by
C.J. Hauser
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I would like to tell you I stopped the relationship because I realized this wasn’t what love was supposed to look like. But even as I decided to stick with graduate school, and not move across the country to be with Arlo, and in so doing caused one more grievous hurt to this person I’d hurt before, I told myself this was another failure on my part. That I was just too weak to be with a person who saw me truly. And here I was, hurting him again. One more bad thing.
In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.
One particular time it was because I had put on a favorite red dress for a wedding. I exploded from the bathroom to show him. He stared at his phone. I wanted him to tell me I looked nice, so I shimmied and squeezed his shoulders and said: “You look nice! Tell me I look nice!” He said: “I told you that you looked nice when you wore that dress last summer. It’s reasonable to assume I still think you look nice in it now.”
Another time he gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet.
I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.
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Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind.
It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?
Wading through the muck of the Aransas reserve, I understood that every chance for food matters. Every pool of drinkable water matters. Every wolfberry dangling from a twig, in Texas, in January, matters. The difference between sustaining life and not having enough was that small.
If there were a kind of rehab for people ashamed to have needs, maybe this was it. You will go to the Gulf. You will count every wolfberry. You will measure the depth of each puddle.
More than once I’d said to my fiancé, “How am I supposed to know you love me if you’re never affectionate or say nice things to me or say that you love me?”
He reminded me that he’d said “I love you” once or twice before. Why couldn’t I just know that he did in perpetuity?
I told him this was like us going on a hiking trip and his telling me he had water in his backpack but not ever giving it to me and then wondering why I was still thirsty.
He told me water wasn’t like love, and he was right.
There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: Who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs?
In the mornings we made one another sandwiches and in the evenings we laughed and lent one another fresh socks. We gave one another space in the bathroom. Forgave one another for telling the same stories over and over again. We helped Warren when he had trouble walking. What I am saying is that we took care of one another. What I am saying is we took pleasure in doing so. It’s hard to confess, but in the time after I called off my wedding, the week I spent dirty and tired on the Gulf, I was happy.
He hadn’t said one specific thing about me or us during the proposal, and on the long trail walk out of the park I felt robbed of the kind of special declaration I’d hoped a proposal would entail, and, in spite of hating myself for wanting this, hating myself more for fishing for it, I asked him: “Why do you love me? Why do you think we should get married? Really?”
He said he wanted to be with me because I wasn’t annoying or needy. Because I liked beer. Because I was low-maintenance.
I didn’t say anything. A little farther down the road he added that he thought I’d make a good mother.
This wasn’t what I hoped he would say. But it was what was being offered. And who was I to want more?
This is a sad story only inasmuch as stories about people like me, who delude themselves, are sad. So maybe it’s not so sad at all.
I tried to help Joey because I thought that without the distraction of all his miseries—which seemed to me so easily solvable—he would finally love me properly. He would take care of me the way I’d been taking care of him. I would fix and fix and fix until he was able to notice that I was standing there, hoping to be loved. But of course it doesn’t work that way.
Would a good person be deterred by these things? I asked myself. Was it ethical to disqualify a person as a partner for any of these reasons? How would someone, most people, react to these profiles?
I told myself that someone, most people, would be fine with them. Excited, even. They would go on dates with these men. They would enjoy these dates. And so I forced myself to hover outside my own mind, and override my own, true, human reactions with what I thought a good and ethical and generally less-strange person would do.
lol, sob
I wasn’t a Scully looking for a Mulder, I was a person seeking some sort of mutual trust. I was a person who wanted to believe that two people with wildly different ways of being in the world, which is, let’s be honest, most any two people of any genders, could come to trust each other as a matter of pure instinct. That you didn’t need to believe all the same things, or have lived the same lives, in order for trust to be possible. That difference is just difference. It’s just human. It doesn’t need to activate into some perfect complementary cycle. It doesn’t need to be pathologized. You just have to believe the other person’s things are real and valid, too. You just need to know that if you called them, they would pick up the phone. That it would almost be beside the point to say, It’s me, because they would know
sweet
As you remember, you were badly dressed but skinny, with gravity-defying tits and an ass the boys sometimes slapped at school, even if you were wearing something patently unsexy like those striped train-conductor overalls you loved. You were frizzy-haired and plain-faced and privileged and sweet and moody. You were tediously Pollyannaish about anything to do with social justice and performatively contrarian about everything else. You kept a shrine to John Lennon in your bedroom at the center of which was this satisfyingly heavy biography you’d never read but in front of which you lit flying-fairy Chinatown incense. You liked to say you were “born at the wrong time.” You preferred animals and children to anyone else. You had no idea what to do with your body but you were always already a hedonistic little ball of senses and you understood pleasure. You loved music and food and the smell of the boy’s armpits and being touched. You had enormous eyes and enormous ears and you were just cripplingly earnest, but, having been raised by fast-talking New Yorkers and having consumed too much art, sometimes disarmingly adult banter came dropping from your mouth and the contrast must have been alarming. You were happiest alone in the woods or with a book. You cried over things like the fact that flowers didn’t bloom for that long. That they had to die. Seriously, literally, you cried about this. You had just turned seventeen and the facts of the world were pressing in on you for the first time with a sort of tedious, metaphysical, white-girl sadness that felt too much to bear. And he was the first one who said to you, Hey, people have like, written poems about that stuff, you know? And songs. Do you know Keats? David Byrne? He showed you how to find yourself in this way. Introduced you to the sacred texts of the terminally sensitive.