BRANDY HERNANDEZ ON THE TALKING STAGE, SITUATIONSHIPS, AND THE SNEAKY LINK AMBUSH
When Brandy Hernandez reached out to her favorite YouTuber in 2020, she wasn’t expecting to get a response. It was the height of the pandemic, she was stuck at home, and she thought it’d be fun to send him a fun meme she saw that reminded her of one of his videos.
When he responded with a plain: “LOL” Brandy threw caution to the wind and sent a follow up message. And, oh my god, she got a response back! Over the next week, their text ping-pong started gaining traction until the fateful day when he finally popped the question…
to: brandy, from: famous youtuber <3
What’s your snap?
Another week passed and they eventually exchanged phone numbers. Before long, they’d plunged into an online courtship that rivaled Shakespeare’s most epic romances…
THE TALKING STAGE
If you’re a woman in your twenties, chances are you’ve experienced the dreaded “talking stage”, which Robertson defines as “a Gen-Z-coined phrase that’s a vague descriptor for an early pseudo-relationship full of texting but no commitment.” Even if you didn’t know what it was, I bet now you’re thinking ‘I’ve definitely been in one of those’.
Here’s the thing: we’re the generation that grew up watching Hillary Duff pull Chad Michael Murray entirely through flip-phone correspondence! The generation that would log onto Club Penguin for an hour, play a few mini-games, and log out having committed to our full-time Penguin Boyfriend, whom, we’d assure our parents, was really hot in a penguin-way and definitely not an online predator!
“We grew up in an era where in-person communication is the exception, not the norm,” said Brandy. “So it’s no surprise that our generation’s really good at flirting over text.”
In fact, Brandy thinks we’re a little too good, to the point where it’s become misleading. You might hit it off perfectly well with someone through text, only to find that in person you have nothing in common. You might find that there’s a glaring lack of chemistry, that their personality is entirely different, or that their witty banter doesn’t hold up when they don’t have assistance from the internet. (Surprise! you can’t pull up WikiHow when you’re on an actual in-person date.)
On these grounds, online flirtations rarely make it past the talking stage. But this was not the case for Brandy and the YouTuber… After a year of talking and never meeting in person, quarantine was over, and they finally decided to meet and hook up.
Enter the chat, a new term:
THE SNEAKY LINK.
Brandy defines a sneaky link as “someone you’re hooking up with in secret.”
She’s not sure why this YouTuber (or, in Brandy’s words, “‘content creator’, because it sounds cooler”) wanted to keep their meetings secret, but she didn’t particularly care… they got along well enough, he was respectful, and he’d made his expectations clear from the beginning: nothing serious, just sex.
Which was perfectly fine by Brandy.
“Except it wasn’t just sex,” said Brandy. “Sneaky links ambush you. They treat you like you’re their girlfriend for the night, and it becomes very hard not to get emotionally invested…”
THE SITUATIONSHIP.
Situationships are a trend that’s grown exponentially in recent years, particularly among Gen-Z. Robertson theorizes that one of the reasons they’ve become increasingly common is because of a growing unwillingness to communicate among the younger generation.
Situationships are also, Brandy assures, the nearest modern equivalent to psychological warfare.
<<<BACK TO HOMEPAGE
OR