30 Before 30

by Marina Shifrin

  I guess that’s what happens when you fall in love—you learn how to fight properly. Which is a good thing, because on the particular night I’m about to talk about, we got in big, fat, stupid fight. Most of our fights are usually pretty dumb and, well, this one started because of our dinner with a newlywed couple, Lucas and Soo.

  We were visiting Lucas, Sam’s lawyer friend from college, and his beautiful new lawyer wife, Soo, in their beautiful new apartment, filled with beautiful new appliances that had been gifted to them at their beautiful wedding. They had invited us over to use their laundry machine, because our apartment doesn’t have one. Although they are our age, Soo and Lucas have their lives together in a way that Sam and I don’t. They both hold high-paying jobs. They have a patio, and more than one bottle of wine. Not to mention an in-unit laundry machine—truly the greatest sign of economic status in a city.

  Sam packed all of our filthy clothes into a suitcase (bought for potential backpacking trips) and we burst out of our apartment just in time to see the bus pulling away from its stop. I was already in a bad mood because social events make me surly, and missing the bus didn’t help.

  Sam ordered a car while we bickered over who, in the relationship, had a dilly-dallying problem. It’s very hard to have a decent fight when yelling the word “dilly-dally” at your loved one over and over. When the car pulled up, we both struggled to get the suitcase into the trunk. Then we proceeded to sit silently the whole way there. (If you’re fighting in public you should break up immediately.) What a sad vacation for these two, the driver must’ve thought.

  When we got to Lucas and Soo’s we turned to each other and kissed. We knew better than to bring our bad energy into the apartment of newlyweds; bickering, like pet names, is best left at home. “Let’s keep it together,” I told Sam as he dragged forty pounds of our literal dirty laundry to a dinner party.

  As at most adult dinner parties, the conversation went from “Would you taste your own breast milk and which method of ingestion would you use?” (yes, and eye-dropper) to “Farts.” I was regaling the table with a story about how all the married couples at my new job claimed to not fart around their partners. I couldn’t believe it. Might I remind you that I work with comedians, and farting is taught in Level 101 of Hilarious Comedy School. I’ve been endlessly fascinated by how relationships work, especially shiny new marriages—and luckily Soo and Lucas were game for my inappropriate questions.

  “They’re lying,” Lucas said.

  “There is something wrong with them,” Soo yelled from the kitchen. She was putting the finishing touches on a cumin-roasted veggie plate, a recipe she had gotten out of a book gifted to them at their wedding. Did I mention the wedding was beautiful?

  “It’s not healthy to hold in that many farts,” Sam told the table. “This herb salad is delicious, by the way, Soo,” he yelled.

  “We started farting around each other like two weeks in,” Lucas told us.

  “We do everything in front of each other,” Soo responded, coming in to enjoy her work.

  “Everything?” I asked her.

  “Everything.”

  I turned to Lucas, “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “Nah, we’re pretty open. I mean, it only bothers me when I’m trying to brush my teeth and she goes to take a shit, I guess,” he told me. My eyes momentarily bulged before I remembered to bring my face back to a neutral position. I looked over at Sam, who dropped his jaw and then promptly closed it. Sam and I had been happily dating for over three years at this point, but the bathroom was still a mysterious territory. It was the only room in our minuscule apartment with a door, so it always remained shut during private bathroom time.

  When we got back from Soo and Lucas’s, Sam went in the bathroom to brush his teeth. I came in, pulled down my underwear, and sat on the toilet. As a joke, obviously. I wasn’t going to do anything. But then Sam screamed “NO!” at such an incredibly high pitch that I burst into laughter and accidentally unleashed a torrent of urine so loud it sounded like I’d dumped a fish bowl into the toilet. Sam immediately stormed out and I knew I was in trouble for breaking the sanctity of the only private room in the apartment. I finished peeing and walked into our kitchen where he was pouring a glass of water.

  “I’m going to bed,” he said, before stomping up to our loft.

  I co-opted his anger into mine, as I am wont to do. “How come you get to fart in the bed and I can’t pee in front of you,” I yelled up to the loft. “It’s sexist.” He didn’t respond, which annoyed me even more.

  I’m not sure where urine and flatulence fall on the sexism scale of feminist concerns, but I was ready to make it my cause. In an act of defiance, I avoided the bed and curled up on the couch with my other boyfriend, Laptop.

  Before Sam and I got to this stage—the “fighting in a tiny apartment with no doors in LA” stage—as you’ll remember, we accidentally ended up at The Moth show together. At the end of that evening he gave me a quick kiss. That’s it. I always thought that if I had the perfect first kiss, the kind where everything slows down, lines up and falls into place, then that’s when I’d know. Most of my “first kisses” up until Sam were completely fueled by alcohol and therefore blurry in my mind. But with Sam nothing stopped. There were no violins, just a drunk guy with a tub of chicken resting on his stomach. Sam tripped, I laughed, and we said bye.

  The kiss was so sweet and polite that I didn’t even know what it meant. Did he like me? Was he just being nice? Was it on purpose? I didn’t know that he’d be the one to turn my life on its head. To tie up the loose ends, answer the questions, and fill in the blanks.

  “You’ll know when he’s the one,” my mother once told me between breakups. “When I met Papa, I just know.”

  I have a theory that a lot of young women are told these kinds of lies by their well-meaning mothers. I also got a lot of, “You’ll meet the one when you least expect it!” which just makes it sound like I’ll meet The One on my wedding day.

  I always think everyone is The One when I start dating them. Those first few months are as exciting as any relationship is going to get. Then it just gets kinda mundane, and I grow uninterested.

  Sam was a little different. We actually met for the first time when we were nineteen years old. I was in Chicago, visiting Kevin’s frat because I’d just lost my virginity and a fraternity is the perfect place to peruse as a newly initiated sexual woman. Sam happened to be one of the slew of men I met that night. I don’t even remember specifics from our first encounter. In fact, I don’t really even remember meeting him, which is a big bummer. Over the years that Sam orbited Kevin’s friend group, I ignored him as a potential hook-up because, quite frankly, he was too attractive for me. Who would’ve guessed that eight years later Sam and I would be sharing a bed, legs intertwined and hands searching for warm pockets of body.

  Living in Chicago after Taiwan, I wanted someone to keep me distracted from the fact that I had blown up my career and was living with my parents. Sam had an apartment in the city, and was still so devastatingly fetching. I had gained some confidence and lost some inhibition in the years since we’d met and decided he was a great distraction. Here is an email I wrote Amy about Sam:

  I like him, Amy. But my guard is SO HIGH. Especially after New York and Taiwan. I just have not had great experiences with men and I am a little worried I am jaded or overdoing it. I don’t expect it to go anywhere with Sam, but I want to continue seeing him while I am here.

  That’s exactly what we did: continued to see each other. We saw each other the next week and the week after. We continued seeing each other weekly until two months later when I moved to Los Angeles. Sam stayed with me the night before I moved. In the morning, I drove him to the Metro Station in Highland Park. As the train pulled up to the stop, he gave me a kiss. This time, it had more depth, more meaning. Our mouths knew each other now, and our souls were getting there too. We said our goodbyes, but when Sam got out of the car, he leaned back in as if
he had forgotten something.

  “Hey, I love you,” he told me. Then he turned around and got on the train.

  It turns out “real love” is as simple as talking to the person you love every day. Even when you’re mad, or tired, or distracted, or happy, or sad. I wrote this email to Amy about six months after Sam told me he loved me:

  Sam and I are great. I love every follicle, freckle, and part of that man’s body. I love his mind. I want to smash my face into his, until our teeth tangle up and we have to breathe each other’s air. He’s my favorite person and I’m his. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, to be someone’s favorite. He’s calm and balanced. He brings some peace to my life and I add spice to his.

  And that’s about it. I always thought the indicator of a good relationship was how little you have to say about it. That’s really when you know you’ve found The One; when your relationship becomes boring, uncomplicated. In fact, there was no revelatory moment when I knew he was The One, just little pushes toward each other until there was nowhere else to go. I used to send Amy emails filled with thousands of words, trying to dissect the men I was dating. “What does he mean, ‘I have strep throat’? Is he lying?” Or “Why did he kiss me on the forehead instead of my mouth?!” Or “Dating a man twenty years my senior isn’t weird, but I feel like it should be! Is it actually weird?” With Sam, there is never much to share other than, “We’re great!”

  Don’t get me wrong—I miss the indulgent nights when my organs were soaked in wine and I divulged the filthy details of a new love interest to a close friend. But after a while even close friends get bored with your love-drama, especially once those close friends have settled into their own secure relationships. You don’t want to be that thirtysomething showing her texts to a friend saying, “But what does it mean?” Being loved opens up space in your conversational real estate for more interesting discussions, like identity politics, misogyny in classic literature, and when Paul Rudd is finally going to age.

  It turns out the greatest love stories are often reserved for the characters who live in them. They are omitted from the page, and composed instead with knowing looks, stolen touches, and wordless exchanges. These love stories take place over decades, and follow a steady path without the conflict needed for a truly captivating tale. They’re simple and private.

  At about three a.m. on the night I decided to sleep on the couch, Sam realized I wasn’t in bed. He peeked his head over the top of the stairs. “Honey?” he said, waking me up from my fitful slumber. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  He had cooled and I had stepped back. I gathered my blanket and slowly marched upstairs to the loft. Sam was already back in the beginning stages of sleep. I got into bed, tangling my legs into his, hands searching for warm pockets of body.

  20

  MOVE BACK TO NEW YORK

  My first apartment in New York was on Ryerson Avenue in Clinton Hill. There was no internet, no air conditioning, no kitchen (except for a mini-fridge next to the bed), and a community bathroom, which I shared with my hot Brazilian neighbor, Cahue, who had loud Brazilian sex with his hot Brazilian girlfriend. I took the apartment because it was only $600 a month. I gave my landlord $1,200 (half a year’s rent in Missouri) and moved in on the same day. My first week was spent sleeping on the two towels I had stolen from my parents’ house.

  The apartment had a lot of quirks. My landlord, who was polite enough to light a horchata-scented candle before smoking weed, lived on the ground floor; my room always smelled of cinnamon, vanilla, and marijuana. Our building sat next to an abandoned lot filled with feral felines. I spent many sleepless nights listening to the unmistakable yowl of a cat in heat. It was hard to sleep in that apartment. I once woke up to the feeling of someone moving my hair out of my face in a gentle and intimate manner. I brought my hand to my cheek only to realize it was a cockroach scampering toward my mouth. Maybe for a kiss? Either way, I slept sitting up for the rest of that week.

  Another time I accidentally dropped my Chapstick on the floor and saw it roll to the other side of the room. The building’s entire foundation was distorted, making everything feel a little off; it was a funhouse reflection of an apartment—but my calves were getting so strong.

  My mind often wandered toward the people who had lived in that room before me. Did they move on to greater things? Apartments with bathrooms, maybe? Or did they get swallowed up by the city, falling through one of those cracks I kept hearing about?

  A month after I moved into that apartment, the New York summer heat found me—it rose up from the fiery pits of the subway and entered my second-floor room with such vigor that it felt as if I might melt through the carpet. It was the kind of heat that sits on your chest until you cry uncle and seek the cool refuge of air conditioning. But the thing is, my room did not have air conditioning, so I spent my summer wandering grocery store aisles instead.

  At the pinnacle of the heat I got my very first yeast infection. Everything in New York City was on fire, including my crotch. Mazel to me. I finally understood the obscenity that is being a woman.

  I spent half of my meager weekly budget to buy an oscillating fan from a furniture store on Myrtle Avenue. The man who sold me the fan asked if my husband was going to help me carry it. Instead of simply ignoring the comment, I yelled, “I’m alone!” and stormed out of the store. I carried the fan the eight blocks to my apartment. Zero help from my husband needed.

  At home, I moved the mini-fridge in front of my bed, opened the door, and stuck the fan in front, creating a makeshift air conditioner. I took off my pants, pointed the fan at my exposed crotch, and lay there. The cool air hit me at the same time as the smell of baked bread. This was no way to live.

  The next day I went back to the furniture store and bought a real air conditioner, proving to the same salesperson that I could do this, too, without a husband. My feminist anger gave me superhuman strength as I carried the fifty-pound unit out of the store. But after about four blocks my arms gave out.

  When I get frustrated, really frustrated, like “carrying a fifty-pound air conditioner home on the hottest day of the year, but you have no upper body strength and a yeast infection” frustrated, I tend to shut off. My mind goes blank and my body does what is needed to get the job done. I lugged that infuriating box of steel and plastic to the nearest bus stop, clumsily rolled it up each step of the bus—much to the chagrin of the driver—and didn’t even have time to pull out my MetroCard before we got to the Ryerson Street stop.

  It had taken me forty-five minutes to get home from what should’ve been a ten-minute walk. I briefly considered asking Cahue to come help me carry the thing up, but didn’t want a man to rub his man-strength in my face. I had been taught to be so fiercely self-reliant that, at a certain point, I got too “I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T do you know what that mean?” to ask for help.

  The worst part about carrying an air conditioner up two flights of your scalding building’s stairs is that once you make it to the top, you want nothing more than to be rewarded with the sweet, sweet relief of manufactured cold air. But instead, you have to set it up, getting increasingly hot and bothered—might I also remind you that, at the time, my nether regions felt like I’d had a one-night stand with poison ivy.

  I kicked the box into my bedroom and tore it apart, using my last remaining ounces of energy to hoist the thing onto the ledge, keeping it in place by shutting the window. I’d later learn that you’re supposed to secure air conditioning units to prevent them from murdering the person who lives below you. (My landlord is still alive.)

  The unit was crooked, but it didn’t matter—there was a new, colder machine at which I could point my itchy vagina. I have never, ever, felt as accomplished or as proud of myself as on that sweaty evening sitting in front of my newly installed masterpiece.

  That’s what I love about New York. You have to earn everything. Instead of bragging about the good things in life, people like to out-difficult each other. “Oh,
your apartment is 300 square feet? How spacious! I live in a plastic container under someone’s bed.”

  What would be known as tragedies anywhere else in the country are viewed as triumphs in New York. It’s like a big expensive obstacle course. Your calves get stronger as you scale the subway steps, your tongue gets sharper after getting groped one too many times, your skin gets thicker as flakey person after flakey person disappears from your life, your brain gets smarter as you pinpoint how you’re about to be taken advantage of. You learn the physical weight of things you buy because you have to carry them home and up the stairs. I’ll never look at watermelon the same again.

  New York is a city that keeps you on your toes. “You’re not living if you’re not struggling,” the subway hisses as it blows hot air in your face. This ideology is even baked into clichéd idioms—“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” I so desperately wanted to make it in New York because then, then, I’d get my free pass to anywhere.

  When you work so hard to earn the affection of a city, you get fooled into thinking you love it. And I really loved New York. I loved New York so much that I hated Los Angeles. I don’t know why, it just seemed like the right thing to do. “Ugh, I could never live in LA,” I said on countless dates. “I need a real city, you know?” Yeah, Marina, a real city for a real deep gal.

  That’s why I surprised everyone, including myself, when I moved to Los Angeles. It was never part of my grand, master future plan, but people with big offices and a lot of money offered me the opportunity to develop my own show, and I took it. I packed up two suitcases, kissed Sam goodbye, and flew to Los Angeles—a city I knew nothing about.