The Facebook Debate

I had thought about how to approach a particular topic for a while and had spent many email hours polling my friends on their opinions. But really, it would just be me doing the asking when I finally wound up my courage, which I managed to do this weekend.

I was sitting with my sweetheart on his bed in his parents’ house, where we were taking a break from cleaning out the shop that holds, among other things, his dad’s car restoration projects and a keg of beer. I faced him with some trepidation and told him I had a really stupid question to ask him. He looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t even look him in the face as I asked:

Will you be my boyfriend on facebook?

Oy vey. My mortification knew no bounds.

I had been chasing my metaphorical tail on this for a long time, well before my boyfriend became my boyfriend (both on and off facebook—and for the record, I know these two phenomena are very different). On the one hand, I fully recognize that making it (cringe) “facebook official” has very little to do with the actual emotional life and reality of a relationship. If the electronic status of your partnership is the glue, there are significantly larger problems afoot. Mark Zuckerburg does not make your relationship real; you and your partner do.

So why, why if I knew all of these things did I still want it so badly?

It isn’t as though I’m insecure about my sweetheart’s affections. I am not, and have not been, lacking in reassurance from him. He challenges me when I need challenging, and he supports me when I need supporting. His Monday morning texts cause me to start my week with a really dopey smile on my face. But it’s also nice that he refers to me as his girlfriend, and that his friends and family know about me. I love that I am in the public record of his life as he is in mine. While I believe that wanting his friends and family to know I exist as his girlfriend is reasonable, the facebook debate takes a few steps beyond and treads suspiciously outside reason.

Facebook played an odd role in my college socialization. Early on freshman year, a friend of mine asked me if I had signed up, and the blank look I gave her indicated that I hadn’t. She immediately helped me set up my profile. I am one of those unfortunate people who have to make a conscious effort not to talk about myself all the time (and I often fail at that—blog much?). But here was this website that was inviting me to do so. I wondered at the time if people actually cared that I love Cheez-its and biking, and the answer was “no, probably not.” That question, however, has become obsolete in the brave new world of facebook and twitter. In the early days of facebook, during which time I joined, the website was restricted to college students only, and we stalked one other with alarming energy—indeed, we adopted “stalk” as our verb of choice, as if that weren’t indicative of some very weird cultural changes. Sometime before graduation, the site opened to non-college email addresses, and the deluge of high schoolers (disturbing) and then parents (even more disturbing) began. I think I entered into a new realm of weird when my grandmother friended me.

Something tells me that my desire to have people know that I am in a relationship finds its origins much, much earlier than facebook, but the current culture of (over)sharing has certainly encouraged my preexisting leanings and insecurities. I’ve had two boyfriends in the past who withheld (as it were) on facebook to varying degrees. The first was so loathe to even hold my hand in public that an expectation to declare couple-hood online must have been appalling to him. When I step back and look at the bigger picture of that particular relationship, I realize that the facebook relationship wasn’t what I was looking for necessarily; I was looking for any kind of validation, any freely given gesture of affection that might indicate that—for whatever reason—he was the other half of a couple, that I wasn’t just making this up.

In a way, the facebook relationship status is just that: a culturally idiosyncratic gesture of affection, rather than a public declaration of exclusivity. My sweetheart is seldom on facebook, so it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to update his profile, but when I asked him, burying my head in a pillow so that my words came out a bit muffled, he smiled and said, “Of course.”

What he did in that moment was not decide he wanted to announce to the social networking world that we were a couple. He decided that this thing that was not a big deal to him was, for whatever reason, important to this crazy girl of whom he is very fond. And so he gave it freely, probably a small thing to him but a big deal to me—whether that is reasonable or not was sort of a moot point.

In the ever expanding, networked universe in which we find ourselves, my own insecurities have been given a whole new stage on which to play out their varying dramas. I am reminded of a good line from an unfortunate movie in which Drew Barrymore laments, “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It's exhausting.” The weirdest part of hearing that line was that I knew exactly what she was talking about. I am often ambivalent about technology, but I have zero ambivalence towards a miraculous phenomenon that I’m sure has been played out for centuries before Mark Zuckerburg was ever born:

The insecure half of a couple seeks an odd form of validation from the other half of the couple, who, being very kind and almost shockingly insightful, gives this validation freely. And suddenly there is a significant change in status—internal, facebook, or otherwise:

Insecure half is… very happy, very grateful, and—by the way—in a relationship.

Cake-Stand Stories (or, The Chronicles of Naperville)

In the town where I grew up, there was a place called “Tasty Bakery.” It had a huge electric sign in the shape of a cartoon baker—imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy, maybe a few pounds lighter, with rosy cheeks. It’s nice to remember my town as it was: quiet, and full of family businesses. I guess when the Starbucks moved in, and the Eddie Bauer followed, the decline was really only a matter of time.

With my twenty-fifth birthday looming—and no, it doesn’t just approach, it decidedly looms—I had a sudden onset of nostalgia for Tasty Bakery, home of the best black and white cookies in the world, other cookies shaped as Chicago Bears helmets, and above all the raspberry chocolate birthday cake. Some of my first memories of home are from my older sisters’ birthdays: my mother would get the cake from the bakery and set it on a beautiful glass cake-stand. I think my love of single-use utensils originates with that stand; melon-ballers, garlic presses, and apple-corers have a special place in my heart because they are items that know their purpose. The cake itself was a two layer contraption of dense chocolate and raspberry filling. On top, around the circumference of the upper layer, were small nests of chocolate frosting and preserves. These, too, served a single purpose: they were where to place the candles.

I went looking for that bakery on the internet, hoping against hope that it hadn’t closed but simply moved. I was out of luck: the number, with my hometown area code, had been disconnected.

When we first moved there, my town was small: two lane roads and empty plots in our development. Storms would come over the prairie preserve across the street, turning the sky a bizarre and thrilling green, and then a thick, dark black. My friends and I would dig holes in the vacant lots and cover them with plywood as forts—afternoon kingdoms fed on goldfish crackers. There was one farmstand where we always bought our corn: a dozen-dozen ears. My dad and the daughters would gather on the back porch and shuck one hundred and forty-four ears of corn, which my father would then scrape, so my mother could freeze the corn-guts for sweet corn soufflé all winter long. My dad and his brother built me the biggest swing-set in the neighborhood with precut lumber; Chuck told my dad it was nuts to have it precut, and when it came together perfectly, my dad was nothing short of smug. I watched my sisters get ready for prom in the brightly lit mirrors in my parents’ bathroom—last minute hysterics over deodorant stains on black taffeta, followed by a deeply enviable entrance down our wrap-around flight of stairs into the foyer.

Sometimes I wonder how Laura Ingalls Wilder felt, writing out her childhood. I acknowledge that there is a very large difference between looking back at your childhood through the lens of industrialization as opposed to yuppification, but I still feel as though I’ve lost something. I view my childhood as something that is over, and therefore in some ways separate from my continuing relationships. I isolate people and places in memory, and in a way, put them in storage: the role they played in my childhood, and who they were then, remains static in the place where I keep my memories. In that space, my oldest sister, who now keeps her hair buzz-cut short, will always have blonde hair down to the middle of her back and wear her letterman’s jacket. My middle sister will always wear dark lipstick and oversized sweaters. My parents are perpetually forty, a time anomaly with which my mother takes no issue.

If one can extrapolate such a verb, I have in essence snow-globed my past—I’ve wrapped glass around the time between my first memories and roughly my twelfth birthday, and every now and then I look into the strange little world and see things that I miss, things that I wonder about. My relationship to my own history is a strange and complex beast, often taking on different incarnations. We necessarily live in our own timelines and tell ourselves stories to make sense of our own history—a post-modern, personalized myth-making, if you will. My favorite history professor in college said once that every generation invents its own past, and I think she’s right, though it’s not a one way street, as her syntax might indicate. As we invent our own pasts, we simultaneously draw on them to inform who we are. This is just one of many odd, tautological cycles I can’t quite seem to shake as I think about getting older. And all of this started because I wondered about a bakery I used to know.

I tell myself a story about my childhood: a snow-globe, a Laura-Ingalls-Wilderization of my history. Taken as simply a story, not as a living part of my own timeline—though it is both—maybe that story is one of those single-purpose objects I love; an emotional cake-stand: mostly useless, but lovely to have when you need it.

When my birthday loomed, then arrived, then passed with remarkable timeliness, I felt incredibly self-conscious, as if the universe were looking at me and saying, “Well? You’re twenty-five now. What do you have to say for yourself?”

I would say that I have some pretty good stories to tell, and that I’m sure it will be a riot to look back at the snow-globe I will inevitably create sometime in the future, and marvel at my sweet and ridiculous twenties.

The Greatest Sum

Whenever I’m dealing with a particular problem, for better or worse my mind begins to catalogue experiences and memories that might help my sorting out the issue. It’s as though my brain has an automatic search function, and whether I like it or not, I get the search results with remarkable speed. Often in our lives, we base our decisions on our judgment of the situation at hand and our experience in the past. While it can be helpful to have that background—a bibliography for a decision—sometimes I wish I could solve the arithmetic of a problem without factoring in the sum of my complete experience:

It is August, and I am sitting in the passenger seat of the car belonging to the person I think of as my boyfriend. I am sixteen and have spent the entire summer with this charming boy, thinking that the high school experience I’ve been craving has finally started to happen. When I came back from my college tour, I knew instantly something was wrong, and today I ask him what will happen when we go back to our respective schools, and more specifically, will he call me his girlfriend. He gives me a look that will make me cringe even long after this painful hour is gone: the look that indicates that not only are all of my impressions mistaken, but it’s a little embarrassing that I could be that wrong at all. He says, “Well, I’ve been hanging out with an old flame lately… I never thought of you as my girlfriend.”

I am walking with my two sisters and our dogs in the park near our grandparents’ house. It is the dead of Indiana winter, and my eldest sister is livid. Earlier that year, she began referring to the man she was with as her partner, and it eventually became clear to the rest of the family that while they had committed to one another for the rest of their lives, that commitment would not come in the form of marriage. Our parents can be liberal-minded about many things, but this didn’t turn out to be one of them. JR, as I’ve called my sister since I was a child, is speaking more to the cold air and our other sister than to me, but she is relating how our mother told her that if her partner would not marry her, that might mean that he did not love her enough. Far out of my depth, I nevertheless venture the hesitant opinion that maybe it was less likely that they would break up if they were married. JR, who most resembles a bird of prey when she’s angry, turns to me and says, “Calling someone a wife doesn’t make leaving her any less of a possibility.”

I am wearing a surprisingly acceptable coral pink color and sitting in a sweltering church in Connecticut. As I listen to my middle sister read her vows, I am trying (and failing) to hold back tears that seem to come from two wells. The first is totally virtuous and kosher: happiness for my sister and her love. The second is completely shameful: somewhere between self-pity and envy, I am crying because I am not in love, and I feel an alarmingly dense hole in myself; the perfect opposite of the whole my sister is becoming with the man standing next to her.

I am sitting in my favorite margarita joint in Boston with someone about whom I am certifiably crazy; he is in a chair, and I’m across the table from him on the wall bench. He seems discontent with something, and eventually says, “Hold on. I want to move.” For a minute I’m confused, because the only thing my brain can piece together is that he wants to trade seats with me, which I find odd. But he gets up and comes over to sit down next to me, draping his arm behind my shoulders. “That’s better,” he says with satisfaction, and I am completely dumbfounded, both with joy and my brain’s inability to reconcile this guy with anything I thought I had figured out so far.

A Sesame Street tune from two decades ago sings in my head: one of these things is not like the other… one of these things just doesn’t belong. When the larger portion of your romantic experience takes the shape of disappointment, it can be difficult to fit a new, obscenely happy shape in with the rest of the puzzle. Part of me expects this round peg to eventually whittle itself down to fit itself into the square hole of my expectation, but I also have a strangely optimistic impulse to which I am entirely unaccustomed. And that makes me think about what exists in between the various shapes of my experience.

I wonder at what point our knowledge becomes more than the total of our experiences; when we become more than the sum of our parts; and when a belief in something we haven’t found yet fills the spaces in between. Out of what, exactly, do we make that mortar? I imagine it as a combination of hope and gravity, maybe even a biological imperative tucked somewhere near the nesting instinct and pack mentality I find within myself. My brain may not quite believe this thing is real, but the rest of me does and has been waiting for the chance to believe it for a long time.

I think somewhere along the way, my search engine memory also took it upon itself to deduce patterns. I have come to expect a certain trend, and this recent outlier has my brain stumped and suspicious. It would be easy, cowardly, to believe in the trend rather than in this new love, but I’ve come to understand that is the point at which I let the past beat the future before it’s even had a chance. So here are the things that are true:

I am more than the sum of my disappointments. I have never been good at math, so there is no reason to apply any of that reasoning to my emotional life now: trends, outliers, or whathaveyou. And more than this, perhaps most surprisingly of all, I am madly in love.

The One Year Mark

And so it was on the twenty-seventh of August that I squeaked in under my own deadline and published my twenty-fourth original work, just a week shy of my one year mark.

My therapist, whom I adore in all of the healthy ways, says often, when I’m questioning why it is that I form the things in my brain the way that I do, “Well, you’re a writer.” I think she frames “writer” as less of an occupation and more of a personal attribute—like being stubborn, or putting my right forefinger on my nose when I’m thinking hard. I suppose it doesn’t matter overmuch whether it’s inherent or learned; the important part is that it simply is, and it is a very large part of me.

One of the things I didn’t anticipate in this undertaking was how through the process of writing, I would be able to articulate things I didn’t know were there. It was as though my writing was two steps ahead of my brain, and when something illuminating would come out, I would stop and only be able to say in shocked tones, “Oh.” Also surprising was how this blog snuck into my everyday speech: talking with a friend, I will now occasionally pause and note, “Hmm… there’s a blog in there.” My friends have taken the addition of this particular idiosyncrasy with great grace and generosity—namely, none of them have rolled their eyes or told me to stop being self-referential. I thank you for this.

It never ceases to amaze me how much can change in a year; true to form, I want to frame this phenomenon as plotlines surfacing, disappearing, and making grand entrances. I am not entirely sure where I’ll go with this effort—whether the year of writing has worn me out or revved me up, I can’t quite tell. But I’m glad I did it: wringing confessions and enlightenment out of myself a couple of times a month made me think in different ways about how I form my world and how it forms me.

I’ll tell you this much: Carrie Bradshaw I ain’t. But I’m grateful to my alter ego, Dylan Fitzgerald, for allowing me some camouflage, without which I might not have had the courage to do this.

My name is not Dylan Fitzgerald, but this is still my Middleground.

With love, and thanks,
Cait