Dear Polly,

Is it possible for someone to have commitmentphobia while simultaneously professing enthusiasm for commitment — all while not doing much about commitment, either way?

Let me explain. For the past year and a half I’ve been dating a man in his early 40s. I am in my mid-30s. Most of our friends are married, cohabitating, have kids, have houses. You know the drill. I have never pushed on these issues, mostly because I don’t feel the need: I have a career I like, friends and family and hobbies I love, a nice place to live, the ability to pay my own bills. My life is full and rich, and this great, smart, caring guy I began dating, after a year-long period of close friendship, simply made it fuller and richer. I’m not against marriage or kids or any of that, but it’s never been my top objective. I’m sure this dynamic evolved, in part, because in the past I’ve dated younger guys who were even less interested in any sort of settling-down than I was.

Now, from fairly early on, we decided to date exclusively and my current fellow seemed to have ‘future’ on his mind. He emailed me real estate listings for houses. He talked about wanting to be a dad and coach Little League. He will say things like “I can’t wait until we can buy a place in [quaint nearby town].” He jokes about how we’ll have to develop a finding aid when we combine our respective book and record collections. And you know what? Instead of being nervous or put off by this, I found it exciting! Turns out, planning for a joint future feels doable when you are with someone who seems invested in it, and who is a good person, and who has an excellent book and record collection. “This sounds great,” I told him. “I’m in.” And I meant it.

The thing is, I’m starting to think that what he enjoys is the fantasy of commitment — the ideaof a cute house in [quaint nearby town], me bringing in greens from the garden, the kid suiting up for Little League — not the reality of making it happen. I’ve tried to have conversations about, say, moving in together, and a panicky look crosses his face. I can practically smell his stress levels rise. We drop the conversation and let it go. Lately if I bring up stuff like that he says he’s sick of talking about it. I get it, commitment is scary, but if it is so scary, why the house listings? Why give me a gardening book as a present, when I live in a Manhattan condo? It’s sort of the relationship equivalent of someone who watches the Olympics religiously but cannot bring himself to go to the gym.

We’ve talked about this, and he tells me that he struggles with indecisiveness and is prone to sticking with the status quo until an external force makes him change. But we’re at a point in our lives where our living situations and future plans are self-driven. We have no roommates to leave us in the lurch, no graduations to launch us into a new job market in another town. Some of my girlfriends have told me to “put my foot down” and “give him an ultimatum,” but that is SO not my bag. Really, I just want to know where I stand, and I don’t want to end up looking like a fool by mistaking his future-talk-mirages for something solid. If he wants to keep it casual but spice things up with unattainable domestic fantasies, I guess that’s OK, right? So Polly, is this a case of commitmentphobia trying to pose as something else? Is he being selfish, or am I? Also, is this give-your-partner-an-ultimatum thing really a thing? According to my girlfriends it is, which horrifies me — then again, they teased me when I found out that Spanx are a thing and I found those horrifying, too. Maybe I am just clueless, in general?

Sincerely,

Single, Spanxless and Confused

Dear SSC,

Everyone hates ultimatums. It’s demeaning to give one, and it’s obnoxious to receive one. It’s like giving someone Spanx as a gift. But you know what? Just as some women feel better when they wear Spanx, some men will not get off their asses without an ultimatum. And by “Get off their asses,” I do not necessarily mean “Run out a buy a diamond ring.” In most cases, it’s more like “Stop bullshitting their girlfriend and make it clear that they are definitely not going to be gardening-and-Little-League material for at least another decade.”

So that makes giving ultimatums even worse, because you’re likely to get bad news. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of several long-term relationships, and witnessed among friends, it’s this: Men who get very nervous and evasive and refuse to talk about commitment after a year or so usually (7 times out of 8?) don’t commit. You say that you don’t really care about marriage and kids, that everything is great. If that’s the case, then why even write me a letter? Relax and enjoy yourself. If you don’t need the goddamn Spanx, why denigrate those who feel they do?

But if you’re thinking that marriage and kids might move up your priority list, if you imagine yourself in the same situation two years from now and that doesn’t seem all that great, then I’d address the issue right now.

When I was 34 years old, I started to notice that my live-in boyfriend of two years, who loved to talk about how awesome our domestic life was, always talked about marriage and kids like they existed in some distant future, when he was much, much older and had a great career. In the meantime, we should just relax, pack another bong hit, and watch “24.”

Life with this man was pretty enjoyable. He was a happy, talkative ray of sunshine. But I was sure I wanted to have kids, so I told him we needed to get serious or I should move on without him. He said he couldn’t decide, so we went to couples’ therapy. Even in couples’ therapy, it was hard to get any information. (If there’s just one thing you want to know and your guy won’t say that one thing? You’ve got your answer already.)

So finally I said, “I’m going to give this three more months.” He agreed. One night two months later, he told me how, on a recent visit to New York, he’d told all his friends that I was disappointed that I didn’t get an engagement ring for my birthday. I’d never said that. (Who gets engaged on their birthday?) But he’d added together my deadline with his habit of buying crappy last-minute birthday gifts at the local drugstore, and came up with that assessment.

See how pathetic my ultimatum looked then? Demeaning. Just terrible. I felt like a disgusting sea slug, crawling around 50 leagues under the seas on which his delightful little stoner sailboat glided peacefully along.

So I broke up with him. Three months later, I met my husband, who is pretty and kind and has a great career where the bong should go. In fact, he’s downstairs right now rubbing sunscreen on two little girls while I sit here tapping out highly subjective drivel. He probably should’ve found some sunshiney cookie-baking pin-up girl, but instead he got me. His loss is my gain, motherfuckers!

Nine years later, my ex is 42 years old, he’s never seriously dated anyone, and he’s humming “Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand!” while spanking it down to Sports Illustrated’s latest discovery.

I know I’ve probably told my twisted, dark heteronormative fairy tale many times before. The real lesson here is that my exboyfriend would’ve upheld the status quo forever. He liked me enough, he just didn’t want to commit. He looked at me and he thought about all of the sunshiney cookie-baking pin-up girls out there he could marry instead. I knew that all along. I knew I’d rather be alone than stay with someone who was ambivalent about me.

I understand that your life is good, you’re undecided about marriage and kids, and it’s silly and beneath you to deliver an ultimatum. But you must ask yourself if you’ll be happy with the status quo in a year or two. You really do need to figure out whether you want kids or not. Don’t walk away from that question just because it fucks with your current life and makes you feel like a walking cliche. If you decide you’ll absolutely be happy without these things? That’s fantastic. Now you can sleep better at night.

But if you know deep down what you want, and you just don’t want to be the sad, lame woman who wants those things? If most of all, you don’t want to play the part of the woman who has the gall to ask for marriage and kids (instead of getting them, magically, from a charming prince)? Well, that’s not going to serve you very well.

Some people will tell you to follow The Rules, pretend not to care, stay busy, act happy, pretend you’re nonchalant about the whole goddamn thing. I can understand this approach for the first few months, but after a year, you need to know if you’re with someone who can tolerate a serious conversation about what you both want from life. Pretending that you don’t need that and you can hang with some weird, juvenile fantasy that romantic entanglements should always be shrouded in mystery? That path lies to ruin, in my opinion.

It’s not creepy to talk about what you want from your life, no matter how much other people want to make you believe that. Don’t ever design your life around the need NOT to be That Woman. Because our culture makes every fucking one of us into That Woman. We are That Woman when we refuse to take whatever is dished out at work, without complaint. We are That Woman when we cry at some moment deemed inappropriate by someone without a fucking soul who’s incapable of feeling human emotions in the first place. We are That Woman when we live alone and we adopt a cat, because we fucking like cats. We are That Woman whenever we dare to behave like regular human beings.

Most of the good things in my life came out of being That Woman.

Decide what you want, and then own it without shame. Knowing what you want, even if you might never get it, doesn’t make you a loser. Owning what you want, and sticking your neck out for it: That’s what separates happy people from unhappy people. Standing up for your dreams and politely declining to “be cool” and “hang” and play along with the status quo? These actions are crucial. They shape your whole life. Without them, you are merely a spectator.

As a woman, you will be denigrated for saying what you want. Because you have made your desires known, and because those desires might be inconvenient to others, you are a problem. People are very good at shaming desire out of women. This is not a conspiracy. This is social reproduction. These are the natural forces that uphold the status quo.

If you think marriage is a joke, people will shame you into thinking you should be married. If you put your kids in day care, people will make you feel shitty about it. If you don’t want to have kids, people will act like you have a serious problem. If you think Little League and herb gardens in a small town sound vaguely dreamy, you are That Woman who wants gross, typical things that she’ll probably never get.

Fuck that noise. Do not let the world shame you out of your true desires. Dig deep and decide what you want. Then own it. If you can’t do that, then you should expect to be disappointed.

Polly

Dear Polly,

I love reading your advice and wondering who these people are with such complicated lives. Well, now I am one of them.

I recently made a new friend at work. He just moved to my city from across the state and basically knows no one, although his fiancée will be joining him in a few months. A couple of my other friends at work are annoyed with him because they just want to go home and sleep after work and he is constantly bugging people to go out. But I see where he’s coming from. I have a fair amount of free time and am always up for an adventure, so we’ve been hanging out a lot in the past few weeks. He and I started to get a little bit flirty, and I figured it was all just in good fun.

One night we got pretty drunk and ended up kissing at the end of the night. The next day he explained to me that he’s been having problems with his fiancée. She cheated on him about a year ago and ever since then they have been trying to repair the relationship. Evidently she wants him to go out without her for a while and be open to new relationships, so that he can experience other people before they get married. (He dated other girls before her, so it’s not like he’s never experienced any other women). He claims he didn’t think he would ever be able to do this because he loves her too much. But then he met me. And now he doesn’t know what to do.

We are now in this weird grey zone where we hang out all the time and do couple-y things, but we aren’t hooking up and we haven’t kissed again since that night. We did both attend a wild party where we got wildly drunk and held hands/cuddled on the couch all night. That’s all. I was hoping that I could just see him as a good friend, but the problem is that I’m starting to fall for him. I know I should end it now and stop seeing him altogether but I just can’t. Every time I see him or I get a call or text I’m drawn back in.

It’s hard to hang out in a large group because my closest friend doesn’t like this guy. To be honest, he can be a bit self-centered and is always talking about himself. He’s had an interesting life though, so I like listening to his stories. He’s extremely polite, holding doors and such for me, which most guys I know never do. I just don’t know what I’m getting out of the relationship. I know he is going to go back to his fiancée in the end. Should I cut it off now before I get more hurt? Or should I enjoy this time with him now? (I am moving away in under a month for a new job). If I keep seeing him I know I’ll want to move the relationship to the next level. He’s said that he’s very attracted to me, but it feels wrong for him to cheat on his fiancée. Even though she kind of wants him to.

My friends all agree I need to stop seeing him, and I know that’s true too. Even if I delete his number, I’m still going to see him around work and our neighborhood. Once I see him, he’ll charm me back into making plans with him.

I’m afraid I’m going to fall in love with him. Then I will leave and his fiancée will come back, and I’ll be alone in a new city, a nervous heartbroken wreck. At least if I break it off now, I’ll have my friends here to support me when I’m a wreck.

I’m usually pretty even keeled when it comes to relationships but this one is throwing me. I’ll have a great time with him but it always kills me when he walks away at the end of the night. I’m even getting weepy about it at work, which is something I never do. I want more and I know he can’t give it. But I can’t seem to give him up.

What do I do?

Can’t Walk Away

Dear CWA,

This one is easy. You’re leaving town no matter what, and this guy isn’t sleeping with you now and he’s not dating you no matter what. Why hang around and demean yourself for another second? This thing you’re in isn’t romantic or exciting or worth mooning over. You know what is romantic? Telling him he’s never going to see you again, and then sticking to it.

Think about your life story. Do you want your moving-away story to have a dark cloud over it, so that whenever you look back on this time, you feel sick over what a loser you were to be hung up over that guy with the fiancée? Or do you want to look back and say, “Oh yeah, that was the time I stood up for myself, walked away from a guy who was just milking me for adoration and attention while his fiancée was gone”? Do you want to call your friends, tell them you’re through with this guy, and it’s time to go out and celebrate? Or do you want them to look at you and sigh and shake their heads, in a way that burns into your brain and maybe even begins to define how you feel about yourself?

Do you want to move to a new city feeling like you’re someone who stands up for herself, who never settles for less than she deserves, who doesn’t get involved with attached men, who absolutely draws the line when things start to look dicey?

You already are that person. All you have to do is walk away, and never look back.

Polly

Are you That Woman? Then write to Polly immediately!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Top photo by Philip Taylor. Bottom photo by “che corona.”

★★★★ The sun hit the threshold, discouragingly, as the children were being negotiated into their sandals. It was discouraging again on the expanse from the dunes to the tide. But a few clouds intervened, and the mission carried on. The breaking waves and the wet sand the toddler was digging in were the same color as each other. One extra-tall wave surged and broke and kept running, overtaking toddler and toy truck and shovel all at once; rescue was tearful but complete. Cumulus clouds piled high, and the sun continued its intermittent assaults. Frozen custard was an exercise in crisis management. At last the sun went away, leaving only alpenglow on the peaks of the mountainous clouds. The tide, near high, ran all the way up the slope of the beach and onto the flat no-man’s land behind. It was nice time for a walk. “Nice walk nice walk,” the toddler said, experimentally. “Nice walk.” Just as the walk turned for home, at the foot-rinsing station, the older boy announced that he could see a light in the sky: the top edge of the moon, a deep orange bear claw, rising out of a low cloud. In moments it was fully out and apparently round, laying its orange beams straight across the water and up over the wetted sand. Just beside the orange, in the offing, was the tiny yellow dash of a cruise ship, someone else’s vacation. Later still the moon had gone white, its roundness slightly flattened on the western edge, and the whiteness shone on long pools of standing water, drawn high above the usual high-tide line.

“This is a brilliant day for women and a fantastic one for people power.”

“A new report from UBS surveyed investors who on the surface all appear to be pretty well off. Of the survey’s 4,450 participants, half had $1 million or more in investable assets, and all had at least $250,000 in investments. Compared to the huge portion of the population that barely has any savings — about half of Americans don’t have an emergency fund that’d cover three months of expenses — it sure seems like the people in the survey are doing quite well financially. But do these people think they’re rich? For the most part, the answer is no.”

Cannibal lobsters!

“Health officials are watching in horror as bacteria become resistant to powerful carbapenem antibiotics — one of the last drugs on the shelf.”

“If 90’s MTV VJ ‘Kennedy’ had access to the Internet or social media two decades ago when she was the trouble-making voice of alternative culture, oh, the photos she would have Instagrammed and the scoops she could have tweeted. ‘Kennedy,’ whose full name is Lisa Montgomery Kennedy, was in a unique position at MTV, then a cutting-edge music channel where all of pop culture converged.” Also: “Kennedy decided the timing was right to commit her memories to paper because of a general wistfulness for the 90s permeating today’s culture.”

by Adam Carlson

“Welcome to Night Vale” is a twice-monthly, 25-ish-minute podcast featuring news, traffic, and weather out of a small town in the Southwestern corner of the United States that does not actually exist. The town’s dog park, which is forbidden, is fictional, as is the mayor, Pamela Winchell, who is probably demonic. The radio show’s host, Cecil Baldwin is real, kind of. One of his most-used words is “void.”

Created and written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, out of New York City, “Night Vale” has been running for little more than a year. Fink told me that on the first anniversary of the series, in June, the episodes had been collectively downloaded about 150,000 times. The following week, they were downloaded another 150,000 times. As of this writing, “Night Vale” is the No. 1 podcast on iTunes, ahead of “This American Life,” “The Nerdist,” and “Radiolab.”

“It took us about a week to figure out that it was just somehow we had exploded on Tumblr and we don’t know why or how that happened,” Fink said.

Cranor has a theory, without any science to back it up: He credits “Hannibal,” NBC’s springtime serial-killing thriller, which has a ghoulish, actualized online fan base. (They are fond, for example, of Photoshopping a crown of flowers onto the head of its murderous star.) “I just started watching ‘Hannibal,’ just to see what it is, and I can absolutely see why there would be some crossover demographic or appeal,” Cranor said.

“What I see mostly are people talking to each other and people saying, ‘Thanks so-and-so for introducing me to this,’” he said. “Or the other one I see a lot of is, ‘What is this shit all over my Tumblr?’”

The first law of fandom is fungality: Like spores, any group of fans grows as soon as it spreads, a process made instantaneous by Tumblr’s dashboard. The “Hannibal” fandom is a particular example, and the speed with which it grew has been satirized in other parts of the web. Once its fans caught the bug, everyone did. “It really comes down to the right person posting about something, being the first to expose their network to it,” said Max Sebela, a creative strategist at Tumblr. “And if you can get up to date really quickly, it’s easy for everyone to establish a hive mind around something and just start gushing about it.”

In a pinch, fans tend to describe “Welcome to Night Vale” as a Lovecraftian love-child: “A Prairie Home Companion” as narrated by Rod Serling, and so on — comparisons which Fink has called “reductive” without saying they are wrong. (In the same interview, he said that fans from Texas assume, without much evidence, that the show is set in their state.)

Starting around July 5th, Sebela said they began seeing the fandom “spiral out of control” on Tumblr: During the seven days before we spoke, there were 20,000-plus posts about “Night Vale,” with 183,000-plus individual blogs participating in the conversation, and 680,000-plus notes. A common tag appears in all-caps, like, “15 eps in 2 days WHERE AM I.” Sebela described another common refrain: “I just marathoned. I know I’m going to finish it tomorrow morning on the subway.”

The newest episode is entitled “First Date” and tells the story of Cecil retelling the latest development in his love life to listeners. Longtime fans were eager for it: The host’s crush has been a recurring plot since the pilot. With “First Date,” it became canon — he is falling in love with Night Vale’s newest scientist, who has perfect hair and teeth “like a military cemetery” and whose name is Carlos.

Welcome to “Welcome to Night Vale,” a gay love story set in a town whose school board is run by a dictatorial Glow Cloud.

Forget your troubles, come on get happy. Throw all your skin away.

— Night Vale podcast (@NightValeRadio) July 23, 2013

Cecil Baldwin didn’t expect that his fictional counterpart would fall in love with Carlos. He didn’t expect to voice a fictional version of himself at all.

“It was very strange for me, I think it was in the fourth or fifth episode, when I read the script and found out the character’s name is Cecil — which, of course, is my name,” Baldwin said. “And I wrote Joseph an email and I was like, ‘So am I playing myself or is this supposed to be autobiographical or am I playing a character who just happens to be called Cecil or is it just a coincidence or is it kind of all three together?’ And Joseph was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really everything.’”

In the pilot, which Fink wrote as a sort of road map for the series’ founding idea — an idea, as he once described it, “of a little desert town where all conspiracy theories are true” — Baldwin’s narration has an Ira Glassian remove. “In all honesty, I try and keep things as simple as possible,” he said. Over time, Cecil has come more and more to life, and the performance is deeply sincere. It is also insane, quirked by grudges against townspersons like Telly the barber (who once cut Carlos’ perfect hair before wandering into the desert and losing his mind) and Steve Carlsberg. Fans often draw Cecil with a third eye.

The universe of fictionalized Cecils has grown so large in fact that each has begun friending the other. “I actually found out the other day that someone in South Africa made a Facebook page for Cecil Baldwin and invited me to be friends with Cecil Baldwin,” Baldwin said. “So I had that existential moment where I was like, ‘Should I be friends with myself?’ Now every once in a while, it’ll be like, ‘Cecil Baldwin said…’ And I’m like, ‘That’s right, it’s the weird doppelgänger-Cecil Baldwin who lives in South Africa.’”

Baldwin, who records the podcasts just a few in advance, didn’t see the Cecil/Carlos chemistry straight away. He thought that “because of the weirdness of Night Vale,” Carlos was just the perfect human being, like a “male model who threw on a pair of glasses and a lab coat.” Of course everybody loved him. “But then when the relationship between the two characters started to develop, I was so happy and so pleased,” he said.

It was a determined development (“First Date” was written months ago) that, paradoxically, developed organically: Fink and Cranor don’t map out the series with any great specificity. (It isn’t “Lost.”) And yet, Fink said, “We know these characters very well and so as we build them then, we just made the choices that seemed most honest, that seemed right for where they were going and who they were.”

Cecil rarely gushes on-air, unless he is gushing about Carlos. To date, there are have been four voices heard on the series: Cecil; Cecil’s Desert Bluffs’ counterpart, Kevin; the faceless old woman who lives in your house; and Carlos, who once called Cecil because he suspected that the town of Night Vale didn’t have a single real clock. “Some of them actually contain a gelatinous grey lump that seems to be growing hair and teeth,” he said in a phone message, which Cecil played for listeners.

In “First Date,” listeners learned that Cecil and Carlos had gone to Gino’s Italian Dining Experience and Grill and Bar for dinner, that they had enjoyed the restaurant’s dessert (“non-corporeal” carrot cake), and that afterward the pair ran tests on the trees in Mission Grove Park. All around them, the citizenry were being devoured by a buzzing, shadowy energy, which Carlos later excused himself to battle. All Cecil could talk about was love: “My sweet and only Night Vale, may you find love,” he said in the podcast. “May you find it wherever it’s been hidden. May you find who’s been hiding it and exact revenge upon them.”

“It’s nice to have queer representation in media that doesn’t poke fun at the characters’ relationship,” said Hannah Powers, who runs the fan blog Dark Owl Records.

Baldwin put it another way: “It’s nice that that is the least-weird part about the storyline.”

The “Night Vale” fan community is, as Cecil once described the condition of life itself, both “proud and terrified.”

There is art of almost every part of Night Vale. If it’s been mentioned on-air, it’s probably been drawn. “We kind of locked into this idea that because it is an audio format, people will fill in the blanks in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily get if it was a half-hour TV show,” Baldwin said.

There are two major “Welcome to Night Vale” blogs on Tumblr: Dark Owl Records and The Shape From Grove Park, which curate and reblog fan art and which the series’ creators have the opposite of an objection to. (There is, of course, Fuck Yeah Night Vale.) “Neither Joseph nor I have ever experienced anything like that, of having a fan base of some sort,” Cranor said. “And to take something that you do and to see people repurposing it and making it their own and doing some cool stuff and drawing things that we don’t have because we’re not a show, we’re not a visual medium, we’re a podcast — it’s really amazing to see what people’s ideas are.”

Cranor and Fink have bookmarked several pieces of art already, to buy for possible use in upcoming projects (there are postcards planned, and maybe posters, alongside the preexisting T-shirts). Fink singled out one artist, username: slodwick, who has designed a series of advertisements for the town, in varying shades of purple and green and black.

But there are so many others, particularly images of Cecil and Carlos and Old Woman Josie Who Was Visited by the Angels, which together create a fan-canon (“fanon”) for the town.

“These people are managing thousands and thousands of notes around their illustrations because they’re so weird,” Sebela said.

There is also A Softer Night Vale — a twist on the photo comic A Softer World, which overlays aphoristic text with a triptych of mundane imagery. (Sample: “Look within yourself./But to do that, you’ll need to find your body./The police are still searching. No luck though.”)

There is also an intro guide to the fandom, done entirely in Tumblr’s font-of-record, Comic Sans.

Carly Chwat, who started The Shape From Grove Park, is particularly fond of the fan-created photosets, which combine stock photos, original drawings, and graphics to capture, she said, “the juxtaposition of the creepy and bizarre elements with the small-town positive attitude.” Many of these sets include Zachary Quinto wearing glasses, as a fan-cast celeb-Cecil.

Chwat’s sister, Margaret, introduced her to the podcast. Margaret works nights as a copy editor in a small town in Georgia. “I spend eight hours a day reading and editing local news at my job — all about last night’s school board meeting and information from arrest warrants — so to hear some of the same information but with such ridiculous and terrifying additions as a Pteranodon attack, is really entertaining,” she said.

Margaret assured me that she was not Tumblr famous “at all.” But her “Night Vale” photosets are her most popular posts. “I think people want to see images from what they can’t actually see and build off what others have imagined,” she said.

Fans are marked in their appreciation for and adoration of the Cecil/Carlos relationship. “Shipping,” the pairing of two characters that possibly only exists in a fan’s headcanon, has become a litmus test for fandom. Warring ships have just as easily torn online communities into snappish factions (see also: Who, Doctor; Wolf, Teen; and, back in real life, Direction, One), each prone to lengthy explanations of why my characters are more likely to fall in love than yours and your characters aren’t really in love and oh-my-god shut up. But there’s only one romantic relationship in “Night Vale” and it has stirred little strife, though there are people, Margaret said, who fight over Carlos’ ethnicity. (In episode 16, Carlos is described as a “dark, delicate-skinned scientist.”) “But what I think is the best are the things that are weirdly, unconsciously the same, like most people draw Cecil with glasses,” she said.

Compared to its infant Tumblr presence, the “Night Vale” Twitter-dom is ancient. Founded last August, @NightValeRadio (which Fink runs with Cranor, in super-casual shifts) engages in the usual community interaction (retweets, replies) as well as updates on new episodes and Twitter-only one-liners. (“Current mood: incandescent swamp gas”; or, last Christmas, “A child was born on this day. A very hungry child. He is demanding food. He is so hungry. We are running out of food. He hunts us. Help.”) “For a long time, the Night Vale Twitter had a huge following that didn’t even know it as a podcast,” Fink said.

A child was born on this day. A very hungry child. He is demanding food. He is so hungry. We are running out of food. He hunts us. Help.

— Night Vale podcast (@NightValeRadio) December 25, 2012

One fan recently tweeted, asking for words of wisdom. Fink (or Cranor) responded: “they are written in a long dead language, a strange alphabet, on a buried artifact.”

Fans also exist away from their computers, just as “Night Vale” does. On the anniversary this summer, a party was held, featuring a live performance of the anniversary episode, “One Year Later.” Not every one of the new fans showed up — many of the new fans didn’t yet exist (this was in mid-June, on the cusp of the mushrooming) — but more than 100 did. Next time, there will almost certainly be more-than-100.

Cranor is used to attention, just not so much of it. “It’s much, much different when you’re talking about thousands of people having conversations about what you’re doing and how it positively affects them, and in some cases negatively affects them, and the thing that they really hope to see,” he said. “And the thing I think I’m learning right now is to take all that in, but also block a little of it out.”

In 2009, Fink watched one of Cranor’s performance pieces (discussing a book-burning in view of the book’s ashes); and in 2011, they wrote and performed “What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us.” So far in 2013, there have been 15 episodes of “Welcome to Night Vale.” Baldwin, a friend of Fink’s before all this and an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists, didn’t know how long the project would last when he joined it. No one is talking about the end.

More live shows are planned (one is set for the fall, with some famous-y guests, though few details are final) as is more merchandise. A tour-able show, maybe; video content — all stewarded by Fink’s independent publishing house, Commonplace Books. @NightValeRadio recently announced that a new merchandise store will soon launch. The series is still supported by donations. “We’re trying to make it something sustainable,” Fink said. “We’re looking at the response, we’re looking at what we have, and we think this is something that could actually go somewhere.”

I asked Fink to describe his real-life fans, the ones he met at the anniversary party. He said that they were not unusual. “I have no idea what it’s going to be like now,” he said.

Adam Carlson recently fled Manhattan.

“You could drop a plumb bob from the back of your head and the string wouldn’t hit anything before it hit the ground.”