Some people arrive with the good weather. Freckling is the name for that pattern: a romance that surfaces each summer with someone already in your orbit — a friend of a friend, someone from back home, the person you always seem to run into in July — and then quietly fades as the nights draw in.

The metaphor earns its keep. Freckles aren't new marks; they're already there, waiting for enough light to show up. That's the difference between freckling and an ordinary summer fling. A fling starts with a stranger and ends cleanly. Freckling starts with someone you already know, never formally ends at all, and keeps a low hum of contact going through the winter — the occasional reply, the story view — which is exactly what allows the whole thing to start again next June.

It's the summer mirror of cuffing season, and the two say something similar about us: that a fair amount of romantic behaviour is weather. That isn't necessarily cynical. It only stings when one of you thinks it's a season and the other thinks it's the beginning of something — and the reason freckling can run for years without anybody addressing that is that it never quite ends long enough for the question to come up.