On Being A Lover

Image by Sophie Blackhall-Cain

I’ve always been a romantic.

It’s looking up your former lover while you’re in town and walking into his work unannounced—“Hello.” 

It’s having sex with the boy you dated in high school in the back seat of his car, as adults. 

It’s remembering that wordless interaction with the talented stranger on Governor’s Island, and finding out two years later that he remembers it too.

It’s the impossibly handsome man twice your age walking up to you while you’re working a summer job at an old-timey department store, and telling you he wants to take your picture.

Then you get to be the girl who tells the next older man, the one who drives you around Paris on the back of his vespa, “Don’t worry, I’ve done this before.”

Then you get to tell the next guy with a vespa, “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

It’s apple picking. With every boyfriend you’ve ever had.

It’s positioning yourself in the right place so that you can "discreetly" kiss your secret-work-lover at midnight on New Year's Eve. Just like you did last year. And the year before that.

It’s the clichés, really. One string of silly-face-and-kissing photo-booth photos is cute. But looking at a stack of them with different partners starts to feel like looking into a hall of mirrors.

Because the juxtaposition of these rituals, the ones that are supposed to be so fun and fancy-free, inevitably evokes a transparency-style layering that makes me feel sort of hollow. Like a sketch that’s been traced over too many times. We can’t impose what is supposed to be impulsive.

But of course, that’s what we romantics do. We crafters of stories, architects of tales.

We see and speak the narrative as we live it. “You kind of want to kiss me, but you’re maybe not going to,” I said at the end of a date a few weeks ago. “I’m not?” came his reply.

Of course he did, and of course it was sweet. But I couldn’t just let it unfold. Even my romantic “lines” sound like they’re describing the scene, rather than being in it.

I realized recently that one of my exes has gotten back together with his ex-girlfriend. The one he cheated on. With me. I have long suspected that I was attractive to him because, at the time, I didn’t want a narrative. Or not the one she wanted. On the rare occasions that the Ex would discuss this woman, the ex-girlfriend-girlfriend, he talked about how frustrated he was that she wanted to get married and have kids, because he didn’t think that was necessarily the direction he wanted his life to go. He spoke of that trajectory with a disdain that in retrospect I find deeply caustic.

But then I was twenty-three, newly out of a highly-domestic too-grown-up too-early relationship, and I had no idea what I wanted. Running around New York City heavily under the influence of black eye-liner and tequila was about all the story-planning I could manage. In fact I wasn’t planning any stories, I was chasing them.  

Not needing the Ex to be my boyfriend was exhilarating, to me and him. For about three months. And then suddenly I was in love.

So was he, but he wouldn’t admit it. I remember dramatically trying to break up with him on New Year’s Eve because he wouldn’t tell me he loved me, drunkenly twisting some Shakespeare quote to suit my needs. Probably because he wouldn’t kiss me in front of our co-workers at midnight. Probably because he had only broken up with his girlfriend six weeks earlier and we thought no one at work knew we were sleeping together (ha).

I had grown bored with the secret narrative. I wanted security. He had blown me off on my birthday a week before, and that had hurt. Mistresses don’t get to spend holidays with their men. I knew that. I had liked feeling mistress-y when the ex-girlfriend-girlfriend was in the picture, or at least I confused the sensations of guilt and audacity with something you could call a rush. But by December they were definitely done, and I still felt awfully mistress-y.

So I cried and I guilted and I pressured. I thought, like so many have before, that I wanted him no matter what. Under any circumstances. That I would put up with his unspoken, unspeakable love. That he would come around eventually.

Of course he did. And of course, sometimes it was sweet. But when I “got” what I “wanted”, it really didn’t look anything like I’d pictured it.

Some people would say he gave too little too late. But it’s as much on me. I wanted too much too soon. I let my inner romantic get the best of me. I couldn’t just be a lover, because I was too busy feeling like a mistress.

He did make room for me in the narrative, eventually. I remember obsessing over a book of photos that his ex-girlfriend-girlfriend had made for him. Pictures of them. Mostly one or the other, arranged next to each other. Very few together. I pored over it like fairy-tale I wasn’t supposed to read.

A year later, when he was trying to woo me back, the Ex made me a book of photos of us. Mostly one or the other— very few pictures of us together exist. He filled the pages in between with Shakespeare quotes he didn’t understand that he had looked up on the internet. I didn't find this book enchanting, I just found it sad.

The hooks this man left in me are still there. He made me self-conscious about my ears in a way I will perhaps never truly get over, ears that I had never been self-conscious of before I met him. It's taken me a year to finally re-don the socks I love so much that he mocked me out of wearing maybe a month into our relationship. He's still in my head when I get dressed, when I order food, when I go out with other people. But it's getting better. For awhile I was angry. Now I'm just aware.

So when I saw the photos online recently, the photos of the Ex and his ex-girlfriend-girlfriend resuming the positions they maintained before some mischievous wide-eyed waitress made him think he could have his cake and eat it too, I felt hollow. It’s weird to feel like an interlude in someone else’s narrative.

While he and I were together, I realized that I did want to get married and have kids. Maybe not with him, but I started to see it as a distant part of my ever-nebulous future. So when we broke up I reminded him that in the long term, we didn’t want the same things anyway. He said I had changed his tune. That I made him realize he did want those things.

I guess that means now he’s ready to give her the things she always wanted. They look happy in the new pictures together. There’s one of them on New Year's Eve, at the ball-dropping ceremony, doing what romantics are supposed to do on New Year's Eve.

Sharing these revelations with a friend, she told me that I was wrong. It wasn’t him getting what he wanted— it was him being too scared to look for someone else. I’m not sure that’s what’s going on, but I sure as hell don’t want to be scared.

I have a lover. He’s a good friend. We were talking about The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I put on my bowler hat. He told me that he likes being my sometimes-lover. How he sees me as a Sabina.

But I have certainly been a Tereza.

If I could have been a lover to my Ex, maybe I could have walked into his work unannounced years later and said “Hello” and had it be romantic. But I couldn’t be a lover then. I was wreckless with my desires, and I got hurt. So I got scared. Kundera writes about Tereza’s vertigo, how it’s the result of her desire to ascend to something higher. And of course, vertigo is not fear of falling, but fear that we’ll jump.

These days, I’m dating. I go on dates. With various individuals. And I sit at bars and restaurants and the anecdotes unfold. I sound like a girl who likes apple picking and vespas and Paris and Shakespeare. And I start to feel the imprint of all of the lines that have been traced on the sketch, rounding the same corners time after time. And I feel heavy. I get tired. Last week I looked up from my amaro into the eyes of a guy that I could probably really like, and I just had to tell him— “sometimes when I think about getting to know someone really well, it feels so daunting.”

It’s a lot of pressure, being a romantic.

Later that night we were at his apartment. We looked at a giant Shakespeare anthology. He lent me a DVD of My Dinner With Andre, saying it would be too depressing to watch together. I told him I was going to leave. We kissed. He put his hand on the zipper of my hoodie, held it for a moment, looked down as if he was thinking very hard about whether or not to pull it, then let go. I went home.

I’m tired, but I’m not scared. I have a big heart. Like Juliette, my bounty is as boundless as the sea—the more I give to thee the more I have, for both are infinite.

But “thee” can’t be just one person right now. Otherwise I start to feel a little less than infinite. Like maybe I need that other person to help replenish my sea. And I can’t do that right now. I have to swim by myself for a little bit.

And yeah, sometimes you tread water for awhile. But then the current picks up again and there are sharks and there are whales and there are really cool plants and slippery seaweed and even the occasional mermaid.

I’m not letting my vertigo get in the way. I am totally jumping into that water.

Being a lover means not imposing the impulsive. Participating in the moment—not constructing it from the past or the future or from some weird birds-eye view.

Today I am a lover— yes, of apple picking and Paris and vespas and Shakespeare. But also of winter and stolen glances and postcards and whisky-soaked late night discussions and a song called “Saturday”. I am a lover of many things.