Then, during the second semester of my senior year, when I was twenty-one, I met Jake. He was a skinny, unassumingly cute guy with dark hair who wore corduroys and glasses. We were both English majors; we both listened to Belle and Sebastian; we both happened to be going to New York over spring break. We rode up together on New Jersey Transit and didn’t stop talking and made plans to hang out the next night. At Max Fish, the bar on the Lower East Side, we kissed for the first time. Was this it? I wondered. Was I finally going to have a boyfriend? When we got back to school after break, we started hanging out more, and it felt easy. He liked me, and I liked him, and that was it. After so much time being single and feeling like love would never happen for me, it felt surreal to then be completely enamored with someone and want to see them all the time, cook dinner with them, go to movies with them, sleep in and skip class with them.
Jake was also moving to New York after we graduated, to live at his aunt and uncle’s in Greenwich Village, and we fit seamlessly into each other’s lives. Instead of just me, it was now Jake and Doree. Doree and Jake. He moved out of his aunt and uncle’s apartment and into his own place in Park Slope, and I liked the weekend routines that we settled into: bagels from the place down the block, the Sunday paper, meetups with friends at the park or a bar. But then I went back to Philly for a graduate program in history, and even though I came up to New York as soon as my classes ended each week, it wasn’t the same. We were drifting apart. We broke up when I was twenty-four. And then, with exactly one real relationship under my belt, I felt like I needed to make up for lost time. I became a serial monogamist.
In the span of five years, while living in Philadelphia, I had long-term relationships with: an optician I met while I was buying glasses, a union organizer, a newspaper editor, and an art student who smoked pot every day. I was attracted to all of them, I even loved a couple of them, but it also felt like I was trying on different identities and different life paths through the guys I was dating. I didn’t see it that way at the time, and I didn’t consider my boyfriends to be anthropological studies, but the novelty of each one was invigorating; in a way, the ephemerality was the point. I didn’t know exactly who I was yet, or what I really wanted from a relationship or a partner—I only knew what they expected me to be, and it was exciting, for a time, to try to be those people.
* * *
—
I MET JON the summer after I graduated from Columbia through his older brother, who was good friends with some college friends—including, somewhat awkwardly, Jake. Jon was a tall, bespectacled man with reddish hair who, unlike anyone else I knew, worked in New York State government as the chief of staff for a state senator. In my world, this counted as exotic; it gave him a vaguely do-gooder sheen that was appealing. He knew all the acronyms of state and city agencies and what they did!
Jon and I started flirting over Myspace, because in the fall of 2006 that was still where you flirted with your crushes on social media. Facebook was still mostly for people in college—I only had an account because we had been instructed to sign up for one at Columbia, although I almost never looked at it—and I barely knew what Twitter was. So leaving puns and funny photos on someone’s Myspace “wall” was a good way to signal your interest. Finally, I texted Jon one night asking if he wanted to go to an indie rock show at Mercury Lounge. I figured I didn’t have much to lose, and if he said no or didn’t respond, I could always just plausibly say that I was asking him to go as friends. Because we were friends, right? He responded that he was out of town, but could we hang out when he got back? We could.
We quickly started the rituals of early relationship life: I met his college friends, he took me to work events, we had sex at night and in the morning. And almost from the time we started dating, Jon and I went to a lot of weddings. Like, a lot of weddings. He was three years younger than me, twenty-six to my twenty-nine when we first met, and so we were both at that age when it seems like half your disposable income is going to weddings, and wedding gifts, and bachelor parties, and he had gone to a small liberal arts college where a lot of people had started dating in college and stayed together and got married at the stroke of twenty-seven. We went to a wedding in California of a family friend of his and afterward drove up the coast in a convertible. In Big Sur, we stayed in a small cabin and hiked to a waterfall and ate pancakes in a tiny treetop restaurant; we visited Hearst Castle and gaped at the opulence. It felt like I had met someone who wasn’t just trustworthy and dependable, but someone fun and adventurous. For the first time, it really felt like my boyfriend and I were a team.
We moved in together after a year. I started at the Observer and he got a new job, working for a more prominent New York politician. “Power couple!” Alison said.
I scoffed. “Hardly.” I knew that it was uncool to say you were in a power couple, but I was secretly a little pleased that she had called us that. It was my first experience dating someone who had a job that (at least from the outside) seemed prestigious, and it felt good to tell people who Jon worked for.
But even though Jon’s job sounded prestigious, he was miserable—the stress of it had caused him to develop severe heartburn, and he had to go on a restricted diet. And then, a year later, when I lost my job at the Observer, my career wasn’t the only aspect of my life that I was starting to question. My relationship with Jon had been cruising along on autopilot for at least the last year. We had gone through all the motions of a couple who were in this for the long haul: Our parents had met, he had bonded with my dog, we started talking about buying an apartment together, we watched 30 Rock together on the couch. (I know—we were basically living a young white Brooklyn couple cliché.) I liked his friends and he liked mine. We went on vacation and out to dinner and to parties. We were a unit. We had been together long enough, and were old enough, that getting married was a logical next step.
But we weren’t engaged, and the weddings we went to together were becoming not as much fun as they used to be. I started to dread sitting next to Jon as we watched couple after couple say “I do,” as he and I avoided eye contact, with the unspoken fact of our nonengagedness hanging over our heads. I was now thirty-one. I had never lived with anyone I was in a relationship with before Jon, because I had told myself that I would only live with someone who I could see marrying. An engagement didn’t have to be an ultimatum to move in together, but I also felt like I needed to at least have that commitment to myself that this was a relationship I was taking seriously. And yet, there was no engagement, and it made me question not just Jon’s commitment to me, but mine to Jon.
At coffee with Daniel, I tried to unknot this increasingly thorny problem. “I can’t tell if I want to get engaged because I want to marry Jon, or if I just want to get married, period,” I said. Daniel had recently moved in with a new boyfriend, and I thought they would probably get married.
“Hmm,” he said. “I mean, there would be a lot worse things than getting married to Jon, right?”
“That’s not particularly enthusiastic,” I said. “Like, ‘it could be worse’ doesn’t really scream ‘till death do us part.’ ” I took a sip of coffee and contemplated this. “I don’t know, maybe you’re right. But it doesn’t seem like he wants to get married to me.”
“Well, he does,” Daniel said authoritatively. “He’s just young. Give him some time.”
But our conversations about getting engaged went in circles. “I do want to get married,” Jon told me not long after we had moved into a new rental apartment in Carroll Gardens, another Brooklyn neighborhood a couple of miles south of our old place in Fort Greene. The apartment was much bigger, probably twice the size of our old place, with very high ceilings and great closet space and a dishwasher (the New York apartment holy grail). It felt like a new start, moving into an apartment that was ours, not mine that Jon had moved into, and yet, we still had not resolved when or whether we were going to get engaged. He ha
d told me that there was a large diamond in his family that, when the time came, he would be able to cut and make into a ring for me. “But I don’t feel ready. I need to get my career to a better place. I need to make more money.” This struck me as a cop-out; Jon’s family was well-off, and he’d mentioned the trust fund he would inherit at thirty-five enough times to make me think that money would never really be an issue for him. It also raised some uncomfortable questions for me about whether we were in an equal partnership. I didn’t feel like Jon needed to make more money before we got married, but if he did, then maybe we weren’t on the same page about money—or anything else.
“When do you think you’ll feel ready?” I asked quietly. I suddenly felt like I might cry. I was fully aware that I was living out a horrible relationship cliché—the woman who’s desperate to get married, the man who is resisting but not resisting enough that he wants to break up. But even as I said it, I wondered if I really wanted to get married to Jon, or if I just didn’t want to feel like a horrible relationship cliché. I realized, with a sinking feeling, that I had started viewing our relationship transactionally: I had put in the time and the effort, and so there should be an engagement at the end of it—which of course is very different than feeling like you’re getting engaged to someone you’re deeply in love with, who’s just as excited about you as you are about them, that this is just the beginning of a long life together. I had lost track of the love and excitement; the engagement was feeling more like an end, not a beginning.
“I don’t know,” he said.
A few weeks later, I was at a friend’s birthday party at a bar in my neighborhood. Jon wasn’t with me, and I started talking with one of my former Gawker co-workers, Alex. He asked how Jon was. “He’s fine,” I said. I paused. I had had a couple of drinks already and was feeling loquacious. “I’m just at the point, you know, where I’m not sure if I should wait around for him to be ready to get married or if I should sort of cut my losses and just break up with him now, because who knows how long that will take,” I said quickly. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d normally just blurt out, but I knew Alex would be honest with me.
“How old are you?” he asked.
I had just turned thirty-two, I told him.
“Do you want kids?”
“Yeah. I mean, I think so?” I said.
“So, okay, say you and Jon break up,” he said. “Even if you started dating someone right away, it’d probably be at least, what, two years before you got engaged? And another year until you got married, and then maybe another year before you had a kid? So now you’re thirty-six.” He paused. “I feel like, unless things are really bad, that you should just stick it out with Jon.”
To see it laid out so starkly like that was sobering. Thirty-six! Even though it was only four years away, it felt so old. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought that I believed that women were washed-up, dating-wise, at thirty-five. But maybe I had in fact absorbed the messages that came from everywhere about women’s expiration dates, and I didn’t feel strong enough to confront my own internalized misogyny. Alex was right—I should stick it out with Jon. Worst case was that he’d come around in, what, a year—right? I could wait that long.
The alternative seemed grim, but I was also embarrassed that I thought the alternative was grim. I was a progressive feminist—or at least I thought I was. But then why was I so fixated on getting engaged and married and having kids? It felt like it was the logical next step, but why? Was it my parents? They had never overtly pressured me, but they made it clear that they were expecting that Jon and I would be engaged soon—but maybe that was because I had telegraphed that we would be engaged soon. Was it my “biological clock”? Maybe, although I also had faith in the medical establishment to assist in that department if necessary. Was it the couples we were friends with who had been together for around the same amount of time who had recently gotten engaged? I didn’t want to admit it, but I felt a little bit of competitiveness and jealousy. Why was it happening for them, and not for us?
Hanging over all of these questions was a big, uncomfortable one: Was there something wrong with me? Was I someone that men wanted to date but not marry, and if not, then why not? The situation with Jon surfaced all of my old insecurities; I was convinced that the problem lay with me, with some vibe I emitted, something that told guys, Mmm, she’s nothing special, maybe try the next one.
Meanwhile, Jon’s older brother Eric had a reputation as a commitment-phobic bachelor, but he had started dating someone seriously, and after less than a year, they were engaged. This threw me for a loop. Jon and I were supposed to be the couple who got engaged! Eric was supposed to be the bachelor!
One weekend, not long after Eric and his fiancée, Nicole, had gotten engaged, the four of us drove up to Eric and Jon’s parents’ house to celebrate their father’s sixtieth birthday. They lived in a quaint seaside town in southern Massachusetts, the weather was perfect, and I was going to wear a new silk Rachel Comey dress with oysters on it that I had spent way too much money on at one of those Brooklyn boutiques where you know you can’t really afford anything, but then you walk in and you get seduced by the sight of one perfect row of clogs and beautiful leather bags and simple, elegant dresses, and when I had tried on this dress, I had instantly felt cool and beautiful and next thing I knew I was taking out my credit card and it was mine.
But when I got to Jon’s parents’ house, even the dress couldn’t mask my dejection at my situation. The afternoon of the party, while everyone else in his family was downstairs, waiting for guests to arrive, I couldn’t bear to leave the bedroom we were staying in. Finally, Jon came up to see what was wrong.
I burst into tears. “I…just…can’t…handle…that…Eric…and…Nicole…are…already…engaged!” I said, hyperventilating through tears.
Jon seemed uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” he said. He paused. “Do you want to come downstairs? Everyone’s wondering where you are.”
Jon’s ambivalence hurt. It made me question just how much he loved me, and how much he felt committed. My logic went like this: If he loved me like he said he did, and he wanted to make me happy, then why did he persist in making me so miserable? To me, his excuses about why we weren’t engaged yet rang hollow. People did the things they really wanted to do. If Jon really wanted to get married to me, it wouldn’t matter if we had no money at all. Plenty of people got engaged when their careers were in flux, their financial status shaky. His refusal to get engaged felt like a daily rejection of me.
But I was also angry at myself because I wasn’t supposed to be the kind of person who would be so upset about not getting engaged that I was sobbing on a floral bedspread at my presumptive in-laws’ house. I wasn’t an engagement ring Pinterest board person! Being so upset about not being engaged challenged the self-image I had of myself as cool, sophisticated, feminist, and certainly not part of any aspect of the mainstream wedding industrial complex. What did it say about me, now, that I was?
I remembered how lonely I felt in college, when it seemed like everyone around me was partnering up, and I was the only one who didn’t have a boyfriend, or even just having sex with someone. Now, I knew, I liked being in a relationship; I liked being in love. I also had no road map for what a life without a partner really looked like. Even as women’s media preached messages of empowerment, so much of it was laser focused on finding (and keeping) a partner. I didn’t have any older single friends I could turn to for advice, or just to hear that it would be okay. My mom’s one single female friend was a TV writer about whom my mom always spoke with pity. She didn’t have to say the message that I heard loud and clear: In her youth, this friend had been too picky, too focused on her creative career, and look where that got her (besides an Emmy). In my mom’s telling, this friend had long been miserable because she was single; the fact of her singledom had overshadowed everything else she had done in her life. According to
my mother, this friend would often tell my mom how lucky she was to be married and have children. Even now, in her sixties, she was, supposedly, still trying to find a man. I didn’t want to turn into her, but I also never thought to question my mom’s perception of her friend. I was scared of interrogating a world in which an accomplished, brilliant, hilarious woman felt that her entire life had been a waste because she had never gotten married.
When we got back to Brooklyn, it became clear that my relationship with Jon was slowly dissolving, and I was doing nothing to stop it, but also nothing to accelerate its demise. I didn’t want to admit defeat. Everything with Jon culminated in a miserable Memorial Day weekend trip to Nova Scotia with friends of ours, another couple who also seemed like they hated each other.
We were barely speaking when we got back from the trip. A few days later, I met up with my friend Jenna for oysters and we discussed our respective relationships; she was also in the midst of figuring out whether she was going to break up with her long-term boyfriend. “I think I’m going to move out,” she said.
“Whoa,” I said. “So you’re gonna do it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “What about you? How are you feeling about everything?”
“Ugh,” I said. “I can, like, see it dissolving before my eyes, but I feel totally frozen about doing anything about it. And he’s so passive that he would never break up with me.”
“You should do it,” she said. “I’m going to start looking at apartments.”
Thanks for Waiting Page 4