ghosted, or a meditation on the lingering and terrifying fear that each new man you meet will hurt you like the one before
In June you meet a man while shopping for oversized tropical plants at a greenhouse in Houston, and he looks so sincere in the sunlight you almost accept his number. But then comes that sneaking suspicion again, like a garter snake creeping through the patches of dirt behind your house. It’s not enough to simply decline the slip of inked paper scrawled in his loopy handwriting and turn away; it’s not even enough to take the number and dispose of it later. You have to decline his number and then provide a brief summary of your reasoning for the decline, starting with the fact that your first relationship was abusive and ending with the fact that you’re worried whatever would come of accepting his number would be too.
And it goes on like that. At the library, with a shy investment banker from OkCupid, at a summer class, with the skateboarder who works part-time at a pizza place, with the man whose name you can’t remember who slept over on your dingy one-person mattress after a disappointing hookup. Each time you almost get somewhere. Somewhere, but not anywhere. Just not far enough. And it happens not suddenly, not randomly, but knowingly. You realize it in the shower, or when you’re heating up a frozen pizza for dinner, or when you can’t concentrate on the drive home from work. Then it’s time to end things again with the next man before he even has a chance. A chance not to make you a better person, or be your guest at weddings, or a chance to take you to that one film you’ve been wanting to see, but a chance to hurt you.
Psychologists call part of it hindsight bias. One of those terms that sounds so foolishly simple, so common sense, that academics from all the other disciplines would scoff if they heard of it. Why have names for everyday phenomena? Why give a name to the sound gum makes when it’s pulled from your shoe, or for the feeling of being nostalgic for a place you’ve never been, or why we fall in love with people who look like us (maybe too much like us). But it’s so simple you can’t even believe you never realized it before. You start seeing a guy, then you drop him, and start coming up with reasons why he would have been (and surely he must currently be) a dangerous person, a person capable of hurting others and treating them as disposable and throwing them away and neglecting them. You think, the blond carpenter looked a little too sad when you declined his invitation to stay in his cabin up north that one weekend. You think, that pizza delivery man responded a little too passive-aggressively when you told him you weren’t interested in historical films. You think, the high school teacher got an odd look in his eye when he took you out to that first bar.
You’ll take any excuse, any miniscule reason, to end things before they even have a chance to begin. You justify every decision, which are all the same, to prevent things from ever going any further. Because you can’t be with a man again like the one you were with three years ago, who held your body down in bed and came inside you and went inside you and stayed inside you as you bucked like a deer against him, trying to get free. You can’t be with a man again like that one three years ago, who told you it was rape and he admitted it and said he was sorry, only to turn around and deny it. Who claimed he introduced you to happiness, who claimed he had given you everything, who yelled until you shrank when you tried to escape, like one of those plants that curls up when you touch its leaves, no matter how gently.
And some part of you, deep down, knows. You know these men will go on to have wonderful wives and wonderful families and beautiful golden retrievers and spend their days reading on the porch and going to work and treating everyone in their lives with the utmost care.
You know. And yet you don’t want to know.
And part of this is what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. How people attribute someone’s behavior to internal factors, to their personalities, instead of to the situation or the surrounding environment. So each time, you attribute your discomfort, your fear, to the look in his eye, or the knot in his tie, or even the way he holds his fork, instead of attributing it to your immense and overwhelming fear of being set back three years ago.
And you don’t realize. You don’t realize that instead of being set back three years ago, you could have been set forward three years by now, if only you could see that not everyone, not every man at a greenhouse with the sun behind him, is out to get you.
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