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.
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