by Lisa McKay
Dishonorable and ashamed.
And twelve years later, finding myself undeniably interested in both Jason and Ryan, I wasn’t at all happy to feel the first faint stirrings of these same uncomfortable feelings.
I tried to tell myself that since we hadn’t met face-to-face I wasn’t really dating Jason yet. Not really. So he didn’t yet need to know that I was regularly sending emails north, to a man I found curiously intriguing, right? After all, I had lots of friends I regularly emailed.
And Ryan – I was barely getting to know the guy. I didn’t owe him full disclosure on other people I talked to, did I?
*
It was Jason I fretted over most.
On the one hand, telling myself that it would be better to wait until after we met before we decided whether to date more seriously was eminently sensible. The only problem with this was that I had not thus far been eminently sensible in how I set about getting to know Jason across the miles.
For the first six weeks that Jason and I were talking, my entire emotional world revolved around our phone calls. Emboldened by the safety of distance and titillated by the mystery that distance enforced, we took the initial spark we had felt and fanned it energetically.
I skated through work, storing up tidbits to share in long, lazy conversations with Jason that night. Nothing I said and no detail he offered me seemed too boring or trivial for us to discuss or laugh over. For the first time in seven long years, I tasted that sweet narcotic of belonging that seems to come only with knowing that you are being treasured and adored by someone else.
We had no idea how the other person moved, smelled, acted around others, or dealt with frustration. We had no sense of what it would be like to look into each other’s eyes. But the immediate warmth of our emotional connection over the phone and an untarnished sense of possibility proved giddily intoxicating. With big decisions as far away as across the country and as accessible as the voice in our ear, we mentioned marriage as a possibility before we ever met.
More than once.
I so enjoyed talking to Jason during those early days that it never even occurred to me that it would perhaps be wiser not to overdose so eagerly on the emotional intensity we were manufacturing, or to settle too quickly into a pattern of talking every day, or to get into the habit of returning every one of his text messages and calls as soon as humanly possible.
I didn’t realize that he would become accustomed to, even dependent on, knowing where I was and what I was doing all the time.
I didn’t realize that a couple of months in, when I felt the first stirrings of needing more space and the first flickering of resentment at the enormous amount of time and energy I was devoting to these daily telethons, that I would also find myself feeling totally unable to risk the frustration and disappointment that I feared would come from him if I sought to reshape these communication patterns.
*
In a plot twist that any good romance novelist would fear being labeled as the banal use of coincidence to conveniently foment drama, Ryan and Jason both wanted to come visit me for the first time on the same weekend.
“Who are you, Lisa McKay?” Ryan wrote to me. “Are you in the habit of writing to strange boys you’ve never met and inviting them to visit you? If not, why are you inviting me? Because I will come, for some reason. I like your spirit. I like the way you tell your secret doubts and smile. I like that all your words have winks hidden in them. But let’s be honest, it would be a bit of a mystery grab-bag of a visit. What if you find me hopelessly boring in person? What if your boyfriend/husband (?) takes exception to you sitting and talking for hours with some boy from the northland?”
“As far as finding you hopelessly boring in person, highly doubtful,” I wrote back. “More prosaic than your prose probably. People usually are, in person. If we run into trouble and find ourselves staring at each other over a Starbucks cup looking trapped and thinking, ‘Crap! It’s only been 20 minutes and we’re stuck in this crazy stranger-drama all weekend,’ we can always take laptops to the pub and sit and email each other. Then we’d be on firm ground.”
And, no, I continued in that email, I wasn’t in the habit of inviting strange men to visit me, but while we were on the topic he should know that it just so happened that I’d branched out twice in the last couple of months. Would the weekend after Labor Day, when this other guy named Jason was already scheduled to visit me for the first time, suit Ryan just as well?
“I must say I admire your fearlessness,” Ryan wrote, “lining up two, um, ‘visitors,’ one after the other. That, if nothing else, makes you either fascinating or mad, both of which are worth coming to see. I’ll be there.”
Except … a couple of weeks and more than a few emails later, Ryan had either had second thoughts about that or fate intervened.
His brother needed help moving, Ryan announced unexpectedly via email one day. He had to drive their car across Canada. Could he take a raincheck on coming to Los Angeles?
I was initially gutted, and then relieved, when I got this letter canceling Ryan’s visit.
It was all for the best, I told myself. For whenever I wasn’t thinking about Ryan, I was happily caught up in the dizzying intensity of my burgeoning whirlwind relationship with Jason, and whatever true fearlessness I possessed had not extended to full disclosure with Jason as I had risked with Ryan.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell Jason. It was just that I was pretty sure that something like “Hey, Jason, I really think I might love you, or that I might come to love you, but there’s this other guy I’ve never met, or even talked to, and there’s a very small chance that he could just be my soul mate. Can I get back to you on us in two weeks?” would not go down well.
I simply figured that with Ryan having taken himself out of the picture, surely things would get less complicated with Jason.
*
For a while – leading up to my first visit with Jason, through the second, and heading towards the third – things did get less complicated.
Marginally.
But there was still plenty of complexity to my feelings as I waited at LAX to pick him up for the first time. Sick of pacing, too scared to sit alone with my own thoughts, I called Michelle on my cell phone as I waited.
“Am I crazy?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she answered. “But it’s a little late to do anything about that now.”
I groaned.
“I think I’m going to throw up. Do you think it’s too late to leave and just disappear?” I asked.
“Do you really want to do that?” Michelle asked.
“No,” I finally answered, slowly. “It’s just that … I think we may have moved a bit fast.”
“How?” Michelle asked. “You haven’t even met yet.”
“Yes, well … You know how sometimes you say or write things to people when they’re not there and you forget that you’ll probably actually see them someday?”
“Uh,” said Michelle, who the year before had married the guy she’d been dating since she was fifteen, “not exactly.”
*
I rang Michelle again three days later while I was driving home from dropping Jason off at the airport. The weekend had been full of sweet moments and the novel heat of proximity. When I kissed him goodbye at LAX, I promised I’d see him again the following month in Colorado as planned. But I was, if anything, only more confused.
“I had fun, but I really don’t know if I can see us together long term,” I said.
“Do you think you can figure that out in a single weekend?” Michelle asked.
“No,” I finally answered. “That’s what dating is, right? You spend time with different people until you get sure one way or another.”
“Apparently,” Michelle said.
There was a brief silence.
I was wondering whether I was even capable of getting sure enough to make that sort of commitment. I wondered whether Michelle was thinking she’d committed too quickly, to
o young.
“Do you think we might have figured this out earlier if we’d been normal teenagers?” I asked.
“You had boyfriends as a teenager,” Michelle said.
“Yeah,” I said, “and as far as I know I’m still dating most of them. After Dion I never actually broke up with anyone – I just left the country.”
“What about Pete?” Michelle said, naming the last guy I’d dated seriously – Pete and I had made it a whole six whole months when I was a 21-year-old university student.
“Awwww, Pete!” I said, smiling at all the good memories. “He was awesome. Technically, though, he broke up with me … after I kept talking about how I was planning on leaving the country.”
“It is sometimes beyond me,” Michelle said, “how you can be a respected expert in stress management.
“That’s work,” I said. “I’m good at work. This is love.”
“I think I should go to Colorado,” I said. “Maybe things will become clearer if I see him on his home turf.”
“Go to Colorado,” Michelle said. “But don’t do anything too dumb.”
*
I came back from Colorado excited and exhausted.
“I had a really good time!” I said to Michelle the night I got back.
“Where are you?” Michelle asked.
“LAX.”
“That’s what it sounds like. But didn’t you get back this morning?”
“Yeah, I got up at 3 a.m., flew back to L.A. this morning, went home, repacked, and now I’m back. I’m going to South Africa tonight.”
“I can’t keep up with you,” Michelle said. “So what was the weekend like?”
It was really good, I told her. It was fun. His family all seemed lovely. His nephew was adorable. His mother was a great cook. It snowed.
“I haven’t heard you say a whole lot about Jason,” Michelle said after half an hour. “What are the three things you like most about him?”
“He is very attentive,” I said, starting to think out loud. “And he’s really good at affirming me.”
“What are things that will be there if the attentiveness and affirmation fades?” Michelle asked.
There was a long pause.
“I need time to think about that one, and I’ve got to go. They’re calling boarding. Hey, remember,” I said, starting a preflight dialogue we had often, “just in case the plane crashes …”
“I know,” Michelle said, finishing the sentence, “you love me.”
*
There were moments when I’d see Jason’s name on my phone and simply stare at it until it stopped ringing – feeling panicked and trapped, wondering how we’d careened so far down this path of emotional and physical intimacy so rapidly.
There were moments when I buried my face in a bouquet of red roses he’d had delivered to my office, or felt the warm weight of his arms around me during those charged weekend visits, and smiled at the thought of marrying him.
And in the midst of all this confusing and exhilarating sweetness, like a mosquito in my mind, there was still Ryan.
Ryan with whom I was still exchanging sporadic emails. Ryan who represented his own brand of mystery and passion to me. Ryan who, to use his own analogy, seemed to promise a raw, deep adventure to Jason’s gentle home.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to figure out whether Jason and I really had something unless I threw myself completely into our relationship. But I feared that I might never be able to throw myself fully into our relationship and really commit unless I also met someone like Ryan, someone who stood a chance of putting my ideals about a true soul mate to the test.
A soul mate, I believed, would meet me on a visceral, darker level. He would have an instinctive understanding, borne out of experience, of the elements that made up my own particular potpourri of angst – constant change, the guilt of privilege, too much witnessed suffering, a battle between hope and cynicism, and a search for God that wouldn’t let you rest even during times when you weren’t at all sure you believed in God.
There would be the companionship of keenly felt questions.
Similarly to God, I wasn’t at all sure that soul mates actually existed. But, also similarly, I rather hoped they did.
What if this comfortable sweetness I felt with Jason now would someday not be enough? What if my soul mate belonged down the other end of the spectrum, where I had placed Ryan?
There were choices to be made, choices that felt impossible to make in isolation.
“I need to meet both of them,” I told Michelle. “If Ryan won’t come here, I’m going to Canada.”
Michelle had no idea what to say to that one.
My mother, who had also suffered through my narration of this docudrama for months, had no such inhibitions.
“Just go already,” she said. “It’s about time you got yourself sorted out.”
*
It had been six months since I was captured so completely by two pages about a stranger’s birthday party. Four months since Ryan and I had first exchanged letters. At least three months since I realized that if I didn’t meet Ryan I would always wonder. And wondering was the last thing I wanted. I felt torn between what Jason was offering me – marriage, the beauty and safety of a warm and constant affection – and the allure of the challenge and adventure I associated with Ryan.
I had spent more emotional energy on my image of Ryan than had been aroused by some of the people I’d actually dated.
Perhaps if I could put a face to that mystery, I thought, it would throw my feelings for Jason into sharp relief and the way forward would look clearer.
This reasoning felt faulty even as I was formulating it, but I couldn’t figure out exactly why. After all, choice is all about contrast, isn’t it? How could I figure out if I loved Jason the way he so wanted me to love him, in a vacuum?
But how could I tell Jason now, several months into what was undeniably a serious relationship, that I needed to cross an international border to go on a blind date with a stranger – a stranger, incidentally, who wouldn’t exactly know he was on a blind date and probably had no idea of the depth of my interest?
I couldn’t.
I did and said a lot of things during these months that I am not proud of, but this one is near the top of the list. Not even the knowledge that I agonized over this choice and that it wasn’t motivated by malice redeems it much. It simply underscores the fact that the way I decided to deal with this dilemma was the culmination of a series of preceding, smaller decisions made in weakness.
It was cowardly, after our early and blithe joking about marriage, not to be transparent with Jason when I started to have more serious doubts about whether we would have a future together. Or, more to the point since Jason had made his intentions perfectly clear, whether we should have a future together.
It was cowardly, when I began to feel pressured in a self-created routine of nightly phone calls not to simply say something like, “Jason, I love talking to you, but I think we’ve moved a bit fast to build on what is so far a shaky foundation. Could we perhaps slow it down a bit? Maybe we should start by talking every two or three days?”
It was cowardly, instead, to start to let his calls go to voice mail or his text messages stay unanswered. (For a little while, anyway. Because the internal tension engendered by not answering the phone was never eased until I had returned the call or text and subtly re-ascertained two basic facts: that he still loved me and that he wasn’t angry.)
It takes two to tango, and Jason did his bit to contribute to the unhealthy communication dynamics we established. But my part was being so driven by a need to be loved by him – even when I was not at all sure that I loved him as he wanted – that I avoided conflict with him at any cost.
Vancouver, Canada
I told everyone involved (Jason and Ryan included) that I was going to Vancouver for work, braved LAX on a sunny Friday morning, and landed in the city of my birth on a cold, rainy afternoon. As I walked into the arriva
ls area I was suddenly desperately nervous and acutely aware that although I felt I knew Ryan’s mind fairly well, I had no idea which body housed that mind. I didn’t even know the color of his hair or how tall he was.
He knew what I looked like. Early on I’d decided that if there was zero chemistry on either side it would be better if we learned that sooner rather than later, but I’d never been able to figure out a way to subtly ask him to send me a photo. So I’d done the next best thing. I’d mass emailed my entire mailing list with several photographs of me from the past year (me in Kenya, me in San Francisco, me smiling prettily) with the sole aim of letting him check me out. He had not reciprocated, but he hadn’t stopped emailing me either, which I figured meant he hadn’t ruled me out.
Either that or he was markedly less calculating than I suspected he was capable of being and had no idea at all what I was up to.
“I’ll find you,” he had cockily written the day before our rendezvous when I pointed out that I’d never seen a photo of him and would have no way of locating him in the arrivals lounge.
I had to wait twelve long minutes before he approached from behind. He turned out to be tall, with curly blond hair and thoughtful blue eyes, and much more diffident than the Ryan of the written word.
We hugged a hello and almost instantly I felt a weight lift. No Technicolor fireworks had gone off – the sort that had always let me know before that I was caught hook, line, and sinker until the story played itself out – and I thought of Jason, smiled, and was relieved. The disappointment didn’t come until later. I went to bed that night tired and cleanly empty, feeling freer.
I never did come right out and try to explain to Ryan why I was really up in Vancouver. I couldn’t articulate it in any way that made it sound remotely sensible, even to myself. So Ryan and I wandered a wet city for the weekend and talked instead of humanitarian work, restlessness, rootlessness, and writing.
We talked of adventure and of home.
And I watched him watching me.
For the first time, I really understood what can make people nervous when they are faced with a psychologist. There are at least ten levels to Ryan and I saw only five of them, at most, that weekend. He was much more inscrutable and guarded in person than he was on paper. I knew that there were plenty of things he was thinking through that I couldn’t even guess at, but one thing he couldn’t corral completely were his eyes. He watched me, a small smile on his lips, as if he were both baffled and amused by what he saw.