19 March 2017 "Falling Out of Love On An Airplane"

Before I really knew her that well, one of my roommates got herself in trouble during an ugly breakup. Being the type of girl who is constantly chasing new opportunities to keep herself alive in everyone’s minds (including her own), she broke up with her ex-boyfriend (or so I was told) on a whim, only to chase him down a few months later in efforts to track down what they had before. This was nothing unusual, and, like most things, fizzled out with time.

My roommate, however, couldn’t allow things to go without a specific kind of personally produced closure, and so as she sat on an hours-long plane ride she wrote a long-winded letter. She was attempting with full disclosure to bring a piece of her mind out and onto the page. She could only hope that the person to whom she had already given certain valuable pieces would understand her motivations, and would take the long-winded letter from the long-winded airplane ride for everything that it was.

Of course that isn’t what happened. My roommate kept writing letters, against the wishes of everyone else, and potentially against the wishes of herself. It only ended up making the breakup uglier. People seem to have a hard time hearing faults of a relationship when they’ve just barely ended it.

I’ve recently become very skeptical of monogamy. There’s no telling, after all, when a life spent together with one person will end. How are you supposed to address that? I’ve spent my lifetime examining relationships, remaining perceptive as so many adult marriages fall apart around me, and yet nothing perplexes me more than a life purposefully shared between two people, suddenly cut short. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not really sure what romantic love looks like. Is it as fleeting as I sometimes think it is? It seems like what we’re all hoping for, those stories about people who are meant to be in every way, have to end tragically in order to be realistic. Either someone falls out of love, or one of the two loses the other. Is that really how romantic love is? Or have I just had the misfortune of being surrounded by subpar examples of it?

I will say that when I was growing up, the relationships that had the biggest impact on me were often the ones that were clearly the most negative. I’ve never had any problem identifying the things I don’t want if I decide to permanently settle down with someone. Even in my last relationship, I would spend hours on social media, looking at pictures on Instagram and Tumblr, and wondering why my relationship didn’t make me feel the way those pictures did. I had no problem identifying what exactly was wrong with him and I together, and yet I couldn’t find the time to string together what made us work in the first place.

Sometimes I think that my happiest times have been when I am not preoccupied with a romantic (or sexual) connection. It’s much easier to go through life without the emotional stress of inviting in a person who might have no intention to stay. But other times, I wonder desperately about the truth in stories about people who truly work, who truly fit with each other and have a relationship built to last. I don’t know the exact cause of this confusion, but I don’t think it’s an uncommon one. When I first understood that this essay contest has to do with the love experience of college students, I wondered what on earth I could write about—I’m not even sure that I’ve ever been in love in the first place. I’m honestly not even sure whether I feel the way I do about my last relationship because I was preoccupied with thoughts of the grass being always greener, or because it was a relationship never designed to work in the first place. And I’m twenty-one years old, with little experience, really, of all that the world has to offer.

I find myself wondering sometimes what I might have done had I been in my roommate’s situation. I can certainly picture myself sitting on a seemingly endless plane ride, staring out the window and watching clouds disappear as if nothing really mattered anyway. At the end of the day, who can really fault her for sending those letters? I have no idea if she believes that relationship to be one of the great loves of her life, that she couldn’t bear to leave him empty-handed, or if she only wished to express her feelings to him as a way to seek a fickle peace in her own mind. How do we really measure an experience like that anyway?

I never noticed how uncomfortable it was when my ex-boyfriend and I would pick fights with each other, how hard I tried to make him feel the exact same ways that I did. It never worked, and I was naïve to think that he could understand me in the same way that I understood myself. Was that wrong? Is it the same wrong as my roommate’s wish to make her ex understand her? I sometimes wonder how much my ex-boyfriend wished I could understand him better. One of our most difficult, and still unresolved issues stemmed from the fact that our refrigerators are organized differently. It was ridiculous and understandable at the same time, but we were young and so it seemed insurmountable. I remember wanting to break up with him the night we had that argument. But I knew somehow that I couldn’t, and when he turned over with his mind erased of all the words he had just said, I let myself believe that imperfections are normal, that relationships aren’t perfect, and that what I had grown up observing in adults was finally making sense to me too.

I don’t want to fault anyone for raising me to believe that love and monogamy and spending the rest of one’s life with one person are unrealistic. I think that somehow I’ve just arrived at that idea on my own. And I think it is crucially important to understand that because I have so little experience regarding love to begin with, it’s unrealistic to think that I can really have a solid idea of what it is. I can only say that I’ve been growing each day to understand the gray areas, and as I grow I have learned to understand my roommate’s experience a little better. In a way I think we all have had a time that we felt we had made a mistake by not expressing ourselves in the best way possible.

I think that, had someone presented me with a pen and paper on that plane, I too would have felt the need to write and write, to try with every piece of me to explain why I had decided to make things happen in a particular way.

My ex-boyfriend and I still talk pretty regularly. And I’ve become much more comfortable admitting that to people as this year has gone by, because our relationship feels so much better than it ever did when we were dating. We aren’t in the type of situation where I would invite him to family parties or expect him to be my date at a wedding, and neither of us have the expectation of the other to remain monogamous. In a way, this seems like the most accurate representation I can give of modern love in college. Nothing about our situation makes sense on paper, and it is not like anything I’ve ever seen idolized in the movies. But I’m happier than I was for a lot of our relationship, and I love talking to my mom about the ways he and I have both matured. There are no expectations, and I think that is what has made our relationship so much stronger.

It’s been a while since my roommate had her situation with the ugly breakup; in fact, I can’t say I ever really spent time with her as she worked her way through that experience. But since I’ve known her, she hasn’t seemed fazed by the consequences of her over-explaining in the past. He and she don’t talk anymore, and it’s weird because they still do have a lot of the same friends. I guess that’s another aspect of modern love in college—things get messy pretty easily. But in a world as small as ours we have to learn to coexist with the oddities of discomfort. I can’t be entirely sure about all that happened between the two of them anyway, since I’ve only heard both sides of the story from third parties. But what I can be sure of is that this story has been a jumping off point for my own self-reflection.

How can we ever really tell how much another person feels we have wronged them? And how can we ever really tell how much another person understands the ways in which we feel wronged by them?