Before I really knew her that well, one
of my roommates got herself in trouble during an ugly breakup. Being the type
of girl who is constantly chasing new opportunities to keep herself alive in
everyone’s minds (including her own), she broke up with her ex-boyfriend (or so
I was told) on a whim, only to chase him down a few months later in efforts to
track down what they had before. This was nothing unusual, and, like most
things, fizzled out with time.
My roommate, however, couldn’t allow
things to go without a specific kind of personally produced closure, and so as
she sat on an hours-long plane ride she wrote a long-winded letter. She was
attempting with full disclosure to bring a piece of her mind out and onto the
page. She could only hope that the person to whom she had already given certain
valuable pieces would understand her motivations, and would take the
long-winded letter from the long-winded airplane ride for everything that it
was.
Of course that isn’t what happened. My
roommate kept writing letters, against the wishes of everyone else, and
potentially against the wishes of herself. It only ended up making the breakup
uglier. People seem to have a hard time hearing faults of a relationship when
they’ve just barely ended it.
I’ve recently become very skeptical of
monogamy. There’s no telling, after all, when a life spent together with one
person will end. How are you supposed to address that? I’ve spent my lifetime
examining relationships, remaining perceptive as so many adult marriages fall
apart around me, and yet nothing perplexes me more than a life purposefully
shared between two people, suddenly cut short. I guess what I’m trying to say
is that I’m not really sure what romantic love looks like. Is it as fleeting as
I sometimes think it is? It seems like what we’re all hoping for, those stories
about people who are meant to be in every way, have to end tragically in order
to be realistic. Either someone falls out of love, or one of the two loses the
other. Is that really how romantic love is? Or have I just had the misfortune
of being surrounded by subpar examples of it?
I will say that when I was growing up,
the relationships that had the biggest impact on me were often the ones that
were clearly the most negative. I’ve never had any problem identifying the
things I don’t want if I decide to
permanently settle down with someone. Even in my last relationship, I would
spend hours on social media, looking at pictures on Instagram and Tumblr, and
wondering why my relationship didn’t make me feel the way those pictures did. I
had no problem identifying what exactly was wrong with him and I together, and
yet I couldn’t find the time to string together what made us work in the first
place.
Sometimes I think that my happiest
times have been when I am not preoccupied with a romantic (or sexual)
connection. It’s much easier to go through life without the emotional stress of
inviting in a person who might have no intention to stay. But other times, I
wonder desperately about the truth in stories about people who truly work, who
truly fit with each other and have a relationship built to last. I don’t know
the exact cause of this confusion, but I don’t think it’s an uncommon one. When
I first understood that this essay contest has to do with the love experience
of college students, I wondered what on earth I could write about—I’m not even
sure that I’ve ever been in love in the first place. I’m honestly not even sure
whether I feel the way I do about my last relationship because I was preoccupied
with thoughts of the grass being always greener, or because it was a relationship
never designed to work in the first place. And I’m twenty-one years old, with
little experience, really, of all that the world has to offer.
I find myself wondering sometimes what
I might have done had I been in my roommate’s situation. I can certainly
picture myself sitting on a seemingly endless plane ride, staring out the
window and watching clouds disappear as if nothing really mattered anyway. At
the end of the day, who can really fault her for sending those letters? I have
no idea if she believes that relationship to be one of the great loves of her
life, that she couldn’t bear to leave him empty-handed, or if she only wished
to express her feelings to him as a way to seek a fickle peace in her own mind.
How do we really measure an experience like that anyway?
I never noticed how uncomfortable it
was when my ex-boyfriend and I would pick fights with each other, how hard I
tried to make him feel the exact same ways that I did. It never worked, and I
was naïve to think that he could understand me in the same way that I
understood myself. Was that wrong? Is it the same wrong as my roommate’s wish
to make her ex understand her? I sometimes wonder how much my ex-boyfriend
wished I could understand him better.
One of our most difficult, and still unresolved issues stemmed from the fact
that our refrigerators are organized differently. It was ridiculous and
understandable at the same time, but we were young and so it seemed
insurmountable. I remember wanting to break up with him the night we had that
argument. But I knew somehow that I couldn’t, and when he turned over with his
mind erased of all the words he had just said, I let myself believe that
imperfections are normal, that relationships aren’t perfect, and that what I
had grown up observing in adults was finally making sense to me too.
I don’t want to fault anyone for
raising me to believe that love and monogamy and spending the rest of one’s
life with one person are unrealistic. I think that somehow I’ve just arrived at
that idea on my own. And I think it is crucially important to understand that
because I have so little experience regarding love to begin with, it’s
unrealistic to think that I can really have a solid idea of what it is. I can
only say that I’ve been growing each day to understand the gray areas, and as I
grow I have learned to understand my roommate’s experience a little better. In
a way I think we all have had a time that we felt we had made a mistake by not
expressing ourselves in the best way possible.
I think that, had someone presented me
with a pen and paper on that plane, I too would have felt the need to write and
write, to try with every piece of me to explain why I had decided to make
things happen in a particular way.
My ex-boyfriend and I still talk pretty
regularly. And I’ve become much more comfortable admitting that to people as
this year has gone by, because our relationship feels so much better than it
ever did when we were dating. We aren’t in the type of situation where I would
invite him to family parties or expect him to be my date at a wedding, and
neither of us have the expectation of the other to remain monogamous. In a way,
this seems like the most accurate representation I can give of modern love in
college. Nothing about our situation makes sense on paper, and it is not like
anything I’ve ever seen idolized in the movies. But I’m happier than I was for
a lot of our relationship, and I love talking to my mom about the ways he and I
have both matured. There are no expectations, and I think that is what has made
our relationship so much stronger.
It’s been a while since my roommate had
her situation with the ugly breakup; in fact, I can’t say I ever really spent
time with her as she worked her way through that experience. But since I’ve
known her, she hasn’t seemed fazed by the consequences of her over-explaining
in the past. He and she don’t talk anymore, and it’s weird because they still
do have a lot of the same friends. I guess that’s another aspect of modern love
in college—things get messy pretty easily. But in a world as small as ours we
have to learn to coexist with the oddities of discomfort. I can’t be entirely
sure about all that happened between the two of them anyway, since I’ve only
heard both sides of the story from third parties. But what I can be sure of is
that this story has been a jumping off point for my own self-reflection.
How can we ever really tell how much
another person feels we have wronged them? And how can we ever really tell how
much another person understands the ways in which we feel wronged by them?
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