Unwifeable(84)

WE DON’T HAVE sex until a few dates later, because I’m trying to incorporate the lessons from mistakes I’ve made in the past. When we do, there is a physical connection that feels like something swallowing me whole.

Maybe because we’re both sober. Maybe because we’re both aware of every breath and kiss and move we’re taking. There is nothing more intoxicating than total awareness of every little thing going down.

Pat is the only man I’ve ever been with who can quickly go from kinky to tender to completely psychological—without ever missing a beat. It’s like Sexual Mad Libs, and possibly constitutes the only way that monogamous sex does not get boring.

If there are any people in relationships looking to spice up their sex lives who are reading this, please, if your partner is into it, go nuts when you do the dirty talk. It is the most freeing experience in the world. It’s like Disneyland every night in the bedroom. I don’t know why it’s so freeing—but there’s this level of trust involved that is absolutely narcotic. It’s like a fucking Scientology audit.

That fun carnality is made all the more precious because he is also one of the kindest, most thoughtful men I’ve dated.

One day I mention to him how alienating it can feel when you are becoming close with someone new. I tell him how I wish he could just immediately know everything that one of my best childhood friends might know—like, say, the name of my first cat I had when I was a kid. The next day, Pat texts me.

“What was your first cat’s name?”

“Rags,” I text back, with a huge grin on my face.

We are so close, so fast. Which means we are also contending with our newfound status of “being in a relationship.” Neither of us really expected it, and sometimes our resentments bubble up out of nowhere and take on a much heavier weight.

One hot day in Bryant Park after one month of dating, he talks about the black-or-white pressures he feels bearing down on him.

“Sometimes it feels like it’s all or nothing if we fight about something,” he says. “It’s this idea that we’re together forever or nothing.”

“What are you saying?” I begin, already feeling the anxiety and the anger rising inside me, beginning to strangle any sense of reason or calm. “Because I don’t need this, you know. I’ve done just fine on my own.”

“Stop with that bullshit bravado, Mandy,” Pat says. “We’re past that.”

“It’s not bullshit,” I say, even more defensively. “I’d rather die alone than spend a minute with someone who doesn’t want to be with me. You owe me fucking nothing.”

While I am in theory sober, my actions are incredibly unsober.

I’m not going to meetings. I’m not seeing a therapist, because I’m trying to save money. And my professional life is falling apart. At xoJane, layoffs have just been announced—and I’m a casualty. I feel unmoored, and the stakes for every little decision seem insanely high.

In fact, all of our fighting stems from a conversation started about how I am up for a full-time features editor position at Mashable, which would mean editing a features section that does not generate much passion within me, but which would be the safe choice. When I prepared for the final round of interviews, I showed Pat what life might be like, with my sample story idea lists: Ten different recipes for broccoli that will blow your mind. Why this season’s caftan will change your life. Seven belly-busters that will change the way you think about cellulite.

Instead of taking that job, I decide to look for every possible angle to figure out how I can dodge the corporate route and have more freedom.

“Maybe we could move in together,” I suggested earlier before our fight began. “Then I wouldn’t have to worry about money so much, you know . . .”

I wasn’t really serious when I said it. Okay, I guess I was kind of serious. I was spitballing. Hey, at least I didn’t register him a domain name. I shouldn’t have said anything. I know that. In fact, I feel shame about having said anything, but now it’s out there, and I can’t take it back. I’m angry at myself, and I can feel myself directing the anger at him as he begins to speak.

“I care for you so much,” Pat says now. “But we haven’t built the foundation for the metaphorical house we would live in—for a relationship. I want the stakes to be lower, rather than living in a house with no ceiling or walls, just posts and beams with holes in the ground.”

Pat tells me he met his second wife a month after his divorce—and moved in with her, and stayed in that relationship for years because he did not take it slow enough. He doesn’t want the same thing to happen with me. This is too important, he says.

“You’re a camper,” he says. “You want to set up camp. I want to keep what we have intact and see where this goes.”

Now, I am in full-on autopilot mode, defensive and enraged at just the smallest whiff of rejection.

“Everything you’re talking about,” I say, “makes me feel like I’m complicit in your fucking entrapment or something.”

My words are violence. Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck you. Fuck everyone.

After having begun the best relationship with someone I’ve ever had, I now feel wildly offended at the notion he might want to go slow to preserve what we’re in the process of creating.