Then came the sex. We only waited two weeks, which went against all the standard advice from friends, family, and magazine articles. It wasn’t so much that I had to be with him in any urgent, lustful sense (although that was certainly part of it). It was more that I saw no reason to squander a single night together. When I know something is right, I believe in going for it, head-on. Sure enough, our first time was neither quick nor awkward nor tentative, the usual hallmarks of first times. Instead, our bodies fit together just right, and Ben knew what I liked without having to ask. It was the kind of sex that makes you wish you were a songwriter or poet. Or at least a woman who keeps a journal, something I hadn’t done since I was a kid, but a practice I promptly began the day after we made love.
Ben and I quickly discovered that we had a lot more in common than our view on children, and a lot more binding us together than our crazy chemistry. We had a similar background. We both grew up in New York with two older sisters and parents who divorced late in the game. We were both hardworking, high achievers who were passionate about our careers. Ben was an architect and loved buildings as much as I loved books. We enjoyed traveling to obscure places, eating exotic food, and drinking a little too much. We loved movies and bands that were slightly offbeat without straining to be intellectual. We relished sleeping in on the weekends, reading the paper in bed, and drinking coffee into the evening hours. We were the same combination of clean freak and messy, of sentimental and pragmatic. We both had come to believe that short of something magical, relationships weren’t worth the trouble.
In short, we fell in love, everything clicking in place. And it wasn’t the one-sided delusional happiness that comes when a woman wants desperately to believe that she’s found her guy.
Our relationship was so satisfying and honest and real that at some point I started to believe that Ben was my soul mate, the one person I was supposed to be with. It was a concept I had never believed in before Ben.
I remember the day when all of this hit me. It was relatively early on, but well after we had exchanged our first I love yous . Ben and I were having a picnic in Central Park. People were all around us, sunning, reading, throwing Frisbees, laughing, yet it felt like we were completely alone. Whenever I was with Ben, it felt like the rest of the world fell away. We had just finished our lunch of cold fried chicken and potato salad and were lying on our backs, looking up at a very blue summer sky and holding hands, when we began that earnest but careful conversation about past loves. About the people and experiences that had brought us to the moment we were in.
Fleeting references to our history had been made up to that point, and I was well aware that we were both silently making those inevitable comparisons, putting our relationship in context. She is more this and less of that. He is better or worse in these ways . It is human nature to do this unless it’s your first relationship, which might be the very reason that your first relationship feels special and remains forever sacred. But the older you get, the more cynical you become, and the more complicated and convoluted the exercise is. You begin to realize that nothing is perfect, that there are trade-offs and sacrifices. The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in your present, and you think to yourself: if I’d known this , then maybe I wouldn’t have let him go. I had been feeling that way for a long time with respect to my college boyfriend, Paul. My relationship with Paul was far from flawless, and yet I hadn’t found anyone in a decade who could squelch the more than occasional longing for what we had shared.
But with Ben, something was different. I was happier than I had ever been. I told him this, and I remember him asking me why it was different, why I was happier. I thought for a long time, wanting my answer to be accurate and complete. I began to awkwardly detail what made my relationship with Paul fail and spent much time ticking off Paul’s specific attributes and qualities. I then listed for Ben the ways in which he was better and more important, better for me.
I said, “You are a better kisser. You are more even-tempered. You are more generous. You are smarter. You are more fair-minded.”
Ben nodded and looked so serious that I remember saying, ” And you recycle” just to be funny. (Although it was true that Paul never recycled, which I thought said a lot about him.) As I talked, I had the distinct sense that I wasn’t really capturing the essence of the way I was feeling. It was frustrating because I wanted Ben to know how special he was to me.
So I sort of gave up and asked Ben the same question about his ex-girlfriend, Nicole. I had begun to piece together a pretty decent picture of her based on snippets of conversation. I knew she was half Vietnamese and looked like a porcelain doll. (I might have snooped through his drawers once and come up with a photo or two.) She was an interior designer and had met Ben on a big museum project in Brooklyn. Her favorite book was One Hundred Years of Solitude , which was also Ben’s favorite book (a fact that irrationally annoyed me). She smoked they smoked together for a long time until he quit. They lived together for three years and dated for nearly six. Their relationship was intense high highs and miserable lows. They had only broken up the winter before. I still hadn’t heard exactly why. So of course the word rebound haunted me. The name Nicole filled me with crazy jealousy.