lessons i learned from the "touch tank" curse

dissecting quinnie's hit single "touch tank" - a dreamy ode to sex, swimming, and a special someone she made sparks fly with (which eventually snuffs out as an old flame)

Today I went on an evening walk. I normally go right when I wake up at 8 AM, but the night before I stayed up until 3 AM attempting to crochet a cat-eared beanie, so I had completely wiped out this morning (update - it still doesn’t look remotely anything like a beanie). Before I left the house, I hit shuffle on my “guy archive” playlist (which is basically if my entire dating history had a soundtrack lol), and it landed on the song “touch tank” by quinnie.

It’s December now, but despite the cold air in my face, I felt all warm listening to this again. I had saved the song in early July of this year, and according to when I had added this to my Spotify, it was the day after I got back from an overdue trip home to the Philippines and was excited to see my (ex) boyfriend at the time. I spent a good chunk of these summer months in San Francisco-bound Southwest airplanes. For 2 minutes and 59 seconds, I let quinnie sing to me about my old feelings. It was nice.

Her frequent use of summer motifs portray a repeated, treasured memory of myself this year, one where the wind whipped my then-ginger hair out of car windows all May long from Oakland to Outer Sunset. Her voice is soft but clever, opening the first verse in bold declaration that she’d leave a sexy threesome just to wade around with her lover in what is basically a splash pad.

She goes on, then, chanting about her travels to see him. She compares their exciting yet gentle encounters to the composure of someone petting aquatic animals in a touch tank, and him being her soft manta ray.

This is a very simple, silly and youthful song that immortalizes the height of summer romance (but maybe that’s just my nostalgia talking) that I think rightfully has earned 20 million streams and counting.

But as every piece of romantic-love media likes to reminds us, summer is fleeting (which is funny because summer days are longer). It’s characterized as a single-season situationship that is often looked back on with kind eyes by nostalgic oldheads. There is a silent agreement that there is no permanence in summer, which adds to appeal of it all.

Some of us (i.e quinnie and I) wanted a little more time with our touch tank boys, but in *apparent* violation of this contract it didn’t pan out this way for either of us (as quinnie recalled, the eager baby will only be gentle when he wants to be…and he did not choose to be gentle when he decided to dump me right before my birthday lmfao). city gurls up tho

But what’s even more interesting is that on quinnie’s TikTok announcing her split, hundreds of comments remarked about the partner they had once dedicated this song to were no longer in their lives either - some have called it the touch tank curse.

But I wouldn’t call it a curse. If anything, I think it was more like a mix of an opportunity and a lesson. It was an opportunity to see how each of us deserve to experience a good old whirlwind romance, and now we all have a fun little story under our belt for our future granddaughters. At the same time, it teaches us that chemistry is not enough to keep a relationship alive - in fact, not even love itself can do that. There is an air of maturity that comes with realizing this, and it’ll change the way you approach the rest of your dating life. I would honestly go as far as to say that it will make your approach to dating even easier, and I’m kind of glad I went through what I did to know what I know now.

I don’t really know what compelled me to write this - maybe it’s because I’ve been seeing a lot of full circle moments in my life in this year of 2022. I rode out the highs in the summer when touch tank took off on TikTok, and now I’m chillin knitting a cat beanie single in the winter. Shoutout quinnie ily bae btw imma send her this article and hope she reads it lol