He eventually resurfaced. He’d been in Texas on assignment and wanted to know when we could hang out at my apartment and watch Breaking Bad together. I was thrilled, of course, and even more thrilled when he came over with a T-shirt he had brought me from his trip. So he had been thinking about me. But I was so nervous around him, and so convinced that if I said one wrong thing that he would just disappear forever, that I overcompensated by acting like I was totally fine with his schedule and his lack of communication and that my life was otherwise so thrilling that it really didn’t bother me at all; I mean, for all he knew, maybe I wasn’t even that attracted to him—right?
I had somehow internalized a combination of Carrie Bradshaw’s toxic relationships; the Sex and the City mantra, later spun out into a book and a movie, of “he’s just not that into you”; and the hipster version of the ideal woman, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who didn’t even have to think about being cool, she just was, in part because she was so fucked-up that she needed men to “save” her. But I could out-cool anyone, I decided. So I waited to email or text him back, I didn’t ask him to hang out, I never articulated to him directly how I felt. I had carefully cultivated a calm exterior, but inside, I was dying. Every time I saw his name pop up in my inbox it was like I had simultaneously hit a slot machine jackpot and I had also lost my last dollar at a slot machine. What if I opened it and he said he didn’t want to see me anymore? But his emails were always long and detailed and just enough to reassure me that, yes, he was still interested in seeing me for no-strings-attached sex for the two days he was in town every month! And because, deep down, I still didn’t think I deserved to be with him, I told myself that this was enough.
Whereas my situation with Andrew had been, embarrassingly, completely public knowledge at the magazine, my fauxlationship with Luke—as far as I knew—was not. And I intended to keep it that way—I didn’t want to be known as the person who had hooked up with not just one, but two male staffers at the magazine in less than a year. The secrecy of the relationship made it exciting, but it also made it seem less real. When we were together, I could convince myself that everything about my relationship with him was great—I loved being with him, when I was with him. But as soon as he left, it was like he had never been there.
That said, when I really stopped to think about it, I honestly wasn’t sure how I felt about him, beyond what still felt like a total infatuation. I didn’t know him—not really. We’d been seeing each other for a couple of months but had only hung out a handful of times. I knew an idea of him that I had built up that was based partly on reality, but also on his emails, and also on what my fantasy of him looked like. I was able to project anything I wanted to onto him because he was so unavailable.
This continued for months. He would leave town, go silent on email, and then resurface once he was back in town and want to hang out. When we were actually together, it was great. He felt like my boyfriend. He came to my annual Hanukkah party, helped me clean up afterward, and then we had sex and snuggled all night. But trying to make concrete plans with him drove me crazy. I asked what he was doing for New Year’s, and he said he wasn’t sure, and I asked if he wanted to hang out; a friend, Nora, was having a low-key party. “Sure!” he wrote.
“Great!” I responded. “Maybe we can meet up before and grab dinner or something?”
And then he just…didn’t respond. I was on a yoga retreat in Upstate New York with my friend Tess in the days leading up to New Year’s, where we were supposed to be relaxing and reflecting on the year that was ending and setting intentions for the new year, and also eating a lot of very bland vegan food. In between yoga classes and meditation sessions I kept checking my phone—Had he texted? Emailed? He had not. (So much for practicing mindfulness.)
“I guess he’s flaking on me,” I said to Tess the night before we were going home.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Why don’t you and I hang out, we can get dinner before Nora’s party, and then if he surfaces he can come along?”
“That sounds great,” I said, trying not to cry—both at his flakiness, and her kindness and willingness to be a third wheel.
The next morning, he texted. “Hey! Yes, sounds great,” he wrote, as though I hadn’t been waiting for his response for the last three days. He came out to dinner with Tess and me, then we met up with some other friends, one of whom had a car, so we drove to Nora’s party in Prospect Heights. It felt like we were together. But it also felt fleeting, like the next morning he would go home and then I might not hear from him for weeks—which was, in fact, what happened.
He was infuriatingly aloof, and yet when he’d beckon, I’d always answer. Because I liked him, and because there was still a part of me that couldn’t quite believe that I was with this guy. I was convinced he was completely out of my league, looks-wise, and I’d never felt that way before about anyone I dated. Maybe it was good for me, I thought, to be seeing someone who was incredibly attractive? But instead of making me feel better about myself, it made me feel worse.
CHAPTER TEN
It never occurred to me to invite Luke to my sister’s wedding. Even if we’d been seeing each other on a normal relationship cadence, we’d only been hanging out for three months or so—not long enough where I was ready to introduce him to my family, let alone ask him to be my date to a family wedding. But as I took the train to D.C. that Friday morning in November 2011, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that I was going to my little sister’s wedding alone. I was thirty-four, she was twenty-seven—shouldn’t it have been the other way around?
I was excited for Karen, and excited to spend the weekend celebrating, but I also felt melancholy. When was it going to happen for me? Then I immediately felt guilty for feeling melancholy. This weekend shouldn’t be about me, but it was hard not to feel constantly reminded that I was single and “old.” At Karen’s bachelorette party in August, I spent the weekend with her best friends from high school and college and sleepaway camp, all of whom were her age and half of whom were also either already married or engaged, and sporting large, shiny diamonds. They had law degrees and MBAs and beautifully blown-out hair. They are on a different path, I had to remind myself, but why wasn’t I content to take that path, too? We played games, like one where Karen had to answer questions about her fiancé, Steve; someone had hired a stripper, who showed up in a cop’s uniform. I’d never been to a bachelorette party before—my friends who were married either hadn’t had them, or I wasn’t close enough to them to have been invited.
At my sister’s bridal shower, which I cohosted with my brother’s fiancée (my brother and his fiancée had gotten engaged over the summer, so now I would definitely be the last of my siblings to get married, if I ever did) at her apartment on the Upper East Side, Karen’s best friend sat next to her as she opened her presents, weaving the ribbons from the gift wrap into a hat. Where had she learned about this ribbon hat making? I wondered. I had never been to a bridal shower and I marveled at yet another “womanly” ritual that I had somehow completely missed. As we were about halfway through the gift opening, my mother whispered, “Where’s your gift?”
“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m hosting the party. I didn’t get her a gift.”
My mother looked horrified. “You’re still supposed to get a gift!” she said. “I can’t believe you didn’t get a gift.”
“How was I supposed to know?” I said. I legitimately meant it. Suddenly, I was back at sleepaway camp, watching as Rachel applied lip gloss in the mirror so she could go meet her boyfriend in the soccer field, as Lisa shaved her legs in the middle of the girls’ area the summer we were twelve, as the other girls wrote their letters home in bubble letters, putting hearts where the dot in the i went. Once again, it was as if when every other girl was born, a nurse had handed their parents a handbook with instructions on how to be a girl, but the day I was born, the copy machine at the hospital was brok
en and the nurse had just looked at me and told my parents, Well, she’ll just have to figure it out. I’m sure she’ll be fine.
And it was mostly fine, and I had figured out a lot of things for myself, and in fact, I had made the conscious choice to not participate in a lot of the things in the handbook, but every so often, I was reminded that this whole world of social codes and cues and expectations existed and I had just somehow…missed it? My sister hadn’t missed it; my mom didn’t seem to have missed it. But here I was, getting shamed for not bringing a gift to a bridal shower and watching as my sister put a hat made of ribbons on her head as everyone clapped. My sister and I were close—we texted and chatted on Gchat every day—but I’d never felt more like the moody Daria to her sunny, carefree Quinn.
In D.C., the day after I arrived, the other bridesmaids and I gathered in Karen’s hotel suite to get ready. She had gotten all of us satin robes with our initials on them as bridesmaids’ gifts. I also had never been a bridesmaid, and now, in my sister’s hotel suite, as a hairstylist curled my hair and a makeup artist applied false lashes to my eyes, I made a mental note: If I ever got married, I should get my bridesmaids gifts.
All the bridesmaids had dresses in the same shade of purple silk. Most of my sister’s friends were tiny; they looked like delicate violets, and I looked like Barney, towering over them in my uncomfortable heels. At the reception, I mostly stuck with my brother and his fiancée. My sister was drunk and happy, and I was happy for her. But for me, getting married had never seemed so far out of reach.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A month later, a writer I knew mostly from the internet who’d worked at a bunch of the same places as me, but at different times, DMed me on Twitter. “Hey—want to get a cup of coffee sometime soon? I’m hiring cat picture aggregators and think you’re a natural.” It was Ben Smith, who had just been hired to take over editorial operations at BuzzFeed and start producing news. We had coffee, then a few days later met for beers in my neighborhood, and he told me about his vision for BuzzFeed, which was then known mostly as an aggregator and creator of viral internet content. Did I want to be a part of it, maybe overseeing entertainment, culture, and lifestyle?
I’d been at Rolling Stone for less than a year and a half, but even setting aside the Andrew debacle, it had become increasingly clear that it wasn’t a good fit. I just could not get excited about another Black Keys magazine cover, and editing daily music news stories was starting to feel like an unrewarding grind. My boss, Alec, had finally gotten fired over the summer, but the replacement they’d brought in was a guy from AOL with a mandate for one thing and one thing only: increase website traffic. The way to do this, he decided, was to just publish a lot. The newsworthiness and quality didn’t necessarily matter; what mattered was that there were new items up on the site all the time. The problem was that there often just wasn’t enough interesting music news in a day, so the definition of what qualified as “news” got stretched and stretched, with stories like “Whitney Houston Nearly Kicked Off Flight” and “Nickelback Respond to Haters on Twitter.”
The difference between the magazine and the website had never felt starker. Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone founder who remained in charge (even if he wasn’t in the office five months out of the year, jetting off to one of his several other homes around the world), still saw the magazine as his crown jewel. It felt like the website was almost dirty to him, just a way to make money and compete with the rest of the content mills.
I was hardly a content snob—we’d had post quotas at Gawker, and I was just as obsessed with web traffic as anyone else. But unlike anyone I’d ever worked for, my new boss seemed uniquely uninterested in what we were publishing. It truly did not seem to matter to him, as long as we were getting more traffic. There was something almost nihilistic about his disinterest. The people I used to work for at least pretended to care. Rolling Stone crystallized for me the idea that at the bare minimum, I needed to feel like my work mattered to someone. Otherwise, what was the point? I had taken the job because I thought it would give me more pride in my work than freelancing and working part-time at the Daily News, but it hadn’t.
So Ben’s offer intrigued me. I’d be able to hire people. I could publish stories that I thought mattered. I’d have influence. People would, theoretically, listen to me. Maybe this would be the job that finally made me feel like I had a purpose. After a couple more meetings, BuzzFeed offered me a job.
On my last day at Rolling Stone, an email popped up from Andrew: “Good luck to you; I’m kind of jealous. Maybe we can catch up someday.” As far as I knew, he and Lauren still lived together—and yet, he was still fishing to see if he could get any reaction from me. I’m done feeding your ego, I thought and didn’t respond. Was this what they would call…growth?
* * *
—
A COUPLE OF WEEKS after I got the BuzzFeed job offer, Luke and I got dinner in the West Village. I was excited to see him, but nervous—a couple of days earlier, I’d finally sent him an email that told him, more directly than I ever had before, that I found his hot- and coldness hard to deal with, and it made me question where things stood with him. He had responded only to the part of the email about making plans, which made me apprehensive—and a sign of my insecurity over the relationship that I didn’t feel comfortable pushing him on it. But that night, everything seemed fine. After dinner, we headed to the IFC Center movie theater on Sixth Avenue to see Pina, the Wim Wenders documentary about the choreographer Pina Bausch. The movie was excellent, but I was distracted, worrying about where things stood between us. Then we headed back to my apartment, and I brought up the email, and once I started talking I couldn’t stop. It was hard for me, I said, how he just disappeared for days and sometimes weeks at a time. Even if he was out of town, I needed some communication. And what was our whole thing, anyway? We had never had the “define the relationship” talk; I had once asked him if he was sleeping with other people, and he had said no, but I wasn’t sure if I totally believed him.
“We are going on occasional dates and having no-strings-attached sex when it is convenient for me—were you under the impression that this was anything else?” he said. Okay, fine, he didn’t say this, but I kind of wish he had, because at least he would have been honest. But the thing I would later realize about guys like Luke is they also have a pathological aversion to anyone hating them. Luke’s actual job was to pretend he liked the people he was interviewing, so that these people would trust him, like him, and then, in the cloud of that warmth and trust, say things they’d later end up regretting. So assuaging the truth was second nature to Luke. You’d never catch him in an actual lie, but you could also never be sure that what he was telling you was the whole truth. So what he actually said was “I feel terrible, I just don’t think I can be that person. I wish you had said something earlier.” He paused. “You know, I felt like you were never really ‘in it.’ Like, I didn’t really know what was going on between us.”
Oh. So it was my fault. I started to cry. The conversation confirmed everything I had been afraid of: I had been so worried about scaring him off by telling him how I really felt, that my playing it cool had backfired and now he just saw me as a casual hookup, nothing more. And maybe it had been my fault. Maybe if I hadn’t been so determined to be the person I thought he wanted me to be, I could have just been myself—and maybe he would have liked that person even more than the person I was trying, and failing, to be.
“Will you…stay here tonight?” I asked. I felt humiliated, but I also didn’t want to be alone. “No sex. We can just sleep.”
He left in the morning. I still couldn’t believe what had happened. That couldn’t be it, right? It was over, just like that? How was it possible that at this time just yesterday I had been looking forward to seeing him, excited about talking about my new job with him, hopeful that we would have a conversation about my email that concluded with him declaring hi
s love for me. Obviously that had been a fantasy, and I felt stupid for thinking it could have been any other way.
I’d had abrupt breakups before—the optician I’d dated in Philly in my mid-twenties had broken up with me after watching the French New Wave movie Breathless on my couch. The movie ended, he announced that Breathless made him realize we needed to break up, and he got up and left. Another time, my stoner art-student boyfriend stayed at my apartment when I left to walk the dog after a fight, and when I came back he was gone, with just a note on my computer that he had left. In retrospect, though, I’d been able to see both those breakups coming, and I ultimately wasn’t devastated by them. This one felt both inevitable and shocking.
I couldn’t think about much of anything else for weeks. I went to yoga and cried during Savasana, the corpse pose at the end of class. I constantly replayed in my head all the interactions we’d had and second-guessed every single thing I’d ever said to him. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to email or text him constantly, but over the next few weeks, I did send him a couple of innocuous, friendly emails, just because I felt like I needed to see his name in my inbox. I missed him so much—the way I’d missed him when he was away was nothing compared to how much I missed him now that I knew even our tenuous, not-really-a-thing thing was really and truly over. And now he responded to my emails immediately—which only made me feel worse, because it was a reminder of how long he’d taken to respond when we were ostensibly “dating.” Maybe, I realized miserably, he hadn’t taken so long to respond not because he was trying to play hard to get, but because he was trying to craft a perfect email to me, because he cared what I thought of him. Now that we were broken up, he didn’t. My only tiny consolation was that I was in no danger of running into him at work—if I was on a motorcycle in Mongolia, maybe. But definitely not at work.
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