How the Cold is Exposing our Romances as Simply Summer Flings

With “cuffing season” reaching its end, these colder months have brought me to the conclusion that the cold is making us re-evaluate how much we really like the people we are dating.

In summer, our view of the person we are dating is heightened by the romance and glamour of a hot sunny day that seems infinite. If we think of the kind of dates you go on in summer (picnics in the park, cycling, going to the beach, paddle boating), they are filled with the kind of thrill and adventure that the coldness of autumn and winter dates can’t
provide.

Mini skirts that bear all, unbuttoned shirts that teases the eye of some of his chest hair, tans and freckles; they’re exotic and free, and you want to be free with them. You share hearty laughs, sloppy kisses and have sweaty sex – they taste like an elixir of warm beer and cigarettes, but you think it’s sexy.

We rave to our friends about the perfect person we have found; they’re cool, they’re funny, they make you feel those tingly feelings. They’re a flame to a candle you think will never burn out. The days are longer and somehow being with them seems to make you feel like the noise of the real world has exhausted its self in to silence.

But why is this? It is scientifically proven that the Vitamin D from the sun makes you happier, which begs us to question if it is the person we’re dating that makes us so happy, or just the sun infused heady feeling we think they give us.

And so, as the water freezes over, we are no longer intoxicated by the romance and glamour of summer and we come to realise this ‘someone special’ was actually just another flavour of the month or a summer romance that should have ended there, instead of being dragged into autumn.

Suddenly, you hate smokers, or maybe you learn he’s got a porn addiction, that thing you thought was cute has now manifested itself in to the dreaded irreversible ick. Either way, you find yourself pretending to laugh at their jokes that once filled your heart with that feeling of forever. Our romanticised version of them has melted away, and (inevitably) our flame has burnt out.

Come autumn and winter, our desire for excitement and thrill is replaced by someone who can fulfil our desire for warmth and comfort, just in time for cuffing season.