#and it's our blorbos fucking up the relationship and being unintentional assholes?

[missmagooglie]

ROTFL honestly about how hair-trigger both Buck and Eddie have been for commitment in 6b. But coming at it from completely different directions. Eddie catastrophizes himself into anxiety attacks over nothing, while Buck ignores every single warning sign and commits himself wholeheartedly at the slightest interest.

First there's Eddie, who literally just sees a woman in his tia's kitchen and immediately goes "I can't marry her!" Like, babe. No one's asking you to? You're allowed to go on dates that aren't lifetime commitments?

He reminds me of those precocious but over-anxious kids who have one (1) minor thing go wrong and they spiral out and suddenly they're like ".... and THEN I'll default on my mortgage and be left with nothing! Is that what you want?" And you, an adult, are just standing there blinking like "How do you know what a mortgage is? You're nine."

And then there's Buck. He's the girl who buys a bath bomb and unironically says, "this will fix my life." That sort of "spiral up" technique they tell you to do in therapy, but in a toxic positivity way.

Honestly, I am so curious about whether Natalia even thought she was on a date with Buck. Like, here she is, a professional whose job it is to help people understand and accept death so that they can have a more peaceful and fulfilling end to their life. And she meets a guy who, within minutes of meeting her, shares that he actually clinically died for a few minutes. As someone who is so invested in understanding and demystifying death, of course she's fascinated! It felt very obvious that she was asking him to have coffee to talk about that experience specifically, rather than having an explicitly romantic intent.

But poor Buck very obviously interpreted it as a date, and now he's over here telling Eddie "I feel like she really sees me" like they're halfway to being in love already.

And listen, I don't think any part of what we've seen so far between Buck and Natalia is a bad thing. Even her "fangirling" over his near-death. Because here's the thing: yes, it would be devastating for Eddie or Maddie or Bobby to hear someone be excited about "that time Buck literally died". But fortunately, Natalia wasn't talking to any of them. She was talking to Buck. She was talking from the perspective of someone who knows Buck is still alive before she even learned that he died, and she's interested in his experience. And I genuinely do not think it's a bad thing for Buck to talk to someone who can recognize that what he went through was transformational in a way that can be positive if he allows it to be. No one who loves him can talk to him about this experience without bringing their own grief from nearly losing him to the conversation - and that's totally understandable, but it's also what makes talking with someone new about these experiences so alluring and so (potentially) helpful.

But the other thing Buck and Eddie have in common is avoidance. We saw Eddie avoid thinking about what he wants from a romantic partner when he was with Ana to the point where the avoidance was giving him panic attacks. Buck talked to Natalia and got the chance to process some if the ways his experience with death was positive. He's also so caught up in that positive feeling that he's letting himself not confront or process some of the ways his death was decidedly NOT positive -- both for him and for the people who love him.

Natalia doesn't have grief clouding her view of what happened to Buck. She doesn't have the tumultuous emotional background of all the ways Buck has been hurt and then tried to tape himself back together. Natalia only knows what Buck chooses to share with her.

In other words, it's easy with her.

Where have we heard that before?