Welcome back to Stories from Tina, folks. Grab your coffee, or maybe something stronger, because we need to unpack something today.
Usually, I’m on here spilling my own tea, telling you about my life, my drama, and the absolute circus that is navigating relationships in this day and age. But today? Today I want to tell you a story about a woman who isn’t me. Let’s call her “Vanessa.” And before you start side-eying me—no, Vanessa is not a code name for Tina. I promise. My mess is different; Vanessa’s mess is… well, it’s a whole other level of deep.
So, here’s the setup: Vanessa is married. On paper, she’s got it all locked down. The husband, the house, the stability. But if you looked inside Vanessa’s head, it’s like an empty warehouse where the lights have been shut off.
Vanessa has a secret hobby. She is running through a roster of men that looks like a “Who’s Who” of her past. I’m talking ex-boyfriends, high school flings, that guy she dated for three months in her twenties who wore too much cologne—all of them. She’s circling back to these guys, slipping out of her married life to meet up with them. And you’d think, “Oh, juicy! She must be looking for passion! She must be looking for that spark her marriage is missing!”
Wrong.
That’s the kicker. She isn’t looking for love. She isn’t even looking for a connection. She’s looking for… absolutely nothing.
Here’s the thing that blows my mind, and maybe some of you can relate to this darker side of things. Vanessa meets up with these guys—men she used to cry over, men she used to think were “The One”—and they do the deed. They have sex. And while he’s laying there afterwards, probably thinking he just rocked her world or rekindled some old flame, Vanessa is laying there staring at the ceiling, mentally making a grocery list.
She feels nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
It’s not just with the affair partners, either. She goes home to her husband—the man she vowed to love and cherish—and it’s the same thing. To Vanessa, sex has transformed from this emotional, intimate act into something purely mechanical. It’s like sneezing or scratching an itch. It’s just a biological function. You do it, you get off, you cum, you release the dopamine, and then you pull your pants up and go make a sandwich.
I know, it sounds cold, right? But here is where the “human” part kicks in, and where my heart actually breaks for her a little bit.
Vanessa wasn’t always an ice queen. She used to be the girl who loved too hard. You know the type—the one who remembers anniversaries of the first time you held hands, the one who cries during greeting card commercials. But life… life beat that out of her. She has been hurt so many times, betrayed by so many people, and let down in so many spectacular ways, that her heart just went into survival mode. It shut down.
It’s like she touched a hot stove too many times, and now her nerves are dead. She can put her hand right in the fire and not feel the burn.
So now, she’s in this cycle. She engages in these affairs not because she hates her husband, or because she loves these exes, but because she’s chasing a feeling that she knows she can’t have anymore. She’s going through the motions. To her, sex is just a thing people do. It’s a transaction. Insert tab A into slot B, achieve friction, release tension, repeat.
While everyone else is out here catching feelings, getting butterflies, and stressing over text messages, Vanessa is walking through life completely numb. She sees her friends crying over guys and she thinks, Why? It’s just a body. It’s just friction. She remembers that she used to feel those things, but now it’s like watching a movie in a language she doesn’t speak anymore.
It’s funny in a dark way, isn’t it? We spend half our lives trying to protect our hearts so we don’t get hurt, but nobody warns you that if you protect it too well, you might stop feeling anything at all.
Vanessa thinks she’s winning because she can’t be hurt anymore. No man can break her heart if she doesn’t let them anywhere near it. She uses their bodies for a quick release, zips up her dress, and walks away without a second glance. But I look at her and I don’t see a winner. I see someone who is sleepwalking.
It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Is it better to feel everything—the pain, the jealousy, the heartbreak—or is it better to be like Vanessa? To view intimacy as just another chore on the to-do list, right next to “buy milk” and “pay the electric bill”?
Personally? I’ll take the mess. I’ll take the heartbreak. Because feeling nothing… that scares the hell out of me. But for Vanessa, that numbness is the only armor she has left.
Stay messy, friends. And try to feel something today, even if it hurts.
— Tina