Girly Juice

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.