If someone could offer me a detailed record of the complex chain of events that led to the end of my parents’ marriage, I am no longer sure I would want it. I could barely process the end of my own relationship; like most crashes, it was devastating and ugly. Maybe some things should stay in the box.
• • •
One day, after moving out of the house Kevin and I shared, I bumped into a friend of his at a café.
With his friends, I never knew what to say other than “hi.” And that “hi” was unbearable. Its two letters seemed to contain all their curiosity about my post-breakup well-being, and my curiosity about what they knew, how he’d explained it, or if he’d explained it at all. The curiosity the happy have about the heartbroken is never quite pure—they are always seeking some confirmation of their own relative safety.
But Laurie’s face, framed by thick curls, was warm. “So, how are you?” she asked, a look of concern softening her smile.
“I’m great,” I said. “Things are great.” At the moment, it felt true. It was a good day.
“That’s fantastic,” she said, then paused. “So, I guess things are really different for you now?”
I’d been so disarmed by her friendliness that a direct question about the breakup caught me by surprise.
“It is different,” I said slowly. “But, you know, mostly good.” I nodded, feeling it was true as the words arrived. And yet, it also felt dishonest, like I was somehow betraying Kevin by seeming so casual about something so monumental. Things were good because he and I were getting along, because there’d been some talk about giving things another go. Without context, I thought, it must seem like I’m happy because we moved apart. But that wasn’t quite true. Or untrue.
I’d originally met Laurie at a cookout in July. Kevin and I had just decided to end things, but we’d told no one. Laurie, who Kevin had met skiing, walked up to me and said, “I love your dress. You must be Mandy,” as if all Mandys wore great dresses. I liked her immediately.
At the time, I thought keeping our breakup a secret was the best way to avoid awkwardness. No one would need to tiptoe around us or feel pressure to choose a side. But looking back, I realize that my motives were more complicated than that.
We weren’t planning to continue our life together, but we were still a team; breaking up was something we were doing together. Telling people would mean staring directly at the space growing between us. And the thought of the act itself, just articulating the words We’re breaking up, panicked me. No one in Vancouver had known us as anything other than Kevin-and-Mandy, and I was worried about changing that. Either they would look at me with pity, reflecting my own ugly sadness right back at me, or with relief, confirming my fear that our incompatibility was obvious to everyone but us.
Only then did I think of my parents, of how hard it must have been for them to explain their decision to mystified friends and colleagues, their brothers and sisters. And to say to their adult daughters, who were holding out for men who would love them the way they believed their father loved their mother: We’re getting a divorce. Apart, my parents were strange creatures, turtles without shells. I cringed at the thought of anyone looking at Kevin or me and seeing the kind of loneliness that is almost grotesque. When we did finally break the news to friends, I always added, “But we still love each other!” as if it might somehow save us from the pitying gazes reserved for the desperate and unloved.
At the café, Laurie said she’d been busy with work, even going in on weekends. I said at least she wasn’t missing anything fun, and together we squinted out the window toward the damp November gray. “I’m knee-deep in grading papers,” I said, and immediately felt annoyed by my tendency toward chirpy clichés when talking to people I didn’t know well. Then I added compulsively, “And Kevin’s doing well!” She said she hadn’t seen him in a while, so I told her he’d just gotten back from rock climbing in Utah and was far too tan for November. She wanted to know if I saw him often and I said we spent a decent amount of time together and that it was nice.
“Wow,” she said. “That sounds like the most amicable breakup ever.”
I’d already learned that everyone likes an amicable breakup. It’s easier when you’re not required to empathize with someone else’s grief. Making a breakup sound amicable is like announcing a death and then adding, “But at least she’s no longer in pain.” It’s a kind of socially ordained kindness toward people we don’t know well.
It felt irresponsible to give Laurie the impression that it had been an easy, friendly experience. For one thing, it wasn’t true. As far as I could tell, love never worked that way. I wished I could show her the inventory of slammed doors and broken plans and say, “No, actually it’s pretty terrible.” But who would want to see it? If I believed that some kinds of love stories were dangerous—particularly stories that ignored the hard parts—then I shouldn’t go around telling them. But I only smiled.
As I walked home, I thought about the first Christmas my family spent together after my parents’ separation. Together, my parents packed up all our family ornaments, our stockings, Aunt Donna’s sour cream pound cake. They tied a fir tree to the top of my dad’s car and drove six hours up the highway. Four months after the night they announced their separation, we all met at Casey’s house as if nothing had changed. In an email to a friend, I described it as “the most amicable divorce in history.”
I wouldn’t have preferred they were unkind, but niceness wore us down in its own way. By the second post-divorce Christmas, finding the most thoughtful gifts and planning the most Christmassy group outings was exhausting all of us. But now I understand that there are always two breakups: the public one and the private one. Both are real, but one is sensible and the other is ugly. Too ugly to share in cafés. Too ugly, I sometimes think, to even write.
• • •
“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily, we do not need to learn it.” I jotted this quotation in a journal a few months after Kevin and I moved apart. Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” is about grieving the loss of a friend, not a romantic partner, but still it struck me.6 Practicing letting each other go sounds like practicing poking yourself in the eye with a needle, I thought. Who would volunteer for such an exercise? But Kevin and I spent another year practicing. Sometimes we saw each other every day. Sometimes we didn’t speak for weeks. I guess for us, letting go did require rehearsal.
There is a pleasant dailiness to a relationship. A routine, a vocabulary, a preference for the same brand of toothpaste. It’s so small you hardly notice it when you’re together, but its loss is acute. When I was a teenager, I wondered why the biblical verb for having sex with someone was “to know.” I thought it was Bible doublespeak, a way of hiding when righteous people do things the rest of us aren’t allowed to. (Of course Abram knew Hagar, she was his wife’s maid!) It wasn’t until I moved out of our house on Ash Street that I understood: The knowledge you have of another person’s body, that they have of yours; the shifts of sleep; the arches of feet; the scent of the skin at the back of the neck—there is a sweet intimacy in the acquisition of this particular brand of knowledge that must be divinely sanctioned. That this person could become a stranger, that his life could—no, will—keep going right along without you in it, that you will one day not know him, that he will not know you, that you may in fact become unknown, these are difficult propositions. I had been so angry with my parents for giving up. But later I could see that after nearly three decades of marriage, giving up meant choosing, rather bravely, to step into the void.
Now, nine years later, I think back to the Friday night we celebrated Casey’s graduation at Mamaw’s house. My parents must’ve been planning (dreading) to tell us for days or weeks—or even months. And that night they stood and listened graciously, cheerfully even, as Cindy told the story of her date with Dad, a story that is at the heart of how he and my mother got together. What did they feel in that moment?
What were they thinking? It’s all locked in the black box. I don’t really even want to ask. But separating my life from Kevin’s—splitting our things into his and mine, packing boxes in the kitchen with my girlfriends while he sat at his desk in the living room, moving into a new apartment in a new neighborhood and feeling the total silence of Sunday morning—all of it showed me something about the things we do not include in our stories.
About a year after we moved apart, Kevin and I went on a climbing trip with friends. We pitched our tent by a lake and shared coffee and oatmeal, apples and beer. One night we snuck a thermos of whiskey into the Thai restaurant, and as we all sat there giggling too loudly, I thought about how glad I was that we’d managed to keep our mutual friends through such a turbulent year. Over the previous twelve months, we’d gone on dates with new people, and with each other. We’d read relationship books, discussed adopting a child one day, and snuck away for ski weekends. We’d even seen a counselor once.
I thought we were coming out on the other side of a dark storm. And yet, when Kevin and I were alone in the tent, the high spirits that had ricocheted between the group of us when we were in the restaurant seemed to collapse. Here was someone I’d known for years, but whatever had bound us together before—love or friendship or oxytocin—wasn’t working anymore. We’d been one thing, and now we’d become another. A black box.
• • •
Two weeks later, we again agreed to take some space from each other. And that’s how we stayed. Though I still couldn’t see into the black box of my parents’ separation, the end of my own relationship made the unknown more bearable. I began to understand something about why the box was black.
I understood, for example, why going to couples’ counseling doesn’t always seem like a good idea. It’s not just too little too late, but sometimes, when you commit to a difficult decision, it comes with an unexpected sense of relief. And the relief feels too good to give up.
I understood how you could leave someone and feel lost without him, and still choose that loneliness over being with him.
I understood why you might put off telling anyone about your separation: not quite because you feel embarrassment or shame (though likely you are experiencing both, deeply) but because you don’t want to be judged for a decision you have already spent months struggling with. You don’t want to be questioned about something you yourself have little confidence in.
I understood that even my parents didn’t fully comprehend the end of their marriage. Because there are some things we can’t know about love, about ourselves, and about the gap between the lovers we thought we could be and who we actually are.
i’m willing to lie about how we met
the tyranny of meeting cute
I was thirty-two and had been single for about a year and a half when I went out with a guy named Scott. We met on OkCupid. It was just one date, but I remember it better than I remember almost any other online date.
We went to a place that had all the ambiance of a dive bar: no sign on the door, a windowless room in a basement, a dark hallway that opened to a “patio” in the alley where “mice” scampered under the Dumpster. (“A lot of mice around this time of year,” our server said with studied casualness.) But, like every other restaurant in Vancouver that summer, they served perfect tiny tacos and local craft beer. I thought I was experienced at online dating, but Scott was a pro.
Shortly after we took our seats on the patio, another couple walked out. The guy looked at Scott, paused, then said, “Hey, I know you.”
Scott gave me an awkward smile.
“Aren’t you the guy who ran after me the other day when I dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the sidewalk?”
Scott looked embarrassed and shrugged.
“Yes. It’s totally you,” the guy said. He looked at me. “Can you believe this guy? Who does that? Returns a fifty-freaking-dollar bill?”
“Pretty amazing,” I said.
“Hey, man, let me buy you a drink,” the guy said. Scott laughed politely and said no thanks and the other guy made his way to his seat.
Scott smiled at me for a moment, then said, “That’s my buddy. I ran into him outside before you got here. I wanted him to do a bit about me saving a kitten, but he thought you might not buy that one.”
I liked Scott. I liked that he had gone to the trouble of making up an elaborate story and that he then confessed immediately. There was a sense of transparency that I almost never felt on dates. Too often, dating created a weird tension: We were all walking the line between cool and sincere. Everyone wanted to be funny, to be liked, even as they were still deciding whether they liked you or not. I was as guilty of this as anyone, though it was beginning to wear on me.
Scott and I traded stories about our experiences with online dating—the strange or predictable patterns that had begun to emerge from the process.
“One of the things I keep noticing,” I said, “is how many guys use some iteration of the phrase ‘I’m willing to lie about how we met.’ Do girls write this, too?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
This phenomenon annoyed me. I made a point of not going out with anyone whose profile conveyed their willingness to make up a fake story, reasoning that they either felt deep shame about online dating (get over it already) or needed a cute, rom com–style how-we-met story for their relationship to feel legitimate. But dating websites were no longer the sole terrain of the desperate or the perverse, and anecdotal observations overwhelmingly suggest that cute stories in no way predict happy relationships. I could name several very charming first dates—like the time I sat by Mariah Carey’s pianist at a bar and my date and I pretended to be newlyweds while he gave us marriage advice—that went exactly nowhere.
I hated how the emphasis on meetings seemed to take away our agency, implying that fate put in the effort so we didn’t have to.
“Why is a story so important to some people that they’re willing to fabricate it?” I asked.
In response, Scott took a drink of his beer and thought about this for a second. “So you’re single—so am I—and I’m guessing your life is pretty good.”
“It’s great,” I told him. I confessed that even though I was theoretically interested in starting a relationship, I was so satisfied with my daily autonomy that I worried about actually fitting someone else in.
“So imagine you meet someone and decide to marry him, and maybe even have kids. What would you have to sacrifice?”
I thought of my guiltlessly sporadic grocery shopping, the hours per week I spent at the climbing gym or writing or drinking beer on rat-infested patios. I thought about the pleasure of making last-minute plans, feeling accountable to no one but the dog. I’d have to give up or renegotiate much of what made my life so satisfying. At twenty-three, I’d been so willing to organize my days around someone else, but by thirty-two I found the idea far less appealing.
“Wouldn’t it be easier,” Scott said, “if you could believe you’re just submitting to some larger force—you’re changing your life because it’s the thing fate has always had in store for you?”
It was a pretty convincing point.
Neither Scott nor I followed up after that date, though I often think back on it fondly. If we had started dating more seriously, it would’ve made a great how-we-met story.
• • •
I suppose it’s easy to be cynical about people wanting romantic stories to share. But how people meet really does seem to matter—and not just to the two people involved.
The sociologists Sharon Sassler and Amanda Jayne Miller found that where couples met was correlated with their sense of support from friends and family.1 Couples who met through strong ties or close-knit communities—through mutual friends or through school, church, or sports—felt more supported than those who met through weaker ties, like acquaintances, or in more anonymous settings, like online dating networks or bars. The study is particularly interesting because it suggests that there’s
more than mere romanticism involved when a couple relays the narrative of how they met; repeating the story is also a way of establishing the legitimacy of their relationship for others.
Since social support can play a big role in the quality of any relationship, it makes sense that we want stories that will make others want us to be together, too.
A few years ago I met a couple—Steve and Joey—at a party. Steve was American and Joey was from Indonesia. They met at work in Pittsburgh, where Joey was finishing a PhD. Both had tried online dating without success, but then they met each other through mutual friends. About ten years later, Joey was laid off from the job that had allowed him to live and work in the US after he finished his degree. Because Joey’s immigration process was almost complete, he and Steve begged Joey’s boss to keep him on the payroll a few more months—otherwise he’d have to return to Indonesia and forfeit his chance at US residency.
“He’d made their company millions,” Steve told me, the creases in his forehead deepening. “But the guy refused, knowing it meant Joey had to give up everything: his home, his relationship, his whole life.”
Same-sex marriage was not yet legal in the US, so with no other options, they decided to apply for Canadian visas, knowing that Canada would officially recognize their relationship. While they waited for word from the Canadian government, Joey returned to Indonesia and his family there.
“If his family knew he was gay, they’d disown him,” Steve told me. “So I couldn’t even visit. We just waited, for a year and a half, not knowing if we’d ever be able to live together again.” What were they doing now? I asked. And did they plan to stay in Vancouver?
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 13
