Eat the Damn Cake

What does it mean to be romantic? I’m not exactly sure. What’s the most romantic thing someone’s ever done for you?

A guy wrote a love song for me once. It started “Dear Kate…” It was a good song.

Once a guy wrote a slam poem for me, and then he performed it in front of a lot of people.

Once a guy wrote a symphony for me. I am not kidding. That really happened. It had three movements. Wait, maybe it had four. It was a while ago.

(source)

On our fourth date, Bear took me to Utah, for the weekend. But he forgot our first wedding anniversary. We were supposed to write each other love letters, rather than doing gifts. He was at a conference all day. I was tagging along on his business trip. I was having a great time. I knew he wouldn’t be around much. I knew he hadn’t thought to do it before. I knew he wouldn’t remember to do it later. So when he didn’t do anything for our anniversary, it was fine.

But I was a little worried, too. People might think, “What kind of husband forgets your FIRST anniversary?” (A bad one.)

I thought my friends might ask me what he’d gotten me, and then I’d have to say “nothing,” and then it’d be weird. I’d have to explain. “No, no, Bear is so amazing…I know how much he loves me! He’s the best! We’re just BOTH not into gifts. Seriously. We don’t even care about them.” And then they’d look at me, with this sympathetic look, and they’d be thinking, “She sounds so defensive, poor girl…He’s probably going to leave her.”

It occurred to me that Bear is maybe not very romantic. Can you be married to someone for a year without realizing that they’re not romantic?

When I think of romance, I think of doing something extra– something dramatic. Of putting yourself out there. Singing in the rain, while the guy closing up the pizza place gives you a look that says, “Why do I even live in this stupid friggin’ city full of crazy people?”

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Recently, I realized that my marriage is not perfect.

Isn’t that shocking? I’m shocked. I thought it was perfect. I didn’t say this aloud, but I was sure that we were the only perfect couple in the world. And not sure in the “Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty great!” way. Sure in the like “I have found God and there is only one Truth” way.

I’m not sure which is more embarrassing– that I thought our marriage was going to remain unblemished and preternaturally self-possessed, like a child model. Or that it isn’t.

When people fall in love, they’re supposed to go crazy. Their brains release all of these ridiculous chemicals and they start running around, jumping in fountains and throwing things in the air and laughing with their mouths wide open and their heads thrown back. That stage lasts for two years. Which is a lot of fountains.

(I’d go for this one. source)

It’s science. People need to get like that so that they’ll commit to each other and then they can raise babies and stuff. Unless they’re gay, and then science gets all awkward and nods a lot and says, “We’re working on that one.”

I was sure my love for Bear wasn’t science. It was something much better. Something much, much more unpredictable. This was pure, wild luck, and Bear and I were its masterpiece.

I’ve known Bear for close to three years now, we’ve been married for a little over one, and I’m starting to recognize our particular struggles as a couple. The things that get stuck just below the surface for too long, until suddenly they erupt. The ways in which we go gradually in circles. The things that we are each really bad at. I have sorted issues into piles. The pile of stuff that bothers me a little but is really fine. The pile of stuff that bothers me more than a little, and I am not sure I’m fine with. The pile of stuff that bothers him, and I should really do something about.

(the stuff under the surface can be scary when it suddenly breaks through)

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It’d been a long time since I saw my beautiful blond friend with the very put-together life. My friend who always knows what to wear, and always has the earrings that match it. My friend with the grownup life and the baby.

She looked great, of course. She was sparkling. The collar of her little dress sparkled. Her clean, contemporary diamond ring sparkled. Her eyes sparkled, too. Since I’d last seen her, a lot had changed. They were moving. To Connecticut. They were looking for a house now.

Whoa.

Connecticut? But– we used to think Brooklyn was too far away! I haven’t even been back to the Upper West Side since we moved down here. Wait. A house. That means you’ll have more than two rooms? And a car? And a yard? Impossible. A washer and a dryer? Amazing. More than one bathroom? Ultimate luxury! Unimaginable.

I tried to picture her new life. She was wearing pearl earrings in my imagination. But then, she does that sometimes anyway. She looked so grown up. So complete. She would drive her kid (her KID!) to school in her car. She would drive to the supermarket. She would return to her house. Her entire house. Her husband would commute into the city for work.

“What’s your plan?” she asked. “What are you thinking, for the future?”

I stared at her. I looked down at my plate. I looked up again, and I still hadn’t figured out what to say.

“Bear,” I said, later that night, “Do we know what we’re doing with our lives?”

“Um,” he said, “Maybe?”

“I don’t think we do.”

“Yeah, maybe not. But who cares?”

“We’re kids.”

“That’s what’s so cool about us.”

“I guess.”

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Feeling bad the way I do sometimes– the bad egg kind of bad- it doesn’t go away completely. It just lies dormant under the surface for a while. And then suddenly, it’s back. It can come back ferocious, hungry, clawing, like it just broke out of prison, where it had plenty of time to think about how to destroy me.

And then I feel sorry for Bear.

I feel apologetic. I feel sorry about marriage not solving all of my problems, as though if only I could just calm down and let it, it would. I feel like I’ve let marriage down.

Sometimes I think that marriage actually makes it worse. I mean, being safe and secure and loved and sexed and having my man dream come true makes it clearer that this is not all there is. Before I had Bear, when I was in a relationship with a guy who was being tormented by what seemed like an army of his own personal demons, I could feel bad about that. It was obvious what I was supposed to feel bad about. I also felt like I really needed to get good grades in college or my life might be terrible, but that feeling was secondary to the emotional trauma of my romantic relationship.

In a way, that’s what relationships were for. To distract me from the things I was really worried about. To distract me from the fact that I might feel bad, anyway, even if they were gone or great.

After being tormented by the tormented guy, I was in a relationship with a guy I wasn’t in love with, and I felt conflicted and anxious and stubborn and frustrated and helpless about that.

And later, whenever I felt bad during the time I was single, I felt scared and tiny and hopeless, because there was a chance I would never find someone.

There was always such an easy reason. Such a plain target.

And now, I have checked so many boxes. I have things I never thought I would get a chance at. I stare at my own reality in dumbstruck wonderment. I pinch myself. I stare some more.

But then, when I feel bad, it isn’t as easy to find a place to put it. So the badness rushes to my career. You’re failing! You haven’t accomplished anything in the past year! Everyone in the world is more successful than you! And they have better hair! And your teeth look a little yellow! And you’re not making enough money because you are a failure!

I feel sorry for Bear because I want to be happy for him. I feel like that was part of the arrangement. We were going to make each other happy ALL THE TIME. That was going to be marriage. When I’m unhappy, it makes him unhappy, and sometimes this feels like pressure to be happy.

(we should always look like this. especially the red hat)

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Happy New Year!

It started like this: twenty minutes before midnight, I resolved to be nicer to Bear when he interrupted something I was doing. At midnight, Bear and I were lying around in his mother’s guest bedroom. We had just finished packing, and we’d forgotten to calculate for gifts, so it was much harder than on the way over. It was much more like the kind of practical logic puzzle I’ve always been disappointing at. Our flight was horribly early the next morning.

“Happy New Year!” said Bear.

I reached for him and somehow managed to claw his face. He turned and his knee slammed into my leg. OW.

A minute later, I was checking my phone, doing something extremely important that I can’t remember, and Bear said, “What are you doing?” and I said, “Can you just let me do this, please?!” And broke my resolution. Awesome.

But then, horribly early the next morning, we were on a plane, flying over the whole country, and it was surprisingly big, and I felt a little like God or a hawk might feel, tracing the sweet curl of overlapping highways with my eyes– enjoying that faint, graceful human symmetry against the massiveness of nature. I thought about the people who live by the base of all those mountains, and the people who live near the start of great forests, and all of the people who live in the wild open spaces that look to me like montages out of movies that will have werewolves later, and I was pretty awed. And cowed. Which is a great word. I had been planning on getting things done on my computer, but instead I stared out the window at the world and felt fulfilled.

I have been trying to think of good New Year’s resolutions. But what I really want to write about is the time before. Because I know I’m in it. I’m in this lucky, easy grace period that happens sometimes when you’re young. And it’s easy not to think about where you are. You’re more likely to think about how you were once there, later, when you’re not anymore. And then you say things like, “I didn’t even know how good I had it.”

For the record, I am trying to know how good I have it.

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Something just happened to me that is like a story with a moral at the end. And it’s a story makes me look bad. You’re going to shake your head and think, “I would have handled that a lot better.”

One of my good friends stopped talking to me a couple months ago.

Everyone’s busy, and we don’t live extremely close to each other, so at first I didn’t even notice. We don’t have to talk every day.  And then I texted her about a movie that’d come out that we were supposed to see together. We had this dorky little pact. It went back years. We had this running joke, and this movie was a part of it. She didn’t text back.

Lame, I thought. OK, so she doesn’t care about the movie. Even though we had that running joke and that silly pact.  I’ll see it with someone else. I don’t necessarily need to see it with her.  Whatevs.

Because I totally say “whatevs” a lot.

A couple weeks went by, and I sent her an email. It was like “Hey– I’m worried that you’re upset at me about something and I’m trying to be funny and act like everything is cool but also show you that I care and I hope you still like me and I’m gonna just send this now before I get weird in case you really are mad at me.” I mean, that’s what I was thinking. I wrote it a little better. But just a little better.

Nothing.

A week went by. Now I was really annoyed. Another week. One more shot. I tossed off a Facebook message: “OK, I’m getting paranoid here. Are you alive?”

Nothing. Seriously? What the hell? She was just dropping me, without any explanation? Come ON. Don’t I deserve better than that? What the hell did I do to her? OK, maybe I wasn’t being that attentive or something. Maybe I was sort of wrapped up in my own stuff. But it’s not like I ever ignored her the way she was now ignoring me.

I told Bear my friend was ignoring me.

“Maybe you should try to get together with her,” he said.

“Whatever,” I said. “I don’t need to see her.”

“Maybe you should be nice to her,” he said. “Maybe we should invite her over.”

“I’m nice enough,” I said, nastily. I was feeling nasty. I was ready to ignore her back, forever. Because this is middle school. No, because that’s really how my mind works sometimes.

It wasn’t the first time Bear and I had a conversation like this about a friend. I’m usually ready to give up. He usually thinks I should try being nicer. When I get hurt, I want to retreat. Immediately. He thinks I should wait it out. He’s not always right. Sometimes things need to end. But usually I run too fast, too soon.

She didn’t write back. She didn’t write back.

And then today she wrote back.

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