Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day for the first two weeks of February, until Valentine’s Day.
Nothing gets me wet like rejection. I suppose this isn’t so unique: We all want what we can’t have, right? Unfortunately this makes forming a relationship difficult, especially if the other person likes you back.
The summer of 2014 was an all-time low for me. I was dumped by my long-term girlfriend and crippled by sadness in a way that forced me to admit, once and for all, that I was not a sociopath (a tragedy). I spent the summer blacking out on bad Tinder dates and making too-frequent trips to Harlem to sleep with a married-“ish” guy. And then suddenly, like a twist of the knife, I was forced to leave my apartment.
There are few tasks more heinous than searching for a decent one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on a writer’s salary. I had resigned myself to simply ignore the problem, until one morning, while walk-of-shaming back from Harlem, wearing a pink leather miniskirt and cum in my hair, I got a text from my token neuroscientist friend, Leah: A friend of a friend was giving up his rent-stabilized apartment in Gramercy, she told me. I took the subway straight to the address and arrived at 10:00 a.m., looking like a stripper on my way to the after-after-party.
I was met with trepidation by the apartment’s current resident, “Max,” a lanky 40-year-old book editor in a pristinely pressed oxford shirt and thick-rimmed glasses. He walked me through the meticulously organized apartment. The shirts in his closet where arranged by color, like a serial killer’s (a hot one, though). I asked him if he wanted to get a drink sometime. He smiled awkwardly and said, “No, thank you.” I silently scolded myself: Stop misinterpreting every routine interaction as a dating opportunity—you seem pathetic. Earlier that week, I’d asked out a guy after he stopped me in the street to ask for directions.
In spite of my party foul, I got the apartment. A week later, I met up with Max to exchange keys and convinced him to let me buy him a drink “as a thank you.” One drink easily turned into three, at which point I was pretty confident that we were officially on a date. And that he was in love with me. We had a lot in common: We’d both been long-term expats in London; we were both going through breakups; we both liked alcohol. At the end of the “date,” I leaned in to kiss him. He leaned out.
There aren’t many things that will make you feel worse than someone doing a backbend in order to avoid physical contact with you. Sadly, this wasn’t the first time it happened to me—as someone who tends to make aggressive and ill-timed first moves, it’s actually not that uncommon. Generally, people make an excuse (usually about having a girlfriend or a cold sore). Still, I’m appalled every time. As a general rule, if someone tries to have sex with you, you should have sex with them back—it’s only polite. After Max dodged my kiss, I made a joke about how, technically, his apartment was now our apartment—that we basically lived together—at which point he slowly backed away from me.
The next few months were vaguely awkward, as I had to maintain semi-frequent contact with him. I’d collect his mail and he’d pick it up during business trips to New York. But soon the mail stopped coming and we stopped talking.
More than a year went by. My girlfriend and I got back together, and then, this past September, we broke up once more. Again, I was depressed, though, this time, less so. I had been craving more personal freedom. Still, I wanted to flee the scene of the crime—aka New York—and so I went on a Tinder rampage across Europe. I abruptly decided that my calling in life was to be a sexual anthropologist by means of dating apps. In my first few weeks of singledom, I slept with a CrossFit-obsessed finance guy, a Parisian law student, an Irish international peace negotiator, and a 22-year-old British anarchist who may or may not have been homeless. And then, on a whim, I moved to L.A., because people are happy there. I started sleeping with actors who star in insurance commercials. I felt confident that I could sustain this lifestyle forever—city hopping, writing during the days, Tindering in the evenings, spending beyond my means. It was all so bohemian.
And then, in early December, I got an email from Max: “I think my new debit card was accidentally mailed to your apartment.” How romantic, I thought. I told him that I was living in L.A. Coincidentally, so was he. Coincidentally, we lived only minutes from each other. He invited me over for dinner.
Yet again, I found myself sitting across from him wondering, Is this a date? But this time I’d promised myself that I would absolutely not make the first move, no matter how much wine I drank. Luckily I didn’t have to. After we ate the vegan mush that he cooked, he kindly shoved his tongue down my throat. Right at the moment when I thought he was going to invite me to his bedroom, he stopped. “You should know,” he said, “I’ve never had sex with someone who I wasn’t seriously emotionally involved with. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I prefer to wait.” Here, my brain short-circuited. Getting to know someone before you fuck? It seemed a bizarre concept. People my age have sex to assess if we want to get to know someone, not the other way around. It’s just the millennial way.
For the next 48 hours, all I could do was fantasize about having sex with him. I was packing to go back to New York for a week, hoping this was just a fleeting obsession, when I got a text from him inviting me to a Christmas party that evening. Impulsively, I spent $437 on a new plane ticket so that I could make the party—a deeply uncharacteristic decision, which caused me to worry that his refusal to bang me had triggered a latent psychosis. We went to the party and made out in his car, and then he dropped me off at home, like in a movie from the ’50s.
Back in my New York apartment, I began to notice all the small, potentially creepy ways that Max had remained in the periphery of my consciousness over the past year. Like that I was living among some of his old furniture, or that my mailbox still had his name on it because I’d always been too lazy to change it. I lay in bed with my vibrator thinking about how many times he’d cum in this very same spot. We started talking on the phone—insane, I know. I impulsively deleted all of my dating apps.
I flew back to L.A. We went to see movies, kissed openly at parties, and did “hand stuff,” which is a term I haven’t used since I was 15. He brought me to a pool party in Palm Springs at which I took all of the drugs, aggressively befriended a bachelorette party, decided to swim naked, and was promptly escorted off the premises. I woke up the next morning like, “Oops?” I assumed he was going to end it, but he just smiled and said, “I’m glad you had fun!” and continued to iron his T-shirts. I took this as a sign that he must like me for me, because he clearly wasn’t tolerating my personality only in exchange for the sex we weren’t having.
A few more weeks went by. I gave him a blow job. I once followed him to the bank and creepily waited for 45 minutes while they printed him a new debit card, despite being on a deadline, because I was having separation anxiety. I couldn’t remember a time when I had been so tragically un-aloof. I kept thinking: Is this the trick my mom taught me when I was 13, which I promptly ignored? Ya know: If you want someone to like you, don’t sleep with them right away? I couldn’t believe this trick was working on me. The irony! For a while, I couldn’t help but feel that every time we met up and didn’t have sex I was being rejected somehow, or worse, manipulated. I found myself thinking, Do I really like him, or do I just desperately want him to want me? It’s hard to separate our desire for someone from our desire to be desired. I also began to worry that, after waiting for so long, sex with him was doomed to be an anticlimax.
But then, it wasn’t. It was just nice. Usually, the first time I sleep with someone, I can end up being a bit performative. With Max, I could be in the moment, because I felt comfortable with him. The fact that he turned the tables on me—that a dude made me wait—made him more interesting to me than my DTF contemporaries. And now, randomly, we’re dating.
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