For as long as I can remember, I have had crushes on people. I had a crush on Jake in kindergarten, and Violet whose mom let her dye a single strand of her hair purple in first grade. I had a crush on my next door neighbors grandsons, Ryan and Sean, who would come into the backyard and play with my brother and I every day. They taught me how to play pokemon. These crushes were representative of the first era of my life, before I moved to my grandmother’s house in 3rd grade. For the last two years of elementary school I didn’t have crushes as much as other people had them on me. The most consistent was a boy named Amir, who was the tallest in our grade. He would pass me notes and sing me songs, but was always too shy to confess his feelings to me. On the field behind the school he would send someone else to confess his undying love to me, and I would say that it was useless unless I heard it from the man himself. In 5th grade we were on the cusp of pre-pubescent emotions and feelings. Super Bass by Nicki Minaj was released and most of the boys in my class were glued to the screen watching it. It was at this same time my grandmother sat me down to ask if I knew that Amir liked me, because the school had called her into the office about it. Turns out he had been writing fantasies of which I was the main character, and I was told to avoid him.
By the time middle school had started I was a strange kid. I had a strong personality and dressed like the lights were off in my bedroom. It was at this time that pre-teen anxiety was starting to take its toll, and I realized the way that I dressed and behaved shaped people’s perceptions of me. In 7th grade I started my official emo phase; ironic considering that I had always liked that kind of music. The poser-aspect was not the songs I illegally downloaded to my phone, but rather that consecrated effort to dress in all black. I had a big crush on the eight grade boy that sat next to me in science class, who had absolutely no interest in me at all. His friend would end up confessing his feelings for me the next year, and then again in high school, but nothing really came of that. When I started eighth grade I got my first boyfriend. I only liked him because he was the only one who asked if I was ok after we watched a video depicting the effects of music on patients with Alzheimer’s. I would go on to lose my great-grandmother to the disease only a few months later. He was a decidedly horrific first boyfriend, and encompassed every pre-teen faux-pax. He was still in contact with his ex girlfriend; who hated my guts and would throw herself at him. He was decidedly unattractive and unintelligent, and would threaten to hurt himself if I mentioned breaking up. We had our first kiss between the stacks at the Public Library. I wore tropical flavored chapstick.
We had more firsts than just a kiss, and by the time we had broken up I felt as though I had to cleanse myself of him. That it could not be true that I had unconsensually lost something as important as my virginity. The same summer I left him I met a girl while auditioning for an honors band. She played the same instrument I did, and was the first person to ever ask for my number. We spent the summer experimenting with each other, but we went to different high schools, so nothing ever lasted. It is important to note that my family had no idea I ever had a boyfriend, or that I even liked girls. I was still a weird pre-teen with three friends and strange interests. Boys didn’t really notice me my freshman year, but I longed for them too. I was a bit too brave for my own good, so much so just recalling these memories is making me blush from embarrassment. If I liked someone, the chances of me telling them was very high. I took all my shots, but was also receptive if the answer was no.
My sophomore year is when I magically became pretty, at least to other people. Up until this point, I had spent my time memorizing the way people interacted and googling the best ways to kiss. I liked to know exactly how to talk to people, how to listen and make space for them. Now that people were interested in me, dating became a bit of a game. I wanted to see what I could achieve, and how fast I could do it. I longed for affection, and often fell into long term relationships with people I was not really interested in. My “main” boyfriend my sophomore year was a reflection of the first emotionally. He also had an ex who hated me, who would go on to hate me more when I started dating another boy she had a crush on. That same year I had two more boyfriends, one much worse than the other. The third-boy, Drew, I would date on-and-off until we graduated. He would be the last person I dated before the Covid outbreak March of our senior year. He was actually my friend. We had similar home lives and dealt with the same mental health struggles. For me, my revolving door of partners filled a void I feared I would never leave. It didn’t matter that I didn’t like them, what mattered was that they loved me. I knew how to make people love me.
As I grew older I joked that almost all of my previous ex’s would come back for seconds, and would always beg me to get back together with them. They were by no means innocent bystanders in my search for love, and often poisoned my understanding of relationships in ways I would not realize until I became much older. Around my junior year I realized I did not have to date someone to just have fun, and things like a kiss did not have to mean anything. I entered this phase of my life quite unbothered, partially because I was a stellar student so my family had no reason to question my actions outside of school. A few memories stand out most from this time, one involved kissing around six of my friends in one day while playing a game on one of their front lawns. Another was pretending to be two of my friends “fake-girlfriends” so they could make their ex’s jealous. At one point there was a pact to go farther between four of us, but that never ended up happening.
All these timelines start to blur together in my head, because it was just so much at once. More highlights include a boy I met in business camp flying up from Tennessee just to try and do something with me in broad daylight in Central Park. We kissed through the subway gates when he left and I cried. I also entered my first long-term relationship with a girl at this time, who like my first boyfriend, threatened to hurt herself for my attention. One of my best friends stopped talking to me around this time too, because he felt that I was leading him on. It was then I learned that having boys who were just friends was to walk a fine line. From my perspective, I had never once flirted with him, jokingly or otherwise. He said I was kind to him, that I listened, but I did that with everyone. His words crushed me, because my goal was never harm, especially not at this time in my life. Years later he would repay me by sneaking into my bedroom at night when I was too crossed to sit up.
I knew so desperately that I wanted to be loved, to know love, to feel it. Everytime I pursued someone I gave it my all, pulled out all the stops, and always had success. Yet what is success when three months in you realize you made a mistake? The true character of a person is impossible to decipher during the honeymoon phase, but I was so worried about losing the opportunity to be loved I often blind-sided myself. Many of my college relationships followed this cycle, of something being good enough in the beginning, but impossible towards the end. In my junior year I met the boy I thought I was going to marry. He would be the only one to actually follow-through on his threat to hurt himself, and I would be the one to find him. He’s fine now, but I am always in that room with him.
I started to believe that love was not enough to keep a relationship. That you had to be with someone who could provide, someone who was logical and dependable, regardless of if you loved them. My next serious relationship was a culmination of those beliefs. It was a man I thought could take care of me, even though he was incapable of taking care of me physically. It took me a year to realize that I needed both things to be true in a relationship. Yet after being touch-starved for so long, I became reckless again. Men who said they would never want a relationship begged me to go on dates with them. I was putting energy into flings that made people worship me. My heart wasn’t in it though, it seemed like it never was. My heart only seemed to exist once, and it stays with him in that room. I felt disassociated, so much so I ended up in my best friend’s bed.
The summer I graduated I launched myself into feminist literature, trying to figure out how to do it right. I was reading books, articles, and magazines at such high rates I started sending passages to all the guys I was talking to. Even though I was doing all of this reading, it seemed as though my lived reality hadn’t caught up to me. I was flippant, talking to multiple people at once. I longed to feel anything, and kept latching on too quickly. I loved being useful to the people I was seeing. I loved to cook when I went to a man’s house, clean their rooms. Even more than that, I loved making myself beautiful for them. I loved when they cared, when they noticed the smell of my conditioner complimented my perfume. I loved all of it, and I had never been more depressed in my entire life. Until I met this one guy, who I thought would be the man I’d marry. Maybe he still is. When we met he was soft, gentle. He graduated from an Ivy League School and had a job that would probably always make money. He seemed to have his life together, he could make decisions. I thought he was what I wanted because he was not a stereotypical man, he was comfortable in his gender and sexuality. He had close female friends and came from a good family, a loving family. To the part of me that wanted stability, that didn’t think that love was enough, he was perfect.
The first time he made my heart drop was right when we first became “official.” He had a female friend who he told me he used to have a crush on. She was blond with blue eyes and just gorgeous. He would show me her pictures and say, Isn’t she beautiful? Which is when I probably should have left, but I was mature and talked to him about it and said that it made me uncomfortable. To no one’s surprise (except maybe my boyfriends) she refused to talk to me when we met, and also did not let her boyfriend talk to me. I thought he was still perfect when he slowly cut her out of his life. This was not something I required him to do, I really did want their friendship to work out and I hate being “that” girlfriend, but it was a choice he made. So we went on in our perfect love, and I was happy I was being taken care of. Is that not what a good relationship is, if not to be taken care of? We moved in together after dating for less than a year, less because I loved him but more because my home situation had become dire. It still is, and you’d much sooner find me in a 300 sq ft apartment than back home. For this reason we moved to the city he had been living in; which was around an hour-thirty drive during New Jersey rush hour that drained me so badly I had to double my meds. I was coming home from a job that offered no joy, after the highway ate my evening, to make dinner for a man who laid on the couch. Which was fine until it wasn’t. When I realized that there was a fine line between letting someone care for me and being infantilized. Worse was, I believed at one point that my love with him was what love was supposed to be.
On our second Valentine’s day he turned to the man next to him and said we were dating because my degree would never pay for my lifestyle. When his family would ask me what I did for work, I was not the one who got to answer. When asked what my thesis was on, I was not the one who answered. I could only offer corrections to the voice that was not mine. I thought perhaps more love was the solution, a higher degree of performance in order to preserve my rights. I had never wanted to be the girlfriend who would have the doctorate but give it up to be a stay at home mom for a man with a real job. I laid myself bare in an effort to be seen, in an effort to be loved correctly. Until he began to forget how to love me physically, and I again memorized the way the plain white ceiling swirled in my iris. It has been months since our relationship has gone that far. Now we have two kittens, a bonded pair. A new lease has been signed, and in two months it will be two-years. I have stretched myself thin, being beautiful and lovable, that my body has disintegrated beneath me. I feel as though I have become nothing, in the effort to be the perfect lover. If enough of me disappears, I may finally be loved.
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