love

Obsessed & Distressed: Reflections on Rabid Love

Kate Sloan

I learned what love felt like from someone I couldn’t bring myself to love.

She was a close friend in high school whose harmless puppy-love toward me darkened into something deeper over our sophomore year. Try as I might, and try though I did, I couldn’t conjure the caliber of crush in return that she shone on me like fervent floodlights. Love can’t be forced, and she knew that, but I’m sure it made her sad anyway. I’m sure it also made her sad that we had a sexual relationship for over a year that remained only one-sidedly romantic. Look, tenth-graders don’t always make the most rational decisions.

I’ve spent ten years processing that relationship, and I guess she probably has too. We’ve made amends for the ways we fucked up, each trying to squeeze the other into an ill-fitting box. But what’s stuck with me most from that relationship was how obsessed with me she was.

(A note worth noting: this post will throw around the words “obsessed” and “obsessive” in their colloquial senses, and not the sense used in mental health diagnostics – although I and at least some of the people I’m describing have mental illnesses that feature some degree of invasive thought-loops one could consider obsessions.)

My tenth-grade paramour wrote me long emails and romantic poems. She kept up with my foibles on Facebook and Twitter, both relatively new and uncommonly-adopted technologies at that time. She mined me for minute trivia, plumbing my lore like I was my own cinematic universe. After a while, she knew everything from my favorite flavors of ice cream to my top 5 favorite Regina Spektor songs to my darkest fears. When our English teacher gave our class carte blanche to do a deep-dive on a topic of our choosing for our final project, she did her project on… me. Those documents are still tucked away in my Google Drive somewhere, curious little remnants of a love that once was.

It is, of course, flattering to be someone’s top priority and main focus – assuming this attention doesn’t frighten you or make you uncomfortable. But I think the reason her love comforted me was that it felt familiar. My crushes had always taken on a similarly obsessive tone: when I pined over pseudo-celebrities of the local comedy or theatre scene, I Googled them late into the night, memorized their answers to interview questions, gave them more real estate in my brain than perhaps they deserved. So when I felt that similarly laser-focused love being aimed at me, I recognized it for the love that it was. Though she was the first person ever to fall in love with me, it wasn’t hard for me to believe or accept; I knew what it was because it looked how I expected it to look. It looked like how I would love someone, if I ever did.

Almost a decade later, the shadow of that old love filtered through my consciousness again – because I fell in love with someone who wasn’t obsessed with me. And it hurt.

I wonder, in retrospect, if I was drawn to him because he was everything I’ve never been able to be: chill, cool, aloof. Aside from initiating our relationship by asking me out on Twitter, his expressions of enthusiasm toward me were scant. Maybe that just made me want him more. (Is this a lesson we all have to learn at some point? That the chase is fun but also exhausting? I hope I’m done learning that one.)

I felt – to partly dilute a word that maybe I shouldn’t be diluting – gaslighted. He told me over and over again that he liked me, loved me, wanted to be with me, but his behavior was comparatively devoid of evidence he wanted me around. He’d ignore my texts for hours at a time, neglect to keep his promises, back out of plans at the last minute, and pull away coldly when I wanted closeness and warmth. I don’t know that he was doing this intentionally, as the “gaslighting” label would suggest – but the net effect was, regardless, a sense of emotional whiplash. I kept reminding myself to listen to his words, because they no doubt were truer than my anxiety-warped perception of his actions – but actions, as you well know, tend to speak louder. His were drowning out his words.

I brought this to his attention only once, and came to regret it. We were looping the same argument we’d been having for basically our entire relationship: I resented that he wouldn’t give me the assurances I felt I needed, and he resented that I needed them. Grasping at straws, I tried to explain: “It’s hard for me to recognize love as love when the person isn’t kind of obsessed with me, because when I like someone, I want to know everything about them, I want to see them as much as possible, and I think about them almost all the time.”

Some part of me hoped he would counter with what I wanted to hear: that he did think about me constantly, that he was obsessed with me; how could I not have noticed? Instead, he replied, “I don’t really get obsessed with people. I never have. That’s just not how I operate.”

Wise and level-headed people in my life, like my therapist and my best friend, would probably tell me to just accept a lower level of attention and devotion from partners. Just because someone doesn’t pine over you nonstop, they might tell me, doesn’t mean they’re blasé about you. If you broaden your view of what love can look like, you expand your ability to be loved, to feel loved.

That’s true, I guess. But I wanted love I didn’t have to do cognitive backflips to understand. I wanted love that was more joy, less compromise. I wanted love that mirrored my own, that matched me in my wild zeal. So when that boy broke up with me, although I was crushed, part of me was relieved. It felt more peaceful, more pleasant, to know for sure that no one loved me romantically, than to beg for scraps of affection that never quite felt like enough.

When I met my now-boyfriend, then-Twitter-crush, one of the first things he told me about himself is that he’s obsessive. I thrilled at the possibility of familiarity.

It didn’t take long for me to discover how right he was, how core this quality is to who he is. Intrepid Googling and curious research have left him well-informed on a broad range of topics. He can tell you the top 5 best cocktail bars in any neighborhood in New York, off the top of his head. He geeks out about etymology, psychology, philosophy. Once, during a conversation over drinks about whether or not our D/s dynamic is technically 24/7, he said, “That reminds me of this quote from SM 101…” and pulled it up on his phone in seconds. I swooned.

As we got to know each other, he’d casually reference old videos of mine, tweets, blog posts. He got embarrassed each time I called him out on it, backpedaling and blushing audibly over the phone, but my screeches of “How do you know that?!” were never accusatory – only excited. For me, combing through a crush’s internet presence is par for the course; it had been years since anyone had made me feel spotlighted that way in return.

He commissioned me a custom perfume based on a list of preferences he cobbled together from research. He devoured my sex toy reviews so he’d know what I like to be fucked with, and worked his way through my podcast so he’d know how I like to be fucked. When he sends me flowers or brings me treats, his selections are educated guesses – or sometimes, exactly the right thing.

The more I think about it, the more I doubt that “obsessive” is the right word. The essence of romance, and indeed of love, is focusing on your paramour: giving them your attention, putting effort into them, demonstrating your enthusiasm for them over and over. That sharp passion is what was missing from so many of my past relationships, which is why it feels especially good in this latest one. I spent years making desperate excuses for aloof partners, twisting their apathy until it looked like love. I settled over and over for paltry affection that barely warmed my skin, let alone my insides. I gave up on thinking of myself as someone worthy of obsession, even as I continued to furtively memorize my crushes’ likes and dislikes by the dim glow of my laptop in the dead of night.

I’m so happy now to be loved in the way I’ve always craved, and so happy to have discovered that love doesn’t have to be a compromise at its core. Sometimes it can just be exactly what you want.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 6 Journal Entries

Kate Sloan

Where my fellow journaling fans at?! I flicked through all my journal entries from the entirety of 2018 (phew!) and picked 6 of my faves for you…

January 30th

I’ve been in love 3 times before and here’s what happened those previous times:

E___ told me after about a month and a half, which I thought was surprisingly early, and then I told him about 2 weeks after that, if I recall correctly.

It took me about a year to even be comfortable conceptualizing my feelings for C___ as love in my own head, or calling it that out loud. I don’t think I ever actually told him to his face that that’s what I had been feeling, though I’ve certainly used the word many times when I’ve written about him online.

I told G___ at about 11 weeks, which is the closest I’ve ever come to hitting the mythical 3-month threshold I’ve somewhat arbitrarily set for myself as a reasonable minimum before saying it. (We said it on July 10th. 3 months would’ve been July 18th or 25th, depending on how you count it.)

I don’t know why I’m obsessing over these numbers like they contain any kind of answer to the questions I am implicitly asking, which are: 1) Am I in love with Matt? and 2) Is it too soon to tell him that, if so?

I have a feeling he would say it’s not too soon and it’s okay to say it whenever you feel it, but I have objections to that, namely:

-How do you even actually know you’re in love? I don’t want to say it until/unless I’m sure, because you can’t really take that shit back. In the past, when I’ve said it, it’s been after a period of at least a few weeks where I consistently found myself thinking it and wanting to say it, and eventually reached a point where it felt like it bubbled over and I had to say it.

-I think it is perhaps irresponsible and premature to say it before you establish adult shit like “Do we have actual long-term potential?” and “Do we even actually like each other, once NRE has worn off?” and “Do we fit functionally into each other’s lives?” because, while “I love you” is technically just a statement of feelings, it is also, to some extent, a statement of intent and commitment and devotion, etc., and I would rather we figure our shit out before jumping to that.

-I would rather say it to him in person, because it’s so weighty and I just think that would be the appropriate and right way to do it. But of course, life happens, and feelings are intense and unpredictable. Who knows what’ll happen. (I do have a lot of romantic feelings about the idea of him putting my collar on me before the Hippo Campus show, though, and I have a feeling an emotional outpouring could take place when that happens.)

-Part of me is afraid to fall in love again (god, what a clichéd sentiment) because the last two times it’s happened have been probably the two biggest heartbreaks of my life and they happened within a year of each other and it was just… a lot. I’m hesitant to give someone else that much power over my heart again, although, let’s be honest: I already have. (Wow, this journal entry is getting REALLY REAL, huh!!)

-7 weeks is probably too short a time to have really fallen in love with someone… maybe… probably. We are still squarely in NRE territory, where everything about a person seems perfect and adorable and even your conflicts are kind of cute and quaint. I would feel more secure calling a feeling “love” if the smog of NRE had cleared and love was still visibly in the picture. But what is the distinction between NRE buzziness and love, anyway? What does any of this mean??

-There is also a self-protective, superego-y part of me that wants to carefully weigh and consider the idea of getting into a long-distance relationship before I wade this deep into it, but tbh, love is not controllable in that way (at least not this late in its development) and I, in particular, have never been good at moderating my feelings in that way. I remember friends suggesting to me, when I was in painful heartsick love with C___, that I take a step back, stop seeing him, at least stop fucking him, and that was utterly unthinkable to me. It literally did not feel like an option. I loved him, therefore, I needed his presence in my life to continue, to any and every extent possible.

-Re: it being fast – Matt and I have talked on the phone for so many hours that we essentially fast-tracked our relationship. I’ve honestly probably spent as much time talking to him as I spent talking to G___ in our entire 3.5-month relationship. So there’s that. Maybe that makes it less insane and more okay, I dunno.

I feel practically ill with emotion today. Having a heart is hard.

March 13th

Been dating Matt for 3 months today. Grateful for long phone calls full of intimacy, vulnerability, orgasms, and laughs. Grateful for emotional support that stretches across national borders. Grateful for a dependable smiling face so handsome it still makes my head swim. Grateful for a daddy/Sir who understands my kinks so fucking perfectly somehow and makes me feel so small, submissive, and taken care of. Grateful for gentle, loving pushes toward productivity, assertiveness, achievement and self-advocacy. Grateful for hot hard kisses in hotel rooms that make me feel adored and desired from the inside out. Grateful for emotional safety like a big comfy net to catch me. Grateful for impeccable cocktails in low-lit opulent establishments. Grateful for big blue eyes staring into me with a want and wonderment I’m always ecstatic to see mirrored back at me. Grateful for nerdy musical theatre references that make my heart soar. Grateful for silly giggles at 2AM. Grateful to feel so close even when we’re far. Grateful for his effort, his attention, his love.

April 15th

I wonder often what my therapist would think about Matt – she who witnessed my hero’s struggle to get over C___, my almost-compulsive hunt for a primary partner after that, my happy early days with G___ and then my utter brokenness when he changed his mind about me so suddenly. I think she would be very happy for me, but in the early days of our relationship she would’ve warned me to be careful, to modulate my level of investment, to keep my heart safe for a while before handing it over to someone else.

I tried to do that. It was hard; I’m not built for romantic reservation, not used to it. Both H___ and Matt have told me they admire my openheartedness and were surprised at my willingness to pour my soul out to them so quickly; I think this quality is a large part of why I’m so susceptible to ruinous heartbreak but is also what enables my relationships to frequently be so deep and electric and juicy. I feel things strongly and I don’t want to tamp them down once I feel them. It’s at once a blessing and a curse.

Despite the speed, I feel like we fell in love in slow motion – maybe still are falling – because of not having as much physical access to each other as most couples have. It was like one of those orgasms where you teeter on the precipice forever, dangling helplessly, until finally you tumble over the edge and it’s so sweet and delicious all the way down.

May 9th

Happy one-year anniversary to the day G___ first slept with someone else and started the slow, cruel process of breaking my heart! LOLOL. I think I’ve done a lot of useful emotional processing since then, in therapy and with friends and partners, to the point that it doesn’t sting anymore. And it helps enormously that Matt always affirms the validity of my reaction to that. “Non-monogamy” doesn’t mean “no rules.” It means you set rules, talk about them, mutually agree on them, and then follow them. It means you take your partners’ needs and feelings into account. It’s not a free-for-all.

I recognize, too, that I have been guilty of what he did – being too cavalier about boundaries and partners’ feelings on my sextracurricular activities – in, for example, my relationship with B___. It’s interesting how these past couple years have repeatedly shown me both sides of a particular interpersonal conflict or mistake, almost as if to give me greater empathy for someone who hurt me or to help me understand how I’ve fucked up and how to avoid making those mistakes again.

I think at this point, I’d definitely check in with Matt a lot before doing any sexy and/or date-y things with a new person – because our relationship is of foundational importance to me and no new thing, no matter how exciting, would be worth upsetting or alienating him or making him feel unconsidered. There are no such opportunities on my horizons right now, but I know they will come up whenever they come up and we will navigate them by communicating with each other as kindly and thoroughly as we always have.

June 4th

My mental health is predictably kind of tanking in response to Matt being at the nerd convention and being too busy for me for a few days. I mean, before he left, he said, “I love you and I will make time for you,” and I see him trying to do that – instating a protocol whereby I have to send him a daily nude, because he knows our protocols usually make me feel closer to him; calling me last night to say good night; texting me occasional updates – but it’s interesting how my brain is still responding by feeling rejected and like the safest and best thing to do is to pull away, act unaffected and uncaring, front like I don’t miss him and am not even thinking about him.

This is a conditioned response developed in former relationships where I wasn’t sure the other person liked me as much as I liked them – or I KNEW they didn’t – and I’d respond to their coldness and distance by mirroring it, instead of clinging, because I’d learned over the years that unreciprocated clinginess feels unimaginably horrible. It makes me feel pathetic, like the worst of the worst, impossibly unwanted, fundamentally undesirable. So I learned that the safer thing to do was to match their distance exactly, so that if anyone were to accuse me of caring, I could say, “Who, me? Nah. You must have me confused with someone else. I’m chill and casual and could take or leave this. Just like you.”

I recognize now that when this defense mechanism kicks in at the wrong times – i.e. with people who actually do care about me and are maybe just temporarily too busy to give me their usual level of attention and focus – it makes me come across as callously uncaring. I can see how I could actually sabotage relationships this way, backing up so hard to stay safe that I back my way right out of the relationship by mistake. That isn’t me; that isn’t what I want to do here.

The trouble is that fighting that knee-jerk defensive response feels as absurd and dangerous as fighting any instinct – like sticking your hand in the fire, touching your tongue to the outlet. It feels like I am literally endangering myself and the relationship, even though I know the opposite is true. To express love, and not have that expression returned for a while or in kind, feels too close to nauseously revelatory heartbreaks I’ve endured: the sudden (and sometimes stupidly repeated) realization that I thought I could be loved by this person but I actually was not. I’m in deep enough with Matt, I suppose, that that realization would crush me massively, so I get even more defensive than usual when it seems imminent. Maybe I even get mean. I’m sure it’s confusing for him. I’m trying to fight it but it’s hard.

My CBT training tells me to remind myself constantly of how much he loves me, to review the evidence of that until I believe it again, to do this myself instead of relying on him for constant reassurance. But then I just think about all the people were so into me until they suddenly weren’t. I don’t know how to believe that he won’t have a sudden change of heart and decide I’m too much work, too much effort, too much.

October 11th

Some climate scientists announced a few days ago that we don’t have much time left to avert the creeping disaster we’ve brought upon ourselves; that true chaos and destruction will be upon us by 2040 if not sooner, unless we change a lot real fast. And we won’t, because Republicans and big corporations believe in saving their bottom lines and their own asses more fiercely than they believe in saving the world, and the only thing that could really do any good now would be the total overthrowing of capitalism from top to bottom, and who the fuck knows how to do that? Not me.

I’m scared and depressed and everything seems so futile. But at the same time, this news is putting life into perspective. There have been times, in my current and past relationships, when I’ve wondered what the point is of staying in a relationship that has no conventional “future” – no hope of marriage, living together, or even living in the same country, probably – but this is making me reflect on how none of us are actually guaranteed a future anyway so we should cling to the things that make us happy NOW. It’s not possible to do this in all cases – for example, I can’t exactly quit my job and spend this planet’s last years making only the art I want to make, because getting through these years will require money and shelter in the meantime – but I should prioritize my happiness in the present whenever possible. And I am in love with Matt and he makes me happy even though there are things I want that I know I can’t get from this relationship. Happiness is a valid criterion. It’s maybe the only one that matters. Maybe I’ll be able to find those things with someone else someday, but there might not be a someday. This exists now and it’s very good and I want it, even if it’s not all I want.

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.

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.

How Did You Know You Were In Love?

Kate Sloan

I’m pacing around my bedroom at a manic clip, one night in January, ranting to my new beau over the phone – because I’m falling in love and I don’t know what to do.

“I want to say it, but I don’t know if we’re ready to say it,” I explain, my heartbeat skittering as fast as my words. “How do you even know if you’re really in love? Do I even want to fall in love in a long-distance relationship? How do you know if it’s too soon? How can you be sure you really mean it?”

I’ve been in love three times before and this is the first time there’s been an open dialogue about it. We’ve read the Wikipedia page for “love” together over the phone. We’ve said “I like you so much” and “I adore you” and “I treasure you” and alluded to the painful inadequacy of those phrases. We’ve lapsed into tense silences where one of us would ask, “What? What are you thinking?” and, both of us knowing the answer, the other would sullenly respond, “I can’t tell you.” “I don’t wanna say.”

Normally when I get to this juncture in a relationship, it’s a private stewing, an internal tug-of-war, an embarrassing call to action that I might or might not rise to meet. It’s never been out on the table like this before. And even now that it is, we still can’t say the thing itself. Or rather, we won’t. Not yet.

“I would rather say it to him in person,” I read to him aloud from my scribbly journal entry on the topic, “because it’s so weighty and I just think that would be the appropriate and right way to do it.”

“Yeah, it’s definitely better to do it in person,” he agrees, “because when you say that for the first time, you wanna touch each other. Real bad.”

A silence passes wherein we both imagine what that will feel like. How we will say it, and where, and then how we will touch each other, and where. I don’t have to ask him if he’s picturing it too. I know he is. And that makes me want to say it all the more.

The first time I fell in love, I was nineteen, and I knew because I simply wanted to say it. It felt natural. The same way I might tell a close friend I loved them, so too did I want to say it to my then-boyfriend. It wasn’t a sweeping passion or a roiling lust; it was a slow warmth that had gathered and grown over the two-plus months of our nascent sweet springtime romance. At first I wasn’t sure, and then at some point, I was. When I said it, in the dark in my twin-sized bed, he hugged me tight and said, “I love you too, and you’ve made me a very happy man.”

The second time was an unrequited accident. This man didn’t want me and I knew it; I knew it for an entire year or more, just like I knew I loved him. It took months and months for me to call it “love,” even to my best friend or in the confines of my journal, because love is embarrassing, messy; there is a permanency to it that makes it so much more of an emergency alarm than just calling it a crush.

But I reached a point where I felt chemically dependent on this man, mired in depression whenever he would leave and espresso-peppy when he was within reach, and that’s when I reluctantly began calling it “love.” Never to his face, never where he could hear it, but that’s what it was to me.

The third time, it built up like water in a dammed fountain. My introverted, reserved boyfriend played me hot-and-cold so thoroughly that I wasn’t sure I was allowed to feel love, wasn’t sure he’d accept my love even though he’d accepted me as his girlfriend officially. Hanging out at his apartment after lunch at his favorite ramen restaurant, I kissed him tenderly in bed, wanting intimacy, but he just wanted to play video games. I got so frustrated by him ignoring me that I announced I was leaving and did so, forgetting my ramen leftovers in his fridge.

The next day, I came back “for the food,” wounded and contrite, and cried into his chest as I mumbled, “I wanna tell you something that’s gonna make me cry even more: I love you.” He held me tighter and said, “I love you too. I’ve known that for a while. I just didn’t know if you were ready to hear it.” It was exactly the kind of backhanded, confusing comment I had come to view as normal in that relationship. Knowing me, I probably made some kind of “ramen-tic” pun.

When my current beau first told me he might be falling in love – by invoking late-night Google searches and Wikipedia trawls – I wasn’t sure how I felt on that front. “I feel like I should have more to say about this,” I wrote after relaying the episode to my journal. “Do I want to fall in love again so soon after getting my heart broken? Do I even feel like it could happen with this boy? (…Yes.) Do I feel safe getting to that point with a long-distance person who already has other partners? (…Maybe.)”

But for all my hemming and hawing about being unsure, certainty whammed me over the head in the coming week. I’m a linguistically-minded person: I organize my thoughts and feelings by articulating them in words, as you may have noticed. So although I’d agonized about how to know love when you see it, ultimately I recognized it by what I wanted to say, and how often I wanted to say it. The words “I love you” stagnated in my throat when we talked on the phone, and buzzed in my fingers when I texted him. Maybe it’s simplistic to suggest, “I think I love you, therefore I do,” but I don’t know of a better barometer. There is no scientific test for love (well… romantic psychology researchers like Helen Fisher might disagree, actually) so for now, I know it’s true when it feels true and I want to say it. That’s good enough for me.

We finally say it on our third date. That sounds ridiculous, unless you know how many hours we spent on the phone between each in-person rendezvous. Long phone calls stretched four or six or eight hours into the night, entire emotional journeys of their own, with laughs and tears and phone sex and warm cuddly mumbles. We fast-tracked our relationship on those phone calls. We rushed toward love, exhilarating and good.

Our third date is a mottled mess of feelings: a tender kiss in the lobby of the Wythe Hotel, a collaring and sweet sex in our second-floor room, Italian food and philosophical discussions at Leuca, and hours of dancing to my favorite band at Brooklyn Steel. We cuddle in the Lyft back to our hotel late at night, and as we pull up, he says, “Can I show you the roof?” I nod, he takes my hand, and we get in the elevator to The Ides.

The bar is dim and ornate, like so many places he’s taken me, with a stunning view of the big beautiful city where I met this boy I think I love. We cuddle up in a corner booth, and he orders me a drink like he always does, and it feels so comfortable and cozy, like we do this every day. But we don’t, and that uncommonness feels cozy too.

At some point he goes silent and presses a kiss against my shoulder. “I wanna tell you something, but I’m scared,” he says. I didn’t see it coming, and also I did. I smile and hold him tighter because I want him to feel supported in this brave thing he is doing. I want him to land safely on cushions when he makes this leap. “Kate…” he says, slowly. I listen harder. “Kate, I love you.”

I say, “I know,” because I do; I can feel it radiating off him, have felt it over the phone and via text and just generally in my periphery, the sensation of being loved, the sensation of loving. I press even more of my body tight against his in that little booth and tell him, “I love you too.” We kiss and we touch and we laugh about how long this took us and how perfect it turned out to be.

The candle on our table casts a glow on his face that is as golden, precious, and ephemeral as this love I hope will last a long, long time.