i’d love to read one of your posts about ben’s actions tonight? like, we all understand /why/ but you have such a lovely way with words and i like pain. thanks 🥺
thank you, you’re so sweet!! usually i like to answer asks in order but imma let u skip the queue just this once bc this one’s time sensitive and ur so nice 🥺
so……. where do i even begin w this……..
the thing is ben has such horrible self esteem issues and a lot of ppl (both characters on the show and ppl in the audience) don’t realize that bc he comes across as very confident and bold and unfazed by anything, but the thing is….. that’s a front…….. he is not confident, he is not bold (not when it really matters) and he’s affected by pretty much everything. like massively so. what other people think of him - particularly people he cares about - affects not only how he sees himself, but also how he behaves. he seems to almost want to be a self fulfilling prophecy - remember how everyone thought it was ben who hit phil over the head, so ben was like ‘well seeing as though everyone thinks i tried to kill him, i might as well actually do it’?? yeah. he’s very susceptible to allowing other people’s opinions on him dictate his opinions of himself, as well as the course of action he ends up taking.
so it’s very easy to see how that lead to what happened with callum and their date. ian making a comment about it? well ben gives back as good as he gets, and this is ian we’re talking about, who is as obtuse as they come. but you see as ben leaves the beale’s that despite seeming unbothered by it, that comment actually got to him. it got him thinking: what if ian was right? what if he has a point? literally ben was already doubting himself after a snide comment from ian, that’s how affected he is by other people’s opinions (and also that’s how much he cares about callum!). and then you’ve got jay piling on top of that, and ok maybe his comments were innocuous and maybe he had a point, but with what ian had already said? the doubts really start taking hold. like maybe ian isn’t just full of shit, not if jay’s thinking the same thing - jay, who probably knows ben better than anyone. so maybe he and callum aren’t right for each other. maybe they won’t work.
and then you’ve got stuart who just puts the giant fucking nail in the coffin. he sets the disaster snowball rolling down the hill. and he does it in a really clever, manipulative way too (it’s a similar type of manipulation we see ben use on callum when he sold him that van!): he disarmed ben with an apology and with this newfound openmindedness, offers ben an olive branch by saying ‘i care about callum and i think you do too’ - essentially lowering ben’s guard - and then goes in with the ‘bad things happen around you so you need to stay away from callum because i don’t want happened to paul to happen to him’. and that undoubtedly completely fucks ben up - we didn’t even really need ian and jay putting doubts in his head before that tbh, i think what stuart said would have been enough to screw ben up on it’s own. and you know, i think even with ian and jay’s comments, if stuart hadn’t said what he said they might’ve been alright. ben might be a little bit off, but it probably would have been recoverable. but as soon as paul was mentioned - as soon as what happened to paul was mentioned - it was all bets off the table. we’ve seen how much paul’s death still affects ben, how much he still blames himself. so to have stuart basically insinuate that yeah, what happened to paul was somehow because of ben and that the same thing might happen to callum - someone that ben obviously really cares about - again because of ben? it was game over. stuart softened him up then went right for ben’s rawest spot. like how the fuck was he supposed to recover from that in a matter of hours?
and yeah, he probably should have done the decent thing and just cancelled. but that’s not how ben’s brain works. ee have already established that doing this exact thing is a pattern of behaviour for ben - he broke up w the guy he was seeing (that he was into!) in newcastle for the exact same reason he purposely sabotaged his date with callum: because he ‘had to, because if anything had got, like, serious, then [ben] would have ruined his life’. those are ben’s exactwords. now who does that sound like? what kind of paranoia is that kind of thinking feeding into? this is what ben thinks about himself. this is what ben worries he’s going to do to the men in his life. like this is what ben does!!! which is why it really surprised me that some ppl thought his behaviour yesterday was OOC. it seems to me that if anything this behaviour is perfectly in line with both his character and his previous actions. and to be perfectly honest, i think if ben hadn’t tried to deliberately fuck it up now, then he probably would have eventually. at least if he’s doing this right at the very beginning the two of them have a chance of working through it.
so why didn’t ben just cancel? well callum would’ve wanted an explanation. and what could ben have said, when he had been so up for it until then? ‘sorry, a few people have talked some sense into me and i realized i like you too much to ruin your life’? that wouldn’t have worked. ‘i changed my mind’? callum’s gonna ask why. ‘something came up’? callum might ask for another date. and ben clearly likes callum quite a bit, and he knows as well as we do that if callum had asked him out again, he probably wouldn’t have been able to say no. so he thinks: i have to break this until there’s no chance of recovery. i need to destroy any chance there is for us, get rid of any interest callum has in me. i need to make him angry at me, because then he’ll stay away from me. i need to make him hate me, because if he hates me at least he won’t be hurting. and if i do have to hurt him, it’s better to hurt him now rather than further down the line when it will hurt him ten times more. it’s flawed thinking, obviously, but ben’s a flawed man with a lot of issues and no self esteem who thinks that a) he doesn’t deserve someone like callum and b) that he’ll only end up hurting him, or that callum will end up hurt because of him. so in his own fucked up way, he was really trying to protect callum - from ben himself, and whatever pain ben’ll inevitably (as far as he’s concerned) end up inflicting on him. (and don’t forget paul and what happened to him was now at the forefront of his mind too, so i’m sure that only made him even more determined to make sure he gets callum as far away from him as possible.)
so what does he do? he completely fucking destroys this date. invites other people along, pays callum no attention, makes 0 effort, literally cops off with someone else in plain view and then makes it clear he’s not bothered what callum thinks about it (although it backfired a little bit bc callum’s such a sweetheart and also has no self esteem so he went the ‘no hard feelings’ route which must have infuriated ben bc like no!! he was supposed to kick off!! swear!!! call ben a bastard!!! anything but be so painfully understanding!!!!) and he does all of this to basically fuck their relationship up beyond repair. bc if he does that then callum will be able to move on and find someone else, someone kind and safe and normal who won’t hurt him or fuck it up.
and i know it won’t make sense to some people, but he did all of it with the best intentions. with callum’s feelings in mind, not ben’s own - in fact, ben’s feelings and what he wants are practically redundant in this situation bc he’s so set on doing what he thinks is the best thing for callum. what ben wants and feels about it doesn’t matter.
and he manages to do a pretty good job of ignoring his feelings up until the very end, when he’s essentially alone. then - and only then - do we get to see how fucking upset ben is about the whole thing. like he’s sitting there drinking by himself trying not to cry! he’s fucking heartbroken! because his actions during the date, that wasn’t him wanting to be cruel or vindictive or hurt callum. that was him trying to protect callum (and i know, i know not everyone will understand or agree with that but i promise you that’s exactly what he was trying to do). his own happiness, his own feelings, they don’t matter. he’s fucking devastated, but it doesn’t matter. callum is safe now. he’ll be alright, and as long as callum’s alright, nothing else matters.
and the most telling part of it all? the fact that ben didn’t go home w that guy he’d been kissing earlier. he could have. he so easily could have - the guy was into him, he was up for it, and we know ben’s not opposed to random hook ups. but he didn’t. he wasn’t at all interested. why? because he wanted callum. he caresabout callum. he was just using that guy to make his point - that ben is bad and callum shouldn’t be interested in him bc because he can do better. he had 0 interest in that guy and the minute everyone was gone and no one was around to witness it, ben made that very clear - he didn’t even want fuck him as a rebound or to prove he doesn’t care about callum or whatever. he couldn’t even pretend.
like ben just really cares about callum and that’s exactly why he did what he did - because he thinks that it was the best and kindest thing to do.
idk i just hope that this helps give people a little bit of perspective on why ben did what he did bc i feel like some ppl were kind of unfairly harsh on him. the way he behaved was not at all fair on callum, and i don’t condone what he did, but as someone who has been there myself (not literally the same situation, but the same ‘i need to scare them off now so i don’t hurt them in the long run’ way of thinking) i can confidently say that it was from a place of good intentions. completely twisted and fucked up and unfair, yes, but his heart was (mostly) in the right place.
but yeah lmao i’m glad you like my way with words bc you just got a lot of them!!! and perhaps a lot of pain too lmao 💕💕
