Like many kids who grew up in the 90’s heyday of rom coms, I was indoctrinated into the culture of grand romantic gestures and happily ever afters – Billy Crystal running across Manhattan to declare his love for Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, Health Ledger parading himself across a football stadium for the forgiveness of Julia Styles in 10 Things I Hate About You. Drew Barrymore writing an apology op-ed to be met on the baseball field in Never Been Kissed. I loved love. I fixated on romantic relationships. Except I didn’t really know what either of those entailed, what I wanted out of them, or what I wanted them to look like for me. My relationship orientation could have best been described as Meredith Gray’s speech to Derrick in Season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy. “Pick me. Choose Me. Love me.” Every other consideration was secondary.
I went on dating apps in college in the days that Ok Cupid was pretty much the only game in town. I was determined to find a boyfriend outside the incestuous partner-swapping I was observing in my college conservatory program. Turns out living in the East Village and being a college student with a budding alcohol dependency and low self-esteem makes you a prime candidate for the dating rotations of mid-late 20s musicians. And so it went. I’d meet someone. We’d fuck around. Then, I’d fall into bouts of compulsive fantasizing about my future with men that I barely knew. Eventually they’d tell me they didn’t see anything serious with me, and I’d cry to my friends like a good ol’ stereotype over a pint of ice cream and a lot of liquor about why I wasn’t good enough and why everyone was bound to leave me after they got to know me. Then go out and find someone else to “pick me” for however long until we started the cycle all over again. Trying to be chosen by men became so second nature to me that it barely occurred to me until I was 28 years old that I was, well . . . a lotta bit gay. Pansexual if you want to get technical about it. Queerness is a wonderful invitation to unlearn many ingrained presumptions we have about romance, but the “pick me” cycle didn’t dissipate when I learned more about my sexuality; I just changed my preference settings.
As Karim Nader points out in “The Gamification of Online Dating,” dating apps create a culture of validation and gamification that makes this easy. Something ends and you log in and continue the game of getting as many people as you can to “super like” you on Tinder. I opened the apps the night my boyfriend of three years and I broke up. I started swiping the night that I moved to a new city. Before my Wi-Fi was set up. Apparently curing my aching loneliness was worth the data usage. Am I blaming the apps for this? No, I’m blaming some heavily addictive behavior patterns, childhood trauma, and maladaptive coping mechanisms. But the apps sure do profit off it. To their credit, I have met some gorgeous humans and one of my current best friends on the apps. Many many people (including NYC’s new mayor) have used it to meet their partners. When used for authentic connection, they are great.
This cycle really came to a head after I spent a summer going on one to two dates a week, to dismal success. I was also sober, doing intentional healing work, and was (am) working with a trauma-informed, queer affirming therapist who specializes in relationship therapy. I was slowly but surely starting to get intentional about dating. The summer came to a close with me telling a woman I was seeing that I was looking for a relationship and I wanted to try one with her. A week later, she ran. My therapist swore to me that this was just part of the process of determining if someone wants what you want. Part of that process was stating it and risking the answer. Nice try therapist, but I think I was too much.
On New Year’s Eve I decided to try an experiment and formally delete the apps for a year. By New Year’s Day I’d already met a hottie friend of a friend. I asked them out but after a few hangs they felt friendship vibes. “Am I fuckable?” I texted our mutual friend. As if that had to be the reason.
I met a person in an organizing space who was solo poly and after finally finishing Polysecure reaffirmed that was not for me. A woman asked me out at a work event then after some mutual excitement told me that the way our brands of trauma rubbed up against one another was just a bit too activating for her at the time. I asked a friend, “What is my work here?” He said, “Your work is recognizing that people are going to be who they are – and to stop taking that personally.”
Maybe. But I think I’ll work on my communication.
I finally got the nerve to ask out a stunning sober woman I’d been crushing on. She joked on our fifth date about teaching me about thread counts in a sexy ASMR voice while we shopped at Ikea together and I was like, this is my wife. By this point, my understanding of what I wanted had changed; and what I wanted was to co-create a life with someone who wanted to live together, might engage in a discussion about having a kid, and was open to exploring connections with other people down the line. There were incompatibilities from the start. But we fell so deeply in love.
Our relationship was playful, sexy, and more healthy and communicative than either of us had ever experienced. Our sobriety meant that we shared a vocabulary for taming the part of ourselves that is seduced by destruction and a commitment to, as she would say, “loving life and wanting to live!” We went on trips together, saw art, met family and friends. We told each other eagerly and often how amazing and gobsmackingly attractive we thought the other was. We let our wounds show up with as much awareness over our own bullshit as either of us could muster and tried to work through it with our individual communities and with each other. But I was always several steps ahead and to the left of her in what I could imagine and felt ready for.
One night, after many painful conversations spent trying to get on the same page, I told her that I would hold space for her to be ready for a deeper level of intimacy, but I was on a limb in our relationship. At a certain point, I needed her to get on it with me. This was kind of my version of the Meredith Gray speech, but I wasn’t just asking her to choose me, I was asking her to choose a vision and a clarity of what I wanted for my life. I was asking her to want it with me.
She couldn’t get on the limb. There’s a Nayriyah Waheed poem that starts with “Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge.” A friend texted it to me immediately.
No no no no no no. If someone is in love with you they run across Manhattan for you. They hire the high school band to play “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” They show up at the baseball field. They meet you on the goddamn bridge! And if they don’t – I hate to break it to you –it’s you.
I tried to blame myself, I really did. Maybe because of how deeply I felt her love for me. Maybe because of the years of recovery and therapy. Maybe the pain of losing her was already so fully unbearable, I had to consider that all of my usual self-effacing stories were hyperbole at best.
It finally sunk in: thinking every break up I didn’t choose was about me was actually a way of feeling in control of what was distinctly not in my control. Yes, the way we show up in relationships does impact their outcome (can control). Yes, breakups are often a great opportunity to do a little self-reflection (can control). But what another person wants, doesn’t want, is working through, is ready for, likes about me, doesn’t like about me, etc. etc. is, NOT IN MY CONTROL. I’d developed the self-protective idea that if I were just hot enough, smart enough, funny enough, successful enough, healed enough, that I could avoid heartbreak. Thus, breakups felt extra painful. Buddhists might refer to this as the second arrow of suffering. The idea of the second arrow states that we have a natural human emotional response to something happening, then we add a second arrow rooted in self-blame. The first arrow (pain) is inevitable. The second arrow (suffering) is optional.
The truth is that her ending our relationship was one of the most profound acts of love that I have ever experienced. How beautiful to say to someone, I love you, and I will lose you if it means that you are free to find what you want and need. Getting my heart decimated would not have been my choice way to unlearn the idea that relationships are a game of being chosen, but pain is often the universe’s way of delivering our greatest lessons. In truth, it was necessary for me to be ready to be met on the bridge. I have faith that someday someone will, and there will be more to unlearn.
Image Credit: Grey's Anatomy