What do you think of all the grester breakup rumors

*sigh*.

All right. I’ve been trying to stay out of it, but all right.

What do I think of all the Grester breakup rumors? That I’ve had rather enough of them.

Look. Grace and Chester are not casually dating. They’re not even boyfriend and girlfriend. They’re partners. They share a house and a dog and bills and presumably a mortgage; they know one another’s families and have established traditions. They have ingratiated themselves into one another’s lives. For all we talk about wanting them to get married, even if they did, very little would change on a practical front. They have become a family.

Casual or adolescent relationships may well crumble without readily-evident lingering emotional damage, but solid, established, deeply entwined relationships sure as hell don’t. We haven’t seen Chester, but Grace is working, laughing, playing with Goose, and being present on social media. She’s okay. In the aftermath of a relationship that serious breaking up, she wouldn’t be. I don’t care how good an actress she is or how much she prides herself on her ability to act as an automaton; that kind of emotional blow would disable her for a good while, and we would be able to tell.

I love Chester to the tips of my toes. He’s a dear, brilliant man with the biggest damn heart I’ve ever seen. But I think we can all agree that consistency is not one of his strengths. He drops off the face of the earth sans explanation at least three times a year, and in the two and a half years he’s been with Grace, none of those times has been due to any threat to their relationship that’s been made publicly available. (It’s wise for us to also note that, every time this happens, we all shit our pants with anxiety waiting to see him again and have confirmation that all is well.)

Maybe he’s in Africa with the Thirst Project. Maybe he’s drowning in work for his album. Maybe he’s cooking up a new project that he can’t talk about yet. Maybe they had a fight - yes, adult couples do fight; it’s normal and healthy! - and he’s taking some time to cool off. Maybe he’s going through a bout of depression - I hope not, but it’s not unprecedented. Maybe he just needed a break from social media. There are literally infinite ways this story ends, and not all of them end on “he and Grace split up.”

I know speculation is way too easy in these cases and that we all have painfully fertile imaginations, but all of us really, truly, desperately need to take a deep breath and step back from the situation. Try to remember that we know what we know about Grace and Chester’s relationship only at the pleasure of Grace and Chester. They’re under no obligation to broadcast anything about it. We have a responsibility to be…well, responsible, with the information they do disclose. We’re a population that is not unduly afraid of speculation, I know, but there’s a huge chasm between “where’s she taking him for his birthday this year?” and “OMG xyz has happened what if they broke up?”

On a personal note, as someone who’s been surrounded on all sides by a mixed-media exhibition of depression for nearly four months following the loss of my job, it’s all kinds of not good for my mental health to go into the Grester tag and see all these hypotheticals being thrown out. It ticks up my anxiety big time, and knowing everything I’ve written above really doesn’t help that. Thinking about the demise of a relationship I love so much between two people I love so much deals a pretty massive blow to my mental health. So above and beyond the greater question of whether or not the rumors have any merit, there’s another completely self-centered reason I want the speculation train to stop, and it’s the preservation of my own sanity.

I won’t argue that something’s off since Hawaii, but I’m also not going to participate in games of “what if.” If we get concrete evidence of some change in their relationship status, then we can revisit the topic, because like many of you, I will be grieving terribly and I will need the support of this community to do it. Until then, for my sake as much as for Chester’s and Grace’s, I’m going to stay the hell out of it.

If nothing else, for the love of god, keep it out of their tags. Have we not already established that Chester and especially Grace see everything? No matter what may or may not have happened between them, seeing that kind of speculation in their tags has the potential to do a lot of harm, not just between them but between them and their fan community. Tag it Grester if you must, but as with fanfic, their individual tags should be off-limits.