GLASS HOUSE

Stories of singlehood.

/ Stories of love and shame.

INTRODUCTION

Before I figured out how to have them, I described intimate partnerships as a glass house I could see on a hill. People filed in and out of it--meeting one another’s family, cuddling on the couch, getting coffee together on the weekends. I circled the perimeter of the house methodically, constantly. How are they all getting in there? I agonized. Many of my friends who frequently entered and exited the house gave me vague directions on how to follow them, but all were a series of left turns to nowhere. I might get into the foyer for a couple weeks or months before being ushered back outside. 

That’s not entirely true. I worked the problem. I devoted myself to entering the house. I got a little deeper into it each time--doorstep, doorstep, doorstep, foyer, doorstep, lawn, foyer, LIVING ROOM (briefly), long period on the lawn, foyer, living room, more lawn time, bedroom.

I now know how to get in the house. I struggle still to navigate the rooms (child-free or have a kid; cut ties or work it out; set firm boundaries or let it go). I feel myself currently stuck in one of the hallways. But I’m not alone. My partner and I dig deep for “I” statements as we urgently discuss which door to open. I don’t want to get out of the house. I’m trying so hard to stay. But if I have to leave, I’ll be able to get back inside this imperfect glass home. I know the door now. 

To my younger self, this is nothing short of miraculous. All of the bad advice I received was, it turns out, bad. I didn’t need to be more feminine, or want a partnership less than I did. (What could be more cruel than this piece of advice? Sit on the lawn, yearning to go inside, but let the record show that you just love being on the lawn through rain, sleet, and snow.) I didn’t need to be younger, prettier, less anxiously attached, more securely attached, less traumatized, more traumatized, have more tattoos, money, clarity about my life purpose, or fewer problems, freckles, moles and wrinkles. I needed to shift the paradigm under which my whole dating life was taking place. The following is a history of that shift.

OREOS

She sat on the edge of my bed

Her eyebrows together

Gaze firm and pressing

She knew I was not sleeping

Often for two days in a row

She must have sensed 

That suicidal ideation was the elevator music 

On my constant elevator down

What are you reading? She asked

What am I reading? I thought

I’m reading about how to become more feminine

Which is to say

I am coating my spirit in a caustic solvent.

I’m reading about how to wear more pink

By which I mean

I’m suffocating the small tomboy of my being 

with a big pink pillow

I’m reading about how to wait three days to respond

About how to erase myself

Like a fox gnawing away it’s own ankle

I’ll remove the ankle if I have to

I’ll suffocate the child

I’ll strip myself of power

And ideas for a date

If it means I’ll be chosen

If I can get one person to choose me.

“It’s called Getting to I Do,” I said.

I want to say she took the book with her that night

That I let her hug me

And confessed that every way I had tried to be loved had failed

That the only option left was to become someone else.

She made a sound when I told her the book’s name,

A small one.

I sat silent and burning on the other side of the bed.

When she spoke, it was as if to a little kid 

caught with a stash of Oreos in their closet

Oreos that were attracting mice

Mice that would devour the whole house.

LIGHTWEIGHT

The first crush I had after my divorce ended in him blocking me.

When I found Sean on OKCupid, I was living in Seattle in a 250 square foot apartment with a view of a 7-11 gas station. I had an overgrown pixie cut that was falling out on account of the animal stresses of divorce, graduate school, and COVID-induced isolation. I had dated sporadically in Seattle, but after going on a three hour walk with someone who looked nothing at all like his photos and spent two of those three hours talking about his cat sitting gigs, I was not hopeful. Not at all.

Sean was relatively attractive, a social worker, and owned a home in Portland. Those were his credentials. He might as well have been the prime minister of France, chatting disinterestedly with me on OK Cupid. Every squashed egg of relationship hope I had, I threw into my Sean basket. 

Our first date went well enough. He was well spoken, if a little jaded. He ordered a Moscow Mule, which I did not respect, but I liked that he surfed and shared the field of psychotherapy with me. Basically, I was thrilled to have found the last train out of Lonely Forever, so he was great. Ideal even. 

When he started distancing himself a few weeks later, I began to frantically pace the train. The texts between us moved in frequency from war-time morse code to telegram. He was blase about where to eat for our next date and shared that he didn’t “know how to cook.” I planned, bought groceries for, and cooked a meal at his house. He didn’t help with any of the meal prep. He poured himself several Pog and Vodka cocktails, and though it gave me pause, I ignored the feeling. The self betrayal began to saturate my solar plexus like ink through a glass of water. It made me want more closeness, so I gave more of myself. We had sex for the first time, centered around his pleasure. He was the first person I had slept with since Todd. When I left that night, my solar plexus was hollow, dark black. The only way to lighten it, I knew, was to regain his desire.

Instead, the text messages thinned out even more. After a week, he gently shared that he did not feel the way about me that I “felt about him.” I wanted to blow a puff of cigarette smoke in his face. Didn’t he realize I had been ignoring all the things that I didn’t like about him in order to get out of Lonely Forever? He said he felt guilty about having to “break another heart.” I wanted to scream at him, “Get in line! Breaking my heart is the boxed macaroni and cheese of heart breaking! I basically made it for you.” 

Even so, I refused to accept defeat. It was too familiar. I was convinced that my marriage to Todd marked the end of being dumped. So I petitioned for another try. I was the car dealer chasing him out of the lot with a screaming deal.

He responded to my offer with a firm: “No and I mean it.” When I texted him a few minutes later to let him know that I was magnanimously accepting the boundary and that it was, indeed for the best, the text bubble was green instead of blue. It was the last text between us.

A few days later, I rode an actual train to Seattle and gazed in defeat at an estuary flashing by. I felt humiliated by the self betrayal. I missed my ex husband. I felt certain that despite the hellish spiral we lived in from the moment we got engaged, he was the only person who could accept the tangled mash of neediness and longing I felt myself to be. I closed my eyes and saw the ocean. I imagined myself swaggering into the surf. Clobbered by the heavyweight, one eye swollen shut, I thought, “Is that all you got?”

LOVE CREATED

Twenty years after my father’s death, I can turn toward his love and pride for me with as much effort as making a left turn out of an intersection. Yes, I have to close my eyes, locate the beam (I feel it to my right, in proximity to my head), and be quiet for a few seconds. It takes shape not as a memory, but as a continued entity, a planet, orbiting for the sake of its own existence. Here I see my dad’s eyes as if grinning, looking at me after I finish my swim lesson, my first high school play, my bike ride home from school. 

I can sense his love for me like you sense the presence of someone who left the house a few minutes before you arrived. It’s the spiritual equivalent of a running toilet, a coffee mug still slick in the sink, a pair of shoes missing from the rack, the door locked with the handle instead of the deadbolt. 

So I have never been able to relate to the bereaved who experience death as a complete severance from their loved one. Four months after my dad died, I stood at the top of a stairwell in a dream. He appeared at the bottom and summoned me down, then gave me a long hug. I woke up, still crying, still too young and Buddhist to believe it had meant anything. The next morning, my landscaping co-worker nodded her head when I told her of the dream. “He visited you,” she said matter of factly. We arranged cement pavers into a path. I didn’t believe her at the time, but the tears slipped down my face anyway.

I imagine love like a stadium light that once turned on, does not go out. With death, it’s easier for me to accept this concept. But in all my relationship losses, the magnitude and tenacity of the love has felt like a profound liability. I have convinced myself it was all for nothing—the voltage I poured into turning the beam on in the first place was a squandered resource. “Wasted time!” I prattle to anyone who gets stuck in the stadium parking lot with me. Meanwhile, the hum of the giant bulb continues to illuminate some field of my mind. I could set down my cynicism and marvel at its power, glowing in spite of the distance, the time passed, the lack of contact. Instead I tell myself the person left and the love I shared with them is extinguished.

But in stillness, I know the beam is lit. I haven’t spoken to my first partner in ten years, but a stadium in our shared memory remains illuminated. I don’t live in it now, but that doesn’t mean the field has gone dark. 

As I reflect on my divorce, and the trail of severed relationships behind me, I think: I’m 38. No kids. I’m solipsistic, broken, a bad picker, a codependent, a don’t-ask-for-what-I-deserve snake oil salesman of a therapist. I lack clarity, failed the spiritual video game, got tangled in my familiar karmic traps. My marriage was a dead loss. Or, another irrepressible beam of light. Three more wasted years. Or maybe another planet orbiting my own, reflecting its face down to mine. Maybe, another human, who showed me my undressed shame, delight, skin, saliva were enough this time. Enough again.