Reflections

I was walking back from a client presentation with some colleagues when one, whom I'd never met before, talked about traveling in general--weekend trips, longer trips, etc.--and in particular, a Costa Rica adventure tour she went on. Without giving it a second thought, I asked whether she paid the single supplement (no; she'd traveled with her mom). It only hit me afterward how quickly I'd adapted to the category of "single." One reason that this breakup has taken less of a toll on me--although there's still a toll--is that I have no issues with being single, per se. No stigma, no judgment, etc. I've comforted friends who, upon their breakups, express concerns about being a "loser;" they took their relationship status seriously--it was a part of their identity--so when it shifted, they lost the identity as well as the relationship. As I was just saying to friends last week--before the formal breakup, but as it was brewing--you just can't associate your value as a human with your relationship status. I mean, don't you know a lot of married people who are jackasses, and single people who are awesome? I'm not saying I'm *happier* single or defiant about it; I'm simply stating that it doesn't change how I value myself.

It also has had amazingly little practical impact on my having a life: I instantly found companions for any remaining theater tickets I had, and Nina helped me make new apartment-sharing arrangements for Prague. As for "happier" or not, I've been thinking about that line in "Bonjour tristesse," which I read in college (in Geneva): "She uttered those nonsensical words: I'd rather be unhappy with you than happy without you." Those words made little sense to me at the time, as I'd never been in love. I read a lot of French literature in my late teens and early twenties, and I didn't get it--this concept--then. I read "Manon Lescaut" and thought, "this dude is the biggest idiot ever, to risk losing everything to chase after this woman!" I read "Le rouge et le noir," more than once (but not as many times as "Madame Bovary"), and thought, "what's wrong with her? Why is she sacrificing herself for this guy? It makes no sense." Well--you've probably figured out where this is going--I now get it; I understand how strong feelings interfere with one's better judgment, how you're willing to overlook the things that you thought you wanted in life, to be with someone. I'm not here to slam F. or elaborate on the details of our relationship or the demise thereof, but even as I see that that demise was the best birthday gift ever, I mourn the relationship nonetheless. I was heading for disaster and was hesitant to change course because the feelings were that strong, even for the highly logical person that I am. It took a real downward spiral to pull me out of the path of danger.

You may be wondering how I got involved with someone so wrong for me, and I would be tempted to invoke, if not blame Lori Gottlieb, even though I never read her whole book or fully subscribed to her message. And let's be clear--it had to happen; I had to try her approach for myself and see it fail spectacularly for me personally--to see how wrong it is. When F. and I were happy, the narrative of our relationship was, "how great that we've managed to get past our differences and make this work," but the differences--papered over by intense chemistry and many not insignificant areas of compatibility--were real and mattered in the end. The very things--each and every one of them--that gave me pause in our first month together, eroded us in the end. We have instincts for a reason, and some of our ideas about people are right for a reason. Ms. Gottlieb gave the example, in a radio interview, of getting over herself enough to date a real estate agent, whom she'd immediately dismissed as not artistic enough for her. Fair enough; if you're that dismissive about people for stupid reasons, than she may have something to teach you. But if you have a decent, reasonable sense of what's important to you, honor it. If your ideal summer weekend is some combination of camping, hiking, and kayaking, you may still be able to make work a relationship with someone whose ideal summer weekend may be some combination of sitting by the pool and watching TV. It's doable--I mean, I like sitting by the pool occasionally and watching TV occasionally, and I had/have people to go to the mountains with while my now-proverbial significant other does other stuff. That's why I didn't see that difference as a dealbreaker: I'd accepted that even though my ideal relationship would entail weekend trips and adventure, that ideal was worth sacrificing for the actual relationship I was in.

But the underlying issue was whether someone like me--who seeks out fresh air, beauty, and nature--could be happy with someone who just doesn't care. I thought of Jonathan Franzen's essay on David Foster Wallace, in which he wrote,

David wrote about weather as well as anyone who ever put words on paper, and he loved his dogs more purely than he loved anything or anyone else, but nature itself didn’t interest him, and he was utterly indifferent to birds. Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I’d stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. “Yeah,” he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, “it’s pretty.” In the summer before he died, sitting with him on his patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps I was studying the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not.

I can empathize with both sides here--my mom is always yelling at me to pay attention to the birds, and I care, but not as much as she does, and I resent her expectation that I have to enjoy the presence of birds the same exact way she does. When we go for walks, she criticizes me for moving to fast and not stopping to enjoy the surroundings; I can enjoy the surroundings just fine and keep moving at the same time. So I don't pass judgment on other people's relationships with nature; there are people who love it more, are much more adventurous than I, who want to spend a greater proportion of their time than I do in the mountains. There are people in comparison to whom I'm as unadventurous and blase as F. is in relation to me.

What made us incompatible was not that I would have to give up, for example, travel and adventure to spend every moment together, nor that we wouldn't be able to spend every moment together because he wasn't interested in those things; I would have been happy to go camping once in a while, with other people. What did break us up, among other things, were (1) that vast gap, which turned out to be too massive to bridge, between someone who cares and someone who doesn't, (2) his utter unwillingness to expose himself to new experiences, to see whether he might just find joy in the mountains, (3) his inability to directly communicate his lack of interest, coupled with my failure to read his indirect communications as lack of interest rather than lack of initiative--although there was plenty lack of initiative--and my responding thereto with bitchiness, to which he then responded with more withdrawal. Rinse, repeat. We unraveled fast--went from happy to bitter in a matter of weeks--perhaps because once you hit the six-month point, you have to start thinking more critically about whether you should go on together.

It wasn't any one thing that broke us up; it was a combination of too many small incompatibilities that fed on each other and crescendo-ed. Some of those things could have been managed--for example, the practical aspects of having very different interests, and perhaps even the mismatched communication styles; but even as my first post-breakup thoughts were, "could this relationship have been saved if we'd just communicated better?" I immediately knew that the relationship shouldn't have been saved because of the bigger underlying issues. In other words, I could live with the fact that F. didn't like to travel, locally or otherwise, and that I would therefore travel less than I would have considered ideal; and F. and I could have figured out how to talk about what we wanted and didn't to do in a way that brought us together rather than tore us apart. But I fundamentally couldn't, in the long run, love someone who just doesn't care.