“You can be with someone for an entire year and have it feel like a one-night stand. For 365 days, you can watch the sun rise while lying in bed with someone and want to slip out the door every time. You’d write them a note saying, “Had fun!” or maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d just run like hell.
It’s hard to understand why our feelings can be so ephemeral and betray us so often. You’d like to think you could love a certain someone just because they’re nice and cook you spaghetti and play the right Miles Davis song when you’re ready to have sex, but it’s never that simple. You know this now, but you didn’t know it then.
You’ll meet this person at a party, on the street, through a friend when you’ll be starving for affection. It’s been awhile since you’ve been shown any love, since you’ve been fed, and this person will seem right for the job. Fine. You’re hired. Love me.
In the beginning, everything about them will excite you. Their opinions on Woody Allen (GIVE ME MORE!), their upbringing, their aspirations: it will all be riveting. Study them like an archaeologist would study bones. Look through their history, look for cracks, look to see if they have a problem you aren’t willing to inherit.
Spend the entire weekend together and experience 48 hours of important lovely moments. You’re in your sheets intertwined and losing track of time, going out for a late dinner and maybe getting drunk off beer. You feel alive for the entire weekend. Everything you were doing before this? You were dead.
You sleep together quickly because everyone rushes into bed these days. You like what you see, feel, hear, and you like the idea of their body belonging to yours indefinitely. Yes! You’ll take it. Give me that body, babe.
Two months go by. You go to work, you go to your lover, and you go to dinner with your friends to talk about your lover. “It just feels nice to have somebody, you know? Whatever we have, it’s normal. It’s refreshing.” Say these words over and over even if you don’t know what they exactly mean. Your friend will nod and be happy for you and then there’ll be a pregnant pause, and you’ll have to say, “Enough about me! How’s working at the eating disorder unit at Beth Israel?!” This will be the natural flow of things. This is your life now. These are your dinners, these are your friends. This is it.
After five months, your relationship hit its apex at a noodle bar on Carmine and Bleecker on a Saturday afternoon. Across from you and your significant other, there was a woman by herself reading a book and gingerly eating her soup. She looked sad and frumpy and it made you clutch your lover’s hand that much tighter. You never felt more safe being in a relationship and vowed to never go back to dining at noodle bars alone or going grocery shopping to buy two cups of yogurt, three bananas, noodles and tomato sauce. Actually, you’re not sure if you ever did those things. You always eat out with your friends and you use FreshDirect for your groceries. Whatever. The point is that you never felt more secure in being with someone than you did that day.
And then things begin to dissolve into crumpled wrapping paper. You start to get annoyed at them for things that would’ve made you smile two months earlier. You bring your lover on an outing with your friends and they get too drunk. Your face turns red with embarrassment and you apologize profusely saying, “I don’t even know this person right now.” One night, while making dinner in your kitchen, they tell you a joke that makes you angry instead of laugh. “Do you know that you just ruined dinner? ‘Cause you did.”
They didn’t return your Netflix video. They need to shave. They need a new face for when they orgasm because the one they have now sucks. These things all add up and get put in a box labeled, “Over it.”
Think about who your lover really is. Know every little detail of their life, about their strained relationship with their mother, about the time they cried in front of a convenience store. Know it all and begin to understand that it doesn’t mean shit.
Come to the shocking conclusion that you have nothing in common with this person. Realize you’re the best at tricking yourself, at creating tender moments to avoid being the lonely woman in the noodle bar. You can laugh, smile, get turned on and orchestrate a perfect relationship. That’s not to say all of it is fake. That would be…scary. You did look at your lover and feel warm inside and care for their well-being. You took them to the ER when they had stomach pains and you were happy to do it. That was all real. You were hoping it would eventually become less exhausting and more natural though. It never did. Your happiest moment together had nothing to do with them, it had to do with you no longer being alone.
They know you’re gone. You’re here lying in bed with them, but you’re actually at the beach, you’re shopping for boots, you’re busy at work and not loving them.
You’ll tell them in your apartment right before your anniversary and they’ll grow silent. Finally, they’ll develop an edge in their voice and say, “You’re incapable of loving. You’re broken. Damaged goods. Good luck with that.”
Their anger will turn you on and you’ll respond, “I’m not incapable of loving. I’m just incapable of loving you.”
And that’s a wrap on a one-year stand. They are ctrl+alt+deleted from your life that moment forward. You’ll miss them sometimes, but mostly you’ll just be scared that they were right about you being damaged. Know that there’s only one way to find out.”
-Ryan O’Connell
