You are dating this enchanting person and everything has been amazeballs so far. You can’t help but flaunt them to anyone who comes your way. They have met your friends, your siblings, and just about everyone who matters to you. Everything is going flawlessly except for this one thing: a nagging feeling at the back of your head that you don’t know a single person from their life and have never ever been invited to hang out with their friends. Weird much?
If you are going through a similar predicament, you’re being “stashed”, my friend. Like literally being stashed from the people who belong in your partner’s life. You never appear in their social profiles, are never mentioned to their closed ones.
Coined by Metro, ‘Stashing’ is a common dating trend where people hide the person they are dating from everyone in their life. The main reason behind this atrocity is that they don’t feel that their partner is good enough for a long-term relationship. It is definitely not a new phenomenon, and honestly every one of us may have experienced this kind of a relationship at least once in our lives.
You are probably wondering why anyone would go to such length of secrecy, but it actually works in their favor. By not acknowledging your existence to the world, the stasher cooks up this weird theory in their head they are not really seeing you and are free to pursue anyone.
However, if you confront them about this, they are more likely to give you a guilt-trip about how you could land to this conclusion when you mean so much to them and the reason they don’t flaunt you is that they like to keep their personal matters private. And somehow you believe them and continue being stashed away.
But the nagging feeling continues to grow stronger and you can’t help but think things like maybe you are not good enough for them or maybe there is something wrong with you. Slowly, it starts to affect your dignity and how you perceive yourself. This takes you to a downward spiral and it becomes harder for you to be objective. You’d think you’re simply imagining this and should trust your partner instead, but you just can’t. If you ever face such a situation, the only way to be sure about this is to talk it out with your partner. You can encourage them to start including you in their life and if they do, that’s amazing! And you should probably be less paranoid.
However, if they continue to keep you a secret, there is only one thing to do: Get out. Get out of this toxic relationship as soon as you can, before it starts to affect your sanity and self-worth. Being with a lousy person who is hiding you isn’t worth it. There are just so many nice non-retard people out there who would love to flaunt you to the world than keep you as their dirty secret. Find someone who thinks you are magic, enough with these arses.
