19 March 2017 nonfiction, "Before I Had to Catch a Flight"

Last year, before I had to catch a flight to my semester abroad, my mom and I spent the night in a hotel. We were both nervous, and had just come from spending a week straight in my house, with my ex-boyfriend.  We ordered room service and tried to pretend that we both liked what was playing on the TV. I thought about crying, but couldn’t make the tears come. Instead, I texted my ex-boyfriend on a whim, frantically asking him to let us go back to the original “don’t ask don’t tell” plan, allowing me the comfort of having at least one familiar thing to hold on to as I left. He agreed, since I had been the one to break it off in the first place.

A few months into living away from home, I broke up with him again. I told him that he shouldn’t wait for me, that we weren’t good together, that we were too different. It took a while, but eventually we both decided it was for the best.

It’s strange, but the weeks between when I ended things with my ex-boyfriend and when I found a new person to attract my attention were some of the best weeks I had while living abroad. I was so free, so unconcerned with my emotions, and so focused on myself that I forgot about almost everyone else. All the connections I made were ones that didn’t necessarily depend wholly on the feelings of others; instead, I was enthralled with the idea of being alone.

A few weeks after I got home, I met up with my ex-boyfriend again. We went to dinner, but I think we both knew it was inevitable that we would end the night by doing something physical. We didn’t have sex, and though I felt entirely different—as if I had a bit of power I had never before felt in the relationship—I still felt tied to him, at least emotionally. In a strange way that felt like being slowly pulled underwater, I began wondering what I had become. It was as if the simple push of one of my most emotional relationships to the realm of the physical suddenly made all my emotional attachments feel worthless.

I think I’ve always been the type of person who values personal, singular connections. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve had trouble in college—I’ve never been very good at the group thing, and sometimes I get myself too involved in things that were doomed from the start. When I first came to college, getting into a romantic relationship with someone was on my top list of priorities. It was something I had never had, something that I desperately wanted. And when I finally found it, in February of my freshman year, I was so desperately afraid to lose it, that I allowed myself to get lost instead.

Even though I keep in cordial contact with my ex-boyfriend today, I still credit my leaving to go abroad as one of the best decisions I have ever made for myself. It allowed us both the separation to grow on our own, and to realize solutions to things we had been so blind to while we were dating.

But this isn’t about my last relationship, it’s about how I’ve grown to view and understand love, and to be honest, I can’t really say that I’m entirely sure about that. I think my generation gets extremely caught up in the idea of love, but how many of us can confidently say what “love” means? While dating my ex-boyfriend, 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 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. One of our most difficult, and still unresolved issues stemmed from the fact that our refrigerators are organized very differently. It was ridiculous and understandable at the same time, but we were young so it seemed insurmountable.

Dating my ex-boyfriend was my longest, deepest, most personal and singular connection, and yet I still allowed myself to say “I love you” only twice.