My sister and I have an annual tradition—every year we go shopping on Christmas Eve. I love the swarming madness and sharp elbows of holiday shoppers. The irony delights me. One of my sister’s gifts, each year, is to go with me. She’s always done with her shopping.
After long anxious hours pushing through a packed mall, we were now alone, rolling along southern Jersey streets, warm in her family-sized SUV. She was driving us to Target, to enjoy the last bits of our harried Christmas shopping ritual. My sister decided that was the perfect time to show me a picture on her phone. It was of my ex-girlfriend and her new fiancé.
“I thought I told you.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I’d remember if you said anything about a fiancé.”
“Did I tell Mom?”
“If you did, she didn’t say anything to me.”
When you’re with someone on-and-off for seven years, they often bond with members of your family. If you’re like me, you do your best to make sure it’s not weird for everyone involved. Which means, most of the time, it’s just weird for you.
“I swear, I told you. …So, Josh told you, huh?”
“Yeah. Like, as soon as he picked me up at the train station. Which was a nice touch. So, is she happy? He a good guy? He looks like he’s, um… nothing like me.”
“Yeah. I know. She says they’re happy. Been engaged for a while. They’re talking about buying a house. She wants to get pregnant in the new year. So yeah, I’d say they’re serious.”
“That’s good. No, it is. Tell her I’m happy for her. Or something like that.”
This was one more occasion in a long line of weird moments involving my ex-girlfriend. As I stared at her smiling face on my sister’s phone, I silently told myself, “That’s her fiancé.”
And I was happy for her. Or something like that. To calm my racing heart, I handed my sister back her phone and daydreamed about a tuna fish sandwich.
“Are you dating anyone?”
“Ha! I don’t know. Not really. You know how I am. It’s hard to find anyone who can deal—”
“You’re not hard to deal with. You just need someone who’s—”
“—criminally insane?”
“I was going to say … rare. Love is also a numbers game.”
“Spoken like a banker. …Sorry.”
“You still won’t do online dating, huh?”
“I was thinking I can take a class. Maybe find something women and men both take. Makes it social. But also I wanna pick something I want to learn about, in case there’s no cute girls in the class.”
I smashed the Target cart into the corner bumper that protected the products from people like me who weren’t paying attention to where they went. I’m not at my best in a big box store. All the products and visual stimuli overwhelm me and I retreat into a zen-like focus. Or, like I do when I’m with my sister, I focus on whatever we’re talking about at the exclusion of everything else. Most importantly, I ignore all the products vying for my attention as well as all the other customers navigating around me, the guy who’s pushing his shopping cart like a drunk driver.
“Excuse me. Sorry about that.” I felt I should apologize to the woman I’d just startled with the crash of the cart. She smiled and nodded weakly. She was busy pricing Pepperidge Farms holiday sausages.
“Mom thinks you should try online dating. She doesn’t understand why you don’t. You’re always online.”
“Just Mom, huh? Well, of course she wants me to. You know, if she hears me say a woman’s name twice she asks if I’m dating her.”
“No she doesn’t. Ssstahp.”
“I swear she does.”
“Fucking Mom…”
“I know right? She can’t help herself. She’s still hoping I give her grandkids. You haven’t made enough, I guess.”
“She’s hilarious. I think you’ll find someone eventually.”
My sister paused to pick up almond milk for me and Lactaid for her.
“You know what kills me? I’m convinced now that I need to not want anything because, recently, whenever I want someone, if I make it clear that I’ve fallen for her … I’m an idiot. Like, I just say whatever. I’m totally surprised by what I say. Or do. It never works for me to be blatantly honest. It’s like no one can believe that I’d feel so much, so soon — like, it must be some game I’m running.”
I stopped the cart to pick out bars of soap. My skin is very sensitive, so I pretty much can only use Ivory soap. Somehow, this seems like a metaphor to me. I have extremely sensitive skin.
My sister picked up new toothbrushes for her kids.
“You know how I tell my friends, if you wanna give a woman a great date, give her a cool story to tell? Well, that works for seduction but not for girlfriends. Like, I tried something new — I told myself no plans. No stories. Y’know, just totally disable the storytelling part of my mind. I thought that way it would be real, and raw, and emotionally honest. That was sooo stupid.”
“Emotionally honest doesn’t mean you just react without thinking.”
“I know that now. But I was tired of—”
“Acting like a monk?”
“Yes. One night? A long weekend? Sure. I’m golden. You know I’m a flirt. But all I learned from being totally honest is if I don’t hold my cards back, play that game, if I’m not seducing a woman … I have no idea how to romance a woman to become my girlfriend. They’re totally different skill-sets.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. It’s gotta be me. I’m the only constant. It’s not them. I’m the reason I fumble away the ones I want. But I don’t want to play the I-don’t-care game if I do care. It feels manipulative. Y’know? Then I email some dumb shit that scares her off. Done deal.”
“Do you ever ask girls out who aren’t online?”
“I meet them at places I go. You know how I am. If they make me laugh, and they seem sexy and super smart, well, I say to her we should go out sometime. I ask for her number or email or whatever-”
“You ask for her email? Hahaha. I’m so glad I have Josh.”
“I bet you are.”
What I don’t tell my sister is how sometimes, after driving home, I don’t want to open the car door. I know what ache waits on the other side. Even though I’m alone, I choose to sit in my parking spot, silent. Sometimes for an hour or more. What better suits the sting of loneliness than the hollow feel of a still-quiet city street in the small hours of morning? It’s like coffee and cigarettes: they may not be good for you together, but the combination just feels better.
On our way home from Christmas shopping, my sister asked me about another one of our holiday traditions. Like millions of Americans, we’ve developed a ritual around Love, Actually. There are some movies you love no matter how sad they make you. That’s how I feel about Love, Actually. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a great movie. You know what I mean.
[spoiler alert]
My sister’s the Anglophile. She’s the reason I first watched and why I now love it. She knows I’m a sucker for a love story. Of course, that’s also exactly what gives me trouble IRL. She teases me for the fact that I genuinely tear up every time I see the writer Jamie lead the parade of people through the streets of Portugal, on his way to find the woman he’s fallen in love with. When the two of them both reveal they’ve been taking language lessons, and they confess in their broken English and Portuguese that they love each other, I look like a widower remembering a lost love, only, it’s more like I’m crying the tears of a little boy with a skinned-knee. Every time.
“You want to watch it?” My sister asked as soon as we were back at her place. She knew my answer. We’re both saps.
Watching Love, Actually with my sister always delights me, and yet, equally, it makes me terribly sad. There we were. Another Christmas. Eventually, my nephew lay against me on the couch. And as part of our tradition, I secretly wondered if maybe this year I’ll find myself in a real love story.
It’s a terribly vain thought. A selfish, self-pitying wish. I know that. No one is promised love. No one should feel he or she deserves it. Some of us get lucky. Some of us don’t. But that awareness of the unfairness of love doesn’t stop me from making yet another quiet wish that maybe, next Christmas, that ephemeral British romantic comedy won’t lay waste to my emotional landscape. I wouldn’t feel like such a complete sap if it were a Billy Wilder film. I could forgive myself if I was getting broken up over The Apartment.
The key is to not become bitter.
Ignore the thought that you’re unlucky in love. I’m often tempted by this one. It seems there is solace in that bitterness. Things are decided. Definite. Concrete. You know that you’re alone. You’ll always be alone. Kinda like a lifer, you learn to deal with your prison sentence.
Despite all evidence to the contrary that I might reasonably expect to find someone to love in the future, I still fight those bitter prison thoughts. To keep them from consuming my hope, I rely on the placebo effect.
In medical trials, a portion of the research subjects are given a sugar pill, told that it’s medicine, and, because they believe they’ve taken medicine, their body responds like they have. I use this trick on myself. I trust myself. I believe what I tell myself. Obviously, if I’m aware I’m doing this trick, it’s not technically the placebo effect. But it seems to work the same.
I tell myself that somewhere out there is a woman making herself lunch.
That feels real. She doesn’t know it but … one day I will make her lunch. Together, we’ll enjoy the lunch I make for us. I like to daydream about those sunlit meals, eaten in an endless stream of imagined kitchens, dining rooms, breakfast nooks, backyard patios, sunny verandas, and sometimes in bed.
When I daydream about lunch with this future love, I never picture her. Instead I imagine our hands enjoying our meal in the same small ways, those well-practiced ways we’ve done hundreds of times before. This is how I daydream about love so that it doesn’t crush me.
The thought works like medicine. Or like a placebo. Either way, it’s why I still believe. One day I’ll share meals with the woman I love. Of course, I could be wrong. For now, my imaginary lunches sustain me. They keep me from growing bitter, like tea left to steep too long. They let me dream of a love that’s small. And real. Not idealized. Not artificially romantic, like a British rom-com. I need a love story to feel a little idyllic. This is the best way to tell myself a love story while believing such a love could one day be as real as a tuna fish sandwich.