My longest relationship lasted for the better part of a decade, give or take, which is an impressive number before you find out that it existed in fits and spurts. Even for on-and-off relationships, it was especially maddening, in part because we never really bothered to define when we were on or off so I couldn’t tell you if we were more on than off or vice versa. There were no blowout fights, no grand pleas for forgiveness. We just were, or we weren’t, depending on the weather or our moods or other people in our lives. I still consider those years an accomplishment of sorts. I don’t have many friendships that have lasted so long. I am a lot to handle. I know I am even harder to love.
Some of my friends are in relationships with their high school sweethearts. Others found each other months or years ago, but made so much sense together that it seems they’ve been together forever. They are comfortable with each other, they know each other, they finish each other’s sentences. I didn’t have that.
Instead, I had someone whose presence in my life I had to explain to my friends, because it made sense to only me that this was the way we just were. I still understood him better than any other person who came or went in my life. I could predict his moods and he knew the way I like my coffee and we laughed at the little jokes that wouldn’t make sense to anybody but us.
The most telling artifact of our time together is our text thread, which has existed for almost as long as I’ve had a smartphone. Sometimes there are weeks between the timestamps, sometimes there are thoughts and fragments and GIFs that come in rapid succession. We have taken it upon ourselves to check in with each other, even if we’re in one of the down periods of not being together, to ask how the other is and what’s new and hey, this funny thing happened to me the other day and I thought of you. Most of the time, not much is new. Not because one or both of us are living boring lives, but because we know each other well enough to infer the space between “not much.”
We have seen each other through four apartments (and a time when I moved outside of the city for a few months to find myself, even though he told me I would not find myself in Greenwich, Connecticut, and he was right), a college graduation, six jobs, and as many birthdays as we have spent years together. I was 19 when we met. He will be 30 this year. And it seems to me that now, because of this big, looming, final number, we will finally have to grow up. Neither of us are very good at that. But he is getting better at it. I am not quite there yet.
Being on and off with someone — whether it’s because you cannot commit or you don’t want to commit, or a strange combination of the two — is, it seems to me, a luxury of being young. The older you get, the more it seems like a strange half-avoidance. After a certain point, you can’t ignore the feeling that you’re sort of...well, wasting time. That though there is nothing wrong with this arrangement, maybe your time would be better spent with a person to whom you do want to commit. Isn’t that what love is supposed to look like? Everyone else says so.
But when you are still young, you can avoid a relationship, in part because you are in something that isn’t not a relationship, technically. When parents ask when you’ll settle down, you’ll point to the other person with a shrug as if to say, maybe. Why not? They could wind up being the one, sure, I guess. Anything’s possible. You have time to figure all of that out. Until, of course, you don’t anymore.
You both know better. We know better. I will not be the girl — the woman — he decides he loves enough to commit to. But I am beginning to realize more and more that I was never designed to be.
I jokingly called him old when we were together, which was a slightly perverse nickname, but I have always been terrified of age, so it made sense in my head. But now that he’s hitting this milestone, it feels less like a joke and more like an eternity. Thirty is something I can’t wrap my head around, and don’t quite need to for a few years. He texts me and tells me that he’s figuring out this business of being an adult. Finally. I tell him maybe I’ll try it one day. He says that if I don’t have to rush it, there’s no need.
It strikes me, in a way, that we have grown up together, have navigated the bizarre post-adolescence of young adulthood in a big, strange city together. When one of us was locked out of the apartment, the other one was there with a place to stay the night. He bought me drinks when I was still too young and my ID was too obviously fake. He laughed at my attempts to cook, and we huddled up together in his apartment when Hurricane Sandy created a blackout downtown and I had nowhere to stay.
On-and-off relationships are often criticized, and the people in them are told that there is something wrong with them, that they need to stop messing around and commit. But I think that they can sometimes be helpful, that having something familiar when the whole world is scary and serious and new can be a crutch, sure, but you have to learn how to survive it somehow.
He will grow up now — or he won’t, because if New York is one thing, it is a Neverland that convinces the lost boy in all of us that we’re Pan. But he is feeling the pressures of getting his act together, I can read this between the text bubbles in my phone. His siblings have children. His friends are all married, or will be married this year. It’s likely that our days are numbered. If we have run our course, I will be the first to admit surprise that we even lasted this long.
Maybe we were each too fiercely independent for each other, or maybe we knew that we were already dealing with more than enough and a relationship could pull us under. Maybe I am poeticizing this. Maybe we just weren’t meant to be.
But, for a while, we were each other’s training wheels, the most constant thing for one another in a sea of uncertainty. We didn’t need the other person all of the time. We were too full of ourselves to admit that we needed someone else, and anyway, we can do some adult things with varying degrees of competence. I’m not totally hopeless, and neither is he. But every so often, if we faltered, the other was there, just a text message away.
We may have not grown up and fused into one life together, the way some couples do and are. Instead, we grew almost parallel, crashing into each other every now and again, a strange weaving of feelings and memories. If we split now, and this time forever, it won’t undo all the times we came together before. It just means we can do this next bit on our own. And that is, in no small part, because we figured out the first journey together.
