“Her life would be so much easier if she would just stop dating douchebags,” we say, “All his problems would magically go away if he could learn how to stick to a budget.” When it comes to the troubled patterns and self-destructive choices of others, we are Ivy League-educated psychiatrists, armed with stacks of dusty books and smug glances over the top of our understated glasses, ready to diagnose and call it a day to go back to our mahogany apartments and sip chianti. But when it’s us dating said douchebags, or spending our money irresponsibly, or hanging out with the kind of social group that exists only to make us feel unworthy, these problems are brand-new, mystifying, and completely unsolvable.
“What are we doing?”
“We’re” – I thought for a moment – “Sitting by a fire in your backyard.”
“Yeah, but us. What are we doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to be done with me in like five days? We just started dating, I mean we just met, I hardly know a damn thing about you. Just-“ She always had a problem finishing sentences, I would learn.
“I’m not going to be done with you in five days.”
“But how do you know?”
“I don’t. In all likelihood we’re going to break up. You’re right. I don’t think that we’ll end up getting married. I don’t think that will be our ending. But between right now and that breakup we have so much to experience together and so many opportunities, it’s pointless to think about the end right now.”
If you were to go on a date and tell the person you are sitting across from that you require your mate be “spontaneous, charming, loving, funny, a great dancer, a sharp dresser, a dynamo in bed, tall, whip-smart, aggressive but not too aggressive, sexy but doesn’t know it, driven, an avid reader, loyal, great with kids, well-endowed but not too well-endowed and fluent in at least one other language,” do you think they’ll line up for a second date? If you were to put that out as an OKCupid ad, would anyone respond?
When you have standards, it allows you to set goals in your life and hold yourself accountable to the relationships you have and the person you want to become. (Fact: I love those Oprah goal boards. I go apeshit over that stuff.) But the problem isn’t that people have too high of standards; it’s that they have the wrong standards, ones they don’t require of themselves. This is because they’ve been taught to want the wrong things, on attaining perfection and this impossible notion of “having it all,” as if that were even possible. Life is not Stepford or Sex and the City, and you can’t have it all: Not at work, the buffet at Golden Corral or the take out menu at Mr. Taco. I can’t even get it all from my vibrator (who I would marry if it were a human being), so why should I expect that from my love life? And so many people get stuck on that—thinking you “deserve” Prince Charming with a 401K and a Benz—that many can’t accept the relationships that are in front of us.
Tell me you love me, even if you don’t. Chances are you don’t. This is why it’s the last time. Because you don’t love me anymore and can’t bear to pretend otherwise. That’s okay. That’s fine. Whatever. Just get to work.
The last few times we had sex were terrible. I knew you were falling out of love with me with every single thrust, so I’m owed this. I’m owed one last amazing f–k. I deserve it. I deserve to be lied to. Give it to me.
Don’t play music. That’s too cheap. That’s an easy way out and this isn’t supposed to easy. This will be the hardest sex you’ve ever had. I want to hear every moan, every groan, every labored exhale. I want to hear the unflattering “smack, smack” sound of your body going into mine, the sound we all abhor during sex and pretend not to hear.
Silence.
We often take for granted how precious a thing it is to be a best friend, how many people can’t freely use that term, how many have never experienced that very particular kind of love. When you think about it, to pronounce someone in your life as being more important than all of those other friends somehow, as being on a different plane of relationship that, despite not being romantic, is still profoundly important, is incredible. So many wait for the cue from their most-beloved friend to be able to tack on the profound, terrifying modifier of “best.” Who wants to be the person who prematurely proclaims the other their one-and-only-best-friend, when they were not ready to take that leap themselves? It’s the “I love you” of platonic relationships, and to be able to securely declare that with someone is a privilege not bestowed upon everyone.
It’s hard to remember the time before I loved you. It exists all in some kind of vague, dull haze — a primordial soup of half-feelings and tired complacency. I know that it was good at the time, that I felt the peaks and valleys of happiness just as acutely as I do now, but I can’t remember it. It’s as though life was in black-and-white then, that every edge was dulled and noise muffled, and I didn’t know that color was an option. It was perfectly acceptable to go through life in this cloudy facsimile of what life could actually be, unaware that so much could change with the addition of a certain kind of love. How could I have known that the grass could be this Technicolor green, that morning coffee could be so deep and rich and sweet, that clouds could stand out so perfectly puffy-white against a sky too blue to look at? I wish I didn’t know this world, that you hadn’t shown it to me, because I can’t ever go back to the muted one I lived in before.
You deserve someone better than me because I will never be able to love you. You know this. I know this. You knew it the second you met me. You knew the score, you knew the only dynamic that could conceivably work between us, and you agreed to be the one who’s loved less. You. Not me. Now we’re both paying for it in our own ways.
I want a love that will breathe life back into my sleeping viscera. I want a love that crushes my past half-lives into a fine dust, a love that obliterates the crumpled strung out papery cutouts, a love that scribbles the last word and seals the letter. I want a love that will change me, alter me, add to me; spin new neural networks in my brain matter like shiny silver webs. I want a love that will make the word itself feel heavy, oversaturated with a strange, exhilarating weight.
No, I don’t want to be reasonable. I don’t want to make the “responsible choice” — I know you’re not it but you’re what I want. I want you because I can’t chart you, because I don’t want to chart you, because even if I did I wouldn’t know how. I don’t want to schedule time with you. I don’t want to schedule life with you. I don’t want to fit you into my surroundings like a piece of furniture. You have too many sharp edges.
You scare the shit out of me and I like it that way.
But sometimes it was hard for me to discern why I slept with the boys that I did. Was it stemming from actual desire or did it come from some bizarre sense of obligation? Did I really want to sleep with the boy I had nothing in common with or was I just 22 and in dire need of life experiences? By dating different men, I thought I would learn new things about myself. I could contribute my own tales of sexual woe to the conversation with my friends and feel included in the happenings of their life. Most importantly, I could think that I was normal, that I was having the healthy amount of sex a boy my age was supposed to be having. At times, it felt like I was just following a script, crossing off my lines, and turning the page.
Maybe I would’ve felt differently about sex if I cared about most of the people I was with. I tried, I tried, and I tried to muster up some feelings that resembled love — these were all good men, not one-night-stands — but the more I tried, the worse I felt and was certain that I was broken somehow. Damaged goods. That’s what dick taught me. That was my takeaway lesson from sex. You have trouble connecting. You have trouble finding ones that “get it.” You have trouble finding your tribe.
Your worst fear is suddenly realizing that it all counted for something. Your mistakes did have consequences. The people you dated and quickly disposed of all added up to something; they all kept you away from really figuring out how to really love someone else. “There are so many other fishes in the sea,” you tell yourself. “I can keep dating nobodies until I find a somebody. I’m young, My heart can take it.”
Time moves slowly until it doesn’t, until all of a sudden you realize that it’s been years since you’ve had something real and you’re moving farther and farther away from where you want to be. Are you becoming damaged goods? Are you becoming someone you would’ve pitied five years ago? Tick tock, tick tock.
