I caught up with his parents and his bride. I took pictures of the newlyweds on my phone, as though they weren’t going to have enough. I refused to dance.
I said my good-byes and walked through a gorgeous field toward my car. Everything seemed wonderfully strange. I’d just been to “my ex’s” wedding, and I was content in the knowledge that he was so happy and found such a good fit.
(Check.)
he’s just not that interesting
The summer I turned twenty-one I dated a musician named Connor. Well, I thought he was a musician and that we were dating. He thought he was a screenwriter who occasionally played music and that we were “hooking up and not labeling things because labels cause drama.” He was twenty-eight and something of an introvert. I took this to mean that he was deep and artistic and probably judged me for talking as much as I do. Once we broke up I realized it just meant that he was kind of boring. And probably judged me for talking as much as I do.
This was my first lesson in He’s Just Not That Into You. Sure, that episode of Sex and the City had aired and the book had been written, but guess what, TV writers can’t learn your life lessons for you. I plowed ahead, actually having conversations with friends that sounded like this:
“Do you think I’m coming across overeager? Do I need to play it more cool with him?”
“Maybe? Why don’t you just not call him for a while and wait for him to get in touch with you?”
“Well, if I didn’t call him at all we’d never talk again.”
(Oh. Sweet Anna.)
When we first started hooking up, I was twenty. He would play in clubs and bars at night, which meant that at first, it was simply unavoidable that he’d spend most of the night without me and invite me over once he got home. I reasoned that it wasn’t a booty call if the law was keeping us apart. A fake ID was out of the question, since I looked like a guilty fifth grader on my best day. So at a certain point my only goal became to not get dumped before I turned twenty-one; then I’d be able to really get my hooks in. Oh god, it hurts to write.
Looking back, it’s hard for me to understand what I was doing. Why on earth would I pursue someone who clearly had no interest in me? It’s not like we had fun together; the man didn’t like me so much as tolerate me. I suppose the easy answer is that I hadn’t had a decent relationship yet, so I thought bagging a “cool” and attractive male was the whole objective. We would have made a terrible couple. But his indifference blinded me to all the red flags. He drove a BMW but slept on a futon. He watched the History Channel like it was a reliable source of information. Part of me knew I was only determined to bring him around because he was resisting me, but the idea of acknowledging the rejection hurt more than pretending it might be going somewhere.
I’d been so nervous when we met (and only got increasingly nervous as I tried to win his affection) that as a result, I have no idea what I was even like around him. If I could see tape of us interacting, I doubt I’d recognize myself. Who was I supposed to be making him fall in love with? My strategy was to just be agreeable. I had this fantasy of a braver, parallel-universe version of myself, but I was the most sterile, inoffensive version instead. When he said things to me like “You use humor as a defense mechanism,” I should have said, “Yeah, and you use pithy proclamations that let you maintain your sense of superiority as a fuckin’ defense mechanism.” Instead I clenched my teeth and made a plan to be more serious from then on.
We saw each other sporadically. Sometimes I’d send a breezy text, start a casual conversation, and spend the day staring at my phone until he got the hint and invited me over. Our group of mutual friends would get together a couple times a week and I’d invariably end up going home with him after those nights, so I did not miss one group hang-out that summer. At the time this group seemed impossibly cool to me as well. I’m sure their allure was wrapped up in my desire to stay connected to him. Also, I don’t know if being motivated by amazing sex would have made my desperation more pathetic or less, but I cannot say that was part of it.