Maybe She’s Only ‘The One’ Because She Got Away
What’s your opinion on Brexit?” Whatsername asks. It’s an odd opener, but I could feel her inquisitive gaze probing for an answer that would reel me into her orbit, so I’ll bite. “The whole thing is a shitshow,” I assert with the inebriated confidence of an urban lefty whose news consumption confers armchair expertise on global affairs. “Does anyone even know what’s going on? Theresa May’s life is an ongoing nervous breakdown.” She giggles. Who is this magnificent creature standing before me? A spellbinding, quick-witted, brunette, Irish wildfire in a black-laced bikini with radiant emerald eyes and a tinge of tan sprawling across her skin. She was dazzling, devilish, and disarmingly sexy — I’m not sure if she drifted here because of the blessing of some beautiful cosmic accident or the random pull of magnetism or the lure of a table stocked with handles of Svedka and Patrón. It doesn’t matter. I’m transfixed by her smile, her curves, her secrets.
I lean back into the cushioned seat situated under an umbrella-cloaked canopy, take a sip from my vodka cran, and invite her for a drink. She nods. This is the culmination of a Sin City bachelor weekend marked by a three-day string of mindless hedonism — strip clubs, gambling, guzzling liquor at one-ounce intervals, and summoning Uber Eats at 4 a.m. to deliver us 200 McNuggets to cap off each night. All of that has led me here: an MGM pool party DJed by Calvin Harris. This backdrop, more often than not, would closer resemble a mildly amusing Bukowski novel rather than a perspective-altering vignette. Everyone here is rotting away under the warm desert sun, the beefy chillbro gentry and the wannabe Instagram models. In a place rife with people trying to look different and act different and be all this and that, I have stumbled upon the prototype that stands out with ease.
I’ve lived my whole life thinking that love at first sightwas a lame fantasy born out of second-rate rom coms and codependent anxious attachers desperately clinging to anything that would make them feel less invisible in this crowded world. Ancient Greeks described the phenomenon as theia mania, or “madness from the gods.” Neuroscience asserts it’s the simultaneous increase in cortisol and oxytocin and a decrease in testosterone and serotonin in the human brain. But we find ourselves caught in the center of a whorl of people and music, cooing and canoodling at the edge of a pool, drunkenly rambling on and on about our friends’ stupid bachelor parties and more pressing metaphysical questions like if fog is just God hotboxing the Earth. Beams of sunlight reflect off the water and shine all around us. We glitter. At some point I make her laugh, which slowly levels off into a smile. The oceanic warmth of romantic bliss floods my thoughts as the chaos of bodies and beats and booze thrumming around us slows and blurs into something barely recognizable — as if my surroundings looped in a centripetal force around her.
For the first time in a long time, I realize I miss the ecstasy of passion and desire. Whatever is tingling around inside me, it’s a feeling unfamiliar. The poolside air tastes of fruity cocktails, chlorine, and sunscreen, but it still feels so goddamn good to breathe.
Am I demented or am I just overjoyed?
Perched on barside stools, cheersing Old Fashioneds, knees facing each other, observing body language, secretly staring at her thighs, soaking in secrets, deliberating when to initiate physical touch — this is my purgatory. My liver screams “Slow down!” But my heart (penis?) is standing on the third baseline, waving me toward home plate. Most first dates are defined by two people nodding along, being as agreeable as possible. But I’m here at the Bellagio hanging onto Whatsername’s every word, unassuming and all-consuming, the end of each sentence a cliffhanger.
What am I feeling? Alcohol? Adrenaline? Affection?
We speak unashamedly and unabashedly for hours. She tells me she’s buried under a pile of examinations and credentialing — par for the course as she transitions from Pilates instructor to physiotherapist. Her dating life in London: dud after dud. She’s bored and delirious and looking for a particular something but not anything in particular. We live on two different continents but exist in the same quarter-life crisis.
For the past five years, I’ve bounced around from job to job, coast to coast: LA to Boston to Chicago. My mid-twenties have been spent braving the waters of singledom via iPhone, careening from woman to woman. Hipster girls. Patagonia girls. The MBA Lean In types. The wavy-haired yoga instructor. The freckle-faced perky painter who ran marathons and volunteered at dog shelters. The tattoo-sleeved, black-haired bartender at the local comedy club. All shapes and sizes and types and quirks. Over time, all the dates and the flings and the bar tabs blend together into a faceless, amorphous sea of monotony. And each relationship ends for the same exact reason: We were both placeholders, keeping the bed warm for a more suitable, long-term guest in our heartbeat’s hotel.
In life, there’s a tension between companionship and adventure. And I’m not talking about the “let’s book a spontaneous flight to Bangkok” kind of adventure. I mean the “every other year, let’s uproot my existence, reinvent myself, reincarnate social circles, adjust to a new city, adapt to a new job” kind of adventure. If I was still into ‘Gramming my life instantly, this career-building hopscotch would seem fresh and invigorating to the average voyeur, but it has brought about an “off” feeling that’s gnawed at me for several years. Sure, there were lots of people to do and things to see, but eventually, the friends, the family, the lovers I left behind were shuffled out for shadow puppets I would throw up against the wall to remind myself of the forms they represent. Apathy and cynicism became my closest companions, turning my internal monologues into roundtable discussions of what is and what can never be.
When you’re constantly on the move, everything in your life spins into radically and rapidly temporary details. Investing yourself in any particular place or person inevitably leads to an emotional void. It’s like the end of the morning routine scene in American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman peels off a face mask and says, “You can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense that our lifestyles are probably comparable, but I simply am not there.” Culturally speaking, Americans have a narrow view of loneliness. Pop culture typically depicts isolated characters locked in a bedroom, staring forlornly out of a rainy window, or recent grievers, or the single woman stereotype. “A person can feel lonely anywhere, with or without people,” says Amy Banks, a neurobiologist and author of Wired to Connect.
Dating apps have turned nights out into quasi-job interviews. Everyone has a standard of prerequisites and preferred qualities, and our attributes are measured up to any number of other qualified suitors. Romantic prospects are collected and discarded like resumes. The paradox of choice leaves us on the relentless pursuit of more, of a better candidate that may not exist. Ultimately though, dating is turd mining: You have to dig through piles of shit until you find the diamond in the rough.
Maybe it’s the product of modern alienation or the Bumble-driven insatiable appetite for instant satisfaction, but when you find someone who embraces the totality of everything you have to offer the world, your amazing qualities, and all your baggage and bullshit that comes with it, you want to hang on to whatever adds some technicolor to your motion picture.
So of all the gin joints in the universe — the Bellagio, of all places — I found the leave-your-cares-in-another-state, make-out-in-the-rain kind of love that isn’t demanding anything, isn’t playing hard to get, isn’t sowing seeds of doubt, isn’t zigging or zagging around the mental claymores we scatter across the battlefield of pursuit. Everyone and everything around us is a distant second. Eventually, we leave and now we’re standing in front of the hotel’s fountain show, a setting plagued with clichés. Our manic energy uncorks a bottle of magic and a whirring hum of pitch-perfect vibrations bubbles and fizzes through my nerves. A moment fraught with urgency, we gaze at each other lustily, I lean in for a kiss, a kiss that lasts the length of a Coltrane vinyl. She has extremely moist lips, like smoochable cupcakes. I bask in the thrill of this directionless endeavor, casting aside the worries of being on the prowl for some theoretical soulmate to play the romantic lead in a story I’ve yet to write.
But is this really love at first sight, or is this a key bump for an attention addict looking to keep on the up?
It’s early morning after a night of naked poetry, and the soft beams of sunlight creep through the dusty beige curtains as Whatsername rustles around, tenderly, ready to embody Walt Disney’s archetype of an ethereal romantic darling. “So lonely boy, what are you really looking for?” she asks. Her head rubs against my chest as we cuddle between the bedsheets and the mattress where we’d just finished devouring each other. It’s an all-too-familiar first-date question. “I dunno,” I reply semi-ironically. “Someone to tell me I’m pretty.”
The mindset of someone looking for “something real,” as many dating app profiles put it, stems from one of the big assumptions of our times: If love is real, it must prove to be eternal. Romanticism emerged as a philosophy in Europe during the 18th century, the one equating genuine relationships with lifelong relationships. You know the kind. The idyllic snapshots of couples who spent a getaway weekend in Napa or cooking Blue Apron dinners every Friday night, all of which appear in an endless scroll of Instagram lives, half-connected like dopamine Chiclets.
The halcyon glow of the mystical, filtered, falsified “successful relationship” has spilled over into marketing schemes to sell roses and chocolate and skimpy lingerie, and it’s left us feeling scammed and miserable. It gets more depressing once you realize you’re just madly in love with an engagement ring commercial. Esther Perel summarizes this phenomenon in Mating In Captivity:
“We come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide… Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it’s a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.”
As I inch closer to my thirties, each flip of a calendar page uncovers an exponential uptick in letterpress wedding invitations. Marriage, at least in its institutional or ceremonial form, seems more like a Panopticon scenario where onlookers gawk bug-eyed at the aesthetics of a relationship. I always thought the concept of The One was a bit farcical, because every person we’ve ever loved was, and is, an extension of ourselves at a certain point in our lives.
Though, I suppose your perspective on dating and relationships stems from whether you perceive life, and the people in it, as still water or current. If you are of the latter, you may not view partners as a one-and-done, till-death-do-us-part commitment, but rather companions who fulfill whatever needs you may have at a period of time to the extent that it’s mutually enjoyable. Perhaps if you’re the former, you might define successful relationships as a roadmap leading to marriage, and anything that falls short is the romantic equivalent of the lost Malaysian airliner.
A relationship is nothing more than a mutual opt-in between two people who happen to like each other about the same amount, who express it in the exact way the other wants to receive it, and who make a conscious decision each day for a period of time that their lives are better together than they are apart. Sometimes the promise of eternity made with earnest and sincerity becomes impossible to keep. Time has it in for everybody. Eventually, our clock’s arms will grab a bow and shoot an arrow through every relationship’s Achilles heel. Best case scenario: You two fall head over heels, trot down a fulfilling and prosperous marriage only to age into decrepit unfuckability, and then, one of you dies.
Short-term relationships are typically viewed as an ineffective expenditure of our prime years. Breakups are the period at the end of a sentence that any lover would happily let run on forever. See, love stories have happy endings because they fade to black right after the kiss. You don’t have to watch the surrealist drama that comes after. You know, life. It’s a big smiling mess laughing at this twisted, existential prank called our existence. We’re born alone and we die alone; everything in between is a distraction.
We’re now standing at the main entrance outside of my hotel. My arms quake as they wrap her in an embrace while a jet black Lincoln Navigator — her Uber ride — pulls up to the Wynn valet. “I’m really glad I met you,” I tell her as we swap numbers. “Maybe someday our paths will cross again.” We’d shared several luxurious hours in Las Vegas that left me breathless, a feeling no royal flush could ever match. “Of course,” she says, her palm sliding down my jawline. She kisses me goodbye, hops in the SUV, and the door slams shut. I sigh at the stinging defeat of watching someone that had me wrapped up in infatuation drift in the opposite direction in this too-big world. Well, as Hank Moody says in Californication, “A morning of awkwardness is better than a night of loneliness.”
Life is vaudeville madness and every actor on stage provides a beacon of light that helps us navigate through the darkness before we eventually reach the exit sign. Our journeys are long. Supporting casts change. Conflicts knock us on new trajectories. Character arcs lead to unforeseen destinations. Plot twists become the journey.
And yet, why am I haunted by another path not taken?
Yeah, it’s been a few months, and we’d text here and there. Late-night drunken messages, hypothesizing about trips to London or Chicago, teasing each other with screenshots of flight schedules. This is crazy. We’re crazy. We’d say “yes” or “whatever,” and these sentiments were uttered in perpetuity until everything between our hellos and TTYLs blurred into definitely maybes. Eventually, the response time grew longer, the enthusiasm faded, the blue bubbles shrank, the text now terse.
Our messages are long gone now. Whatsername is long gone now. Her face has faded. Our connection has frayed. The clock is ticking. The gap is widening. She’s vanished beyond the distance of an ocean and several time zones. Maybe it was destined to be this way. It’s entirely plausible that longing for something is better than actually having it. Imagine wanting something so bad that you move heaven and earth to get it, and two days after, you think, “Meh, this is garbage.” I think it was some ’90s hardcore band that said satisfaction is the death of desire. It was probably for the best that we never reached the cold, clinical climax of the go-through-the-motions phase of long-term love — where the sex is less exhilarating, the future plans curdle into routine, and we become cardboard cutouts of what we were.
We’re all too familiar with stale relationships prolonged for comfort’s sake. The ones where both parties are effectively dragging a dead deer up a hill, jamming it into a wood-chipper, and attempting to piece it back together until they realized they’re dealing with an inscrutable mess. When two bizarrely wrongheaded people come together in a perfect synchronicity of breathtaking stupidity, I suspect it’s more monkey/typewriter/Shakespeare syndrome than anything more profound.
Relationships, no matter how long or short, are seemingly bulletproof but ultimately fragile at the whim of an external force. Each person is a planet orbiting around our shared reality, and on each mesosphere, any number of things could be cascading together to account for the weather patterns of that particular place and time. How we see the endings of love and intimacy depends on what our society deems to be “normal.” We’re long overdue for an account of love that is allowed to end without some ultimate antagonistic send-off. A more imaginative space for short-term love could help foster a deep appreciation we felt for someone for a time, a beautiful and breathless cadence that wasn’t forced to drag on into a mournful melody. Our breakups could turn into nice to know yous, a bow to tie up the gift that is sharing some time floating in space with someone you cherish.
Or you could light their entire wardrobe on fire. It’s your choice.
Whatsername has no idea I wrote this, and I have no idea if I care to share it with her. Any story with me at the center of it leaves more questions than resolutions. But one thing I know for sure was that our time shining under the Vegas lights was a thing of beauty, the gorgeous shimmering insanity of a love that was a fireworks show: a sudden and spontaneous flash of happening, exploding into a big smoldering nothing. We spent a night at each other’s heartbeat hotel, a vacation from a reality full of ulcerating rage that gradually scabs over into deadened cynicism, where, for a moment, we felt less invisible in this crowded world.
But that’s all it was. A vacation. And yet, I couldn’t help myself from indulging in any Hail Mary attempt to rekindle whatever it was we had. “Hey,” I text her. “I’m thinking of embarking on a little Euro trip a few months from now. Wanna be my tour guide?” Instead, this message was the flick of a zippo sucked dry of its lighter fluid. Her response seemed a little deflated. “Sounds like fun, but don’t you think it’s a little weird to fly all the way here to hang out with someone you barely know?” I found myself feeling disappointed again, even though all she’d done was express my own thoughts back to me.
Still, there’s a part of me that desperately wishes the thousands of miles between us would miraculously shrink, and we could radiate along the Vegas strip once again. But now I’m basking in the bright white glow of a MacBook screen with nothing but apathy and cynicism to keep me company. It’s funny how the smallest snippets of love and recognition can keep us resuming the indispensable delusions that life depends on. Idiot philosophical discussions by the pool. Barside confessions drenched in Old Fashioneds. Making out in front of the Bellagio fountains. Turning a hotel room into a zoo show of animalistic impulses. Cuddling until sunrise. A kiss goodbye.
I can’t turn backward, but I’ll have this scrapbook memory to laminate and store in my mind’s time capsule until it decays and turns to dust. Well, isn’t this grand? All my life I thought love at first sight was a lame fantasy, but now I realize the joke was on me.
