The Revision and Relapse of Heterosexual Love

Every woman has an Elon somewhere in her timeline.

Recently, A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein did an episode on Grimes. I almost wrote a poem about Grimes five years ago, but I felt that it was probably too esoteric or bound by time; that Elon was her past and not her present. In fact, I was so certain of this I referred to him as “Grimes’ ex,” wanting to disempower him and clear my headspace of his name.

I didn’t realize that she’d had not one, but three children with him. And that she was desperately trying to get in contact with him.

Every woman has an Elon somewhere in her timeline. A man who is charismatic, magazine-handsome, rich, and/or powerful. A man who makes her feel like a girl-boss, 2nd-in-command, riding on a road of flames, black leather and neon green light. Maybe he gets distant, or hurtful, or controlling. But everyone said sacrifices come with love. And she knows the padlock to his ego, his tears, the weakness he hides behind closed doors. She knows every footnote to his heart. She has a PhD in his life and times. And like most doctoral programs, she’s lost herself in the process.

My Elon was Brad. I was. Infatuated. In love. In addiction. In everything with Brad. If I thought about him while driving, I narrowly missed an accident. Which was, fittingly, the emotional atmosphere we cultivated.

We were polyamorous.¹ I would fantasize about getting together with one of his other partners and just talking about him for hours–how to find peace within the relationship, how to contort around his emotional map, his egotistical triggers, what he would and wouldn’t react to. How to get what you want, how to phrase it.

We broke up, we got back together, we broke up, we got back together, we broke up. A cursory glance at this trend would call it the addiction cycle, or codependence, or “neediness.” And it is. But this goes so much deeper than those textbook terms. Using social media to ask the father of your child…to hire someone to speak to you about your child…beckons a deeper dive.

Because this isn’t just about why women stay with narcissists. It’s also why women stay with depressed, alcoholic couch-tumors. It’s why Taylor Swift is a billionaire. It’s why the Bechdel test is a real measurement. It’s why we all have compassion fatigue.

This is about everyone’s conception of heterosexual love.

The Fantasy

The fantasy is that you’ll be the woman of his dreams, and that when he “finds” you, the world will stop and he’ll only see you. You stand out from anyone he’s ever met. You’re smarter, funnier, more beautiful, more patient…a deeper soul worth knowing so well that he can read your feelings. His ex didn’t understand him. But not you. You get him, and that’s what makes you better. And that’s why he’ll never let go, no matter what happens in his life.

The Truth

Here’s what the fantasy misses. He absolutely does let go. Or becomes so overwrought in depression that you leave. The majority of men cannot sustain a romantic relationship throughout the trauma of a fully lived life–winning, losing, grieving, reinventing.² The relationship starts its end when he encounters something unexpected that shifts him. When he gains success beyond his wildest dreams; when he looses an opportunity that he’d put all his eggs in (against his partner’s advice); when he’s cut due to corporate greed; when his father passes away.

That said, I don’t actually begrudge them for it. I’m pro-divorce, pro-breakup, pro-evolution. We shouldn’t stay in places that confine us. But maybe, we should adjust our expectations and interpretations of endings.

Here’s what else the fantasy misses. When you become everything for your partner, you also disappear into the ether of the “granted”–like oxygen, vital but invisible. You’re the rock during his crisis, and there’s a sweet intimacy to that. But then he expects you during the next crisis. And then you start building the environment around him to avoid the crisis. And then you start taking care of his emotions altogether. When you tell him you’re emotionally tired, he doesn’t understand, because he doesn’t see past his own fatigue. You start explaining what empathy is. You start explaining that you have feelings too.

Something inside you breaks when you start explaining empathy. Something you never forget.

Here’s the thing. You’re truly not supposed to live for someone else. We’ve based a fantasy on someone else’s perception of us, not on what we will explore or experience or build. The entire fantasy of love, like the fantasy of fame, is outside our locus of control. The only way we could have bought that lie was that it was so intoxicating, we’d twist any way for it. It’s not profitable for anyone that women live entirely for our own goals of our creation, which is why no one sells us that idea.

The Magic

In my experience, love isn’t even about love. The very word bores me. It’s about the life I’m choosing to live, and someone else’s life in my orbit, and the gravitational pull we each find ourselves drawn to. It’s about the oblivion of loneliness we’re all terrified of, and the ways we reach our roots towards each other to save ourselves as a collective. And yes, it’s also about the pleasure of sex and the intimacy we build to give and receive the bliss our bodies sing for.

But I spend less of my life talking and thinking about my personal relationships³ than I do working, creating, and striving toward abstract goals that get closer and closer to forming words.

Here are, currently, some magical things I’m experiencing that have nothing to do with romantic relationships: the physical ways I feel Time in my body; the political conversations I have with people who are panicking; the preparation for the Great Loss, which is still ahead of us, and the Great Love, which is also still ahead; the way that mortality and eternity are connected; the absolute audacity to believe that my writing is worth reading.

After all that, does anyone truly have the time to fix every heterosexual relationship that falls apart? We’ve been treating Friday night door-dash like it’s our last Thanksgiving meal because we think it means something about our hearts. Girl, you’ve got so much more to do. Eat your food, and get to your to-do list.

The Relapse

You know what? I still have dreams about Brad, 6 years after we said our last words. I have every dream in the book about him. That he’s kind, that we’re each the first version of ourselves, that we’re in the throes of our best days. I’ll have dreams that we’ve broken up, but we try to come back together. Then I’ll have dreams where we know we can’t, but we don’t know why. That we already said the worst things, and all I want to do is ignore them and get back into the warm fantasy, limbless and stupid and primordial.

Brad, Brad, Brad. My most cherished burial; my most blissful ignorance.

I wake up in a different world, where I am old and dark and goddess. There is not a direct line of magenta dopamine to my brain. Gray hairs sparkle in the street light that comes in through the window. I stand on the hard floor before the sun rises, let the life I’m living collect and snap into place.

I know that I should stretch, put on a podcast or music to wake me up, and not scroll through my phone. Only one of those things will happen.

Welcome to the morning.

1. No shade to polyamory–both of us still are, though not with each other, and are living rich and fulfilling lives as such.

2. Maybe we’ll call it the new 80-20 rule? 80% of men can’t handle 20% of life? 20 is too small though. I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t hear that deranged phrase twice in the last week.

3. “Hard disagree,” says my therapist and all of my readers. But isn’t a nice goal??