So That If We Break Up

This piece originally appeared on the blog Everyone Except You in May 2018.

There’s an episode of Happy Endings (the underrated canceled-after-3-seasons-network-cable-take-on-Friends) in which the main character Penny makes a list of her boyfriend’s most unlikable traits. She is in a super happy relationship, finally –the healthiest by far in the series—and naturally, her boyfriend is confused. Boyfriend Pete is hurt by all of the things he’s accused of, and of course, doesn’t understand why they’re together if there are so many things that bother her about him. She explains that she does this with every guy she dates; she’s dated so many guys that she ended up breaking up with, she started making a list of their not-so-favorable traits to look and make her feel better in the aftermath—to convince herself that they weren’t really meant to be together after all. (“So that if we break up, I can console myself with his many weaknesses and such.”)

I’ve always been so intrigued (and amused) by this idea (one her qualms is that he pronounces “quinoa” wrong), but too terrified to bring myself to actually do it.

For starters, it falls a little too handily into the trap my brain has very successfully set up for itself: focusing on the negative aspects of a thing that has many aspects to it, some positive, some negative, some neutral (it’s fun to describe your significant other like an operating system).

In a more real way, the list would force me to reckon with two things: 1. The possibility of the relationship ending, and 2. That there might be actual, tangible things that I don’t like about the person I’m sharing a considerable amount of my time and body with. And the possibility (well, reality) that the human being I might choose to spend the rest of my life with has…flaws?

And really, those are the only two outcomes of a relationship: you break up or stay together forever (with a flawed human being  - as we all are). Or one of you dies.

So! Why are these options so horrifying? Well, we’ve all cried in the driver’s seat of our Mazda to Taylor Swift, so we understand the terror of having to experience heartbreak. But what about simply choosing the wrong person? Maybe not even the wrong person, but - the Person Who Is Exactly Right For You? How do we avoid the anonymous late 40s, stuck in a dead-end, passion-less, joyless, anxiety-inducing relationship because you were super into each other when you were both young and hot but maybe you didn’t really know each other that well and also you’ve grown apart and become different people with different perspectives on the world in middle age? As you can tell, I’ve barely hyperventilated about this at all.

As Penny learned once she entered a Real Relationship, there are real things that are kind of a bummer about the person you’ve already shared so much time with. You don’t really notice them at first, because, shiny distractions: pretty eyelashes (my boyfriend’s are honestly great), weird tattoos, sex, funny cat videos, actual cats, getting drunk and making out in public, making up dumb nicknames for each other, and I guess, eventually, love.

We as a society can't even really agree on what "love" or "falling in love" is (I will refer you to: the entire history of novels, films, music, and poetry), and yet we let it explain a lot of our decisions. Trying to describe how it feels to fall in love is like trying to explain what it feels like to be stoned: there is no arrangement of words that exactly describes the cloudy, hazy feeling - and you're too giggly to think about it too hard anyways. To continue the drug metaphor: when you're in it, you're not worried about how you feel so much as you're worried about not losing that feeling. I would be more careful about this analogy except...studies show that the experience of being in love is like being on cocaine. The good news is: if you're open to entering the illegal drug trade, and seriously compromising your nasal health, you will never have to swipe through Tinder again.

When I hear people talking about falling in love, it always sounds like it happened in a big swoop, a whoosh of air that swept them up and never put them down. When I think of falling in love, I think of a collection of moments, and the feelings that exist inside of those moments. The most intense of those feelings in the most intense of those moments feels very similar to: being 11 and laughing with your best friend at the 2 in the morning about a joke that isn’t actually very funny, and the pure good-ness of the vibe isn't found in the quality of the joke or the circumstance of hanging out with your friend but in the weird, super-fun giddiness of staying up too late and goofing around with your favorite person in the whole world.

But, it’s safer. Love is not safer (best friends usually stick around longer than "lovers", u kno), but it feels safer in the moment in which you are experiencing it. (Love is a tricky bish). Sometimes in life, things feel so great that it makes you realize the feeling is entirely ephemeral; as great as the thing is (look at the beautiful sunset!) you're immediately wracked with panic that the moment is ending and you might not feel this way ever again (the sunset is fading!). But love has a sneaky way of making you think this feeling you’re feeling is so good that it HAS to last forever. At the very least – you know now that if this person has made you feel this way once, they will (could) make you feel this way again. 

This is when falling in love starts to make you feel like a crazy person. You might not be able to see that person 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to feel this good all of the time - but what feels like an appropriate stand-in for that is thinking about that person 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Turning over and over in your head that thing they said to you, and just the way they said it, and just the way they were looking at you when they said it. Compiling a calendar of events in your head where you can go and show off in front of all your cooler friends how in love and loved you are. Writing dialogue for both parts of conversations about love, life, and how fucking great you both are - conversations that you'll never have. You will stop paying attention in class so you can relive the same stupid memory of seeing his doofy fucking smile look at you over the top of the covers over and over and over again. You will miss your stop on the train because you were too busy making up a scenario about how, at your wedding, he'll surprise you with a well-choreographed Love Actually/10 Things I Hate About You combo reference, in which (as if I need to explain), he'll sing "Cant' Take My Eyes Off of You" live, accompanied  by a full brass band that pops up out of balconies. And then will say to yourself, oh, I missed my stop, none of that happened nor will it ever happen, I am a crazy person. And then you will keep doing it.

After you get past this insane psychotic infatuation phase, if you do, you congratulate each other on how far you’ve made it while realizing you don’t feel that hype about each other anymore. This is only sane and healthy. Aziz Ansari’s book Modern Love made the point that if we all lived our lives in the throes of Honeymoon Phase (staying up all night talking and doin’ it) we would never get anything done. Love is practical or it is not sustainable.

It's also complicated; it’s not always fucking patient, or kind. It's such a powerful and wonderful thing in our lives, but that doesn't cancel out the things that people who love you do to you. Because it is the people that you love and trust most in the world that will hurt you the most - for the very reason that you love and trust them so much.

This is where – at least for me – the real serious doubt starts thundering in. It’s not the early-relationship, what-are-we/does-he-actually-like-me insecurity. It’s next level uncertainty; Oscar-nominated, starring Doubt, starring Meryl Streep and Viola Davis. (Plays Should Never Be Movies Unless They’re Musicals: Change My Mind).

Those (not frequent, but present) miscommunications, brainless mistakes, scary parent dinners, drunk 3am fights, snippy moods, and biting words. Are they all… for a reason? For some higher purpose, like, dare I say, marriage? The forever thing? Or – is there someone else out there in the giant world that would decrease the frequency of the Bad Things in the Relationship by, I don't know, 10%? By 40%? Is it worth it to give up this incredibly good, amazing, fun, cool thing that would kill you to lose to see if you can find this other Soulmate person that might very well not exist?

Here I am again, focusing on the negative.

What I need to do - is the opposite of the faults list. The Reasons I Love Him List, the Good Qualities List! And I'll look at that when I’m feeling not so sure, when I’m feeling all my dumb scratchy nagging feelings.

Like love, it’ll be a collection of memories. The time he baked me cookies on my “first day of school” teaching in an extracurricular program, as a nod to my mother’s longstanding tradition of fresh-baked First Day of School chocolate chip cookies. The day I went to the hospital (for "nausea," I'm fine) and he left work to come rummage 75 blankets around me all day. The first time he told me he loved me; it was the summer in my parent’s house. He told me he knew he loved me when he saw me with my family.

What! This list is already so much better.

In conclusion, relationships are just a matter of settling for someone whose collection of “good” qualities outshines their collection of “bad” ones; thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

JK kidding! (As my college ex-boyfriend would say.)

A relationship is never going to be boiled down into “a list of things I do like” versus “a list of things I don't like.” This has always been my issue with pro/con lists in the first place: one list may be longer than the other, but don't some pros hold more emotional or practical weight than their respective cons, and vice versa? Relationships are not a list of quantifiables that align closely enough to create a nice partnership (although they would be way easier if they were).

But, if they’re not that, then…how do you know?

I mean, if you’re not one of those people who just knows. If you’re one of those people who questions everything – good for critical-thinking in liberal arts college classrooms, not so good for Boyfriends.

2018 Love Culture is tellin’ you you should know. That you will know when you meet The One. That you have a One, and you should never stop climbing mountains and swimming across oceans to find the One. Or I guess in “now” speak, you should mine the bars, restaurants, dating apps, and yoga classes for the One True Spirit Friend that will fulfill your every need and desire and craving. When you know, you know, you know??? The worst part about these statements is the assumed universality of them. I mean, I know I love him. Then what?

I don’t know.

The world in which some of my friends/acquaintances from high school are years deep into marriage, with a child or two, is the exact same world in which it can take me two to three hours to decide what to have to for lunch (I start considering options around 10am). These peers, that are supposedly my “maturity level,” have found another weird, broken, idiot (how I would describe anyone), and said: “Yep! You are the one I want to spend Saturdays with scraping grout out of the bathroom tiles. You will wash out my hair when I puke in it and I’m too sick to do it myself. You are the person who will check me into a cool, art-deco assisted living center. But! For several decades preceding that, you’ll be the person with whom I’ll fight about parallel parking in a clunky rental car and with whom I’ll sit next to at a restaurant while we silently scroll through our phones.”

I’m not saying I don’t believe these 20-somethings when they say they’re found their soulmate. I’m just saying it’s amazing to me that they know anything at all that definitively that they’re willing to (have their parents) shell out $10 - $50,000 (??) on an event that announces it to everyone they’ve ever known, rather publicly entering into something that is very socially awkward, expensive, and emotionally ravaging to get out of. If I sound down on marriage, I don’t mean to be. It seems, for many people, a source of life and iridescence and grace (and hey, divorce rates are going down).

But here’s the thing – what if the human I share an apartment with, who has gotten drunk over Korean BBQ with my dad, who I’ve flown across half the world with (these prepositions are killing me, too), who has a personalized stocking on the fireplace at my family Christmas, and the person with whom I’ve shared most of my favorite music and memories and versions of myself - what if it … doesn’t work out?

One obstacle (potential List item) is that his favorite film is Movie With Strong Man that Makes Loud Bang Noises (I assume there’s only one). Other than this glaring personality flaw, which I suppose I can overlook, people change. Like, maybe five years from now he’ll get really into LARPing and only want to share his life with someone who shares his passion for live action role play. Maybe in ten years we’ll want different things out of life. Maybe life will get too hard and busy and we won’t be able to focus on each other.

Maybe none of this happen, and we’ll be chillin’ forever.

When I ask the universe for some kind of sign (I know, shut up), to show me like, which of the three Relationship Alternate Endings my character ends up in (break up, marriage, or death), I don’t get much back.

If anything, it’s saying (in a vibes-y type of way. I am not hearing Universe voices, in case you were worried): “fucking calm down for a second. You don’t need figure everything out right now.” So then, I look around at what I have. I ask myself if I am doing the kinds of things I want to spend my time doing. If I’m heading towards a direction I’m excited about. If being around this person makes me a more better, less worse person. If this real, live, beautiful, breathing, laughing, farting person is one thousand percent better than some false hypothetical dude that never hurts your feelings (the obvious exception being Mr. Rogers, of course).

The universe (and I would imagine God) doesn’t tell you the answers to 8 Ball questions like “Will I be with my boyfriend forever???” She is not a future teller, girl. But also, the answer to that question is definitely not going to come from the outside world.

What the universe seems to be constantly reminding me to focus on is: Right Now. I am okay, right now. And the reason I’m okay right now is a direct result of all of the choices and life forces that have pushed and pulled me here. I chose the person in my life who makes it better – and he is making it better right now. The universe can’t really see past right now, and neither can I.

You're okay, right now. So the universe says.

What about tomorrow? I ask. (I can’t help it).

Look at your love! It shouts at me. It’s here now. Don't waste it.Stop trying to figure out if it’s going to be exactly the same tomorrow.