Casual by Chappell Roan helped me ditch dead-end relationships

‘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…