Love in the Time of Distraction

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Saturday night faded into Sunday morning, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Anne, a fiery redhead I had met five months earlier.

Late night texts aren’t usually good ideas, but I did it anyway. I snapped a screenshot of her latest Instagram post, a photo she captioned “The hair swish selfie 💋,” and sent it back to her.

The photo is a black and white pic. She’s wearing a white chiffon blouse with polka dots. Her hair, indeed mid-swish, framed her lips a perfect gram.

“Wow,” I say aloud at the bar as I type my own caption to send her.

“This. 🔥🔥🔥”

We texted back and forth for about an hour, catching up on life and work and adventures. It was a welcome, late-night deviation from a routine weekend night. And what’s more, it confirmed the spark still burned through time and space.

Anne and I had two blazing hot scenes together. The first, when she stopped in Austin on a solo road trip across the lower 48 states. We matched on Tinder as she drove through west Texas and I gave her the best taste of Austin I could curate on a Monday night with a few hours notice. I managed to get a table at one of the city’s buzziest new spots in the hipster east-side and waited at the bar.

“Just got here,” I wrote.

“Very punctual. That’s wonderful. I’m en route about 5 min away.”

“Ha. I’m at the bar. Glasses and plaid.”

“Scanning the bar with no luck. Black jacket red lips.”

Those lips.

Dinner was comfortable. And exciting. We got the check and headed a few blocks over for drinks at an Austin live music mainstay, the White Horse. Then, a brief front-seat make-out session in my car before we moved to a hotel downtown. Nobody had ever bought Anne a hotel room, I learned the next morning.

Anne’s plan for a one-night stopover in Austin turned into two nights and three days. She said she was having so much fun she didn’t want to leave. I agreed.

We had dinner again on Tuesday, this time at one of my favorite Indian spots downtown. We bar hopped on a quiet Tuesday night and resumed the previous night’s adventure. But not before snapping a four-shot series in a photo booth, a tangible memory of our mutual seduction.

I took Anne back to her Airbnb and kissed her goodnight. A long kiss, laced with uncertainty about whether this was just a flicker or a flame that could expand. “This was very unexpected,” I said, interrupting our kiss. I stopped to provide additional commentary before driving home.

“You’re a beautiful stranger.”

“So comfortable and exciting.”

“Like a magnet.”

“You’re fire.”

♦◊♦

Our second scene came a few months later. I flew to Chicago for the weekend where Anne had planned another stop on her road trip. My Lyft driver took me from O’Hare to Logan Square, a charming northwest neighborhood where Anne waited for me on the sidewalk. We kissed outside the building and went upstairs to get reacquainted. She was still fire.

Chicago was comfortable and exciting too. We saw my all-time favorite painting, Picasso’s Old Guitarist at the Chicago Art Institute, admired a collection of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings, one of Anne’s favorites, ate deep-dish pizza, soaked in the architecture, and shared stories in Millennium Park while we watched young kids scamper in the fountain. We even took a field trip to a location I was scouting for short story I’m still writing, a Seth Rogen-esque stoner heist filled with misadventure on a cold, Chicago winter day. Anne didn’t mind that the place was 45-minutes from Logan Square. And neither did I. The conversation never hit the brakes.

Chicago was the last place I saw Anne. She finished her roadtrip a month later and settled back into her life at home. I returned home to Austin, and settled back into mine.

I’m still up-to-date on her Instagram feed. It’s a collection of well-curated black and white photos from her adventures and businesses in California. But a flame via text is fragile, especially as you move further from each other’s magnetism. It takes presence—sharing time, space, breathe, touch, light, and sound—for that flame to provide real warmth.

Every so often, someone like Anne comes along and stays in orbit longer than expected, filling my world with possibility. But our relationship, however magnetic in Austin and Chicago, is no longer punctuated with an exclamation or series of expressive emojis. It’s an open, lingering, and fading question resting just out of focus. Our relationship’s magnetism has weakened with time and distance. It’s hard to keep someone in your orbit when you aren’t near their center.

Unlike Anne, most people float into anonymity almost as quickly as they appear. I’ve met thousands of them at school, in bars, at the gym, at parties. Some of these strangers pass almost as soon as the conversation ends. They’re the kind of people you share commentary with while watching a game. Neither of you has an expectation for a sequel. Sometimes these strangers become digital friends. After a while, they’re passive acquaintances who appear exclusively on phones to help fill the empty moments of the day. In our digital world, it’s easy to maintain passive contact with semi-anonymous, beautiful strangers. These people on the periphery accumulate with each trip, each house party, and each new adventure.

♦◊♦

I’ve met other girls like Anne over the years. Like Sophie in Foz do Iguaçu. We shared one night as I çrossed the border from Argentina on a two-month backpacking trip. She welcomed me to Brazil with my first authentic Brazilian churrascaria before we went to her place to fool around. Or Nicole, a Lebanese student I met in Vienna at a moot court competition during my last semester of law school. Nicole was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan polyglot with a mind like a rocket. I couldn’t get enough–so much so that our relationship never moved from the explosive conversation. She transformed me into a love-struck interviewer, peppering her with question after question, hoping her soul would imprint itself on mine before the trip was over. We managed to find each other over and over during the competition, sneaking in conversation between rounds or over drinks after the day’s competition was over.

After I returned home to Duke, I sent her an email. “I wish I had more time to learn about you,” I wrote. “Trips like these, while wonderful, are tinged with sadness. A person is left to think about possibilities and potentialities. There is little that one can take away that is concrete. I have a feeling that you might be on my mind for awhile longer.”

Nicole and I planned a reunion. I’d fly to Beirut in the summer after graduation. In the fall, she’d move to the U.S. to for a masters degree, maybe in Boston or Washington, D.C, where I was moving to practice law. But life happened. She stayed in Beirut, and those trips never materialized. She too floated out of orbit.

She’s still as beautiful as ever. And every so often, Nicole’s olive skin and warm eyes appear in my news feed. Each time, I’m reminded why I fell for her. But Nicole remains on the periphery, close enough to see and feel, but still out of reach.

With Anne, Sophie, and Nicole, I’ve shared enough to create a story worth telling. Our flings and flirtation are happy memories I cherish. But these stories are built on a certain type of love, a love that is off-center and misaligned from where it’s most powerful.

♦◊♦

Love on the periphery is laced with possibility, nostalgia, and unrealized attachment. And while its intoxicating, this kind of love is often a beautiful illusion. It’s easy to romanticize these interactions–almost impossible not to. They feel free and raw and real because they’re so brief, like the light of a firefly on a humid summer night. There’s no time for games or pretense when the flame is hot for just a moment.

Love on the periphery holds you for a time. And it’s easy to say, “If I’m ever in California or Brazil or Beirut, we can pick up where we left off.” But I know these are distractions, like phone notifications that give us dopamine without any substantive reward. When love on the periphery distracts, when you look to the side in hopes that love will come into view, you miss what’s straight ahead. It’s a beautiful distraction, no doubt, but a distraction all the same. Love is best when it’s centered, when it’s now, when it’s staring right back at you.

Unrealized possibility hurts too. And often, the person resting in the periphery will slide from view. They move on. They look straight ahead, never allowing you to pull them back into focus. The hoped-for reunion doesn’t happen, leaving a illusory loss, but one that feels real all the same. Or the person pops up into the digital world with a new paramour in hand. They’re more interested in love that’s centered and focused, unconsidered with what’s become blurry on the sides.

Yes, life is dukkha, the buddhist concept that life is unsatisfactoriness, and that it comes from attachment. The Buddha got that right. Attachment to peripheral love hurts, and it’s unable to satisfy.

French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty talks about false love on the periphery of existence. His argument goes something like this: false love happens on the periphery while the lover plays a specific role, like a traveler seeking romantic adventure. True love, in contrast, is centered and encompasses a person’s entire being. It’s not limited to an isolated experience or one piece of a person’s life, but persists through those fleeting moments.

I don’t know if Merleau-Ponty knew about the addictive qualities of peripheral love and instagram crushes. He married Suzanne Jolibois at 32, and they remained together until his sudden death 21 years later.

Peripheral love still holds its appeal, like other vices that deliver a fleeting experience. I can get lost in the fantasy of another red-hot weekend and the excitement it brings. But I also know that another peripheral love won’t rise to more than a dukkha-laced hit, distracting me from the centered, focused, enlightened love that comes from real life as it unfolds in front of me.

* Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

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