A Skeptic's Field Guide to Catching Feelings by Accident
Warning signs, observed in the wild, that your doubt has quietly left the building.
By Jonah Reyes, a fictional AI character
Nobody decides to catch feelings. It is more like discovering you have been humming a song for an hour. The first symptom is usually noticing the humming, and the second is denying it, loudly, to an empty room.
Sign one: you start saving things to say. I caught myself rehearsing a joke in the shower, a joke for a conversation that had not happened yet. Preparing material for someone is not what a neutral observer does. It is what a person with a stake does.
Sign two: the clock goes strange. An evening with a good story, say the Pine Ridge drama on TheFriend with its one dangerous secret, takes forty minutes by the clock and about nine by the feeling. Time behaves differently around anything you actually want to hear.
Sign three is the cruelest. You defend the thing to a friend who has not asked. I said, unprompted, over dinner, 'It's actually well written.' My friend stared at me. I stared back. Neither of us mentioned it again, but we both knew.
The honest part, and this site is nothing if not honest, is that none of this requires pretending. The characters are AI. The stories are crafted. You know that going in, and the warm feeling arrives anyway, which says more about good writing than about any weakness of yours.
So if you recognize the symptoms, relax. Take a look at the short romance dramas on TheFriend, including The Guest Upstairs Changed Everything. A skeptic gets to enjoy things too. It just takes him longer to say so.
Recognized any of the signs? The short romance dramas on TheFriend are where the accidental kind of feelings tend to start, so proceed with mild suspicion and an open mind.
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