In the following months, we met up once or twice a week to eat, go to the theater or see an exhibition. On another, we saw a documentary about the evils of salmon farming. I liked him instantly, but I didn’t fantasize about marrying him.įor one of our early dates, Henry made reservations at three restaurants and let me pick which one to go to. He was obsessed with being outdoors, loved to cook and was a moderate drinker.īy contrast, I considered a trip to Central Park hiking, got my meals (sushi, cupcakes, pre-cut fruit) at the gourmet deli, and wasn’t moderate at anything. He was British, like me, but the similarities ended there. He had freckles all over his face and a big, unselfconscious smile. That someone was Henry, a friend of a friend I met at a film screening. I stopped leaving my light on all night, got some proper sleep, found a therapist and became open to the possibility of meeting someone else. You’ll see.”Įventually, it was obsessing over my neighbor that grew boring - trying to make dinner plans with someone who found reservations “restricting” and watching friends zone out as I complained, yet again, about him canceling. “You need to be with someone secure,” he said. He taught me that anxious and avoidant people often connect quickly and powerfully, but the relationships are a challenge at best and doomed at worst. I went to a weekly meditation group led by a Buddhist teacher with double-digit sobriety who introduced me to attachment theory and, at the risk of sounding dramatic, changed my life forever. I changed his name in my phone to “prosecco” so I would remember how emotionally hung over I felt after seeing him. So, I went to an ashram upstate and prayed for the obsession to lift. And, for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have alcohol to numb me. I would later learn this dynamic is called an “anxious-avoidant” relationship. I would get high off his attention, then crash when he withdrew. I pretended to have no needs, then felt distraught when he didn’t meet them. The more space he wanted, the closer I longed to be. Now, I was pursuing my neighbor with the same fervor. I grew up chasing my father’s love, a man who, like my neighbor, could be affectionate or absent depending on the day. It was my first experience of falling in love sober and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was repeating a familiar pattern. Every time we decided to stop seeing each other, one of us would eventually leave our light on all night, knowing the other would see it from the street below and send a text to come up, restarting the cycle. Instead of freeing ourselves from this mismatch, however, we seemed bound to it. Ultimately, nothing could change the fact that we didn’t want the same thing. I tried every tool in my arsenal to get him to be my boyfriend: I charmed, seduced, cajoled, bargained, raged. He could not commit, and I could not accept it. “I’m not looking for anything serious either,” I said.
I looked up at him under the yellow glow of the streetlamps and did what so many hopeful single people have done before me: I told a lie, wishing it were true. “But the restaurant keeps me pretty busy, and I just want to be clear that I’m not looking for a relationship right now.”
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