It seems like a shame—and possibly a personal failure—that,
at the age of 34, I don’t have any experience with “staying friends.”
I know it’s not entirely my fault. I came of age during a
weird cultural moment for intimacy. The Internet, Dan Savage, and
Days of Our Lives have pretty much
equally shaped my thinking on relationships. I believe that the human heart,
like the ocean, is a beautiful, strange, and dangerous landscape governed by
flux, predation, and mystical vibrations. I believe that monogamy is, at best,
problematic and statistically uncertain. I believe that your true love can turn into a person
possessed by the devil in the time it takes to watch three commercials.
In this milieu, it seems like some of the happiest couples
I know are the ones who are no longer together, people who found a way to
evolve their relationships after the romance part went south. Given that half
of marriages end in divorce, this chameleon-like ability to adapt seems like
cultural necessity, and maybe even biological imperative.
Kate Bolick, a journalist who has become my cohort’s
unofficial PR rep, described this brave new world really well in
“All the Single Ladies,”
her high-profile essay about unmarried women that ran in
The Atlantic
last year. “One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers’
was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex,” she wrote.
“Men were our classmates and
colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and
employees and subordinates—an entire universe of prospective friends,
boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even
ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid,
and roles constantly changing.”
I had intensely mixed feelings about that piece as a whole.
At one point, I actually started a list of all the things about it that
bothered me, but then I was like, you know what? My blog isn’t college. (A few
months later, I would go through exactly the same process with Lena Dunham’s Girls.) Suffice it to say I find it depressing that
someone had to write a 10,000-odd word essay explaining why it’s okay for
ladies to not get married. Like, we are at least ten steps behind where we need
to be as a society if the editors at The Atlantic think that is in any way appropriate, much less
progressive.
Putting aside for the moment the article’s weirdly
outdated Sex and the City-esque
graphics, Bolick’s closing image—the
“iconic medieval bastion of single-sex living” where Ellen, an ex-pat with
“smiling red-painted lips,” has a tiny apartment—struck me as vaguely sinister.
Surely there is another “place where single women can live and thrive as
themselves” that doesn’t have single beds and a policy against gentleman
callers? Gah.
At the same time, other parts of the article really
resonated with me. I especially appreciated the more personal sections of
Bolick’s story, which were far more interesting to me than the other case
studies and her (really rather iffy) anthropological argument.
For instance, I was moved by her account of shopping with
her ex-boyfriend for his wedding suit. To me it perfectly captured how former
lovers can (should?) flit in and out of one another’s lives in increasingly
complex contexts and configurations, merrily co-existing like characters in an
upbeat soap opera.
My own love life has been much more dramatic and bleak, more
like a telenovela, if telenovelas were written by Cormac McCarthy. Every guy
I’ve ever loved has become, in the fullness of time, a stranger staring up at
me from a pile of old photos like a missing person’s face on the back of a milk
carton. One day they’re just gone.
Kate Bolick, on the other hand. Somehow her suit-shopping
anecdote struck me as the pinnacle of serenity. Her appropriate, rational,
healthy behavior made me feel all too aware of my own tendency towards total
romantic apocalypse.
In particular, the photo of the author calmly sipping a
glass of champagne seemed to me a grotesque parody of the Mezcal-fueled blowout
fight I had recently had with D, a good friend and longtime Person of Interest
in the ash-covered hellscape that is my romantic life.
It’s ironic, really, that my friendship with D was built on
the back of a one-night stand. We were freelancers working on a long in-house
project who ended up going home together after another colleague’s karaoke
birthday night. (I don’t even know what to say. Some days I think I’m pretty
cool and then other days it’s like I’m living in an Everybody Loves Raymond plot.) When one night became two, I told D that I
thought we should pursue it. He said no thanks, so we found ourselves in the
awkward position of continuing to share a workspace. Our first day back he
walked into my cubicle and, without saying a word, sat on my desk and handed me
half of his peanut butter cookie.
It was a simple gesture, but it was exactly right. It opened
a door in our nascent friendship, which I had been prepared to write off for the
sake of convenience. We became closer after the project ended. We emailed a
lot. We went to concerts. We went to movies and dinners and drinks. We stayed
out really late. Increasingly, we made out in bars and on street corners while
we waited for taxis. (Kind of gross, I know. Sorry, mom.) Then finally, one
night, we started going home in the same taxi.
A self-proclaimed paragon of modern values, I tried not to
worry too much about labels. I was so tired of overthinking, so ready to embark
upon a new era of my life in which I would be super cool instead of perpetually
worried and weird. I was careless under the pretense of feeling hopeful,
drinking too many Manhattans and artisanal beers to dull the clanging alarm
bells that I willfully wrote off as neuroticism. The old me.
For a while that worked pretty well. And as much as I liked
sharing taxis, that was almost secondary to the friendship, which I treasured.
D’s the rare sort of person who makes you feel like the best possible version
of yourself. I liked going to shows and tapping his shoulder to tell him about
the songs with lyrics that, as a teenager, I printed on notebook paper and
taped to my bedroom wall. I liked crafting witty emails that poked fun at his
absurd acting classes. I liked watching his favorite movies and talking about
his screenplays. I liked sitting in his kitchen and looking at his bookshelves
and drinking his coffee. I even liked the stupid dance he did when he made the
eggs.
Boundaries can get really blurry when you have a friendship
like that, but the facts on the ground seemed simple enough. I knew that I
liked him, that he liked me back, and that we both liked peanut butter cookies,
and as stupid as it sounds that somehow added up to this sort of dream logic
that made me feel sure our friendship would be absolutely fine no matter what.
I held up the memory of that cookie like a talisman as the signs became increasingly
clear that we needed to make a change, one way or the other, and that we had
different ideas about what that change should be.
Turns out while half a cookie can work miracles in the
confines of a cubicle, it’s no match for whatever chemical reaction must occur
when a boy tries to teach you to play his ukulele. And half of ALL the cookies
couldn’t even touch how bad I felt the night we went out to celebrate D’s
birthday—after we went to the movies, after I’d taken him to my favorite place
to eat oysters, after we ducked into the first dive down the block because it
was raining so hard—when he folded his hands and told me he wanted to have a
“serious talk.”
It pains me to admit that I did not comport myself in the
calm cool manner befitting a self-proclaimed paragon of modern values having a
serious talk with her good friend and paramour on the night of his birthday
celebration. “You’re right,” my idea of me might have said. “The degree to
which I enjoy your stupid egg-making dance is troubling, to be sure.” Instead,
I got so upset that he had to take me home, where about a year’s worth of dippy
friends-forever dream logic devolved into a waking nightmare of ugly psycho
tears and bitter accusations.
When the worst of that had passed, D, who has somehow
remained Kate Bolick-style besties with every ex and friend with benefits he’s
ever had, held my hand and patiently explained how the next phase would work. Soon
we’ll get dinner and check in with each other, he said. The difficult part is
always the end of the night. It’s going to be awkward at first. It’s going to
be hard.
His honesty was always something I admired and aspired to.
Okay, I said. We’ll get dinner. I gripped his hand and felt
very bleak, but also very brave and mature.
And something else. After he left, I threw up for two days.
Thus began our new life together as friends without
benefits. You could say it set the tone.
R told me I have plenty of friends. She told me about
something called the benefit-to-burden ratio, a formula she uses to evaluate
potential treatments for hospice patients. She said sometimes the benefit isn’t
worth the burden. Sometimes you let it die.
Medical professionals don’t understand the world in terms of
cookies, I gather, so it was hard to know where to begin.
Slide 1: You see, the cookie is a symbol, sort of like
those friendship necklaces.
Slide 2: Peanut butters are my favorite!
Slide 3: In conclusion, the benefit of being special
cookie friends far outweighs the burden of conducting the special cookie
friendship in an ash-covered hellscape.
I want us to stay close, he wrote in an email around
Christmas. Let’s go to brunch. Let’s go the movies.
I told him I wanted those things, too. (I did. I do.) I love
brunch. I love movies. And I suppose I love him (not like that), though that’s
not really a word I use with my friends unless I’m signing a card acknowledging
some milestone occasion.
I thought that love would be enough to fuel the transition.
That my desire to talk about all the other stuff that makes a life would trump
the one terrible moment in time that was our serious talk. That I could sign on
for something so benign as a brunch and be like, hey, did your cousin have his bastard
child yet?
And yet, for the last nine
months, I have found myself utterly unable to do so. Far from having embarked
on a new era of super coolness, it turns out I’m more worried and weird than
ever. The very thought of having brunch with him fills me with Victorian-grade
melancholy and dread, the kind that makes me want to go lie down. The kind that
did, in fact, make me lie down for the better part of, oh, two months.
It’s a grim enterprise, trying to reason with your own
dread. It really detracts from the perverse satisfaction you can find in
feeling sad.
I have tried to explain to myself in all earnestness that
change is a part of life that is inevitable—essential, even—and that to fear it
is not only futile, but is also sort of missing the whole point.
Shut up, my dread said. Seriously, ugh.
When it became clear I couldn’t talk myself out of my dread,
I decided I would rise above it. Indeed, I would renounce it! I SHALL EAT THE BRUNCH. I said this to myself in a booming Gandalf voice to make it clear
I meant business.
But that didn’t work either. So finally I was like, okay.
The prospect of exchanging the occasional newsletter-style email with this
person for the rest of my life fills me with even more dread than the prospect of a nightmare brunch. The window
is closing. Buck up.
They have already started, those emails. They have already
stopped. Presumably, his cousin’s bastard has long since been born.
Who knows? D could have his own bastard by now.
I want to take everyone I’ve ever kissed off the backs of
their milk cartons and cast them as characters in my upbeat soap opera. I want
to join my single-lady sisters in the Promised Land, where we all shop for
wedding suits with our former lovers. I want to wear a pretty dress and drink
champagne and write about my paramours for The Atlantic. We can all get together and laugh over steaks or
something. We can go to yoga and meditate side by side, totally comfortable and
serene in the way that only old friends can be, without any of us ever emitting
a single psychic death ray.
Staying friends, yeah, I like the idea. But what I think
never seems to count for much in these situations. There is only what I feel.
Only the airless depths of my stupid inscrutable heart. Only the lingering wish
that I could have handled it better.
A few months before our serious talk, D’s car was stolen.
One afternoon he went out to run an errand and it wasn’t where he had parked
it.
It took five minutes for the police to take the report over
the phone, and that was that—no fanfare.
It’s weird, he told me, when something you take for granted
disappears. One day it’s just gone, like it never existed.
Yeah, I said. So weird.
