Love & Relationships

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.

10 Ways to Love a Writer

Kate Sloan

1. Read their work. But like, really read it, though. Soak it up. Tell them what you liked about it. Tell them how it made you feel. Marvel at their clever word choices and melodious phrasing. If you haven’t had time to read their latest piece yet, say, “I’ve been saving it for when I can really take my time with it,” and mean that, and follow through.

2. Brag about them. When the subject of her last piece comes up at a dinner party, inquire, “Did you read her article about that? It was great!” When you introduce him to your friends, tell them, “He’s an incredibly talented writer.” Have her big-deal byline framed. Bring up his accomplishments in spaces where he might be too shy to do so himself. Be your sweetheart’s one-person hype machine.

3. Read their work aloud to them. Whether it’s an in-progress draft or an essay they wrote years ago, they’ll hear it differently in your voice. They’ll adore hearing which sentences surprise you, which metaphors make you giggle, which piece of dialogue trips you up. It’s a sort of artistic collaboration: their words, your voice, mingling to create something new.

4. Don’t offer edits unless asked to. If you’re not sure, ask before you begin to read, “What kind of feedback are you looking for on this, if any?” Sometimes they might want your detailed suggestions. Other times they might just want someone to look it over and say, “This is great!”

5. Nerd out about books with them. Be the person to whom they can text excerpts excitedly, or shriek gleefully about perfect sentences. Recommend them your favorites, and read theirs. Lie in bed together reading, taking occasional breaks to query, “What the fuck is this character doing?!” or “How the fuck is this going to end?!” Give them a gift certificate to their favorite used bookstore, or an annotated edition of their fave novel, or a shiny new Kindle. Hold them and kiss their shoulders while they devour something beautiful.

6. Let them bounce ideas off you. Help them shape the plot of their novel, or the arc of their essay, by listening and asking questions. Tell them what’s working for you and (gently) what isn’t. Point out plot holes or fallacies, and help them fill in the gaps. Develop the skill of being diplomatic but honest when asked, “Does this make sense?” or “Is this funny?” or “Is this any good?”

7. Write them love notes. Their love language is probably linguistic, so they’ll appreciate this even more than the average person. Put into words why you love them, what they mean to you, what they bring to your life. Tell them how their presence in your life heals your past, sweetens your present, and brightens your future. Write things that are meaningful, sweet, and true. Your prose doesn’t have to be flowery or crystalline like theirs is, though maybe they inspire you to make it moreso.

8. Surprise them with beautiful writing supplies. But ideally the ones you know they prefer, since that proves you truly know them. Get them their next journal, a box of exquisite pens or pencils, a year-long subscription to Evernote Premium or a domain for their blog… Whatever you know will get them fired up to write even more.

9. Give them space to write. Don’t take “I can’t; I’m writing” as a rejection; be flattered they trust you enough to be honest with you about their boundaries and needs. Don’t interrupt them when they’ve retired to a private space to write – or, if you must, ask first if it’s okay. Find ways to work on solitary pursuits, independently but together – they will feel adored and accepted when they see you can amuse yourself with some other activity while they write, happy just to be near them. They’ll be happy to be near you, too.

10. Give them things to write about. Magical experiences, poignant moments, deep and true love. Kiss them in pretty places, hold their hand in bustling streets, shoot them meaningful glances from across a room. Incite in them joy and lust and exhilaration and whatever feelings you’d want to read about – because they want to write about those feelings, but more than that, they want to feel them.

Do You Have a “Type”?

Kate Sloan

“You should date this guy,” my friend said, forwarding me a screenshot of someone they’d encountered on Tinder. “He’s totally your type.”

I stared at the picture, trying to see what my friend saw. The dude was scrawny, bespectacled, and looked like he’d probably make an obscure Sondheim reference in the same breath as telling you why your favorite Pokémon’s stats sucked. Yep. Definitely my type.

Curious, I took to the internet. “What kind of person do you think I’ll end up with?” I queried my Facebook friends. The answers were very interesting indeed.

“Good sense of humor? Which I guess is subjective, but someone who is good with joking around and not making asshole jokes and stuff. Someone who’s passionate about some hobby/job/pastime. Not necessarily something nerdy, but maybe.” -my friend Dan, who’s known me for a few years

My first girlfriend was an improvisor, and I’ve been drawn to improv weirdos ever since. There is just something about a person who can not only make you laugh, but can do so with a quick wit and a theatrical committedness that dials their jokes up to eleven. Being on a competitive improv team for a few years saddled me with some of the most intense crushes of my life, simply because seeing people be that funny, that fast and that often, is bound to give you Feelingz about at least some of them.

That first girlfriend also cursed me with a permanent attraction to purple fauxhawks, squeaky laughs, and – most crucially and most enduringly – puns. I practiced my punniness to impress her, and now, all these years later, wordplay still makes my ears perk up. If you can outpun me with aplomb, I probably want to kiss you.

“Somebody intelligent, who has a working knowledge of something you’ll develop a passion for after you meet them (you’ll teach them about something you know lots about, like theatre or something, and they’ll teach you about the new interest). Somebody calm/level-headed who isn’t drawn into an argument easily.” -Max, my brother

My first serious boyfriend was a game developer, and ever since that years-long romance, I’ve been hopelessly attracted to other developers of games and apps. If you can ramble my ear off about code, interactive narrative, and the evolution of iOS, I’ll have very little idea what you’re talking about, but I’ll probably wanna listen anyway. Especially if I already think you’re cute.

This proclivity got so bad at one point that I would start flirting with someone and only find out after the fact that they were a game dev. “Of course you are,” I’d say, smacking myself in the forehead. I could not escape the devs!

I was mystified by this for a long time, until a game-dev friend of mine offered a potential explanation. He said I’m attracted to nerds, but especially creative nerds – and software development is where hard-nosed geekiness crosses paths with starry-eyed dreaminess. To make a good game or app, you gotta have both imaginative vision and nerdy know-how. It makes a lot of sense to me now why I’m attracted to people in this career so frequently.

“They will be laugh-out-loud funny, have empathy out the wazoo, be a good listener, and spontaneous. Funny is so important. I think a unique sense of humour is big too, and owning their own quirks.” -my friend Georgia, who’s known me for 10+ years

When pondering whether or not I have a “type,” the phase “charismatic nerd” kept floating through my consciousness. It’s really the most succinct and accurate description of the people I’ve dated. My physical preferences have shifted over time, and usually haven’t been all that important to me – but charisma and nerdiness have endured as crucial qualities in all my crushes.

See, I love the zany zeal that characterizes nerds – their no-chill enthusiasm for whatever captivates them, and the ways that passion can translate to sex and dating. But while I find some nerds’ shyness and awkwardness endearing, it feels too familiar to my dorky heart; I tend to enjoy dating people more outgoing and socially smooth than me, because they pull me out of my introverted shell and take me on adventures.

S. Bear Bergman says you should date “someone who is similar enough to you to make you feel comfortable, but different enough from you to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.” Nerdiness sets me at ease. Charisma sets my nerve endings on fire.

“I mean, they’d need to love BJs and you’d need to have good sex with them, but I feel like as long as they weren’t selfish dickwads in bed, you’d be able to have good sex with them. Like, obviously you have your preferences, but I feel like your sexual priorities are a little more mutable than the things you’d need from their personality. So if they were amazingly funny/supportive/creative and willing to learn (because they’re supportive of your pleasure) then you’d be happy to do the work to make sure y’all were having good sex.” -my best friend Bex

Last year, I was telling my then-boyfriend about a man I’d previously been in love with, and he said, “Why did you fall in love with him? Wasn’t he vanilla?”

It struck me as an odd question, because at the time that all that shit went down, someone’s kink orientation didn’t really enter into my vetting process vis-à-vis crushes. If they were smart, funny, feminist, enthusiastic, and kind, I figured great sex could come later. Or I could settle for pretty-good sex. Or we’d figure it out when we got there. I dunno, man.

These days, though, I lean toward viewing my submissive identity as integral to my attractions. Someone can capture my attention by being a little dominant when otherwise I might’ve skipped over them. Admissions of risk-aware sadism or daddy-esque predilections get my blood pumping. I consider kink compatibility alongside humor, temperament, and lifestyle when deciding how deep to wade into a new crush.

But I still get all swoony for mega-vanilla people sometimes. Hey, you can’t win ’em all.

“Smart. Open-minded. Probably a goof or you’ll get bored, let’s be real.” –Sofi, who is a literal matchmaker for a living

Ultimately, the qualities that draw you to someone, and keep you interested in them, are to some degree ineffable. You can write out what you think is the precise formula of your attractions, but you can always prove yourself wrong.

All my major crushes have shifted my own perceptions of my “type” in some way. I never knew I could love an extrovert until I did; I wasn’t sure I could fall for a bald guy or a short guy or a vegan guy until I did; I’ve dated people older than I thought I ever would, younger, louder, quieter, farther away. They’ve probably all had some kernel of something in common – some clever glimmer, some magnetic tenderness – but it’s hard to see their similarities at a glance. If you put ’em all in a lineup, they’d look like a pretty disparate crew.

I love that about attraction, though. I love never knowing who I’ll want next, and why. It reminds me that life is a wild ride and there’s no use in trying to predict anything. Just enjoy it while you’re on it.

Do you have a “type”? How do you feel about it?