Ick, Interrupted
An unromantic comedy about cringe, gut instinct, and the exorcism of desire – why getting the ick might be the most spiritually accurate thing you’ll ever do in love
It always starts with a flicker. Not a red flag, those are too dramatic, too noble, too retro. No, the ick is a paper cut on your libido. Tiny, accidental, and somehow excruciating. One minute you are hypnotised by the curve of his jaw and the whisper of his voice in a dimly lit bar. The next, he’s saying “nom nom” while eating tacos and it’s like a priest just walked in mid-orgasm. Your body recoils before your brain has words for it. Suddenly, this man, who, an hour ago, had the tragic poet energy of someone you could have cried on, now looks like he high-fives after sex and collects Funko Pops. Something snaps. Not in him. In you. And there’s no going back.
It’s an equal-opportunity horror. The ick doesn’t discriminate, it strikes regardless of gender, orientation, or how good the foreplay was.
Again, one minute, you’re leaning into the warmth of attraction, high on the potential of a woman who seems to get it, your taste in music, your jokes, your face. The next, they call their pet “mommy’s little man” in public, or wear toe rings, or describe a salad as “yummy” with unearned enthusiasm. And that’s it! Desire packs up its things and flees the scene like it’s late for a flight. Suddenly, the person you were fantasising about three hours ago now reminds you of a tax auditor with a podcast. You recoil, not just from them, but from the version of yourself that once found them hot.
This is not pickiness pretending to be instinct. This is divine filtration. Is the ick a glitch in your romantic code?! Oh no, it’s the encrypted firewall protecting you from a lifetime of folded laundry and unvoiced rage. Think of it as a kind of spiritual spam folder. Everything that could one day become unbearable, the guy earnestly says “let’s circle back” during sex, the woman who believes therapy is “just a vibe”, gets flagged early and eliminated with one full-body shudder. It’s not shallow. It’s sacred. A holy “nope”. Like God gagging through your nervous system. You want transcendence? Try watching someone say “cruh-sont” (croissant) with confidence.
Let’s be clear, the ick is not only about cringe. Cringe is temporary; the ick is terminal. Cringe can be forgiven, laughed at, shared with friends over cocktails (“He wore a leather vest… to a poetry reading”). But the ick? The ick has no redemption arc. It’s the moment desire dies mid-sentence, unrevivable. You don’t come back from seeing a man run after a ping pong ball with too much commitment. Or hearing someone say “me likey” while chewing string cheese. There is no recovery protocol. Your libido files a restraining order.
I once met a man who was very interested in me, and who used his inhaler mid-argument. Not apologetically, no! With flair. He would exhale rage, punctuate it with a sharp wheeze, then take a puff like he was reloading a rhetorical gun. “I just think it’s really unfair that you – ka-pshhh – always assume the worst”. And not because he had asthma. God bless the asthmatics! But because he weaponised it. He made breathing theatrical. And not in a sexy, James Earl Jones kind of way. In a “my mother still calls me her little warrior” kind of way. That was the day my vagina locked its doors and threw the keys into a moat.
The ick doesn’t care if you are lonely. It doesn’t care that you have journaled about “leaning into intimacy” or that your therapist thinks you’re finally “available”. It doesn’t care how long it took you to open up, how expensive the dress was, or how promising the sex could have been. The ick will interrupt an orgasm with the emotional equivalent of a car alarm. You’ll be mid-thrust and suddenly haunted by how he pronounced “croissant” earlier (“cruh-sont,” with confidence). And that’s it! May as well hand him his pants and your last remaining illusion.
A friend once told me she got the ick because a man tried to bite her lip during their first kiss, but missed, and bit her chin instead. Hard. She said it wasn’t the pain that did it. It was the whimper. His. The fact that he apologised by whispering, “I just got so excited” into her neck like a 13-year-old at band camp. She said it was like a helium balloon had deflated inside her uterus. She ghosted him the next day (which I disapprove, but I cannot control how others take their exit from the dating stage), sent a donation to Planned Parenthood, and went on a three-day cleanse. The ick had entered. The temple had to be purified.
Men will accuse you of being irrational. “You’re throwing this away over that?” Yes, Dylan. That was the canary in the emotional coal mine. That is what your entire personality is built on, an ecosystem of red flags dressed as hobbies and LinkedIn endorsements. That is your Spotify playlist titled “Good Vibes Only”, which is just Joe Rogan episodes interspersed with lo-fi beats. It’s the way you say “guitar” like it’s a spiritual identity, not an object you use to butcher Radiohead at parties. It’s how you think being “into finance” is a personality trait, not even real finance, but crypto bro-speak and passive-aggressive tweets about “grind-set”. It’s the TED Talk cadence you slip into when explaining the menstrual cycle as if you personally invented ovulation during a wellness retreat in Bali. It’s when you call your mother “ma’am” and still somehow think you are emotionally available. The ick isn’t me being dramatic. It’s my nervous system whispering “Run!” Not in lowercase, but in full caps, italicised, and with Forrest Gump-level urgency. And when Forrest said “Run, Forrest, run!” he wasn’t escaping schoolyard bullies, but he was prophetically warning me about a man who calls his bed “the productivity station”. The ick is not overreaction. It’s an evolutionary fire drill. A divine expulsion. Early detection for the soul.
Of course, we don’t always listen. Sometimes we rationalise, bargain, perform emotional CPR on what is clearly a corpse of compatibility. We say things like “But he’s so kind”, or “She’s just really confident”, or “Maybe I’m self-sabotaging”. No, love. That’s not sabotage. That’s your soul refusing to mate with a human podcast. A walking algorithm of recycled opinions and suspiciously strong feelings about intermittent fasting. And let’s be honest, kindness, while noble, is not a pass for everything. Plenty of cult leaders were kind in the early stages. Kindness is the bare minimum. It is not a character arc. And confidence? Confidence without self-awareness is just narcissism in drag. But the mind is clever. It builds elaborate justifications for why you are being “too picky”, especially if you are tired, horny, or surrounded by friends who keep telling you to “give it a chance”.
The ick, however, is not some petty mood swing. It’s your immune system for intimacy, an allergic reaction to bullshit. Ignore it long enough and you’ll wake up five years deep into a situationship with someone who thinks “vulnerability” means crying at Marvel movies and genuinely believes oat milk is a psy-op orchestrated by Big Cereal. You’ll find yourself nodding along while they explain “alpha energy” using wolves and LinkedIn. And you’ll wonder how you got here, and why your soul feels like it’s been living in a beige waiting room with no magazines.
We live in a culture that punishes discernment. Especially if you are a woman. Female intuition gets rebranded as being “judgmental”, “cold”, “afraid of intimacy” as if the only acceptable form of female love is unconditional, pre-verbal, and preferably forgiving of mediocrity. If a man calls off a romance because she’s “not adventurous”, he’s setting standards. If a woman leaves because a guy still uses a Bluetooth headset in public like he’s on call for the CIA or refers to his car as “she”, then she’s accused of being shallow, ageist, uptight, or cruel. But discernment isn’t cruelty. It’s a refusal to cosign your own slow decline. The ick is not frivolous. It is the nervous system doing surveillance for patterns you’d otherwise spend a decade rationalising in couple therapy. It is political. It is gendered. It’s the silent protest of women who have watched their mothers, aunts, sisters, and friends metabolise endless small compromises in the name of companionship, until their personalities were footnotes in someone else’s plot. The ick is not a meme, it’s a last line of defence against becoming someone you wouldn’t recognise in the mirror, holding a casserole dish at a dinner party hosted by a man who uses the phrase “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” as a pick-up line.
And yet the ick does not discriminate. I have a male friend, hyper-intelligent, emotionally literate, hot in a distracted-professor way, who once confessed to me, over Negronis, that he got the ick because a woman he was seeing used baby talk… to refer to herself. As in, “Jenny’s hungryyy”, followed by a little pout and a tongue click. He said it was like watching a TED Talk glitch into a Teletubby. But what really tipped it wasn’t only the baby voice but that she did it while handing him a copy of The Second Sex. A woman who, in one breath, could reference de Beauvoir and then ask, “Is my wittle tummy rumblin’?” He felt like he was being seduced by both a Parisian existentialist and a toddler in cosplay. And what was he supposed to do with that? How do you explain that to your therapist? “I felt emasculated by the juxtaposition of feminist literature and infantile regression”.
The ick isn’t about appearances. It’s about the fracture when eroticism breaks its spine under the weight of incongruity. He said he started to dread her texts not because she was cruel or careless, she was, in fact, one of the most thoughtful people he had dated, but because every message came with three emojis and a sentence that began with “Dis gurl…” It felt less like being seen, and more like being cast in a low-budget sitcom he hadn’t auditioned for. He left. Of course he left. And people told him he was “intimidated by a strong woman”, as if his libido had ghosted her out of political cowardice rather than psychological coherence. But men, too, have their thresholds. The ick is human. The mistake is pretending it isn’t.
But here’s where it gets tricky. Sometimes the ick isn’t theirs. It’s yours. And that’s the kind that hits below the belt, the ick that doesn’t protect you from others but reveals something inconvenient about yourself. It’s the internal twitch that whispers, “He sees me”, and suddenly, visibility feels like exposure, not intimacy. He texts back too quickly, uses punctuation, asks follow-up questions. She remembers your sister’s name and how you take your coffee. It’s sweet. It’s sane. And yet your body tenses like you’ve just been handed a marriage certificate and a slow death. You interpret emotional attentiveness as a threat because some outdated part of you learned that love arrives late, leaves early, and keeps you guessing in between. You don’t recoil because they are wrong for you. You recoil because they are right, and your nervous system is still wired for chaos. That’s not the ick. That’s fear in a bad wig doing improv theatre in your subconscious.
But tell that to your body while it’s flooding with the same cortisol cocktail it used to reserve for abandonment. Tell that to your legs as they begin their quiet retreat. The real ick is clarifying, it draws a clean line between incompatibility and survival instinct. Fear is distorting, it builds a haunted house out of perfectly safe furniture. But in real time, with no translation manual and a trauma history that still limps, the signals blur. Is it entirely possible to ghost someone who would have adored you, just because their consistency made you feel more trapped than cherished? For a mentally stable person, no, but how many are still mentally stable today?!
We talk about the ick like it’s always divine intuition, but sometimes it’s a defence mechanism in drag, a dissociative response to the unbearable kindness of someone who isn’t going to make you prove your worth. And when you have spent years confusing emotional neglect with erotic tension, that kind of softness can feel repulsive because you don’t know where to put it inside a body that was built for bracing.
A friend of mine once dated a poet, and I don’t mean someone who occasionally scribbled angsty couplets in his Notes app. I mean a full-fledged, capital-P Poet who wrote letters on actual parchment. The kind that crackles when you fold it. The kind that smells faintly of mildew and misplaced ambition. She said at first, it felt oddly charming, like dating someone from another century. He recited Rilke at brunch. He brewed tea in a copper kettle he referred to as “my morning ritual vessel”. He wore suspenders. In July. Without irony. “It’s part of my aesthetic”, he told her, as if that explained why he looked like an off-brand Abraham Lincoln attending a farmer’s market.
At first, she tried to convince herself it was endearing, that maybe she was too cynical, too quick to dismiss. That she needed to “soften”, like every woman is told to do once her instincts become inconvenient. After all, he was thoughtful. Gentle. He used semicolons in his texts. He brought her hand-bound chapbooks and once wrote a sestina about her left shoulder. But then came the Gregorian chants. During foreplay. Imagine preparing to be kissed and instead being acoustically assaulted by medieval monks harmonising in Latin. She told me she lay there, motionless, trying to decide if she was aroused or being exorcised.
But the real moment, the moment that sealed the ick with eternal wax was when, mid-climax, he quoted Goethe. And not even a sexy line. Not even a well-placed Faust allusion. No, he moaned something vaguely metaphysical in German, and she said it felt like being propositioned by a haunted library. She screamed, not in pleasure, but in existential protest. She told me, “All I could think about was the fact that if we had a child, this man would name it something like Allegory or Threnody and make it wear linen from birth”. That night, she packed her things, her sense of self, and a lingering fear of metaphors, and left. The ick had spoken – in calligraphy.
Sometimes the ick arrives because you are healing. It doesn’t always feel like a breakthrough, sometimes it feels like boredom, or dryness, or suddenly seeing the wiring behind the performance that used to dazzle you. What once thrilled you – emotional unavailability, chaos in a tuxedo, men who quoted Bukowski like it was scripture – now nauseates you. The seductive pull of unpredictability becomes exhausting, not exciting. You are no longer impressed by someone who flirts like it’s a dare, who makes you earn every scrap of affection like you audition for love. You have retired from decoding cryptic emojis and sentences that end in ellipses. You want the truth, not the riddle. And suddenly, the game is just… loud. And stupid. You are not wrong for outgrowing your own patterns. You are holy for it. The ick isn’t always about them. Sometimes it’s a celebration of who you have stopped being… a quiet hallelujah from the part of you that finally refuses to be seduced by your own suffering.
I have learned to trust the shudder. Not every repulsion is rejection; some are revelations dressed in dry heaves. When I flinch at someone’s presence, or recoil from a touch that feels slightly off but not objectively wrong, I ask myself: is this my ego being petty, or my body being wise? Am I reacting to an unmet fantasy, or am I sensing a misalignment I can’t yet name? And more often than not, it’s the latter. My nervous system knows things my mind tries to politely un-know. It remembers what I have tried to forgive. It notices the voice pitch that mimics my ex’s when he lied. It catalogues how many times he says “anyway” when I speak. It warns me, not with panic, but with a subtle tightening, a microscopic withdrawal, like a plant folding in the dark. It says, “Not this. Not again”. And I’ve learned, slowly, and sometimes expensively, that I’d rather be alone than entangled with someone whose idea of intimacy is DMing me reels of dogs eating peanut butter followed by a heart-eyes emoji, as if that’s a love language.
This isn’t to say I have figured it out. I’ve confused boredom with safety. I’ve stayed too long in places that drained me, clinging to the narrative that “no one is perfect”. I’ve fled too fast from people who scared me with their sincerity. I’ve mistaken drama for depth and gone home with men who quoted Nietzsche while DJing, not even a good quote, either, something like “Without music, life would be a mistake”, which they said while fading into The Chainsmokers. I am not proud. But I am vigilant. Ick doesn’t mean flawless judgment, it means I have developed a kind of romantic allergy test. Sometimes it’s triggered by narcissism wrapped in novelty, and sometimes it’s just the wrong smell on the right person. And while it’s not foolproof, it has saved me from many slow-burn disappointments, and a great many breakfasts with people who think having a Spotify Wrapped and a favourite Scorsese film counts as a fully-formed personality.
So yes, I get the ick. Sometimes it arrives with the subtlety of a feather, like a pause too long after a joke, or the way he says “no worries” with a strange paternal tone. Other times it slams down like divine intervention: he insists on calling his ex “crazy” before the drinks even arrive or says “I’m a good guy” with the trembling conviction of someone who is trying to convince himself. Sometimes it’s immediate, a full-body shudder before the second date. Sometimes it takes weeks, sneaking in like a quiet draft under the door, until one day I look at him and all I can think about is how his thumbs move when he texts and how that alone makes me want to fake my own death.
But each time, even the late ones, even the ones I wanted to ignore, I thank the cosmos, the ancestors, the vagus nerve. Because the ick is my oracle. It doesn’t whisper sweet nothings. It shouts inconvenient truths in a language only my body speaks fluently. It’s the part of me that refuses to be seduced by potential, packaging, or pheromones. It’s the feral knowing that I no longer need to explain, justify, or therapise into submission. And I would rather be haunted by that honesty (raw, unsentimental, occasionally ill-timed) than be lulled into a fantasy that wears statement sneakers to brunch and says “big feelings” without irony. Amen, and may we all keep our inner ick turned on like a smoke detector… annoying, unfailing, and absolutely designed to save our lives.
From the church of nope, with reverence for every red flag I didn’t laminate, in gratitude to every cringe that came disguised as clarity, let the ick be loud and unedited,
Tamara
Hilarious, Tamara!
*scrambles to delete Joe Rogan episodes and dispose of Funko Pops*
*googles how to pronounce croissant*
*laments being born on the wrong continent*
OMFG! “But then came the Gregorian chants. During foreplay. Imagine preparing to be kissed and instead being acoustically assaulted by medieval monks harmonising in Latin.” I cannot! I dropped my phone, I scared my dog, I remembered someone saying, “et cum spiritu tuo” because I had mentioned being Catholic and they thought it was Italian for, “did you…?” I definitely did NOT!