Have We Figured Out a Modern Love?
Cuffing season in Chicago can be as self-questioning as it is self-affirming. I’m not entirely sure if women spend these frigid nights cuddling with me because they’re craving intimacy or if my gentle warmth helps them save on heating bills. Late hours spent summoning different intimacies with different lovers, the pursuit of sweet salvation remains the same. The mornings roll around, and the dark, perma-drizzle atmosphere gives way to a faint overcast glow reminding us it’s time to pause our ritualized pantomimes and resume our more public lives. There she lays, all shimmering blonde and elegant posture, rustling around my bedsheets, her eyes glistening in the soft light of another grey Saturday morning unfolding with near-weightless snowflakes drifting downward in a casual flurry of zig-zags. Cloaked in nothing but an old hoodie of mine that drapes down to her thighs, she nestles her cheek against my bare chest and sweetly warbles a quick refrain, “Hey, you.”
The haze of the previous night’s debauchery dissolves at the sight of her smile, shooting through me like lightning and vanishing just as quickly. Hey, you … the familiar vodka-soda-soaked serenade from a Rolodex of women careening in and out of my life thanks to Hinge and happenstance. In the opening months of 2020, the hallowed Before Times, nearly every week was marked with a whirlwind dash of rendezvous with women who seemed seriously interested in me to varying degrees. Wisecracks would unfurl with each passing cocktail. Flirtations evolved breathlessly until we’d arrive on whomever’s couch, smoking joints and tangling toes while the magnetism of wistful lust pulls our bodies together in a way we couldn’t resist.
There was the fling with Diane, who, whenever she wasn’t writing for The Onion or performing improv, would grace me with endlessly hilarious and enrapturing zingers that brilliantly navigated the intricacies of millennial urbanity. Jenn is a shaggy-haired freckle-faced healthcare VP who doubles as a globetrotting yogi; she described her travels with the kind of luscious detail that could rival a National Geographic feature. Leah is charming and weird, crackling and cocksure, a musical theatric who moonlights as a folk singer and multi-instrumentalist. Jaime is half-bartender, half-intersectional feminist covered in either a black-on-black outfit or a carefully curated art exhibit inked to her body, who serially quotes Sylvia Plath and uncorked bottles of champagne with a meat cleaver just because.1
I’m aware that, at face value, a description of my pre-pandemic dating life had all the trappings of an opportunistic sleaze, though it’s fairly common for city-dwelling twenty- and thirty-somethings to try on and discard an assortment of starry-eyed strangers. I’m not territorial by nature, nor do I torture myself with jealousy and blinding rage over abstract “competitors.” I date under the assumption that anyone who’s attractive and socially competent has both the ability and the option to keep several horses in their stable. Exclusivity shouldn’t be demanded or expected until it’s mutually and explicitly agreed upon.
Right around the first or second week of March 2020, I received variations of the text “where is this going?” that made it acutely obvious these women were waiting, with quickly diminishing patience, on me to declare a decisive direction. After about a handful of dates with each of them, I realized this situation was becoming a bit untenable — and, in a way, a cliché romcom. The calendar pages were flipping and uncovering something penultimate, the dreaded time when partners have the nerve-racking talk about exclusivity and Getting Serious. It always feels like it’s too soon to have this conversation until it’s suddenly too late. So I let each of them know, as a courtesy and in the interest of full disclosure, that I’m seeing other people and I’d need more time to ponder.
This ultimatum of choosing one of these wonderful women to be, effectively, my girlfriend based on some scant dates was a jarring, even if predictable, climax after a frenetic few months of my life. Mulling these things over almost always revs my anxiety until it redlines, my mind stuck in neutral by wretched indecision. Who was better in bed? Who had the dopest apartment? Who’s down to give me foot rubs? My dilemma immediately arrived after realizing I wasn’t comparing and contrasting these women because I wasn’t sure which one was The Right Choice — they’re all conceivably The Right Choice — but because choosing one meant forfeiting others. I wasn’t afraid I’d regret the choice I’d make, but the ones I didn’t. This manic paralysis typically makes for some interesting internet fodder but damn near an existential dilemma when it’s 1:49 a.m. and I’m stoned and deliberating between a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder.
Chasing copywriting gigs has bounced me around three cities in a five-year span, and I’m uncertain if and when I will nest in a more permanent or stable place. I’ve come to understand the thin line between me and certified fuckboi is my fidelity, and I suppose moral obligation, to transparency. I inform every fling of my predicament before reminding each of my throbbing adoration for them, pairing it with the familiar caveat that I can’t make a promise of long-term commitment that’s likely impossible for me to uphold during my tenuous and uncertain state of affairs. These conversations usually culminate with me inviting them to continue spending time with me if they so choose, without any resentment on my end if they pursue other, more concrete options on the side. And they respond accordingly to the boundaries they’ve set for themselves, which is usually a hard pass on my proposal. Fair enough. My years-long stint as an urbane vagabond has instilled in me a bohemian, Zen-ish focus on maximizing the present, which I understand pegs me squarely within the vast minority of strident love-remoras.
It was at some point during my seven years of singledom when I came to terms with the possibility of dying alone. And I don’t say this out of some terminal, apathetic dejection or as part of a whiny pitty parade, because I’ve encountered a sort of liberatory revelation. Contemporary America is the loneliest place at the loneliest time. Life is also inherently transient. Accepting these fiercely unkind realities is the first step toward making an honest peace with the foreboding facts of the human condition. Our inability to fully cohabit within one another partitions us all into fractal selves — as we float further from youth, we drift toward and away from each other. Time is a one-way current, as ruthless as the ocean waves, carrying us toward a later moment that is both unidentifiable and contingent. And somehow, whoever drafted the boilerplate relationship contract expected the ironclad monogamy clause to account for fluid circumstances and desires and priorities. It’s something people agree to but no one actually wants, like gainful employment or attending a baby shower.
To the extent this pandemic has been the “great equalizer,” it has highlighted the strictly provisional, temporary aspects of our lives that lurk behind the flimsy little Potemkin villages of permanence and security. I’m not grateful for this past year, but there is something to be appreciated when life becomes, briefly, real. This collective quarantine has brought greater explicitness to the grim reality that undergirds every relationship: The only possible conclusions are separation and death. But with this dreadful reality comes a more serendipitous clarity; a simple human connection can unfold into an explosion of miracles both subtle and life-altering. Almost everything else is either arbitrary or subjective.
We’re loosely tethered to this life by the breath we inhale and the life we breathe into others, by the fire coursing through our veins and the thunderclaps pinging through our chests. Women are truly magical and fascinating creatures. Boundless fireballs of beauty and brilliance carrying a sunset’s shimmer and a campfire’s calm. I’d spend first dates positioning myself a foot away at the bar to bask in their radiant presence.
It’s a minor miracle any woman would even agree to go out with a random guy. They undertake a Rube Goldberg process of cosmetic preparation just to grab drinks and endure a barrage of cringe one-liners that probably make them wonder if men eat bowls of lead paint chips for breakfast while confusing it for Frosted Flakes. Lipstick and blush and eyeliner and eyeshadow and mascara and nail polish and face cream and hand lotions and body lotions and exfoliants and facial masks and leg shaving and eyebrow plucking and waxing and perfumes and hairspray and blow-dries, all before they slip into some skimpy underwear they paid $35 for to feel like a piece of polyester is aggressively flossing between their buttcheeks. Men just have to not come across as the kind of crazy person who spends their weekends getting into knife fights with hobos in an alleyway.
And yet, we trek forward with this slightly dignified mating process in hopes of finding that magical other who makes all the previous bad dates, awkward first kisses, lackluster sex, unsolicited dick pics, obnoxious pet peeves, and accidental snorting laughs feel like we were ascending toward a worthwhile purpose atop this mounting exasperation.
In a culture mired with self-serving striving and a fixation on certainty, we’re often instructed to make our goals tangible. We need to know when we’ve achieved them, to measure our progress toward a benchmark that will shift to new heights whenever we reach the previous one. We may mock the phrase “happily ever after” because it’s synonymous with naive children’s literature and corny romcoms, but in practice, we do tend to live as if one day we will find security somewhere over the horizon. Hopeful romantics seem safe in this delusion, comforting as a fuzzy blanket, an unwavering belief in the present conditions of our lives, our relationships as being givens, fixed forever. This narrative is woven together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions, and white lies. We can never properly be secure because life is a process of replacing one anxiety and desire with another.
Our obsession over an exclusive relationship filled with a lifelong passion, I suspect, comes from our yearning for an adventure and a foregone conclusion, thrill and security, a mystery and an answer, all payoff and no risk. And the more we truly want something, the more prone we are to choking under the suffocating force of our desires, of the dire stakes of any particular moment. We may surrender our independence to the comfort of being with someone for its own sake. We fear losing, or not attaining, an everlasting and singular love, and we trigger an anxious attachment to it. Suspended in an absence of knowledge and an abundance of chaos, we trick ourselves into thinking if we have more information, we can safeguard against failure. The times when you lose all structure and incentive are frightening, laying bare something we normally arrange our days to conceal: an incantation against the frightening blank of existence.
I’ve wondered if I’m possibly polyamorous or if I’ve yet to find that magical human to tame my feral heart. Maybe it’s a combination of commitment issues and ADHD. Like many guys, I am tormented by the delusion that every attractive woman I encounter will trigger a sequence of cinematic vignettes that will lead me to successfully seducing her, even if this fails to happen 99.99999% of the time. I’ve become almost trapped in a reinforcing and restless dissatisfaction, imagining there might still be some ideal person out there, tantalized by the bottomless choice promised by dating apps. Many of us cling to the belief that the pursuit of love and sex is the power source of life’s luster. Even if we find what we think we want, it’s hard not to be haunted by the specter of every love that could’ve been.
Stripped of its sappy ornaments and sentiments, every relationship — friendship or romantic — is a mutual opt-in between two people who like each other about the same amount and make a conscious decision for a period of time that their lives are better together than they are apart. The more emotionally mature accept that even the best-est of friends can devolve into suboptimal goobers, or the cleft between commonalities yawns too vast to even bother anymore. We collect and maintain and juggle friendships that fulfill different emotional needs, but they aren’t subjected to the same zero-sum mentality as romance. Imagine taking drastic and draconian measures to invalidate your confidants because you’re not the sole focus of their friend circle: “I thought what we had was special, but you grabbed beers with your rec-league volleyball team!?”
Does sex up the ante for love and exclusivity? Even a random one-night stand requires a degree of trust and intimacy. A woman still has to have some confidence that whoever reels her into a one-on-one situation is not some slut-shaming serial killer luring them into their apartment to reupholster their skin into a couch. A man has to trust that a woman won’t stab them to death with a fork at any given moment — or even more frightening, laugh at their ding-dong.2
Love is a liquid we hold in our hands, and when we loosen the guarded clench of our palms, it flows to wherever the bends will take it. The reasons we connect are the tendrils that bound us tighter to life itself in such a way that we could grasp at sanity in a land filled with insanity. Such a precious bond blossoms with being mindful and attune to the present, by being honest with ourselves and our partners, and it envelops into a profound kind of escapism we are tasked with reinventing constantly in tandem with time and effort. Sharing chips and guac also helps. It is through action and presence and immersion and emotion that we affix ourselves to one another, to momentarily transcend our lonesome curse. Just because a relationship never reaches happy ever after doesn’t mean it never left a trail of meaning in its wake. Just because love can extend in multitudes doesn’t mean it can’t be special.
This pandemic has imposed an existential trial on much of the world’s relentless quotidian bullshit. All the rules and truisms we’ve collaged together into this makeshift romantic social contract were supposed to mitigate unpredictability and risk, but they’re probably inhibiting our ability to grow and connect. These efforts are baffling and self-defeating, like spending Black Friday returning a pair of socks to Nordstrom. Humans tend to be dim-witted creatures with deranging chemicals gradually ebbing from our brains, indefatigably battling debilitating bouts of elation and deflation. This holds especially true in the most irrational realms of love and sex. We’re terrible judges of what we think we want and where we think we want to go. The double-barreled turd blast of 2020 and 2021 has illustrated how god-awful we are at predicting what will happen next, which is both terrifying and exhilarating.
When we cling to our past, our scars, our expectations, our underlying anxieties, our desire for certainty, all the dating how-tos and don’t-dos, we fail to be present for all the beauty fading around us. Initial encounters can be breathless and spellbinding if you’re not transfixed with where they may or may not lead you, or if they exist outside the norms of conventional relationships. Beneath the whirring hum of flirtation and vibration lies two humans releasing the entirety of their everything, not idealized nor romanticized.
It may seem counterintuitive, but accepting my inherent loneliness and transience has enhanced my capacity to connect. I became empowered to enter and depart relationships on terms and conditions amenable to my given emotional and material situation. First dates felt less like a process of evaluating potential significant others and became a trial run of maximizing enchantment, with the end goal being nothing more than wanting to see each other at least once more. Girlfriends became less of a necessary component of a codependent whole and more like an extension of myself, a companion, a complimentary cherry-on-top, someone I could bring the best out of and bring the best out of me — and we’d share our lives both within and without each other. Unburdened by social pressures, I opened myself to women outside of what I believed to be “my type” and to intimate arrangements I didn’t know I could manage. I am free to be my fullest self in the tangible now .
I don’t know if polyamory or monogamy are inherent sexual orientations as much as they are relationship models we choose to participate in. Anyone who lived through free love in the ’60s or is from the LGBTQ community can confirm polyamory isn’t anything novel. According to books like Sex at Dawn and Sapiens — as well as studies of the Iroquois, “non-classical polyandry,” South American tribes, and the Mosua in China — humans in prehistoric societies mated with several partners simultaneously to build communal bonds and a sense of egalitarianism. Lifelong marriages can be traced back to Ancient Greece and Rome, but their prominence is a recent phenomenon morphing into a vestigial custom, like saying “bless you” or the United Nations. The term “nuclear family” wasn’t used in the United States until 1949.
In an idealistic sense, I live for the type of woman who, when I lock into her 300W irises flecked with green and gold, holds me around my waist and sends a low steady flow of voltage to the small of my back through the conducting mediums of vulnerability and anticipation. And when and I brush her hair back and gently kiss her lips, the spark of her artsy hipster style shoots lightning through my veins, striking my heartstrings in just the right key. It seems like such a melodic harmony is a product of my heartfelt interiority or those godforsaken jewelry commercials. Kisses are more likely to begin with tequila shots than they are with Kay!
I don’t oppose the concept or prospect of marriage, I just don’t orient my sense of self-worth and fulfillment around finding it. But, what might be hardest for me to surrender for monogamy’s sake isn’t so much sleeping around so much as my self-image of being adventurous, spontaneous, faintly dangerous. By the dint of a terminally single person, domesticity dampens desire. We can simultaneously feel comfortable with a significant other while suppressing a horndog infatuation for some bumbling jabroni. Sigmund Freud initially diagnosed the delirious dance between love and desire as a deranged waltz, an irreconcilable tension, and he concluded that attachment and sexuality are separate biochemical systems that are symbiotically antagonistic. Essentially, love and lust can actively inhibit each other.
We get wrapped up in the myth of burning, undying, singular love, one that was invented by the troubadours in the European Middle Ages — the kind that thrusts the burden of desire, sex, emotional support, property ownership, and dual-income taxes onto one person. This evolutionary jerry-rigged system is set up to leverage sex to entrance us into a relationship long enough for us to grow attached to each other; by the time the hormonal buzz wears off, you’re attracted to each other in a way that you’re both willing to commit several decades managing feuds and jumpstarting ruts with intricate role play and special date nights. This system, of course, is deeply imperfect in practice, but nature invented this mechanism to make more people, not make more people happy. Cognitive scientist Jonathan Haidt has reviewed questions on love and attachments and concluded that this obsessive, drug-addiction-like infatuation is bound to set us up for disappointment. The Hallmark-card euphemism for this is “things getting stale,” which is about as romantic as testing HIV-positive.
And yet, love is precisely portrayed as this unrelenting compulsion to tear off the Band-Aids and expose the whole of ourselves to another person we decide is The One. The love that yields diminishing joy but maintains comfort. The love of inflated expectations. The love that doesn’t last so much as it endures.
The failures of open relationships are no more proof of polyamory’s shortcomings than the increasing divorce rate is evidence of monogamy’s dysfunctions. The point is, none of this really works. We yearn for the impossible — unflinching solidity in a malleable world. Maintaining our traditionalist conceptions of Something Real requires everyone to conform to a narrow, if not fanatical, norm. The ideal of a long-term monogamous relationship that seamlessly integrates love and sex and desire and stability might ultimately be doing more harm than good. We reserve the phrase “if you love someone you’ll let them go” for relationships approaching their grave finality, but its application could be broadened to lift the confines of emotional and physical exclusivity before our bonds are irreparably severed. The pain of cheating doesn’t necessarily stem from the act itself as much as it’s from the deceit and manipulation attached. As Donnie Easton writes in The Ethical Slut:
“A lot of people describe having sex with only one person as ‘being faithful.’ It seems to me that faithfulness has very little to do with who you have sex with. Faithfulness is about honoring your commitments and respecting your friends and lovers, about caring for their well-being as well as your own.”
Now, I don’t intend to moralize because a “successful” relationship is ultimately defined by the people who coexist within them. But familiar solutions to monogamy and predictability, like stoning or tax breaks, are rigid and institutional and haven’t adjusted to Playboy or The Pill, feminism and LGBTQ equality, the sexual revolution and the decline of Puritanical chastity. Traditional incentive structures neither have the scope nor the scale to account for the behaviors of billions of insatiable beasts shedding their 9-to-5 facade to join the writhing orgy of decadent lust and sociopathic devotion. We all assume we’re talking about the same thing when we toss around labels like marriage or relationship, but no matter how similar they look from the outside, people’s private lives could range from monogamous missionary to consensual flings to a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. The truth is we’re improvising everything ad hoc.
The temporary companions involved in my specific early-2020 dilemma eventually placed a moratorium on any actual dates until I, for a lack of a better phrase, figured my shit out. A global pandemic reinforced this romantic death-knell, but that’s beside the point. I exist in the same space as women, but operate on a different sense of time — and when I try to get to where they are, I often find myself late.
“If you can’t decide between two people,” I’ve heard over and over as if it’s a pointed, subtextual message, “then neither are right for you.” This is some nonsense we repeat ad infinitum to reassure ourselves that our choices are inevitable, preordained by fate. Hence, why love-struck neurotics blather on about finding their One True Soul Mate In All The World, masking the more unsettling truth that this person appears as an astronomical coinkydink and there are a host of hypothetical lovers out there that you could conceivably fall in love and spend your life with, if you let yourself. There is no magical person when you first meet someone; they either become magical or hot garbage. This is an illusion we tacitly opt into to ensorcell us into the monomaniacal process of investing time and sacrifice into love. After years of indentured drudgery comprised of in-jokes, secrets, compromises, frothing fights, cathartic reconciliations, we then realize that person has become a unique and irreplaceable support beam in our life.
I remember the best gifts women give me, even if their presents didn’t last. The way they devilishly stare into my soul and gently invade everything I thought I ever knew about myself. The way they can bolt me to the mattress for hours at a time. The way they make me want to hurl a falling raindrop back into the sky to push the boundaries of my humanity.
I remember the way Diane would make time vanish as we’d enrapture ourselves in belly laughs about the world-at-large and her reassuring wink that everything would be alright. I remember the way Jen’s nose crinkled up when she smiled at me as she was telling tales of her journey through the Colombian jungles. I remember the way Leah would make my blood run like Christmas lights and short-circuit my brain with her glowing performances and scintillating lullabies. I remember the way Jaime’s wildly searching eyes would fix upon the next shiny adventure, leading me down a rabbit hole of pit-stops and drop-shots until we’d arrive at the corner of Western and Milwaukee, butts planted on the curb with half a burrito in our hands and gushing over Tame Impala.
Eventually, I cornered myself into a bitter self-pitying funk once they vanished in my rearview mirror, fading into distant nice to know yous. But the dense bonds I formed with them remain within the totality of who I am. Life tends to devolve into a tiresome barrage of petty and vindictive gripes if you let the conclusions soil the fonder memories of those who rotate in and out of your orbit. Anything worth pursuing will carry some inherent risk and vulnerability. If you want to reap the rewards of being loved, you’ll have to submit yourself to the terrifying ordeal of chance. “Life is an adventure, not a test. There are no correct answers in the back of the book; we don’t get to find out what was behind door number two; we never even know whether we won,” Timothy Kreider writes. “If you want some guarantee that everything will turn out all right and you’ll have no regrets, it’s not an adventure you want; it’s a theme park.” Trusting in and caring about another person is tough and scary and frankly quite weird, but it’s what being a functional human demands; the important thing is you either do it or you don’t.
Most relationships are dead-ends whether we want to admit it or not. Ceaselessly fixating on an ephemeral future instead of a more exact present is an emotional tourniquet suffocating possibility, blocking us from forming connections that can help us and each other grow and fulfill our various needs and urges. A more profound truth lies underneath all the messiness of jealously, irrationality, possessiveness, wanting constant amid constant change, or having a partner who forgets to refill the Brita. Love is both the noun and the verb. Finding our final form means letting ourselves be drawn inward, letting go of our earnest vanities, shedding our egos, and breaking the concept of unnecessary conventions. In the overwhelming bummer gravity of this alienated moment, all we have is each other — whether it’s brief or long-lasting, singular or plural — because love is the only thing that makes us real.
Names changed to protect these ladies from Joe Goldbergs.
I’ll refrain from commenting on the dynamics of queer relationships, as there are plenty of lovely LGBTQ homies infinitely more qualified than me on this front.
