the whole Quidditch team has access to our address.
KAYLA: They all know where we live, so I feel it has to be someone on the team, because they know where we live and people on the team have played weird pranks at our house before.
SARAH: And your name was spelled correctly.
KAYLA: Right. So they know me.
SARAH: Right. Kayla's name is not the easiest to spell.
KAYLA: It is not. So anyway –
SARAH: That's a thing now.
KAYLA: If you have any input on who sent me the mystery mail.
SARAH: The mystery mail.
KAYLA: You should also look on my Instagram because it's a whole highlighted story now.
SARAH: It's a thing.
KAYLA: It's called Mystery Mail.
SARAH: And that's the tea, sis. That's where this came from, because I was saying it was CSIS and that's the tea, sis.
KAYLA: Anyway, not related at all, but it's a big –
SARAH: Unrelated. Kayla just loves to tell that story.
KAYLA: It's probably the biggest thing going on in my life right now, which, is that sad? Yes. Is it true? Also yes. I just thought I would share.
SARAH: Okay, what's our poll for the week?
KAYLA: Have you ever experienced a breakup or a friend breakup?
SARAH: Okay.
KAYLA: Okay.
SARAH: The answer is no for me. You're welcome.
KAYLA: Thank you. I had no idea.
SARAH: What's your beef of the week?
KAYLA: Oh ho ho.
SARAH: Kayla has beef of the week. I don't have any prepared.
KAYLA: I think we share mine, anyway.
SARAH: Okay.
KAYLA: My beef of the week is people who don't follow the rules. We are involved in a sport and –
SARAH: (laughs) We may have mentioned it before. Maybe, less than five minutes ago.
KAYLA: It's Quidditch. Sometimes, you will play teams that notoriously just don't follow the rules, blatantly.
SARAH: Blatant cheating.
KAYLA: Blatantly cheat, and when refs tell them you got to do this, they will just blatantly not listen to the referees.
SARAH: And then the refs don't try to continue to enforce it. They just kind of let them do it.
KAYLA: Because the refs for Quidditch notoriously are the worst.
SARAH: I feel like refs for every sport notoriously are the worst.
KAYLA: I guess, but Quidditch just seems –
SARAH: Quidditch, it's mostly students.
KAYLA: Well yeah, so it's dumbass students.
SARAH: I am certified to assistant ref, and I did assistant ref, and I have.
KAYLA: But it's Sarah, so take it –
SARAH: Yeah, right.
KAYLA: So take that for what it's worth. So we played one of these teams and got completely screwed over by them, because they just were cheating. There was so much blatant cheating.
SARAH: Our team doesn't cheat, and so we were at a disadvantage because we refused to cheat.
KAYLA: Yeah.
SARAH: Our team has a lot of weird shit that we do, but we do not let our players cheat.
KAYLA: Yeah. So, it's a whole – That's my beef of the week.
SARAH: Yeah, I don't really have any other – I feel like I thought of a beef of the week earlier today, and then I forgot it. I share Kayla's beef of the week.
KAYLA: Yup.
SARAH: Okay. We will go into no more detail, because we'll just get mad.
KAYLA: That's very true.
SARAH: (laughs) You can find that poll or tell us about your own beef of the week on our Twitter @soundsfakepod. You can also find us on Tumblr at soundsfakepod.tumblr.com, or email us soundsfakepod@gmail.com. We also have a (coughs) We also have a cough. I might leave that one in, that was good, good joke.
Kayla’s just scrolling on her phone and shaking her head.
KAYLA: Oh well, I am also shaking my head at a friend of mine who is making poor decisions in life.
SARAH: Good.
KAYLA: Yep, that’s all.
SARAH: You can also find us on Patreon, if you would like to give us your money, we’d appreciate it. You don’t have to give us very much, you can give us –
KAYLA: You can give us just a dollar.
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: But it does go a long way for us.
SARAH: It really does. We’re pretty broke.
So our $2 patrons are Sara Jones and Keith McBlaine, our $5 patrons are Jennifer Smart, Asritha Vinnakota, Austin Le, Drew Finney and Perry Fiero.
And our $10 patron is Emma Fink, you can find her on YouTube by looking up Emma T Fink. Thank you for listening, tune in next Sunday for more of us in your ears.
KAYLA: And until then, take good care of your cows.