Love & Relationships

Whoops, I Love You

Kate Sloan

I find excuses, at improv practice, to tell the cute boy that I love him.

It’s not entirely on purpose but not entirely an accident, either. One approach to improv is walking on stage and knowing, immediately, who you are to each other – in spirit, in feeling, if not in detail. So when I walk on, and look at this floppy-haired blue-eyed sharp-tongued goofy-grinned boy, the overwhelming feeling that flows into focus is love.

(Okay, maybe not love, but something like it. We’ll get to that later.)

I’m his wife in too many scenes, his girlfriend, or the moony admirer with whom he becomes entangled over the course of a longform set. I don’t know if he notices, but other people do. “I think you should try pursuing more non-romantic storylines,” my coach offers offhandedly at the end of practice one day. I blush, because I know what he means, I know why he’s saying this, and I know I probably won’t take this note. Improv is a wildly careening ship and my love is a tumultuous river pouring downstream toward disaster. Anchors aweigh.

“I love you,” I shriek in improv scene after improv scene, terrified the cute boy knows I mean it.

“I love you” is weighty, a Big Deal, perhaps too much so. But any time I find myself wanting to believe it can be casual, it just means I’m flooded with love and embarrassed about it.

My shame about my lack of chill is sometimes so intense that I could probably talk myself into thinking “Will you marry me?” and “We should be buried side-by-side” are breezy things to say.

But who decided love was embarrassing? Who, like John Lennon, argued we’ve got to hide our love away?

These fears all stem from the root fear of reciprocation or lack thereof. When you Say The Thing, you’ll find out pretty quickly whether the person you’re addressing Feels The Thing too or very much doesn’t. We all want to live in the will-they-won’t-they illusion a little longer, suspending judgment about Schrodinger‘s love, because “I’m not sure if they…” is uplifting, while “They definitely don’t…” is soul-crushing. So even when love seems likely, we still hedge our bets, guard our cards, crunch the numbers before we make our move.

The dreaded “I love you” is a big deal because it signals the end of one chapter and the start of another. The end of plausible deniability and the start of a reckoning. Whether it goes poorly or beautifully, you’ll learn even more than you thought you would.

Polyamory perk: being comforted by one partner about another.

Or maybe the person you’re crying about isn’t even a partner of yours. Maybe they’re just a crush you somehow let fester into love. Maybe your Actual Boyfriend knows what the deal is, and likes you anyway. Maybe your Actual Boyfriend is therefore a goddamn saint, but still not the person you’re devastatingly in love with.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Actual Boyfriend assures me, late one summer night, as I cry in my bed over a man who isn’t him. “I’m here for you.” He’s right; he is. But I wish he wasn’t. I wish he was someone else.

“I’m just scared that when he leaves at the end of the summer, I’m going to have a mental breakdown,” I sob. The object of my affections doesn’t live in my city, so this was always a time-limited endeavor. As if unrequited love isn’t painful and risky enough as is. I’m sick with contrition, my heart inconsolable. If I can’t have him then I just want to be alone.

Yet here is the boy I’ve been dating for not-even-a-month, his warm-but-wrong arms wrapped around me. “If you do, I’ll be here for you,” he promises. “I know we haven’t known each other that long, but I love you and I wanna support you and I don’t want you to feel alone.”

I can tell, from the way his sentence stretches out like taffy, that the “I love you” was an accident. Whether he meant it but didn’t mean to say it, or meant to say it but didn’t really mean it, is irrelevant. It’s between us now, screaming to be acknowledged.

I laugh a little, through my tears. “Did you just…?”

He laughs a little, too. “Yeah.”

This would become a cute, funny anecdote from our early relationship, if indeed I liked him enough to progress past this stage. But I don’t. It’s hard to love someone good and kind when you’re accustomed to love feeling distant and cold.

Later, when we break up over the phone, he yells that I’m clearly not capable of loving anyone but that other man right now, and that I shouldn’t have led him to believe otherwise. He is right. I wish I could have caught his embarrassing leap in a plush net, but instead I just let him shatter on the ground. You can’t save everyone, hard as you might try.

The weight of “I love you” comes partly from our cultural conviction that it ought to be a Special Moment, much like a proposal or asking someone to prom. The right time and place, the right ambiance, must permeate the memory upon reflection. It should live on in our minds like a Tiffany’s catalogue centerfold, sparkling and emblematic.

But of course, first I-love-you’s aren’t always this picture-perfect in reality. Many are whispered against sweaty skin after sex, or cackled in irresistible cacophonies, or lobbed automatically at the end of a phone call. We’d all like our lives to look like a perfect three-tiered cake, but sometimes the yummiest desserts are the crumbly, misshapen ones from an amateur baker trying their best.

We’ve known each other for 35 days when you accidentally tell me you love me. It’ll only be a few more weeks before you say it for real.

We’re having phone sex – a thing we’ve done a dozen times or so, and will do hundreds more times as we fall harder – and I’m a subspacey mess. Unraveled, wanton, slurring my words. I know how this aligns with your kinks, and I know you put me here on purpose, but I’m still nervous: what if you find this messy gibberish version of me unattractive and you’re too nice to say so?

“Sir, do you like me like this?” I ask, uncertain, seeking feedback that will calm my heart.

“I LOVE you like this,” you retort without thinking. There is a split-second of silence. We’re both too smart, perceptive, and overanalytical to have missed what just happened, but we’re both also too polite and socially fluid to make it into the big deal it obviously is. We launch back into dirty-talk as before, like cocks and cunts can overshadow what’s developing between us.

When you really say it, later, in a dimly-lit bar, it’s slower, more considered. I feel like I’m hearing you perform dialogue we’ve been rehearsing for weeks – the words were empty and now they’re full, dripping with meaning. You preface the phrase with my name, so I’ll know you really mean it and you mean it about me, specifically. “Kate, I love you.” I tell you “I know,” because I do, I do, I deeply do. And then I add, “I love you too.”

We didn’t plan to fall in love; we didn’t plan to say it tonight. But it wasn’t an embarrassing accident. It was a perfect surprise.

6 Skills Every Introvert Should Cultivate

Kate Sloan

Any fellow introverts in the house? I bet there are…

Jung defined an introvert as someone who is more energized by the internal world than the external one. That is to say, an introvert expends energy when they have to deal with external things, like other people and attending events, and recharges their energy when they can return to the internal, by spending time alone and on introspective activities.

This is the definition I lean on when people seem surprised I identify as an introvert. Sure, I can be gregarious and chipper at a party; sure, I talk about my sex life on the internet; sure, you may not think of me as “shy” (although I certainly am that, too) – but setting all that aside, I expend my energy when I go outside of myself, and I replenish it when I turn inward and shut out the rest of the world for a while. It’s that simple.

In recent years, I’ve come to accept my introverted identity more and more, by reading books like Quiet and The Introvert’s Way. I’ve developed a skillset – not perfectly, you understand, but I’m working on it – that I think every introvert needs to master if they’re going to live a happy, healthy life that respects their temperament. Here are some skills I think are crucial for us inward-turning types…

Boundary-setting. This is important for everyone, and I use it to manage my energy levels all the damn time. If you’re not feelin’ a party but could do a one-on-one hang, request a coffee-date raincheck the next time a pal invites you to a rager. If you did an extroverty thing last time you saw your best friend, maybe they’d be up for a quiet art-gallery crawl this time. If you know you tend to get exhausted after a few hours with a friend, tell them upfront what time you have to leave by. (It’s okay to use work or sleepiness as an excuse, although I hope your friends are understanding enough that you don’t have to do that.)

Nowadays I’ll usually set a time constraint before I go to anything – “I have to leave by 11 because I have work in the morning,” “I’m gonna take off by 10 because I’ve been working all day and I’m pretty tired,” or even something as simple as “I can stay a couple hours!” without providing any additional details. These boundaries will leave your friends less confused and will make you look and feel like less of an asshole if you have to peace out in the middle of a party.

The art of the self-date. Some introverts are ride-or-die for their beds or bedrooms, as am I, but often I want to take myself out, too. I used to be terrified to do this – I worried people would judge me for being alone at locations frequented by pairs or groups – but after a while, I realized no one really pays that much attention to strangers. Fun fact: Julia Cameron calls these solo outings “artist dates” and says they’re vital to the creative process!

Some examples of self-dates: Go see a movie you’re interested in. Take your journal to a cocktail bar. Read a book on the patio of your favorite restaurant. Peruse a museum or gallery. Visit a bookstore, art supply store, or crystals shop. Treat yourself to a massage, mani-pedi, or facial. Sit on a blanket and people-watch in a park. Take your camera someplace pretty and snap some shots. Drop by a farmer’s market for ingredients and then make yourself a lovely meal. Hole up in the library for a while. Explore a public building you’ve never been in before. Go on a walking tour of local public art. Search on Yelp or Foursquare for a well-reviewed café/bar/restaurant in your area and go check it out. Get a rush ticket to the theatre. Go see an improv/sketch/stand-up show at your local comedy venue. Find an open mic to attend. Drop by a live jazz venue for an evening. Paint some pottery. Take a long walk while listening to your favorite podcast or audiobook. Bike to the beach. Find a balcony or rooftop to sit on with a nice cold drink.

Connecting and compromising with extroverts. This is easiest when the extroverts in your life are well-versed in the concept of introversion (I’m lucky that most of my favorite ones are!). For me, the most important parts of relating to extroverts have been 1) figuring out how to communicate about my mental/emotional energy limitations without hurting their feelings and 2) each of us compromising sometimes. #1 is easy enough: I’ll explain the Jungian concept of introversion outlined above if the person I’m talking to is unaware of it, and I’ll try to figure out what I need at any given time and ask for it specifically (“Can we just be quiet for a while?” “I need some downtime tonight, but I’d love to see you tomorrow!” “I have the energy to watch a silly comedy with you but not to go out to a party”). If necessary, I’ll remind them that it’s nothing personal, and that my issue isn’t with them but with my own energy levels.

The compromise piece can be a little harder, because it requires creative solutions (e.g. “Sure, we can go to your friend’s party, but I’m pretty tired so I might disappear onto the balcony to scroll my Twitter timeline for a few minutes here and there,” or, “Yeah, let’s go to your super-loud favorite restaurant! As long as we can sit in a booth in the back and have a nice focused one-on-one chat”). As is the nature of compromise, there will be times when you agree to do things you don’t strictly want to do. But if your favorite extrovert can snuggle up with you on the couch and silently watch your favorite show with you one night, you can probably bring yourself to accompany them to their chatty happy-hour function another night. Maybe you’ll just let them do most of the talking while you hang back and gaze admiringly at them. And hey, it’s more than okay if you duck out early and they stay another hour to meet a few more people, so long as you’re both okay with that arrangement.

Setting realistic expectations for yourself. I have so often fallen into the trap of shaming myself for not being more social than I am. Feeling suddenly embarrassed about my barren social calendar, I’ll pack back-to-back plans into my week, hoping to feel like less of a hermit/recluse/loser. But I always end up miserable when I do this, wishing halfway through my second or third consecutive Big Night Out that I was in bed with a book instead.

If you haven’t already figured out your ideal ratio of social time to alone time, you should! It’s also okay if it shifts. I’m more social in the summer than in the winter, for example, but not by a lot.

Paying attention to your energy levels over time – and perhaps even tracking them, in a journal or an app (my partner recommends Gyroscope or Day One) or however you prefer – can help teach you what tends to drain you dry and what tends to feel okay for you. For example, I used to sometimes double-book myself – “I’ll go to this family function and then drop by my friend’s birthday party across town!” I’d posit, ambitiously – but now I know that one Social Thing per day is pretty much my maximum; maybe two if they’re spaced out and I can get some downtime in between. It’s nice to know that about myself and be able to make plans accordingly!

Tapping out. Sometimes you think you’re gonna be okay at a social event, but then you spend a little while there and realize you’re… not. It’s awkward to leave before it’s socially acceptable to do so, but there are ways to do it smoothly and politely. I usually fall back on “tired” as my adjective of choice when doing this – it’s true, though most people tend to assume I’m tired in the “didn’t get enough sleep” way, which we for some reason see as a more legitimate excuse than social/emotional fatigue.

As with any instance of delivering potentially upsetting news, it’s good to bookend your “I’m leaving, byeee!” with more positive declarations. For example: “This party has been really fun! I’m tired and gonna duck out early, but let’s get together again soon so we can catch up properly.” Or: “I love talking to you, but I’m just not in a good place to be social today. Can I take you out for drinks next week?” It’s important to be kind and polite whenever you can – and you usually can.

Recharging efficiently and well. Taking introverty time to yourself is pointless if you don’t actually use it to replenish yourself and make yourself feel good. That’s the whole reason you’re doing it, so might as well do it right!

While sometimes my idea of introverting is mindlessly scrolling my Twitter timeline in silence for half an hour, generally I find that social media drains me instead of filling me up. As resistant as I may be to putting my phone down, sometimes that’s what I have to do if I want to recharge properly. There are few sweeter gifts I can give myself than an hour with my phone on airplane mode and my nose in a book (or my journal, or pressed into my pillow as I lie in bed in thoughtful silence). The more fully I revitalize myself during my time alone, the more kindness and exuberance I have to offer my friends, family, and partners when I spend time with them again. So I owe it to myself and to them to take good care of myself!

Introverts: what are your best tips for setting boundaries, connecting meaningfully with extroverts, respecting your introverted nature, and replenishing your social energy?

10 Thoughts On a Long-Term Relationship Out of Left Field

Kate Sloan

1. I thought no one would ever love me this much again. I don’t know quite when or how I picked up this belief; 4 years ago I was deeply entangled with my last long-term love and I recall feeling rock-solid in that union, unshaken and unshakeable. Where did that strong girl go?

She was beaten down by all the rejections and breakups and disappointments, I suppose. Hammered into a smaller shape to account for the smaller and smaller spaces her partners made for her in their lives. I learned to believe, at some core level, slow to shift and hard to change, that big love wasn’t for me. That maybe all my big loves had happened to me already.

But then a new big love crashes into me like a wave and I think, Well, shit. I guess this is happening.

2. The beginning of our relationship contains many themes, patterns, traditions. One is this: I express fear he will leave. He assures me he has no intention to. I don’t believe him. He keeps right on assuring me.

The trouble with these sorts of assurances is that they guarantee nothing. My last boyfriend thought we’d be together for a few years, and then – 3 months in – may as well have said, “Oops, never mind. Joke’s on you.” This is what I meant when I wrote in my journal that I’d never trust anyone again after him: the sturdiest of words can crumble in an instant when their foundation does. There are no sure things.

But there are safe bets. And there are precautions. Instead of telling me he won’t break up with me – which even he knows he cannot entirely guarantee – my new love tells me, “If I did, here’s what I would say.” “Here’s what I would do.” “Here’s what I would try before I resorted to that.” Somehow, it makes me feel better – like when someone soothes my anxiety-ridden heart not by saying, “We won’t be late to the movie,” but by saying, “If we are late to the movie, here’s another theatre we can try, here’s a different movie we can see, and here’s a bar nearby where we can go instead if all else fails.” I like backup plans. I like knowing what those backup plans are.

3. Useful skills in short-term relationships (an abridged list): Flirting. Fucking. Negotiating sex. Making plans on a whim. Putting words to your new feelings, but having the self-control to keep those words to yourself when it’s not time for them yet. Taking cute coupley selfies. Pitching fun date ideas you think will make you seem interesting and cool. Maintaining the illusion of chillness, even to your own detriment. Keeping your body well-groomed, like a sexy cyborg. Telling friends about the latest dramatic development in your romance. Fantasizing too far forward into the future and feeling like an idiot about it. Mitigating disappointment. Saying, “Don’t worry about it, that’s totally fine!” when it totally isn’t.

Useful skills in long-term relationships (a list in progress): Talking about your feelings. Saying you’re sorry. Getting knee-deep in the daily dramas of someone else’s life, and keeping them up to speed on your own. Shouldering their burdens, and letting them shoulder yours. Asking for what you actually want, not just what you think it’s “okay” or “cool” to want. Talking about your feelings some more. Letting another human see what you’re really like when you’re sick, sad, unshowered, or all of the above. Believing they still want you after all that. Finding that you still want them, too.

4. My early-relationship anxieties are predictable as hell: He’s going to break up with me. He doesn’t like me as much as I like him. I’m too clingy. I’m too much. I’m making a fool of myself.

The timbre of my anxieties shifts as time goes on and I trust him more. They’re less pressing, but they also get darker: I don’t have what it takes to love someone well for a long time. We’re barrelling toward disaster, whether we know it or not. My past relationships failed because of some fundamental flaw in me, that he simply has yet to discover.

One night, I tell him, as I have many times before, “I’m worried I’m not good enough for you” – and he says: “‘Good enough’ doesn’t really compute to me. That’s not how or why I get into relationships with people or stay in them. I love you and I want to be with you. That means even if we are bad at something for a while, I want to figure it out and get better at it if we can. It’s not about you being good enough; it’s about whether we make each other happy and better.”

Floored, I splutter, “Most of the people I’ve dated have not looked at it that way,” and he writes back with utmost calm, “Yeah, that’s sad for them. But we’re not them.” I shiver like a leaf on the breeze but I feel stronger, all the same.

5. It occurs to me one afternoon, as I’m staring into space on the subway, that I think of myself as someone who can’t sustain relationships, but that perception just isn’t true.

It’s true that for years, my “official” relationships – the ones with people who called me their girlfriend – have all lasted a few months or less. It’s true that several of these ended in uncomfortable breakups I wish I could have found a way to spare us.

But it’s also true that a former friend-with-benefits is now one of my dearest pals, years after meeting him. And that my current FWB has been a consistent source of carnal comfort for over a year. And that I’ve had casual beaux and “comet partners” drift in and out of my life with uncomplicated ease. And that my friend group is full of people I’ve known and loved for ages. My social life is laced with longevity that too often goes unacknowledged because I’m hung up on “official” relationships, as though romantic feelings and labels are the only markers of social validity.

This isn’t my first long-term relationship in years; it’s just the first one of this specific type. My past relationships didn’t “fail”; they just ended, often for totally legit reasons. Those endings weren’t my fault; they were just part of the dating game. You can’t win ’em all. It’d be boring if you did.

6. He sends me a link to a page which keeps track of how long we’ve been dating. I keep an eye on it steadily, getting a little teary each time one of the numbers rolls over in a significant way.

One day in March, I text him excitedly that we’ve been together for 15 weeks, and immediately regret it. What if he thinks that’s stupid? What if he doesn’t care about these mini-anniversaries like I do? What if he says, “So what?”

But instead, he writes back, “Do you feel happy and fulfilled and excited about having been in this for 15 weeks? Do you wanna do another 15?” I do. I really do. He does too.

7. When I fell in love for the first time, friends used to ask me if I thought I’d be with my boyfriend forever. I always just laughed. At age 19, I thought forever-love seemed absurd. It wasn’t what I wanted, anyway. I wanted someone who’d walk through life with me until it no longer made sense for us to be together, at which point we’d go our separate ways. That is exactly what happened.

Friends don’t ask me that anymore. I think we’ve all grown up and learned how much and how quickly we change. Instead of asking, “How long do you think you’ll be with him?” they mostly just ask me, “Does he make you happy?” The answer is “absolutely,” and that is enough. For now and for however long our future turns out to be.

8. Having dabbled in promiscuity, I’ve ultimately learned it doesn’t thrill me. Some people fuck strangers aplenty because that’s what they want; I fucked strangers aplenty because I wanted something else and thought somehow I could find it that way. (I’m not ruling out sluttiness entirely. My inner slut may well surge back to life someday – but hopefully with clearer intentions and a healthier heart.)

Sex with someone who knows you inside and out is sweet and deep and qualitatively different from more distanced dalliances. Exploring a new body is fun, but for me, it does not compare with traversing a body you know by heart. Familiar topography, beloved landmarks, and an assured sense of ease: I’ll take these over uncomfortable first-time fumblings almost any day. Good sex with a stranger is a fluke; good sex with a stable partner is a process, a journey, an art.

9. Helena Fitzgerald once wrote, “Romance is mainly a repetitive act of remembering, a shared language of reference inflated and made important because someone else remembers it along with you.” I like weaving these sturdy neural nets of inside jokes and vivid events together. I like knowing that the information I’m filing away will actually go somewhere, will actually matter and be useful, instead of being relegated to the part of my brain deadset on remembering the lyrics to “Sk8er Boi” and that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

A couple months into our relationship, we open the Notes app on our respective devices and create a shared note containing a list of the “characters” we’ve developed in our many, many hours of phone chats. There are lots, because we’re goofs: there’s the growly-voiced guy he does when he wants to caricature his own dominance; there’s the spot-on Ira Glass impression he breaks out randomly to crack me up; there’s our imitation of a gleeful waiter who tried to sell us on fingerling potatoes during one of our fancy dinner dates. At last count, there were over a dozen characters on this list. I howl with laughter whenever I read it.

Inside jokes and other niche references are a relational currency; they can measure a connection’s duration and depth. Every time we add to our dramatis personae, or share an experience I know we’ll reference later, I feel we’ve stitched another thread between our hearts. There’s a thick rope there now – and when I tug on it, I can feel him tugging back.

10. “I am in love with who you are,” he tells me one night, “and I want to be in love with who you become.”

Ever-articulate, all I can manage in response is, “Jesus fuck. SIR!” before my eyes spill over with happy tears – salty little signals of how safe I feel.

Love Addiction, “The Pisces,” and Me

Kate Sloan

I’ve never been addicted to a substance. I’ve never been over-reliant on booze or weed or pills. But I have been addicted to romantic fantasies, and let me tell you, the compulsions and withdrawal can feel surprisingly tangible – like something vital is missing from your blood, your bones, and you’d do anything to get it back.

In the last few dying weeks of 2016, I went on a Tinder date which was completely unremarkable, except for what I learned from it. My pre-date banter with this boy was fast and easy, creating the sense of chemistry where perhaps there was just empty charm. The date itself was boring, one of those classic Tinderludes where you work painfully hard to pull dry conversation out of a monosyllabic, nervous stranger. The sex that followed was boring, too: our bodies didn’t fit together right, we didn’t take each other’s hints or make each other giggle, we just loped through the encounter as if on hookup-culture autopilot. The boy left around 2AM and I snuggled up in my bed, alone.

It took me until the next day to realize something was wrong. I felt a profound heaviness in my body, like when I’m hit by depression, yet even more acutely needling. It felt like something I loved had been abruptly taken away from me, even though – much to the contrary – someone I didn’t love had left me alone.

Dissecting these feelings in my journal, I saw that I’d put a lot of stock into this boy in the few days we’d known each other. I’d extrapolated wild compatibility from his brief texts and bland emojis. I’d spun our present into a plausible future. I’d imagined he wanted more from me than just sex, and I’d imagined wanting anything from him. So when the date itself was a disappointment and the boy left, I was shaken – not by the loss of the boy, but by the loss of the fantasy.

This had become, I realized, a pattern in my life. Compulsive swiping was how I dealt with any uncomfortable emotion, from boredom to sadness to fear. No matter what, it felt safe and sparkly to return to a reliable old fantasy: that this next swipe, this next match, this next message would lead me inevitably closer to the love of my life. That I was moments from a meet-cute that would cure my every sore spot. That someone perfect would come along and relieve me from the mundane inadequacy of myself.

The trouble is, when romantic fantasy gets you high, you crash spectacularly hard whenever your romantic hopes are dashed. I saw this in the months to come: a sexting pal told me he was unavailable for a more romantic situation, and I cried; a Tinder match told me he wasn’t actually interested in me because our views on polyamory differed, and I cried; a new FWB stated clearly that he didn’t want me in a romantic way, and I cried. A promising OkCupid boy ghosted me after less than a day of scintillating texts, and I had a total meltdown: nausea, panic, weeping, unsalvageable despair. When the pain of that rejection became unbearable, what did I do? I hopped on Tinder to find someone else to fantasize about. (That next distraction eventually ghosted me too.)

I was in therapy all the while, and probably not being altogether honest about the extent of my addiction. But my therapist, ever-perceptive, asked me once, “How much time would you guess you spend on online dating every week?” and I couldn’t quantify it. There were the hours I spent swiping, and the hours I spent moonily fantasizing, and the hours I spent going on dates, and the hours I spent crying and journaling when the dates didn’t go perfectly. The total seemed incalculable – partly due to the shame of that calculation.

Somewhere around this time, a friend of mine started going to weekly meetings for sex and love addicts. I was surprised to hear this; she had always seemed so level-headed. But looking back, I saw places where maybe our kinship and connection had been based on a shared addiction: we loved debriefing about boys and dates and minute flirtations, and we encouraged each other in these fancies. Where was the line between healthy fun and self-destruction?

Though I wasn’t sure whether my friend’s condition was anything like mine, the phrase kept returning to the forefront of my mind: love addiction. It seemed to fit. The highs of my fantasies were euphoric, like that first sweet hit of a new drug – and the subsequent devastations felt all-consuming, closer to rock bottom every time. In those depressed states, I’d hunt for something, anything, to relieve my sense of loneliness and failure. Alcohol, drugs, shopping, self-harm, exercise, bad TV, more Tinder time – nothing could fill the void. It felt like I needed love, but really what I needed was a healthier relationship to love.

I went to see another friend of mine who had struggled with multiple addictions in the past, and had been through a couple of twelve-step programs. As we sipped milkshakes in my pal’s apartment, they told me, “When I find myself wanting to do something rash, I always just tell myself, ‘If I still want to do it in 15 minutes, I can.’ And I almost never do.” I took their advice to heart: distraction, I knew, was not a long-term strategy, but maybe it could help shake me out of my addiction just enough that I could start recovering.

And recover, I did – slowly, non-linearly, with the help of a therapist and my friends and intermittent partners and lots and lots of writing. Nowadays I can browse Tinder occasionally without hanging my entire livelihood on each swipe, and while I haven’t been on a first date in months, I gather the day after a date would no longer make me feel like death. I’m still careful and self-critical about these behaviors, but I seem to be doing okay.

I hadn’t thought about this stuff in a long time, but then I picked up Melissa Broder’s new novel The Pisces and felt like I was peering through a looking-glass at my early-2017 self. So it seemed like a good time to examine my history with love addiction and write about it here.

Broder is the biting writer behind the viral @SoSadToday account on Twitter, the subsequent depression-soaked essay collection So Sad Today, and a book of poetry called Last Sext, among other things. While I think she deals with mental illness more intense than mine has ever been, her work fixates on themes of love and sex and how they interact with depression and anxiety – so, naturally, I adore her.

Her debut novel, The Pisces, is – as you might already know if you’ve seen any press about it – the story of a woman who falls in love with a merman, and has tons of sex with him. (Yes, a merman, as in a male mermaid. Yes, he lives in the ocean and she lives on land. Yes, he has a dick. It’s under a loincloth.) But at its core, it’s really a novel about love addiction. The protagonist, Lucy, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend at the start of the novel, and falls into a toxic cycle of chasing fantasy men and then being disappointed by them. I found her Tinder tribulations so relatable that I made more Kindle highlights than I’ve ever made in any book, and kept alternately weeping and cackling as I read. “There was something about the morning of a date that tricked me,” Lucy muses, after spending far too much money on lingerie for a tryst that will turn out disastrous-bordering-on-traumatic. “It tricked me out of the haze of being alive. Or perhaps it tricked me out of the sadness of knowing that one day I would die. It punctured the nothingness.” I nodded so hard my teeth chattered.

I saw myself in Lucy’s hapless Tinder dates, and, later, in her pining lovesickness over Theo, the handsome merman she meets near her sister’s beach house. While the novel sets Theo up as potentially being Lucy’s “true love” – the one she’s been waiting for, searching for, longing for – there’s actually no indication that he’s better than any of the online-dating fuckboys who leave her sexually and emotionally dissatisfied. It’s telling that Broder gives her romantically delusional protagonist a dream man who is a literal fantasy creature – and that no other character in the book ever actually sees Theo, so we can’t be entirely sure he exists at all. Isn’t every “true love,” in some sense, a projection, part mirage, a trick of the light?

Far from being the wild merman sex romp it’s been marketed as, The Pisces is a deeply philosophical novel that struggles with huge themes of love, emptiness, and contentment. It spends more time picking apart the whys and hows of romantic addiction than it does describing Theo’s scaly tail or the logistics of his underwater life. We know more about Lucy’s fears, fantasies, and yearnings than we ever know about Theo. But that’s the way of the love addict: making other people into a goal or a punchline, rather than allowing them to just be people.

By the end of the novel, Lucy seems to understand herself a little better, and to have a better handle on what she actually needs. I cried when I finished this book: I cried for Lucy, and for Theo, and for myself. At one point in the story, Lucy quips, “I didn’t want to be seen too closely or I might have to look at me too,” and that’s how The Pisces made me feel: seen, looked at, called out. But ultimately it served as a reminder of the habits I’d hate to fall back into, the fantasies I can no longer rely on, and the emptiness I no longer need to feel.

The Pisces
by Melissa Broder Hardcover
Powells.com

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

Kate Sloan

The most romantic story I’ve ever heard is told to me in my aunt’s kitchen during a family party.

It’s shortly before the total solar eclipse of summer 2017. An older woman I hardly know – a distant relative by marriage – is sipping white wine on a barstool next to me, and we strike up a casual conversation. “My husband and I are headed down to Illinois to see the solar eclipse,” she announces breezily. “We’ve been planning this trip for almost 30 years!”

I furrow my brow. “What do you mean?”

I watch her eyes wander fondly to the nerdy, affable-looking guy currently fussing with a roast chicken he’s about to slide into the oven. “When I first met him, in the ’80s, a total solar eclipse had just happened, and he’s a big eclipse nerd, so he was there,” she tells me in a low, conspiratorial voice. “He said, ‘Hey, you should come with me to Illinois for the total solar eclipse in 2017. It’s going to be beautiful.'” She takes another sip of her wine. Her husband is catching none of this; he’s too busy making dinner. “We’d only been dating a few weeks,” she adds with a smile, “and now it’s decades later and we’re going!”

I’m floored. Shortly into a new relationship myself, I have no idea what would make someone so sure of a relationship so quickly that they would start making plans that far in the future. People breeze in and out of my life so easily, so suddenly; I can barely imagine believing a partner will still be around in a few weeks, let alone a few decades.

“Did that freak you out?” I ask, unable to contain myself. “That he asked you that, so soon into your relationship?”

She considers the question, and shrugs. “No, not really. I guess I just knew.”

Both of our eyes slide back over to her husband, and I can feel us wondering how he knew. How anyone knows a relationship is meant to last. It’s an impossible, unanswerable question, and one I desperately want an answer for.

Some heartbreaks are big, and some are small. That summer goes on to contain both for me. The first in the series comes when my boyfriend sleeps with someone else when we’ve only been dating for an intense, heady two weeks – without asking me, notifying me in advance, or seeming in any way to consider my feelings in this decision. I feel like the rug’s been ripped out from under me, but because we’ve agreed to be non-monogamous, I feel I have no right to express displeasure with him, even as my heart crumples in on itself.

But he’s not completely oblivious. Apparently sensing my misery, he texts me, “I was having this lovely daydream yesterday, of us together in a few years. You were more established as a writer, and you’d always bring me as your +1 to all the fancy events.”

This text comes in while I’m en route to a coffee shop, and I burst into tears on the street.

His near-immediate gravitation toward someone else, so soon after meeting me, has me feeling like he doesn’t want me anymore, or like our relationship is doomed. So to receive this explicit acknowledgment that he not only wants me now but thinks he’ll still want me in a few years is groundbreaking: a balm for my wounded heart. It hasn’t occurred to me yet to wonder if I still want to be with him in a few years, because women are socialized to desperately cling to any halfway-decent man who wants us, our own desire and comfort be damned.

“It made me feel really happy and safe to know that you think we’ll still be together years from now,” I tell him later. “That’s why I cried when I got that text.”

“I know,” he replies. “That’s why I sent it.”

But his daydream turns out to be an empty promise. When he breaks up with me a few months later, he offers dully by way of explanation, “The long-term potential I thought I saw isn’t actually there.” I gather my things and walk out his door with hot tears stinging my eyes, faced with the task of rewriting all those futures I thought he’d be a part of.

“My heart is fucking broken,” I write in my journal. “This makes me feel like I can never trust anyone again. Like even people who insist they love me and will take care of me, and who prove it for a while, cannot be trusted to stick around.”

My dating life, for a while, is haunted by the spectre of this man. Far from “seeing what happens” and “going with the flow,” I can’t maintain an interest in any person in the present because their presence in my future is not assured. I know, logically, that any relationship can end at any time for any reason, but still I long for the safety of a solid long-term commitment. Without that, I feel sad, adrift, and alone.

The shadow of that perceived betrayal weighs heavily on my next relationship, to my chagrin. “It’s like the two of you are in dialogue with each other,” I tell my new boyfriend thoughtfully over the phone, after relaying to him – in January – the details of my August breakup. I should be over it by now. I know that; I do. But that profound feeling of safe-and-then-suddenly-not-safe is still haunting my psychology, making me see danger where there is none.

See, this new relationship is, by all indications, safe as houses. Five days after my first date with this mysterious Twitter crush from New York, I’m telling him about the Hippo Campus concert I’ll be attending on my next trip to his city, and he asks, “Is someone going with you to that?”

“Nah, just me.” It hadn’t occurred to me to ask anyone. I don’t know any other Hippo Campus fans in real life, and certainly would never expect a friend to trek to another country just to see my favorite band play. “Do you want a date?” he asks, so casual, like this question isn’t a Big Fucking Deal.

“Haven’t you not even heard any of their music?” I ask, and he answers coolly, “I’ve got time.” And then he hops onto the Brooklyn Steel website and orders his ticket.

I can’t articulate how much this gesture means to me, and I worry that even if I could, it would scare him off. Because what he’s telling me with this simple $20 ticket purchase is: I like you enough to stay in your life for two months, at least. We’ve only spent a couple hours together so far, over coffee and kisses, and he’s already sold enough on me to bet we’ll want to dance together to a quartet of indie-pop boys two whole months from now. It’s funny how I’ll happily make plans with friends months in advance, but a new potential romantic partner tries to flip a couple calendar pages and I panic. There’s no way he’ll still be interested in me by then, I think, pathetically – but he’s already bought the ticket, so what can I do?

As those two months slide by, more and more hints emerge that maybe this boy plans to stick around. I tease him, “You’ve gotta charm my best friend if you ever meet them,” and he amends, “Hopefully when.” I tell him I know what color I’d use for him in my spreadsheet if we had sex, and he corrects me, “When, not if.” One night during a tearful phone call about Serious Emotional Stuff, I wipe my leaky eyes and say, “I’m sorry; I’m just not used to feeling this emotionally safe with someone,” and he answers fiercely, “Well, you can get used to it, because I’m not going anywhere.” I melt. I cry harder. I melt some more.

When the night of the concert comes, it’s even more special than I imagined it being when he first bought the ticket – because I’m not just going to a show with some guy I went on a date with once; I’m going to a show with someone I’ve been talking to on the phone almost every night, and slowly negotiating a delicious D/s dynamic with, and – whoops – falling in love with. He kisses me in the line outside the venue, holding my gaze steadily whenever our lips aren’t touching, and I imagine showing this tableau to me-from-two-months-ago. She’d be shocked he showed up at all, let alone showed up with this ferocious affection in his eyes.

Later that night, at a rooftop bar overlooking Brooklyn, he tells me he loves me for the first time. I say it back, and it’s devastatingly true. It’s so much not what I was expecting, and yet it’s exactly what I want.

He’s shown me even more, in the months since then, just how enduring he thinks our love will be. He’s bought plane tickets to Toronto a month in advance, and then showed up at my doorstep on the appointed day, handsome and smiling. He’s assigned me protocols that reach into the future, with more certainty than I can muster – enough certainty for the both of us. He’s bought tickets to conferences I’m attending, and exclaimed excitedly about all the things we’ll do there. Most of all, he’s told me, many nights, “I want to love you for a long time.” And though it’s impossible to guarantee such a thing, I feel more and more safe in his love every time he re-asserts this sentiment. We’re building something together, and I can see from his actions – not just his words – that he is serious about building it strong, building it well, building it to last.

When I used to complain to my therapist that no relationship felt safe to me because there was no certain promise of a future together, she’d ask, “But why do you need that to feel safe? Can’t you just enjoy the way things are right now, without worrying about what comes next?”

I can’t. Maybe it’s my anxiety, or my past heartbreaks, or just my temperament, but I can’t be fully satisfied with a futureless present, try as I might.

But fortunately, in this relationship, both the present and the future look pretty bright.