The Myth of Hookup Culture Put to Bed in One Beautiful Essay
No Labels, No Drama, Right?
âMy Jeremy is coming to visit this weekend,â Maddy whispered to me one night while we were out for a friendâs birthday
âYour what?â I asked. I thought I had misheard her.
âMy Jeremy,â she repeated. âIâve told you about him. His nameâs Will. We grew up together in Washington. Heâs visiting from school. My Jeremy.â
And just like that, a name â one I referred to often â became an archetype, a trope, an all-purpose noun used by my college friends to talk about âthat guy,â the one who remains for us in some netherworld between friend and boyfriend, often for years.
I met mine, the original Jeremy, at summer camp in the Poconos at 14, playing pickup basketball by day and talking in the mess hall late into the night. Back home we lived only 30 minutes apart, but I didnât see him again until 11th grade, when we ran into each other at a Halloween party in a Lower Manhattan warehouse.
I was dressed as a rabbit and he as a vampire. As we converged, he put out his hand to meet mine. âHas anyone ever told you how well you rock a tail?â he teased, tracing the lines on my palm with his fingers.
âYou should really get those bloody fangs checked out,â I replied, suddenly conscious of my bitten-down nails
As Maroon 5 blasted in the background, he murmured drunkenly in my ear, âIâve missed you.â
âIâve missed you, too,â I murmured back, standing on tiptoes.
Under the muted flashes of a strobe light, we shared our first kiss.
We stayed in touch for the rest of high school, mostly by text message. But we also met up in person when his schoolâs basketball team played ours and when I ventured from New Jersey into Manhattan for academic events or to attend another warehouse party.
I was eager to move on from high school, and talking to Jeremy was an escape, a peek into an alternative universe where shy boys with moppy brown hair and clever minds seemed to care about more than their next hookups. When I published an article about my struggle with Crohnâs disease in an obscure online magazine, he wrote with praise and to tell me it moved him, lessening the shame I felt.
Every time his name popped up on my phone, my heart raced.
Still, we were never more than semiaffiliated, two people who spoke and loved to speak and kissed and loved to kiss and connected and were scared of connecting. I told myself it was because we went to different schools, because teenage boys donât want relationships, because it was all in my head.
I told myself a lot of things I never told him.
Two years after our first kiss, we were exchanging âIâve missed youâ messages again. It was a brisk Friday evening in our first semesters of college when I stepped off a train and into his comfortable arms.
He had texted weeks earlier on Halloween (technically our anniversary) to ask if I would visit. We had not talked since summer, and I was trying to forget him. We had graduated from high school into the same inexpressive void we first entered in costume, where an âIâve missed youâ was as emotive as one got. I decided to leave him behind when I left for college.
But he wouldnât let me. Whenever I believed he was out of my life, Iâd get a text or Facebook comment that would reel me back in.
And I wouldnât let me, either. His affection, however sporadic, always loomed like a promise. So I accepted his invitation, asking myself what I had to lose.
I lost a lot that weekend: A bet on the football game. Four pounds (from nerve-driven appetite loss). A pair of underwear. My innocence, apparently.
NaĂŻvely, I had expected to gain clarity, to finally admit my feelings and ask if he felt the same. But I couldnât confess, couldnât probe. Periodically I opened my mouth to ask: âWhat are we doing? Who am I to you?â He stopped me with a smile, a wink or a handhold, gestures that persuaded me to shut my mouth or risk jeopardizing what we already had.
On the Saturday-night train back to Manhattan, I cried. Back in my dorm room, buried under the covers so my roommates wouldnât hear, I fell asleep with a wet pillow and puffy eyes.
The next morning I awoke to a string of texts from him: âYou get back OK?â âLetâs do it again soon :)â
And we did, meeting up for drinks in the city, spending the night at my place, neither of us daring to raise the subject of what we were doing or what we meant to each other. I kept telling myself Iâd be fine.
But now, more than three years after our first kiss and more than a year after our first time, Iâm still not over the possibility of him, the possibility of us. And he has no idea.
Iâm told my generation will be remembered for our callous commitments and rudimentary romances. We hook up. We sext. We swipe right.
All the while, we avoid labels and try to bury our emotions. We arenât supposed to want anything serious; not now, anyway. But a void is created when we refrain from telling it like it is, from allowing ourselves to feel how we feel. And in that unoccupied space, weâre dangerously free to create our own realities.
My friend Shosh insists that I donât actually have feelings for Jeremy.
âYou donât know him anymore,â she says. âI think maybe youâre addicted to the memories, in love with a person youâve idealized who probably isnât real.â
Maybe sheâs right. Maybe my emotions are steeped in a past that never presented itself. Still, he envelops my thoughts. And anyway, Shosh has a Jeremy of her own, another guy at another school she holds both close and far away.
To this day, if I ever let a guyâs name slip out to my father, his response is always, âAre you two going steady?â
He means to ask if weâre dating exclusively, if I have a boyfriend. I used to hate it.
âPeople donât go steady nowadays,â I explain. âNo one says that anymore. And almost no one does it. Women today have more power. We donât crave attachment to just one man. We keep our options open. Weâre in control.â
Iâve brooded over the same person for the last four years. Can I honestly call myself empowered if Iâm unable to share my feelings with him? Could my options be more closed? Could I be less in control?
My father canât understand why I wonât tell Jeremy how I feel. To me, itâs simple. As involved as weâve been for what amounts to, at this point, nearly a quarter of my life, Jeremy and I are technically nothing, at least as far as labels are concerned.
So while I teeter between anger with myself for not admitting how I feel and anger at him for not figuring it out, neither of us can be blamed. (Or we both can.) Without labels to connect us, I have no justification for my feelings and he has no obligation to acknowledge them.
No labels, no drama, right?
I think my generation is venturing into some seriously uncharted waters, because while weâre hesitant to label relationships, we do participate in some deviation of them.
But by not calling someone, say, âmy boyfriend,â he actually becomes something else, something indefinable. And what we have together becomes intangible. And if itâs intangible it can never end because officially thereâs nothing to end. And if it never ends, thereâs no real closure, no opportunity to move on.
Instead, we spend our emotional energy on someone weâve built up and convinced ourselves we need. We fixate on a person who may not be right for us simply because he never wronged us. Because without a label, he never really had the chance.
When I realized I hadnât misheard Maddy, I asked her to elaborate.
âYou know what a Jeremy is,â she said. âYou practically dubbed the term. Heâs the guy we never really dated and never really got over.â
Most people I know have a Jeremy in their lives, someone whose consequence a label canât capture. In years past, maybe back when people went steady, he may have been the one who got away. For my generation, though, heâs often the one we never had in the first place. Yet heâs still the one for whom we would happily trade all the booty calls, hookups and swiping right. Heâs still the one we hope, against all odds, might be The One.
But until weâre brave enough to find out for sure, thereâs life to keep living. Until he can be labeled ours, just calling him Jeremy will have to do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/style/modern-love-college-essay-winner.html?_r=0
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