Approval Junkie

by Faith Salie

  In writing this, I started to wonder if I wanted/needed to receive the first ILY because I am an approval junkie or if I am just a normal lady-person. So I conducted some rigorous research by e-mailing a bunch of girlfriends, a few straight guys, and one gay man. I offered them all anonymity but only had one taker, who asked to be called “Marzipan.” Marzipan divulged, “I wanted him to say it first and he did. It’s a holdover and old-fashioned [but] it was very important to me.” Marzipan spoke for almost all the ladies who prefer that the gentleman say it first.

  Only one friend said that it would probably freak her out and make her run for the hills to hear it first. But she dates people she calls “guys,” preferably ones who have long hair that can be braided and swirled into a kind of hair turban. The two most mature responses both came from friends named Amy. (Coincidence? I think not. The name “Amy” means “beloved,” so these women have been validated their whole damn lives, every single time someone says their name.) Here is what Beloved #1 wrote:

  I will say that the phrase “I love you” is so often abused and misused and I am far less interested in its use than I am in seeing it in practice, which is usually not romantic.

  And from Beloved #2:

  I don’t remember. I know I cared about who said it first at the time but 15 years and thousands of “I love yous” later, I just don’t recall how it went down. How lame am I?

  No, Amy, you are not lame. I am lame and rendered lamer by the simple loveliness of your words. And good for you for being happily married for that long to a husky Republican.*

  The dudes didn’t care at all who said it first, and it so happens that each of them did deliver the inaugural love address. When I asked my most voluble pal, Brad, “Did you care who said it first?” he uncharacteristically answered with the single word, “No.” When I e-mailed the question to my absurdly evolved friend Jon, he pretty much wrote a poem by accident:

  No—because there was nothing calculating about my wanting to say it. It was important to me to say the words, but there was no expectation in it—I just wanted her to know. My belief that this was a fact of the world that she needed to have, irrespective of what she did with it, meant that keeping it to myself wasn’t an option.

  And then this from Mario:

  i told joe i loved him on my ex chris’s ugly black pleather Ashley couch, when we were staying over at chris’s place to take care of the dog.

  The men’s responses further comfort me that this is a gender thing. So I’ll go ahead and put a tiny score for myself in the column marked “Not Totally Pathetic, Just XX.” So now we can continue with my story. Because there was one man who didn’t say it to me first. And his name was wasband.

  I said it first. I’d waited four months and one day from our first date, but who was counting. I’d waited through a sexy New Year’s Eve. I’d waited through a perfectly romantic Valentine’s Day dinner. I’d waited at his hospital bedside as he came to after a minor surgery. I’d waited and waited. He came up with a catchphrase during our early days that provided a promising teaser. He’d proclaim, “I’m just swabbing the decks on Faith Salie’s yacht!” Then he’d sign off phone calls with, “I miss you.” So close!—just one word away! It was killing me to wait. I emotionally ruined every “important” moment by expecting it; I ruined banal moments by fervently wishing they’d become significant.

  I told him I loved him on the night of my twenty-eighth birthday, right when he was walking out my door to go back to his place. I remember I was wearing a super late-’90s ensemble of pink capris and a gray-and-pink peasanty top with gray platform mules. A clip held my hair in that artfully messy Friends-inspired way. All in all, a late-twentieth-century appearance meant to evoke a profound declaration. For the life of me, I can remember all these details, but I can’t remember why he had to go home instead of spending the night. I can picture how the sun had set and my screen door was letting in the evening breeze. I recall how it felt to tilt my head up at him and confess, softly, “I love you.”

  Except it wasn’t a confession. It was a plea to hear it back immediately. My “I love you” really equaled “Please for the love of God tell me you love me especially because it’s my birthday.” It was a defunct love boomerang that never made its return journey. I must have thrown it wrong.

  He didn’t say it back. He didn’t say, “I love you, too.” He nodded like he already knew this cardiac newsflash, paused, and said…“Thank you.”

  “Thank you?”

  Pause.

  “Is that all?”

  Pause.

  “I was hoping to hear you say it back.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know how much you want me to say it. I knew how much you wanted me to say it on Valentine’s Day. I know you want me to say it all the time.”

  “Do you not love me?” With that, of course, I started to cry.

  “I’m not saying that. I just don’t want to be forced to say something because you said it.”

  And in that moment, something occurred, which I would not understand for years to come: our dynamic was crystallized. I needed; he meted. I wanted; he waited.

  So. Happy Birthday.

  That was April. Obviously we continued on—I mean, this anecdote is but the juvenilia of our toxic opus. May went by, and I did a fine job of keeping my wound wide open, and we reached June. And in early June, we went to his bucolic hometown in the Finger Lakes. We were walking hand in hand at dusk at the shore of a Finger. Lightning bugs began to flicker around us—insect equivalents of Proust’s madeleine for an Eastern-bred girl like me. I felt closer to him, now that his childhood was more alive to me. I also felt thin. The timing was surely right.

  Crickets. Literally.

  The next night we stayed at his grandfather’s house. In separate bedrooms, of course, because old people think hallways are moats that prevent premarital sex. Baba, like most elderly gentlemen named Baba or Grampy or Pawpaw, was a talker, not a listener. So I listened and listened. Even before I got paid to be a professional listener, I could be an excellent listener. Of course that doesn’t mean that my dark, evil mind wasn’t occasionally generating judgmental commentary while my face scrunched into the “Tell me more about being a horse doctor in the ’50s!” position.

  Later that evening, the wasband walked in on me while I was in his grandfather’s bath. Baba was not in the tub at the time. Wasband stood by the door, leaving it slightly open.

  “I was watching you while you were talking to Baba. I was watching the way you listened to him, and I just want to tell you that I love you.”

  Pause.

  My pause didn’t last very long in real time. However, any pause after someone first says I love you carries weight. I knew this from recent, soul-shrinking experience. Because I possessed a generosity roughly the same size as Gollum’s, I wanted to inflict upon him the weight of the wait. During that pause, a zillion feelings and thoughts passed through my heart and brain. I savored his announcement like the world’s quickest but most thorough wine tasting: the immediate aroma that hit me was happiness. But happiness is such a jejune bouquet, n’est-ce pas? So I swirled the “I love you” around in my mental love wineglass a bit. Despite my overwhelming thirst for those three words, I summoned the resolve to make them linger there in my middle palate until they gave way to a smooth finish of resentment. Then I swallowed. His words hadn’t aged better for having been bottled up. And saying “I love you” back to him didn’t have the right mouthfeel.

  “Thank you,” I replied. Matter-of-fact; no smile, no tears. Why should I give him anything more?

  I was naked. I pulled my knees to my chest.

  “Will you please close the door, I’m getting cold.”

  I was. I was growing colder.

  And that was the first time I’d felt like I possessed power in our relationship, even if it only lasted until Baba’s bathroom door closed. The second time came five years later, almost to the day.

  We found ourselves in Sco
tland. The northeast coast of Scotland to be exact, by a lighthouse, on a cliff overlooking the North Sea. The wasband pointed out that from this vantage, we stood on the very soil whence his great-grandparents hailed and looked vaguely toward his Viking ancestors. And it was there, in a spot dedicated to his patrilineage, that he asked me to marry him.

  Unlike the Love Tub Episode, I totally saw the proposal coming, because, well, it was simply time. We’d talked about getting married, explicitly and erosively, for so long that it wasn’t worth talking about anymore. We’d been dating for five years, which is also known as a “lustrum.” But even that rococo word doesn’t romanticize that half a decade is a long time to wait, and everyone in our lives was sick of it. There was an unspoken feeling of Let’s get this over with, so we can see if it will make things better. Please buckle up, because here comes some caps lock: YES I TOTALLY KNOW THAT GETTING MARRIED IS NEVER THE WAY TO FIX A CRAPPY RELATIONSHIP BUT I ALSO KNOW I SHOULD FLOSS MY TEETH EVERY DAY BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH THANKS.

  I really didn’t think it would happen this one particular afternoon. This explains why I had no makeup on and had decked myself out in an Old Navy shirt, comfy jeans, and boots that supplied no flattering heel height. The wasband had gone into the Lighthouse Museum, because his great-grandfather or someone had had something to do with the building of the village lighthouse. I was exhausted (from anticipation) so I stayed in the rental car, reclined my seat, and napped. He woke me up with a knock on the window and an enthusiastic grin. “You’ve got to see this view!”

  If you’ve watched Braveheart, you know that Scotland doesn’t really give a shite that it’s late May or that you’re about to get proposed to, so it was wildly windy and chilly. My hair was flying everywhere. Poised on the precipice, we admired the vibrant indigo of the North Sea and the wasband’s cultural provenance.

  When he told me to sit on the lone bench surrounded by wildflowers, I knew. His fist was clenched, and he began to kneel. My heart started beating faster.

  I shook my head. “Oh my God…no. Stop.” That is what I said. Something deep inside me, beyond ego and beyond heart, knew this thing for which I’d been yearning wasn’t what was best for us.

  He paused midkneel, his blue-gray eyes full of hurt. Uncharacteristically, transparently, vulnerably surprised and hurt. I’d never seen that look on his face before, and I would never see it again. It lasted maybe “one Mississippi, two Mississippi,” and I couldn’t bear it.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m sorry, go ahead.”

  He knelt down and asked me to marry him. He kept it simple. Perhaps that was a bold choice suggestive of a rebirth of our relationship, or maybe it was head-in-sandy not to acknowledge how rough our journey to this moment had been. Or, quite likely, I wasn’t much of a muse after ordering him to stop proposing.

  When he asked, “Will you marry me?,” I looked at him through my shades, coolly. His question, like his first “I love you,” created such a panoply of emotions that the best course seemed to be to try to keep my face neutral. I didn’t smile or cry or gasp. I waited a few moments, my heart beating out of my chest, while I tried to relish the return of that ephemeral taste of power.

  The man I deeply loved and resented, in whom I’d deeply invested, was on one knee, asking me the question I’d longed to hear since our first date. It was, in theory, the ultimate gesture of approval, but it didn’t feel that way. It was too hard-earned, and that made me feel hollow. The Scottish winds carried any “power” I had out to sea. I said only, “Yes,” quietly, because I wanted to. I wanted to marry him.

  You don’t have to believe in karma to understand this: he and I were meant to be, well, not meant to be. We had to live through the first part to realize the last part.

  I couldn’t wear his grandmother’s ring, because it was too small. Way to feel fat at your betrothal.

  We kissed and were awkwardly silent. We took a selfie on top of that cliff, years before anyone called it a selfie. In the photo, I’m kissing his cheek with my eyes closed, and he is staring right at the camera with determination. That is, neither of us is smiling in our engagement photo. I remember deciding I should kiss him, because I didn’t know how genuine my smile would look if I took on the camera’s eye.

  We got into the car, and he asked me whom I wanted to call first. I realized I wanted to call my mom and started crying, because I couldn’t afford the roaming charges to the afterlife.

  Later that afternoon we stopped at Loch Ness, and my full bladder was more monstrous than Nessie. The only option was to crouch behind a rock on the shore. So I took option number only. I squatted, watching the yellow stream creep through the large pebbles, reaching my boots and then the hem of my jeans, and realized, I’m peeing on myself on the day I got engaged. Because that’s how life can be: sometimes we pee on our storybook moments.

  I’m not proud of the way I behaved that day. I took a meaningful, singular day in a youngish man’s life and made certain it was not nearly as pure or joyful as he deserved wanted it to be. I truly hope that if and when my wasband next proposes, his words are not fraught with painful history, and the reaction he receives is not laden with hurt and entitled expectation. I also hope his future bride is big on Scots and Vikings and little of finger.

  On the other hand, I forgive myself for how I reacted to his proposal. To react any other way than I did would have been transcendentally generous but disingenuous. I wasn’t surprised and moved to tears. I was hurt; I was happy; I was relieved; I was confused; I was lonely; I was fearful; I was hopeful. I was human. I was honest, even though I knew my honesty hurt him. And honestly, I got a little pleasure out of hurting him—but only for that moment. The pleasure was Pyrrhic.

  When my wasband didn’t say “I love you” back that first time, he wanted to teach me a lesson. He wanted, foremost, to teach me that I could not coerce him into anything, even matters of the heart—especially matters of the heart. Perhaps, too, he wanted to teach me the loftier, if clichéd, lesson that really loving means giving love without expecting it in return. Or is it if you love something, set it free so that when you look down, there’s only one set of footprints in the sand? All of those lessons kind of suck. Because when you give love, it feels really good to get some back. (I say “I love you” to my kids so much that they’d probably get sick of it if they were listening, but when my son does say, “Mommy, I love you so much” once for every forty-two times I say it to him, it’s like the heavens open and drench me in pink glitter.)

  But the most valuable lesson my wasband accidentally taught me, beginning that very instant he refused to say I love you, is that I wither when I withhold love. And when I say “wither” I don’t mean in a beautiful, Victorian, consumptive way. I mean I shrink and get brittle. All those years I spent offering him myself and then holding myself back to tip the balance of power only succeeded in rendering myself unbalanced. Every exercise in withholding left me less powerful, less happy, less…me. When you concentrate on self-preservation, the best you can do is preserve; you don’t grow. I was pickling myself. When it feels natural to express love and you don’t, it’s like stopping a gigantic sneeze over and over.

  So by the time John appeared like a mensch in shining armor, I was ready to sneeze love droplets all over him. And I did—in every way but one. I never played coy; I baked for him, trekked to his apartment constantly because he was the one with dogs, scratched his chest on lazy weekend mornings, looped him in on the whole egg-freezing process I had going on, and spent kooky amounts of time in the middle of shopping at Whole Foods responding to his texts whose contents probably helped to hyperstimulate my ovaries. I even told him, when he was considering a job in LA, that I would be willing to move back there for him. What I didn’t tell him was that I loved him, clearly because he hadn’t told me.

  I had a “relationship coach” at the time named Susan Kraker. A friend had raved about Susan, and although I was extremely wary of involving myself with anyone whose job title i
s “coach” but on whom I was not invited to dump a cooler of icy Gatorade no matter how victorious our partnership, I nevertheless threw my love lot in with her. I was coming off a postdivorce dating bender and craved some goal-oriented guidance. I knew John was special, and I felt a kind of urgency to make it work with him that I worried would undo our easy rhythm. I enlisted Susan to calm me down. Susan looks like the tiny love child of Janeane Garofalo and Morticia Adams. She has butt-length black hair and a sexy, crackly voice and an indefatigable interest in the romantic minutiae of her clients. She’s even been known to shadow a client on a date and sit incognito at a table next to her. Susan will then pretend to read while she is really deconstructing her client’s whole exchange. We’d talk on the phone for hours, and as things progressed effortlessly with John, my conversations with Coach Susan started centering around—you guessed it—The Case of the Missing “I Love You.” John’s behavior toward me demonstrated nothing but commitment and attraction that left me shocked I hadn’t developed a UTI, so I was flummoxed by his reticence on the silly little all-important point that was consuming me. Not being consumed was the final truffle, sitting in my butter compartment, separated from its colleagues by my mouth and my hubris, looking less like a love token than a desiccated poopy.

  Susan kept repeating something so wise that my only choice was to ignore it: she said, “You will tell him you love him when the pain of not saying it outweighs the pain of not hearing it.” To which I’d exclaim, “Susan, you are not getting it! I will nevereverever say it first!!!” She knew my history. So she’d respond with something unhelpfully reasonable like, “Okay, well then, we have to come up with a strategy for waiting.” As if the lone chocolate in my fridge impersonating the dropping of a medium-size rodent wasn’t an effective strategy.