How to Properly Microdose Your Partner with Your Crazy
Step 1: Start with Soft-Serve Skewed Sanity
At long last, it has happened. After years of rolling out the red carpet for people who wouldn’t even hold the door open for you at Cracker Barrel, you’ve finally found someone worthy of your time, affection, and neuroses. This is the real deal: a healthy relationship built on mutual love, respect, and the ability to split a plate of fries without anyone keeping score. You feel secure with them; they feel secure with you; and you both never have to question how the other one feels because every day you wake up and choose each other, and that choice is made evident in more ways, shapes, and forms than you thought possible. It’s easy. You both say yes from a place beyond heart and mind.
And then you remember: you are absolutely, cosmically, irreversibly insane.
Fret not—these two truths can exist side by side! Complexity is what makes us human. The key is proper dosing. You can’t just emotionally Tokyo-drift after being triggered by a throwaway moment in the B-story of a Veronica Mars episode. No—you have to microdose them with your psychological maladjustments. Think: escalating rituals of disclosure, tucked neatly into the folds of mundane couplehood.
Step 1: Start with Soft-Serve Skewed Sanity
First, start soft. Let them see you cry, but only at universally sanctioned cry-triggers: a poignant film, a dental hygienist belting a power ballad on a vocal competition show, the crushing impermanence of time itself. This shows you’re “emotionally open,” not “someone who called a hotline after trying to adjust one tiny website element and accidentally annihilated the entire layout.”
Mention therapy, but keep it cute! Casually drop that you’re “working on your inner child stuff,” while discreetly withholding the part where your therapist has gently suggested twice-weekly sessions—at least until you can emotionally regulate without renting a storage unit just to scream in.
Step 2: Frame Your Quirks as “Funny Stories”
Next, introduce your quirks as anecdotes. Stories are a safe way to test the waters. For example, try saying something like, “Isn’t it wild that I once researched how long I’d have to lie in the woods before moss started claiming me?” Then pivot—fast—so they never get the chance to ask if you actually tried it (you did). Mention that you don’t trust mirrors at night, but in a way that sounds like a charming superstition, not a hard boundary.
This stage is all about plausible deniability. You are quirky, not legally unfit to own a guinea pig!
Step 3: Conduct Low-Stakes Trials
Then, run some controlled experiments. When they catch you staring blankly at the ceiling and ask what’s wrong, just be chill and say, “Nothing, just hitting up the void.” Drop into Child’s Pose when you get overstimulated at the Apple Store for reasons you can’t fully explain—somehow surrounded by fourteen employees and no help—and when they ask you what the fuck you’re doing, tell them you’re just recalibrating your nervous system.
Titrate these episodes carefully, and counterbalance them with behaviors you’ve heard that well-adjusted people do—like hanging eucalyptus in your shower, or going outside on purpose.
Step 4: Reveal the Rituals
Let them witness you take your nightly meds—and be ready with a fun, flirty answer when they ask, “How do you take those all at once?”
Step 5: Administer the Full Dose
Once they’ve built up a decent tolerance, hit them with the full dose. Let them witness you doing full-blown grounding exercises at a Panera at eleven a.m.—voice shaking, eyes darting, naming objects like your life depends on it: “Booth. Croutons. Corporate art. Napkin dispenser. That soup cauldron which knows too much.”
Lie on the floor and listen to sad girl indie pop at a volume typically reserved for seismic testing. When they ask if you’re okay, you say yes—but in a tone that suggests you’ve been gently overtaken by the slow, silken creep of ennui. If they respond by silently joining you on the floor and humming along to Phoebe Bridgers, congratulations. You’ve found your person.
Hey!
Got an idea for a humor piece? Want to sharpen something you’ve already written? Or maybe you just want to brew up some fresh lols on the page? Join my humor workshop—it’s a space to test out material, get feedback, and have some fun while you’re at it.
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Credits
Art by: James Jeffers
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