Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  When we got back to my apartment, we made out on my stoop for a few minutes. Then I turned to him and said, “So I know this is a little crazy, and normally I would never ask, but for some reason it feels totally normal to ask, so, um, do you want to come to dinner with my sister and her husband tomorrow night?” Karen and Steve were flying into town the next day, and we had plans to eat at an Italian restaurant in Venice.

  He did. I went to bed that night, feeling giddy and excited, and wanting to talk to him on the phone until I fell asleep.

  * * *

  —

  A COUPLE OF days later, I flew to New York for work. Matt drove me to the airport in my car and promised to take care of it for the week—he would move it on street-cleaning days and even take it to be washed. It felt like the most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for me. Why had I come to expect that people wouldn’t do nice things for me? Had I become too cynical, too quick to assume the worst of people? I was letting him do nice things for me, and so far, it hadn’t backfired. He had the week off—the show he worked on had built-in “hiatus” weeks—and I semijokingly said that maybe he should come to New York with me. Even as I said the words, I was aware of my tone, a way of protecting myself from this grand gesture in case he said no. But I was ready to make the grand gesture.

  He didn’t seem freaked out by the suggestion, but on the plane, I wondered if I had made too much of a grand gesture. Who invites the guy they’ve been seeing for a week to come to New York with them? And what if he came, and it was a disaster? Then he’d be stuck in New York with me, and I’d have nowhere to escape.

  When I got to New York, I had dinner with some of my friends, and Daniel said that I looked happier than he’d ever seen me.

  “Well…” I said. “I met someone.”

  “Okay…” Daniel said. He’d seen my boyfriends come and go, and he also knew how dejected I’d been about my romantic prospects right before moving to L.A. “Say more.”

  “I just get a good feeling,” I said. “Is it totally cliché to say he’s not like other guys? But he’s not. I swear. He’s super into me and I really like him and, well, let me ask you—would it be insane if I got him a ticket to come to New York using my Delta frequent flier miles?”

  Daniel laughed. “I mean, yes, it would be.” He paused. “But you should definitely do it.”

  The next morning, I cashed in thousands of Delta miles. It felt a little reckless—I barely knew this guy, and now he was going to be coming to New York, on a ticket that I had bought, and staying with me while I went to work during the day—and was definitely not something I would have done even a year before. I would have been worried about what people would think of me if the trip went badly—She knew him for like a week and then invited him to New York! Can you imagine?—and also how the sting of rejection would have been heightened because I had taken this huge risk and it hadn’t paid off. But I had to learn to trust my gut again—or maybe for the first time—and my gut was telling me not just that I wasn’t going to get burned by this guy, but that he was worth it.

  I thought about how I would never have offered to fly Luke to New York—I was way too concerned with playing it cool and trying to divine what he wanted and make myself into that person. With Matt, I had immediately realized I could be myself, and let myself do what I wanted, even if that meant something that would have previously scared the shit out of me.

  I deserved someone who was excited about taking a spontaneous trip to New York to be with me. A couple of days later, Matt caught a flight to JFK. My sister and her husband happened to be in town from D.C. with their pug, and we met them in Madison Square Park. It felt easy and normal. We sat in the park and the dog climbed into Matt’s lap. My sister snapped a picture. In the photo, we’re laughing, our heads close to touching, around the dog. We look happy. We look like a couple.

  “You guys are cute together,” my sister whispered, as Matt and her husband talked about one of their shared interests—Star Trek. “He’s so sweet!”

  “Can you believe he came to New York with me?” I said. I still couldn’t totally believe it myself.

  “I can,” she said, and I realized that one of the benefits of all the bullshit that had come before—the slow decline of my relationship with Jon, the anguish over Luke, all the not-horrible-but-definitely-not-great dates—was that I knew when something good had come along.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The rest of the trip was the very definition of the honeymoon phase, in the best possible way: Matt walked around Manhattan visiting guitar stores and drinking coffee while I worked during the day, and at night I took him to my favorite restaurants and introduced him to some of my friends, and then we went back to the corporate apartment that BuzzFeed rented for its out-of-town employees and had sex. But even though it all felt so easy, there was still an undercurrent of anxiety. I wanted to just “be in the moment” and enjoy being with someone I really liked who seemed to really like me, but I also felt like I needed to hold just a tiny bit of myself back to protect myself. What if he turned out to be just another one of those guys who disappeared?

  There was a part of me that was worried Matt was a “future-talker”—that is, someone who loved to talk about plans they had no intention of actually bringing to fruition. These are the guys who, on the second date, tell you that they really want to go on vacation with you, take you to a family reunion or to their company holiday party, or even just say that they want to go to a concert with you next month—but then they get squirrelly about scheduling anything for Friday night. I had gone out with more than a few of these guys and found that, at first, their enthusiasm was incredibly seductive—until I realized that they didn’t have any intention of going on vacation or to the family reunion or the company holiday party with me.

  The charitable explanation is that in the moment, these guys actually do believe they are going to want to go with you to whatever far-off event they have in mind. But its remove from reality means that they never have to follow through on their pie-in-the-sky plans, and they don’t actually want to invest the time and energy one would need to get to a point in the relationship where it would be appropriate to take a partner to a family reunion. The not-so-charitable explanation is that these types of guys are possible sadists and revel in getting you excited about something that they know is never going to happen.

  Before I met Matt, I had tried to unpack with Cynthia, my therapist, why I kept attracting future-talkers. “Is there something about them that feels comfortable or familiar to you?” she asked. “It’s possible you’re subconsciously replicating patterns that aren’t necessarily healthy, but that are easy for you.”

  I thought about it. “Well, I guess my dad is kind of a future-talker,” I said slowly. “I just remember him always talking about going on a trip or doing things that he never followed through on, but I’d get excited thinking they were going to happen. And, like, it was hard to plan stuff around him because he always wanted to ‘keep his options open’ about whether he might be traveling for business. Sometimes he would travel, but sometimes he wouldn’t.”

  “We want our parents to be stabilizing, secure presences, so it can be disorienting when they’re not,” Cynthia said. “But you know—our parents are also human. They make mistakes, and a lot of the time they don’t even know why they’re making them.”

  I turned this over in my mind for a moment. “I guess I just ended up thinking that he was never going to follow through on anything he said he was going to do, because I didn’t want to be disappointed.”

  “So it would make sense that you’d be attracted to men who come up with grand plans,” she said. “It’s a pattern that you’re familiar with. And the disappointment is part of that pattern.”

  After things ended with Luke, it had occurred to me that there was something comfortable about his emotional unavailability. He wasn’t a fut
ure-talker, but he remained forever somewhat aloof, out of touch. Future-talkers were kind of the other side of the same coin, but until now, I hadn’t let myself fully unpack that, because what a cliché, right? Woman has daddy issues and this leads to her fucked-up relationships with men. This would also explain why I alternated between guys who seemed like the opposite of my dad in terms of being dependable and reliable, and those who seemed uncomfortably like my dad.

  “Okay,” I said. “So what if I want to break that pattern?”

  “I think it starts with coming to terms with how you feel about your dad,” she said. I realized that even if I never confronted him about it, I needed to forgive him—for my own sake. I had to deprogram myself if I was going to have any hope of making things work with Matt, because right now, I was so sure that he was going to disappoint me that I almost set myself up for it, and then I was surprised when he actually followed through on what he said he was going to do.

  “Why is that surprising?” he asked me a couple of months after we started dating. “I said I would do something and I did it.”

  “I…don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m just used to guys who don’t follow through on things.” He seemed genuinely befuddled by this, like it would not have ever occurred to him to say he was going to do something and then not do it.

  I needed to give Matt the benefit of the doubt. Being a late bloomer may have meant that I recognized a good thing when I saw it, but it also meant that the memories of my past relationships were always lurking in the background.

  A couple of months after we met, I turned thirty-seven. The morning of my birthday, we were at Matt’s house, and he brought a wrapped gift to me. It was a framed print of an illustrated Harriet the Spy that he’d gotten on Etsy. She had her notebook, and big glasses, and her signature tomato sandwich, and a quote: “Is everybody a different person when they are with somebody else?” The print made me feel seen in a way that I’m not sure he even realized: For so long, I had contorted myself to be the person I thought guys wanted me to be, and I ended up just losing myself. Now, when I was actually being myself in a relationship, it turned out that the person I was with liked me more than ever.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE END of the summer of 2014, Matt and I started casually talking about moving in together. It was too soon, we both agreed, especially since neither of our apartments was really suitable to house both of us, so we’d have to move into an entirely new place. January seemed realistic, we decided. And yet there could be no harm in just looking online to see what was available, right?

  Matt quickly found something—a single family house not too far from where we both currently lived, a short bike ride from the studio where the show Matt wrote for, @midnight, was shot and similarly close to the BuzzFeed L.A. office. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, parking. And it was relatively cheap, less than our combined rents. We should just go look at it, we decided. What was the harm in that?

  I didn’t love it. It had bland light brown carpeting in the bedrooms and the walls were painted a similar milky latte color—great for coffee, drab for halls. The living room was big and bright, but the kitchen was cramped and old, and the bedrooms were small. Surely we should keep looking, I told Matt, but he pointed out that there was nothing similar available in this neighborhood for the price, and it had a big yard and a patio, and the landlord agreed to provide washer and dryer hookups. Slowly, I was won over.

  Buying a house was never on the table; neither of us had much in the way of savings, and real estate prices in Los Angeles were getting out of reach even if we had. The only people I knew who had been able to afford a house in L.A. had either bought it years ago or gotten help from their parents. We couldn’t turn back time, and neither of our parents was in a position to help us. It seemed like the trade-off I had to make for living in L.A. was that some aspects of my life were just always going to seem suspended.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I cannot deal with her for one more second.” The person sitting across from me was an editor, one of my direct reports, who oversaw the entertainment coverage on BuzzFeed. “She goes behind my back, her reporters cover the same thing our reporters cover and don’t tell us, she complains about us…I just can’t deal anymore,” he repeated. The “her” in question was another editor in New York who managed celebrity news. They each reported to different people, in a managerial structure that made little sense except to protect certain fiefdoms at the company, and these two editors in particular were always at odds—and I was always in the middle of it. Ben, my boss, was impatient with the conflict and implored me to fix it. I would try, and then things would just go back to the way they were. It was infuriating, and petty. Couldn’t everyone just relax and not be so territorial?

  Apparently not. And generally, I was growing more and more disillusioned with work. Hadn’t I been a creative person at one time in my life? It was getting difficult to remember. Now my days were spent in meetings and mediating disputes. I was wrestling with the fact that after two years, I still wasn’t totally comfortable being a manager. I was never sure how much authority I was supposed to project, or how friendly I was supposed to be with the people who reported to me—and most of the editorial team in L.A. reported up to me. It created a distance that made being actual friends difficult. I was keenly aware of being “the boss,” even though no one used that word. I could sense that there were definitely people in the office who just didn’t like me, and I couldn’t totally figure out why. Was it just because I was “the boss,” or was there something I was doing that made me especially unlikeable? I wanted to be a person who didn’t care that she was disliked, but it bothered me—and I didn’t know how to fix it.

  I saw other male managers who were friends with their direct reports, and I wondered whether it was something about being a man that made it easier to “bro down” with people who worked for them. That had certainly been the case at Rolling Stone, where it seemed like being a man conferred an instant insider status. But to a lesser extent that still felt true at BuzzFeed, especially when I’d been in the New York office. There was a group of guys who went out to lunch every single day, never inviting anyone else along; one of them ran a large editorial team, and he was best friends with a couple of guys who reported to him. Of course people are going to make friends at work, and it’s unrealistic to expect that cliques won’t form. It was just eye-opening to see how the same power structures that had felt inaccessible to me at Rolling Stone were so easily replicated at BuzzFeed.

  Being a manager was not just exhausting, but also unrewarding. It was impossible to please everyone—something that made Ben happy would piss off someone who reported to me, or if I tried to stand up for my direct reports, I’d get shit from Ben. I was still under enormous pressure to have my teams not just keep their traffic up, but be part of “the conversation.” Ben had a habit of sending terse emails late at night or very early in the morning, asking what was up with an article or, worse, one of my editors or writers. One of the ways that I found I could keep Ben placated was by responding almost immediately to his emails—he felt that people who didn’t respond to him within minutes were blowing him off—and so I would scramble to respond to him whenever I saw his name in my inbox.

  Once Ben had developed a negative opinion of someone, it was nearly impossible to change his mind, so I spent a lot of time trying to make sure he thought I was doing a good job, what is usually derogatorily referred to as “managing up.” What I didn’t realize until much later was that oftentimes, people who reported to me were also managing up, and I didn’t always have a clear view of what was going on with their teams or whether people who reported to them were having problems, and for a long time I was too inexperienced as a manager to figure that out, to ask the right questions.

  There’s an assumption, in creative industries especially, that if you’re good at your job as a writer or edi
tor, then you’ll be a good manager, but I can tell you that being an editor and being a manager are very different skill sets, and when it comes to the writers and editors I know, myself included, few of them are great managers. I started to wonder what it meant to be ambitious if the career path you assumed you’d be taking—and you assumed you would want—turned out to not be so appealing after all. I had never really articulated, to myself or anyone else, that I was “ambitious,” but I felt like it was just implied. Everyone I knew wanted a promotion, to make more money, to get hired by the more prestigious website or magazine, and I had just gone along with that. But eventually, you had to stop, right? Very few people got to be editor in chief of anything. So if you weren’t going to be an editor in chief, and you weren’t going to try to get the job at the more prestigious place, where did that leave you? Were you just supposed to be content wherever you were? Was that just…giving up? Or—and this was a reframing that I had never stopped to think about—was it just an acknowledgment of what made you happy, and that was okay?

  In the same way that I couldn’t play the “cool” girl in dating any longer, I was growing disillusioned with following someone else’s script for my professional life. I’d taken it as a given that being ambitious always meant getting the next promotion, and the next, and the next. But now I was asking myself, what if this wasn’t something I really wanted—and if I didn’t, did that mean I was a failure?

  * * *

  —

  I NEEDED A writing project of my own, completely separate from anything I was doing at BuzzFeed—a creative outlet. A project that would just be for me, something I could lose myself in and not have to care about finishing performance reviews or responding to emails. I might not even let anyone else read it.