The great dating massacre of 2021 was not premeditated. When I woke up on a nipply November morning and went for a jog along the Toronto lakeshore, I had no idea I’d end the day with going from casually dating five women to informally seeing one. In a fit of insistence and dating fatigue, I sent some variation of the text, “I just need some time alone,” to all five of them, and wasn’t met with much resistance. But this last one was persistent, and it became clear that drastic and draconian measures would be required to set the record straight. In the weeks leading up to that moment, I had been experiencing a bit of an existential conundrum as someone who I thought could be that special someone had recently notified me that her feelings for me were more ambivalent. It triggered something erratic and shrill within me, and I responded with a tailspin of dates to fulfill some need for superficial validation, compulsive but pathologically unfeeling. So a few nights later, I found myself sitting across from this woman with a pineapple capicola pizza between us, and letting her know that I had some things to work on myself, as I was trying to nudge my way out of whatever this was. “Well, I also have some things to work on,” she responds, “and maybe we can work on ourselves together.” This woman has been my girlfriend for four years.
In that span, I’ve gone from a meandering, myopic serial dater with commitment issues to someone who can exchange feelings and take on the responsibility of being a dog dad. Granted, I’m still a maladaptive idiot with a host of neuroses, but she has stuck with me even when I forget to do the laundry and grits through my rants about Radiohead and The Big Lebowski. Back in my single days, I described relationships as “a mutual opt-in between two people who like each other about the same amount and make a conscious decision for a period of time that their lives are better together than they are apart.” Granted, I wrote that an inquiry into the validity of polyamory, or what Pamela in Louie calls an “a la carte” of open-ended, short-term flings. “There’s more than one way to be together,” she tells Louie after he expressed insecurity about their situationship. “Not to have to, but to choose to, to always make a new choice to be together.” I also subscribed to the idea of indulging in the permanent impermanence, and while I still do in most contexts, when it came to relationships, I let this feeling become a detached sense of chill, the opposite of choosing warmth and kindness and earnestness and vulnerability.
So when my girlfriend and I started dating, I spent the previous eight years as a geographic and romantic nomad. Her prolonged patience and support allowed me to let her inhabit where there was once emotional vacancy. In the time since, I’ve come to realize that the person who will love you for the rest of your life might not want to love the version of you that exists today. This is difficult to accept because we want to believe that the person who is really for us will love us unconditionally. But it would be selfish to put the person we love through every version of ourselves that could ever exist. The pressure and responsibility to be the best version of ourselves for the people we care most about is a beautiful obligation. It makes every day a blank canvas of possibility and growth. It is much more rewarding to develop into the best version of yourself and attract the right person than it is to be picked up by someone who will settle for a suboptimal you. That is a combination of the love you have for yourself and the love another person has for you.
At the end of Before Midnight, after Jesse and Celine question the validity of their marriage, and all their latent resentments bubble until bitterness erupts from every word they exchange. They’re still interested in making their relationship work, even if their love has been weighed down with everything that comes with the ruthless passage of time. Love is a feeling, but it’s also a choice. Where I once thought that choice was fleeting and impermanent, I now understand it as a daily and ritual commitment. And as much as I treasure the memories of us taking an impromptu weekend trip to Montreal, her baking me a s’mores cake for my birthday, seeing her eyes tear up when she locked down Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets to see her for the first time, looking over the cliffs of Tunnel Bluffs and out into the ocean, watching her mouth extend to infinite possibilites to scarf down a canoli from Mike’s Pastries, and all the belly laughs and cuddles in between—I feel my love for her most whenever it is absent. Not in the sense of the heartbreak that could come if we ever went our separate ways, but in the absence of feeling, what my life would be like had I never met her. My days would have less of an emotional dimension without her. And that’s a terrifying proposition to consider, but that parallel reality makes me appreciate every choice we make to and for each other.
I consider most love songs to be cheesy, but Billy Corgan managed to capture the feeling of psychotic desire that envelopes a sense of hope, that love is an action.
“For the first time, I’m telling you how much I need and bleed for your every move and waking sound. In my time, I’ll wrap my wire around your heart and your mind. You’re mine forever now.”
— Smashing Pumpkins, “Stand Inside Your Love”
He describes a love that is fueled by conviction, resolve, and divine in origin. These lyrics communicate a bold declaration of commitment and fact, almost devoid of emotion or opinion. A type of love that’s an unmoving object, a furious longing and determination. Time forces us all to face what happens after the romance settles, which makes the choice to begin each day with each other more significant. Love is the noun and the verb. It turns each moment into an opportunity for growth, and by putting both of us before myself, it’s clear how that connection reinforces what’s important and what’s the kind of bullshit that we can let go of. In turn, we learn more about ourselves, which is a true gift.
This is the first of a new series about finding the simple pleasures in life. In an attempt to be less irony-poisoned, I will be posting these a few times a month to balance out all the indignities and shitty shit that can be a bummer when it is unchecked with positivity. And, no, my girlfriend definitely did not strong-arm me to lead off this series with a post about her.
♥️♥️♥️♥️
“The pressure and responsibility to be the best version of ourselves for the people we care most about is a beautiful obligation. It makes every day a blank canvas of possibility and growth.”
Good stuff Sam. I’m a believer that intimate, loving relationships that involve truth, vulnerability, and all the risks those things entail are the requirement for becoming an authentic adult.
The challenge of that has rarely been as well described as in the last 5min of Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. Cheers to you and your partner - may you continually find love and acceptance for yourselves and one another.
https://youtu.be/gdlf-texJaM