I am me because you are you

On falling in love when I didn't believe in it.

It’s not that I didn’t believe true love was possible, whatever “true love” is supposed to mean. As opposed to untrue love? Just plain, old love? There are as many definitions of love as there are people on the planet, I figure. We all grow up in diverse communities and cultures that have different values and so define love in various ways. Companionship? Loyalty? Procreation? Safety? Respect? Everyone has different wants and needs. What some may dreamily describe as perfect love may not do a thing for others.

In American culture, growing up with movie, TV, radio, and social media performances of love as a superhuman kind of ecstasy all shoved up in our gullible staring scrolling faces, the entire romantic relationship endeavor (twin flame, soulmate, my person) is cranked up to an absurd, nearly unattainable level. We are constantly bombarded by the notion that love is a triumphant, happily ever after, our raison d'être.

Or hey. Maybe it’s the opposite? Pop culture also tells us love has to be hard, dramatic, and heart-rending or else you must not really be in love. Jealousy is redefined as devotion and someone’s ability to make you angry or irrational is passion.

Maybe we tell ourselves these things to justify the horror of finding ourselves in a terrible relationship. Like that line of Cher’s in Moonstruck,“Love don't make things nice, it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess.” Romanticizing dysfunction into love to justify staying in a shitty relationship?

Been there. Done that.

Maybe I decided love was my parents’ awful relationship: a shotgun wedding immediately after high school graduation. Perhaps love was how my grandpa and grandma savagely called each other out in front of us, clearly sick of each other’s tired bullshit after decades of orbiting each other like strategizing civil war generals on opposite sides of the battlefield? Or maybe I learned what love was from observing the life my other grandma led? A mother of 5 boys, at 40-something, she escaped a physically abusive relationship with a violent alcoholic and spent the rest of her life contentedly alone.

I understand now that my parents’ terrible relationship after their divorce and a childhood without much in the way of positive relationship role models left me ill-equipped to comprehend what actual love - however you define it - entails, let alone understand how to be in a marginally successful relationship.

It has always been easy - a relief, even - to eye-roll a response to the schmoopy antics of lovers. I’m not that kind of girl, I convinced myself. Girls who need love are weak. I don’t need anyone. I felt like this not because I didn’t want to experience love. Deep inside I think I was dying for love but experienced a visceral aversion to it because it didn’t seem love actually existed. Easier to tell myself I wasn’t missing out on anything because real love wasn’t, in fact, real. It was the stuff of movies or cloying love songs.

Now, after seven years with Cory, it’s pretty simple to understand how, with the right love with the right person, anyone can bloom into the kind of human I used to roll my eyes about.

Yep, even me.

Out of nowhere, you entered my life. Post-divorce Tinder dating in my late thirties was a bust; a few long-distance infatuations with men I’d met online had fizzled. I was starting to contemplate an existence similar to my grandma's. Middle-age spent solo parenting children and then alone. Could I be content? Could I be happy? I thought - or convinced myself - I probably could.

Then there was you.

It only just occurred to me as I’m writing this that it was my writing that brought us together. I had a full-blown doctor’s office panic attack. After a routine check-up led to a call-back for an ultrasound that would offer a technological look at suspicious cysts on my ovaries, I talked myself into a certain stage 4 cancer diagnosis.

Later, after I wrote about it and revealed that I was planning a move to the town my kids’ dad lived in to make co-parenting easier, you messaged me supportive words explaining how our sons were in daycare together in that little town and promised it was a cool place with nice people who had rallied around you after your own very real cancer diagnosis.

And we never stopped talking.

Even though I tried. Over and over, I pushed you away. I don’t even know why now. I’m so glad it never worked. You just kept on being there. Even after a marriage we re-defined as co-signing your healthcare, it wasn’t until just this year that I was able to look you square in the eyes and be like; holy shit. We’re in LOVE. Fuckin movie love. Goddamn Jerry Maguire you complete me love that I make fun of.

Gross.

But I love it.

Here you are. Here we are. Look at this beautiful relationship we have so deliberately, thoughtfully, and gracefully built together! It has been an honor, sir. A delight. YOU are a delight.

Still.

I won’t delude myself into a happily ever after. It’s just not how I roll. People change, and circumstances change. It’s the gamble of love. Too many people go into it with til-death-do-us-part-expectations and that’s part of the problem, I think.

This is where you shake your head at my perpetual cynicism and where I tell you it’s not cynicism it’s realism and that you just never know how shit shakes out. I’ve seen too much, fella. But, for now, you and I, we have a really fucking good thing going. Which makes writing about it super uncomfortable. Online declarations of love feel smug, and performative. But, is that damaged Monica talking?

Love makes me uncomfortable, I texted a writer friend.

Why uncomfortable?

Anything verging on performing it online…

Don’t think of it as performing.

Yeah, but it’s dangerously close.

And then she sent me this:

When I had no roof I made

Audacity my roof. When I had

No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.

When I had no ears I thought.

When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made

Care my father. When I had

No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made

Quiet my friend. When I had no

Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made

My voice my temple. I have

No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune

Is my means. When I have

Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment

Is my strategy. When I had

No lover I courted my sleep.

- Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky (hat tip Robyn Rydzy)

This was my mantra for the first handful of years after my marriage ended. She texted. I totally get love being uncomfortable. I constantly convinced myself I didn’t want it.

Robyn, who just turned 50 and met the wonderful man she now shares her life with at age 47, always gets it.

The sweetest, most gentle human I’ve ever known. Sitting on the back porch with you all these years later writing about you I peek over my laptop screen to catch your eye. You vibe me peeping like you always do, tilt your head and squint at me in the afternoon sun, sexy crinkles instantly fanning out around coffee-brown eyes that look back into mine, a shy smile pulling at your lips causing those adorable dimples to pop into existence.

Hey, fella. Hi. I see you. I see you see me. See me wanting/needing to be seen the way you see me. Basking in your beautiful view of me. Thank you for your view of me. It’s a veritable lifeboat in the stormy ocean of my life, no question about it.

You tell me my view of myself is distorted. That the me you see is the real me and how I think of myself is just a result of a scary childhood and relationships with people who weren’t the right fit.

On good days, I believe you and think back to myself at 10 or 17, or 20 or 33. If that scared, lonely girl knew you were in her future maybe she could have stopped thrashing through life like a person drowning in the ocean and relaxed into the current until you arrived in your lifeboat.

I am able to experience myself through you and can begin to understand that I am worthy of a love like this. Maybe I’m even good at being in love like this? But only because you show me what it can look like day after day. After all these years you’ve never uttered a mean word to me. Not one! It sounds impossible, like a social media lie packaged in a Happy Father’s Day Instagram post but it’s true. I can’t fathom how this kind of relationship can exist. And that I’m a part of it. Your unwavering kindness has taught me a new way to navigate the world.

You reach for my hand as you drive. Pressing your thumb hard across my palm to keep me grounded, the same way you wrap your long leg around mine in bed and press the top of your foot up into the arch of mine because I told you it makes me feel safe during the black 3 am nightmare moments. More often than not, I wake up to your big hands kneading whatever body part of mine you can get hold of through dogs and pillows and covers.

I don’t feel like me without you.

My body feels like an extension of your body, your thoughts an extension of mine.

It isn’t just me. You have put as much effort into courting my children as you have me, which has caused me to love you more than I thought possible for a divorced, aging love cynic.

Your own kids are tough. Somebody else’s kids can feel impossible. It never occurred to me that, at nearly 40, I’d find someone who would legitimately love my children as much as I do. That I’d meet a person who knows them as well as I do and could become the partner I exchange knowing looks with when they do or say their funny/annoying kid bullshit. I thought I’d lost that kind of shared parenting bond forever.

If I had to pick a celebrity that would give you some idea of what Cory is like it would be Nick Offerman. That sexy-electric combo of scruffy guy who can build or fix anything while being an evolved, emotionally intelligent gentleman. The kind of man who listens better than anyone I’ve ever known - without judging - who also happens to be wicked smart with a kickass sense of humor.

“What’s the last thing you jacked off to?” I lazily ask the sky as I lie on grass thankfully more spring green than winter yellow and let the warm April sun heat my cold-weary bones.

It’s Sunday, the kids are with their other parents and I’m half-watching a tool-belted Cory build a gate. It’s for the rickety, old deck in the new backyard of the 1960s red brick rambler we recently bought together so our kids can attend school in a better district.

Like a chef throwing random ingredients into a pan, Cory is riffing the gate into existence. “Making it up as I go,” he tells me as he does his magic thing with screws, hammer, and drill. He pauses every now and then to envision, adjust and get back at it. He does this kind of thing all the time and it always turns out so well. Like I said, magic. He can magic anything into existence. Including this version of me. The best version of me.

Cory pauses while drilling a screw into a post, and tilts his head skyward in thought.

Maybe it’s weird, but I always ask him stuff like that and he always answers. He’s my best friend and we have no secrets. I dig how open we are about sex; what we like and don’t like; other people we’re attracted to, and who we fantasize about. It turns me on. Sometimes he’ll tell me he’s watched a video of us we’ve recorded on his phone. Sometimes it’s a YouPorn vid. Other times he’ll describe how he was thinking about me with somebody else or how he was only thinking about someone else.

“Amateur lesbian scissoring,” he answers after a minute. “Pornhub.”

“Me too!” I shout as if we’re 7-year-olds who just discovered we have the same favorite color.

“Lesbian scissoring compilation,” he reads off my iPhone screen as I delightedly wave my search history at him.

“Ooooh, SAMESIES,” he laughs, winks at me in a way that makes my chest ache, and goes back to gate riffing.

Later, watching old Parts Unknown episodes with Anthony Bourdain, Cory instinctively covers my eyes and talks loudly about how tall Bourdain must be during the grisly animal killing and chopping scenes that always happen in foreign food markets.

I marvel at the inner transformation that can occur when a human feels so cared for. To have another person constantly, genuinely inquiring about your well-being, regularly offering to put your needs above theirs. I’ve never experienced that with anyone except to offer it to my children. Not with my parents, not within any relationships. Never.

“Can I get you anything from the kitchen?” he’ll ask when we’re watching TV together and I nearly laugh with incredulity at the politeness of it. Seven years in and I still wonder, Who is this person? Offering to bring me a glass of cold water at bedtime, a dirty martini in the evening, or an Ibuprofen in the morning after a late night of beer drinking, determined to finish the first kickass season of The Last of Us on HBOmax.

I feel immense relief that we share a life together. That I haven’t fucked it up. That we feel the same about each other. That the way each of us defines love seems to match up like puzzle pieces clicking into place. That he loves my kids, that they love him, that I love his son, and that he loves me. That our kids will grow up around this kind of love. Anyone trying to make one work knows that blended families are no joke, the dynamics are so delicate the carefully constructed scenario can implode at any moment.

I look back on how damaged I felt when we met and feel so lucky that I kept saying yes to his constant but easy persistence. He never wavered once and seemed to know what this was or what we could be long before I did.

He’s still like that, even in the face of my increasingly rare freakouts. Calm. Steady. He looks at me with such love, even when I’m at my worst. Maybe even especially when I’m at my worst because he instinctively gets it. He understands without me having to explain.

I told my therapist I feel like Cory is reparenting me. “He always makes me feel safe, never judges me. Like, unconditional love!” I marvel. “That’s how parents are supposed to be!” My therapist nods slowly, eyes wide, eyebrows raised in gentle affirmation, as if to say, Yesss, Monica. Welcome to functional adulthood.

But I didn’t know!

With the help of therapy and unconditional love, I can feel myself slowly blooming into the person I’m meant to be. Cory’s love for me is a kind of re-parenting that provides a calm, safe atmosphere I never experienced as a kid. Or as an adult. I feel it happening; the trauma responses and heightened survival mode baseline is slowly melting away. Like riffing that gate into existence, he’s allowing me to become something new at his hands. A metamorphosis that, to this dysfunctional human, feels like absolute magic.

These days, when I recognize in others that spark I share with Cory, I don’t feel eye-roll-y, skeptical, or judgmental, I feel excitement at the recognition of the true, comfortable, contented kind of love that can grow between people. Sharing being alive with someone or several someones who become a part of you, who see you and validate your existence, who mirror to you the best version of yourself or who make you feel at home when you’re with them no matter where you are… That’s what it’s all about.

So many of us exist for years, decades, lifetimes, in relationships we’ve convinced ourselves are working or maybe we’re well aware they aren’t working but we get used to them or we’re afraid to leave and it’s just easier to stay because, like me, you don’t know what you’re missing, have no idea what is possible.

A big part of me feels embarrassed to write about this. But I need to write about it. Articulate it to myself and to him with these words and then float this mysterious and magnificent energy out into the cosmos like releasing a balloon into the sky. It’s never too late for love. You’re never too far gone for love.

Thank you, universe. THANK YOU.

I can’t believe I tried to talk myself out of being with him so many times. Maybe I was addicted to the fight-then-make-up drama. Children who experience neglect or who have a parent with mental health issues can be more likely to get caught up in that kind of prove-your-love behavior. Fear of abandonment we hide with tough facades, discomfort with intimacy and fear of relying on someone besides ourselves. Maybe I subconsciously needed to see what Cory would endure to be with me? Who the hell knows why I did what I did?

The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone.

All that matters is that he just kept on keeping on with me. Now, when I ask him why, he shrugs with a small smile, dimples flashing, eye crinkles crinkling, and says simply, “You are the best thing. I couldn’t imagine not talking to you.”

Samesies, fella.