Casual by Chappell Roan helped me ditch dead-end relationships

After years of one-sided commitment, revisiting her hit song Casual finally gave me a reality check

‘Sadie,” I say. “I would call our daughter Sadie. Or I like Leo for a boy.” I’ve been on the phone for two and a half hours, speaking about our hypothetical children to a man who has explicitly said that he does not want a relationship. At the same time, he’s said things like: “I told my mum about you. She wants to meet you.” When he makes those comments, I can’t help dreaming – in the words of a certain song – of us in a year: maybe we’ll have an apartment, and he’d show me off to his friends at the pier?

That’s the fantasy Chappell Roan imagines in her 2022 hit Casual. My own vision looks a little different: instead of a pier there is an apartment (where the now familiar sound of his key in the door still excites me), and his friends say things like: “I’ve never seen him act like this with anyone else before.” But crucially, in this fantasy, we’ve made a commitment to each other. The first time I heard Casual, I was in a committed relationship. I listened to it often, singing along loudly in the bedroom I shared with my boyfriend to “Knee deep in the passenger seat, and you’re eating me out”. (Roan was nervous about that line – “it’s crass,” she said – but fans loved it.) I also loved the song’s sense of unrequited yearning, but I couldn’t really relate to it. Not yet.

Two years later, single again and back on the apps, seeking connection in the hellscape of modern dating, I kept finding myself in confusingly ambiguous relationships. I dated people who would do things that suggested commitment: they’d offer me a toothbrush, which I’d leave at theirs, and I’d keep my clothes in their drawers. We’d cosplay being a couple – visiting garden centres on lazy Saturday mornings and giving each other our favourite books to read. They’d say how well I’d get on with their sister.

It was the fantasy that made it so intoxicating – imagining what it could be instead of what it actually was. For months, I rode a dopamine rollercoaster that soared whenever the fantasy was fuelled, but then fell rapidly when reality hit – when they would take three weeks to reply, accidentally send me a nude meant for someone else or upload a photo to their Instagram with their arm round another girl.

I don’t think their ambiguity was intentional or malicious: we’re all just craving connection, and it was easy for me to get carried away by the idea that this could be The One. But now, in my mid-30s, the fear of wasting my time on someone who will never commit started getting louder with each birthday. I had found myself knee-deep in another undefined romance, and this time it was long-distance. “Do you really want to wake up in two years and find you’re still in a long-distance situationship with someone who’s unwilling to commit?” my sister asked.

I didn’t think I did, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was OK with that. I’d found chemistry and connection, and isn’t that what we’re all ultimately looking for? Why did I need commitment to feel safe and secure?

That night, on my walk home, Casual started playing in my headphones. I heard the song for what felt like the first time. As Roan sang “I hate that I let this drag on so long, now I hate myself. Hate that I let this drag on so long, you can go to hell”, I heard the anger, the humiliation, the self-abandonment – and realised I’d buried those same emotions in me. I realised that, by falling in love with the possibility of someone, I’d forgotten to pay attention to the reality of who they were. I’d responded to their gestures and ignored their words. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost sight of what I actually wanted.

The next day, I asked my latest “situationship” the question: would this ever become something more? That relationship ended because of that conversation, and I haven’t been in one since. Now, when I’m dating someone and they say “We’re not together”, I listen to them – rather than getting swept up in some fantastical future involving Sadie, Leo and a house in the country.