They'd been through two actual relationships when they met the girl. The girl was a MAJOR fan. Big fan. Could not be fan enough of this person that simply decided to exist in her life. They liked the girl back, and the two became close.
For context, they come from a bad place with closed minds and open doors. Singles have always been a constant in their life: single floor, single bathroom, single mother, single obligation; they have an obligation to be perfect.
For the longest time, that was their goal. Then they met the Physicist, and that changed their priorities quite a bit. Now they had a new single. They had a friend.
At first, they and the Physicist exchanged polite lies and petty avoidances. After 7 months, they decided that maybe the Physicist could be trusted. Contact was no longer singular; there were now two on the list.
They exchanged conversations of a deeply intimate nature. The two longed for something found in the other. Once obtained, the Physicist stopped texting. They were left facing withdrawal.
They were lonely for a period of time. On top of that, they were empty and broken. The first friend betrayed them, and left. Surely, friends weren't supposed to leave. Now they made new friends, but each one left, and so they came to feel the inevitability of loneliness. Loneliness was the new single. They felt only that.
After that, they came to know Piety. Piety treated them very kindly at first. The two had encounters that they, at least, had never experienced. They had also never experienced a normal relationship, and so stayed far too long in an abusive one. Loneliness was first accompanied, then replaced, by self-loathing.
Almost immediately after Piety was cast out, they found the third. She was their extended family, a relationship documented on paper through one of the marriages. When it inevitably escaped that the two preferred each other's company, it was forbidden. It was perfectly legal, but families often have their own rules. Allowing two to relate to each other, two that had no regard for those rules, would have been dangerous. And so contact was forcefully cut. They painfully dream. Self-loathing is slowly replaced by emptiness.
