You know what's interesting? I'll tell you. I think it's interesting that even when I thought I was happy, I really wasn't. I came across an email that I sent to my good friend Frankie a few months ago:
in a terrible funk. Happy to be getting out of town but really feeling the burden of uncertainty/unemployment. Will call you this week when I can talk without sounding like I'm channeling Eeyore.
This email was sent when I was in one of my healthiest relationships with someone I really liked and had just scored a timely fellowship that would take me to Africa and Turkey. Yet I was channeling Eeyore?
This account should serve to vindicate any woman who has ever chastised herself for not giving the nice guy a chance.
I met him online. He was at the bottom of my list in terms of people who had reached out to me on a website that was a bit racier than match but less tawdry than craigslist. If you've seen or been on either, you'll agree that's a pretty good description. If you haven't, then consider yourself blissfully ignorant. His initial email introduced himself as a journalist and then mentioned a professional trade magazine I had never heard of. I was dismissive, thinking that that's not a real journo and in his pictures he looked very young and very Jewish. Neither of those attributes whets my appetite.
We exchanged a few emails but my prohibitive night shift at work was hard to navigate logistically. In fact, I missed the boat on one guy, a sexy filmmaker, who after weeks of flirtatious texts and phone calls ended up hooking up with a good friend on the same site. The next guy I went out with was a great date but verbally dressed me down when he failed to physically do so.
Offline, I was excited by the prospect of a promising romance with a hot local news reporter who I couldn't quite figure out. Was he chasing me or just a determined networker? One night of drunken carousing downtown and I had my answer. Tall, dark, handsome with charm to spare. Too much charm. Overwhelmed, one day when I couldn't believe my luck, I gushed, "How is it possible that you don't have a girlfriend?!" Silence.
I sat up and stared at him. That's when he told me that they had an "understanding." She was traveling the world and he was a free man? I was dubious. So were my friends that I consulted. "Does his girlfriend know about this arrangement?" they wondered. My pesky conscience and belief in relationship karma forced me to end our fall fling.
My personal trainer who was privy to these mishaps in matchmaking was endlessly amused by what he perceived as a real-life Carrie Bradshaw... only with less success.
So next at bat was the nice guy who was casually persistent, following up every week to ten days asking when we were going to get that elusive drink. After canceling once, or was it twice? I forget. Anyway, I finally decided one Friday night after an ill-timed afternoon nap that I needed to get out. I texted him and asked if he wanted to meet up at 9:30. He was game.
My girlfriend, who had nabbed the filmmaker off the site and made out with him for four hours, suggested a South African wine bar near Hell's Kitchen. I was late as usual and found him at a table against a wall. He looked about 15. We talked for a while. I found out he was from Missouri and possessed the stereotypical Midwestern mild manners and niceties. My purse vibrated and lacking the social etiquette to resist my crackberry addiction, I looked at it. An IM from aforementioned girlfriend: "How's it going?"
I smiled apologetically as I tapped out a quick update: "Nice guy, no sparks."
And that should have been the end of it. Isn't that enough? Nah, I decided that I was going to give the nice guy another shot. Maybe I was destined to meet my soul mate through him, I reasoned. Plus, I enjoyed the fact that he was quick-witted and well, nice.
We met out for dinner and drinks again that same week. After several glasses of wine, he had yet to make a move. I was OK with that but more intrigued. His Charlie Rose impression was spot on and he was a gentleman. We went out on two more dates before he kissed me and I finally decided I liked him. We hit the ground running, spending an entire weekend together the following week. He told me he was falling in love with me. I was taken aback but lacking any knack for self-preservation, I took it in a stride. Actually, no that's not entirely true. I gave him a chance to recant. At dinner a few nights after our whirlwind weekend, I told him that things may have moved too fast and I understood if he needed to recalibrate. That’s when he reached across the table, took my face in his hands and said, “I think about you every minute of the day, why would I want to do that?” Sold.
The next few weeks we talked about religion, he was Atheist. How would we reconcile that with our kids? "Relax," my sister advised, "y'all are being crazy." Yet the premature questions kept surfacing- and he was asking them! How would my Muslim family react? To our surprise, my mother was supportive, if only because she ambitiously saw an Atheist as an empty canvas she could paint Moderate Muslim in flashy green and yellow (who was I to correct my mother?). Suddenly, we were an item, spending most of our week and weekends together. My girlfriend who had texted during the first date called him “insta boyfriend.” My friends loved him. They were so proud that I had finally fallen for a nice guy devoid of arrogance or the requisite head games that come with dating men in a city where the perception of unlimited options dwarfed the threat of dying alone.
And for the most part, he was a great boyfriend: reliable, considerate, funny, effortless company. I remember an elderly couple I interviewed years ago on their 50th wedding anniversary saying that you should “marry someone with whom you have great conversations.” And he was the smartest guy I had dated in a long time. Not the most ambitious, but that I possessed in spades. Not the best dressed. A lot of his clothes were tattered and frayed, a trait I attempted to remedy by buying him a Jack Spade Messenger bag to replace a shockingly ragged one that was inexplicably still in use despite his daily interaction with prominent lawyers, dressed to the nines. “Tell me it has sentimental value,” I remarked on our first date when he caught me glancing down at it. “Nope,” he laughed. One day I noticed that all of his shoes looked like Oliver Twist’s collection so I bought him a pair of Cole Haans, using a sale as an excuse. “You shouldn’t try to change him,” a guy friend cautioned. “I’m just sprucing him up, not changing his style,” I countered. I loved that he was brilliant but unpretentious and if that bled into his wardrobe, so be it. He never bought me flowers or whisked me off to fancy restaurants but he made me laugh and was supportive in the wake of my unexpected unemployment. My friends told me that he looked at me adoringly when I was in the midst of telling a story. It’s amazing how the relief and comfort that comes with a healthy relationship can so quickly make you forget the despair and loneliness that abounds when you’re single in this city.
Shortly after being laid off, I won a reporting fellowship to Africa and Turkey. I was so happy that my desperate need to escape New York during the oppressive negativity that loomed like a dark cloud over the city was going to be paid for by someone else. Two days into my trip, we had an IM exchange that my friends would refer to as the yellow post-it.
I’ll refrain from quoting it here but basically he expressed doubts about our relationship. I had chalked it up to cold feet that most guys get when they meet “the One.” I figured he was smitten but too scared to admit as much. I was pretty wrong. He broke up with me in an IM when I (jetlagged and stressed out about my reporting partner/camerawoman who made my crazy look normal) pushed an issue regarding his failure to email me and demanded to know if our relationship was in fact on a level playing field. “I guess I’m not that guy right now.” My sister would describe my next few remarks as schoolyard bully tactics. I lashed out as I do when hurt and sealed the deal. Instead of exploring beautiful Istanbul that night, I returned to the hotel and cried myself to sleep. I woke up and sent him an email. “Did I just dream that we broke up over IM?” His response was swift and sobering. “No, we broke up and I think it’s for the best.”
The rest of my trip was shit. I was on autopilot, doing my interviews, making the perfunctory appearances at seminars and once in Ethiopia, I completely unraveled under the strain of witnessing heartbreaking poverty and well, my own loss. We had a long conversation where he reassured me that he cared about me more than I knew and that “nothing has been decided.” I felt better. But upon the completion of a ten-hour flight back to New York, I spoke to him and said that my stomach had been in knots awaiting this momentous conversation. “I know, babe,” he said as I cradled the phone with my neck while getting my bag out of the overhead bin, “but I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” I couldn’t believe it. First he had broken up with me on IM while I was in a foreign country and now on the phone when I was in the same city?
I never really got a reason. I pushed and pushed and he said something about how you should want to spend every minute with someone when you’re in love but that he found himself craving space. When I reasoned that that was an unrealistic paradigm, he said he couldn’t account for his doubts. Then he told me that I was the perfect girlfriend who showered him with more affection and attention than anyone else and perhaps his own self-esteem issues couldn’t handle that. Immediately after offering this explanation, he dismissed it as a hunch and likely untrue. Then weeks later, when I was still trying to make sense of how the man who was falling in love with me one minute was suddenly fleeing, he told me that when I confronted him on IM about not emailing me, he began to wonder why he hadn’t and decided that he must not miss me and therefore wasn’t really into me. “I just didn’t think this was someone I wanted to get to know better or have romantic feelings for.” Ouch.
He wanted to be friends. Either to ease the guilt of breaking my spirit or because he genuinely liked me, just not enough to love me. I missed him so often and so much I agreed that I could do that and I wanted to do it quickly. But every time I’ve tried to ignite a friendship from the embers of our relationship, it’s blown up in my face. Granted, the deluge of tears that erupt when he acts distant and awkward only extinguishes my attempts to blaze a trail to that platonic place. And there’s no evidence of what we had when I see him. By that, I mean he has no discernible soft spot for me and a potent paranoia that I’m operating with a secret agenda to win him back. The former I feel and the latter he tells me. It’s evidence of a hubris I would have described as incongruent with the man I knew. And my anguish that he can’t rise to the occasion when it was his idea to end the relationship is met with an anger I also find uncharacteristic of my mild-mannered ex.
Are you still reading? Because wow, that all sounds so self-indulgent and boring. Anyway, the irony is that this was the nice guy who initially produced no sparks. And I’ve often wondered if this was my relationship karma coming home to roost. Maybe he was exacting revenge for all the other nice guys who I had dismissed without a second thought. Because it’s one thing to be dumped by an arrogant asshole, but it’s on a different plane of demoralization, when the nice guy turns into an arrogant asshole.
Epilogue:I’m healing. Unexpectedly, a romance has developed with a good friend of mine. We’ve known each other for five years and have been there for each other to share the ups and downs of our lives. We used to see each other a couple of times a year, vowing to make time more often because it was so much fun. Then a few weeks ago, we met for our traditional dinner and a bad movie. An affinity for a genre our significant others typically detest, we became each other’s “scary movie buddy.” Since those are usually B movies, we drank a little and shelled out a lot for a flick undeserving of an audience. That was our tradition. “A Haunting in Connecticut” was where we connected again. But something was different. I was different, according to him, “hotter.” And. Heartbroken. Over nachos and beer, I blinked back tears as I explained how it had all come undone. As usual, he offered to kick the ass of the latest fool to let a good thing go. “I know some people,” he joked. But that wasn’t all that was different. When I sprained my foot and he came over to help with the cabin fever, he was different. Towards me. The energy had changed and when I asked him about it he told me that he loved me too much to risk our friendship. I was relieved because I was determined to make myself whole again… on my own. But we started spending more time together and now we’re dating..sort of. Fingers crossed that this new frontier doesn’t bankrupt the pioneers.
