If you peel it, they will come

To their senses.

Greetings from citrus season, my favorite bright speck amid the gray, shruggy months of winter. This is when my local supermercado is overflowing with sumo citrus (or Dekopan citrus)—one of my top fruits, and not just because it wears its own messy bun (relatable). Their plump, juicy sweetness is the closest I can get to fruit actually being good in America. I am of the factual opinion that fruit is simply not good in America, a theory that is substantiated every time I have fruit in a different country or the place of its local origin¹. Well-traveled fruit is just not the move.

Officer, that’s the culprit

But oranges are being co-opted for some innocuous-seeming, he-he-’til-it-gets-too-re-real reindeer games. They didn’t ask to be used as pawns in your little love games. Oranges are for eating or juicing, not for being agents of your ways, and certainly not for testing your boyfriends. Playing love games is the leading cause of sore losers (plural). And love tests? Well, those are simply the dark arts.

I get it. Now that men don’t present their hunted kill at your feet, start Trojan wars, battle your other suitors to win your hand, and they insist on splitting the bill 50/50 because of gender parity optics, it’s really difficult to tell how committed a man is to you.

Yet, even as we’re all coming around to the notion that standardized testing does not accurately measure learning or growth, we are developing new standardized tests… for Boyfriends™. Meanwhile, boyfriends are perhaps the demographic least suited for standardized testing, according to girlfriends everywhere. Boyfriend tests are not new. Their tee-hee comes in varying degrees of teeth. But now with oranges in our arsenal, we can ditch the middle woman and have the fruit lure disappointment instead.

@tiktokoh, to have an orange peeler in your life 🍊🧡 #orangepeeltheory #orangepeeltest

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As someone born an Asian, I’m predisposed to succeeding at test-taking fruit. No one knows how to fruit loved ones better than Asians. It’s our people’s #1 way to express care and affection in a non-verbally affirmative culture. It is so deeply ingrained into our cultural etiquette that there is no genetically modified leaf unturned in the pursuit of fruit beauty standards. Square watermelons, perfectly pink strawberries, and those $50 boxes of four (4) perfectly aesthetic Asian pears². Asians have the edge on the luxury fruit market. We can sell you a $200 melon. A melon! The most loathed of fruits!

Behold: the $200+ luxury cantaloupe aka the Japanese crown melon

When I was growing up, almost every evening after dinner, my mom would present a plate of cut fruit to us (the rest of the family) going so far as to peel each grapefruit segment individually, including the membrane, so it was a plate of perfectly glistening grapefruit slugs. You barely had to chew them, they slid straight down the gullet. If she served apples, she’d skin and slice them. If it was melons, she’d ball them. If it was grapes, she’d grape them³. I mean, you get it. She removed all barriers to edibility, likely as many mothers do to get their kids hooked on nutritious whole foods as early as possible.

Fruit delivered in all its sweetness, stripped of its bitter rind or teeth-cracking pit, is a gesture of love and caring. This makes oranges a juicy vehicle for affection. To ask someone to peel an orange for you is not a test so much as it is a request. And requests can be denied or delayed, especially when their purpose is not expressly deemed urgent or convenient. (Also, are we sure we are asking the person best suited for the job? Are men⁴ known for being adept fruit peelers?)

Ya, I know that isn’t the point. The result however is a binary speculation of whether your boyfriend will do what you say or if he doesn’t love you and wouldn’t care if you dropped dead. Or something like that, so seems to be the sentiment.

It harkens to the bid theory coined by the Drs. Gottman. Couples who were responsive to their partner’s bids for connection at least 86%⁵ of the time stayed together longer than couples who dismissed or missed bids most of the time. A Gottman bid is defined as a “fundamental unit of emotional communication.” (I respect the semantics but my inner chaotic good demon dislikes the transactional nature of this definition.)

Here’s thing thing, though — men who hate you will still do stuff you ask them to. Men you have no business dating will sometimes possess enough interpersonal skills to keep you on the hook for whatever their intentions crave. Men will be obSESSed with you and still cheat on you and feed off your resources. (I know all this from personals.) And some beautiful, kind-hearted himbos will simply not understand an orange from a grapefruit. You don’t want those people handling your fruit, but they will perhaps handle your heart with much more care.

Don’t get me wrong — I do think you should ask your partner to do stuff for you. And I think many partners enjoy doing nice things for their partners. When it’s in good faith. I do. Orange-testing men infantilizes them, undoing all the rehabbing of girlfriends past. (Same with loyalty tests, names tests, David Beckham tests, etc.)

Testing your partner robs them of the pleasure of caring for you. Plus, it has a way of scrambling your connection frequency, recalibrating your signals toward seeking ruin rather than seeking connection.

And perhaps worst of all, it is embarrassing. Especially if and when you’re presented with an undesirable outcome that you yourself orchestrated. There is no curse more appropos than getting exactly what you wanted.

@shelbyywilfongfailed attempt. #fyp

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Relationship tests are what happens when we are estranged from our deepest longing. When we don’t feel worthy of what we may or may not feel we deserve. When we choose to bind ourselves to people we don’t trust but want to trust us. When we fall in love with the idea of someone first.

Here is the thing about men people — they always tell on themselves eventually. You don’t have to test them when you pay attention. People learn how to treat you based on how you treat yourself. Technically, you’re always teaching your partner how to treat you. If they’re paying attention.

Love can’t be quantified to make our lives easier; all we have are more opportunities to love people better. And to learn to love ourselves better, reflected in the ways we are made to feel loved. Romantic relationships do not have a predictable ROI, no matter what currency you try to convert it to. Love cannot be measured orange by orange. But over time, it can become the whole orange tree.

1. The best papaya I ever had was at the continental breakfast buffet at the Mariott Hotel Rio De Janeiro. The best peach I ever had was from a local market in Pisciotta, Italy. Same for lemon.

2. I call them papples for their perfectly pear-apple flavor/texture combo.

3. If you’ve ever had Concord grapes (the ones that get turned into wine, and what all artificially grape-flavored things are based on), they can have a thick skin, which she would peel off before serving with the customary warning “watch out for seeds.” Alas, for all the barriers mothers can remove for us, they cannot protect us from what’s within.

4. I say “men” because so far I have only seen this and similar tests only performed in this hetero dynamic pipeline.

5. I don’t love quantifying behaviors this way, or labeling them as “masters” (as they are called on the Gottman Institute’s blog) or “disasters,” which is used to describe couples that turned toward each others’ bids only 33% of the time. But the big picture is clear. Pay attention to your partner.