Doesn’t she look beautiful?
We all do, before they get hold of us.
We are all the light. We shine at dinner parties and impromptu potluck lunches. We know what to wear, how to move, how to entice and flirt without getting too involved. We lay a hand on his shoulder, we lean down to whisper in his ear. By the time the night is over, he is enthralled.
He follows our Instagram account. He tracks us down on Facebook. He carefully selects which photos to like, choosing the ones which show a little bit of cleavage but not too much — he doesn’t want to be a perv. He doesn’t realize that his intentions are already far, far too obvious.
We are adults by this time. We won’t push past our misgivings for just anyone. We won’t choose the man who lacks in social skills, who trips all over himself to please, who runs hot and cold at a touch. Not unless he gives us a really, really good reason to make that choice.
Maybe he does. Maybe he has some shine of his own, something notable with which to barter. Perhaps he has a particularly pretty face, has a cute body, has social capital in the form of a doctoral degree or a six figure income or a beach house. In the case of Jonah Hill, he is an actor.
We choose.
We choose thinking we can fix the problems we already see. We choose thinking we can help him heal. We choose thinking his positive traits will make up for the ways he can sometimes make us feel. We choose because we are so, so lonely.
We choose because his immaturity also means he moves faster and with more insistence than most guys our age, and we like that, we like the sense that we know where this is going from the get-go. We like the feeling that he is in this for real. We like knowing he cares so, so deeply.
I don’t believe that we are blinded, either by love or by desire. I don’t believe that we don’t see the cracks. By this point in our lives, we are not ignorant in that particular way. Our naivete lies in a different area. We believe we can fix the cracks we see. We believe we be the healer he needs.
We are so, so wrong.
He will feed into our delusions. He will kiss us on the forehead and coo, I’m so lucky you came into my life. When he messes up, which he will, he will come sobbing into our beds and tell stories about how he only slept with her because she reminded him of his mother/his abusive aunt/his first girlfriend who died and we will fall for it. The first time. The third time.
He will cook for us. It will be an average meal but we will tell him it is the best thing we have ever tasted and we will convince ourselves that’s true. He will cook for us and it will be a series of meals served late at night, too cold, starchy, tasteless, unpleasant. Served by the hands of someone who expects to be rewarded simply for showing up, for trying at all.
We will watch him flirt whenever our attention leaves him even for a second. We will be expected to put up with this behavior. The actions of an insecure man can never be criticized. It is anathema. It is not allowed.
We will be denied the right to hang out with our male friends. We will be denied the right to hang out with our best female friend who is dating a man we hooked up with ten years ago at a college party when we were 19 years old and high for the first time. We will be denied the right to hang out at certain clubs where the bartender is particularly attractive. We will have an unofficial curfew, and we will laugh about it to our friends but we will find ourselves obeying anyway, just to avoid another fight.
There will be many, many fights. He will stonewall or yell. Sometimes we will scream back in frustration and when we do, his hurt face in the morning will tell us that we stepped over the line. We reminded him of his stepmother/narcissistic first girlfriend/cheating last girlfriend. We have betrayed him and now we must pay the price, we must be good, we must spend the next week the next month making it up to him until he forgives us all our trespasses and then we can be happy again.
We will convince ourselves that only he can make us happy again.
We will forget that we were ever happy, without him. That we were in fact much happier, without him. That he is making us unhappy. So unhappy.
Maybe we will leave him. Maybe he will find someone new and leave us. Maybe we will grow a spine and he will leave us and say it is our fault. Maybe he will leave and we will get so, so depressed, like he was our oxygen. Maybe we will not feel connected to the person we were before him. Maybe we will forget that we loved ourselves, before him.
We loved ourselves, before him. He never loved us at all.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Jon Flobrant on Unsplash