(Re)learning to Love

Relationship templates, and the junk we fill our heads and hearts with

Good Pesach on this good Friday! It’s time for Down the Pipes, your weekly opportunity to consider what I’ve been considering in a bloggy newsletter. Your subscriptions are deeply appreciated, friends and acquaintances always read for free (unless you’ve opted to pay, in which case…I’ll buy you a Coke). The rest of you need to pay or be relegated to free snippets and the occasional Weekender edition, that’s just how we do it. Regardless, welcome on down.

I’ve been hesitant to write about my own romantic relationships here, mainly because it’s none of y’all’s business, but also because my relationships by definition aren’t just my business…there’s always another person (or people) involved. That’s what makes it a relationship, after all.

So while I’m always happy to spill my own guts, I get a little skittish talking about the other people in my life without their consent. It wasn’t always like this…through high school I gleefully and openly blogged about backseat makeouts and relationship drama, half in awe of my blossoming sexual appetite and half in braggadocio.

Looking back on these posts make me cringe; we were 16, horned up, and I was blogging about it constantly. It’s one of the great reliefs of my life that none of this content exists on the open web anymore. We’ll leave the endlessly looping DVD menus, numb lips, and musty basements in the past, where they rightly belong.

But those films and TV shows we grew up on left an unmistakable imprint on what we thought romance was supposed to look like. There were seemingly two streams of courtship presented to us in 80’s and 90’s culture, neither of which has any basis in reality.

On the one hand, you had sincere, female-marketed romcoms that followed the common arc of boy meets girl, girl likes other guy, boy makes some kind of grand gesture to win girl over, other guy turns out to be a jerk, boy and girl kiss in the rain, happily ever after, etc. A whole lifetime of complicated love condensed into 90 minutes, airbrushed and beautiful, with a perfect bow on the end. I’m looking at you, Nicholas Sparks & Nora Ephron, though Disney films had us trained on this idea from infancy too.

On the other hand, you had the Farrelly Brothers style of bromcom, which had cruder humor elements for “the boys,” but they still followed the same general romantic arc. The male protagonists in these films were always presented as profane, broken, sex-starved apes, until a girl—“not like all the others”—rejects him, forcing him to change his ways so he can “get her” by the end.

These films feel unwatchable now, as there’s almost always a casual implication (or graphic depiction) of unbridled male conquest and/or date rape. American Pie came out just as I was hitting puberty, if that gives you any indication, though you can find a slew of these films in every decade (and sometimes emulating previous decades). American Graffiti, Animal House, Fast Times, every John Hughes film, Clueless, Dazed & Confused, Ten Things, SuperBad…it’s so common, I took an entire NYU course called “Coming of Age in American Cinema.”

I remember distinctly when 500 Days of Summer came out almost a decade after American Pie, perhaps one of the first romcoms of my era to suggest that sometimes happily ever after means not winding up together at the end. This was fairly revolutionary at the time, though credit to James L. Brooks who dabbled in the 80’s anti-love story with Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News. I guess Woody Allen kinda goes there too with Annie Hall, but even that movie ends with Allen’s Alvy writing a stage play of his broken relationship, though notably in his dramatization she accepts his wedding proposal at the end (which she flatly rejected in his “real” life, perhaps an early comment on the trope of love stories being entirely staged kabuki).

I mention all of this because I think if you’re a single or loosely dating millennial like me, this is what we we’re working with culturally. Women who are conditioned to expect grand gestures of love to make them see what’s right in front of them, and men who are too childish to ever get there until a woman inspires them to clean up their act.

But is art imitating life, or are we just imitating bad art?

There’s a concept in psychotherapy called the “relationship template,” a kind of roadmap inside each of us that determines the kinds of relationships we seek out. Like most things, it’s not static, but it often develops without our awareness. How your parents relate to you and each other (or not, as the case may be) is often our first taste of a template we can either choose to accept or reject, though later in life it’s more often influenced by the content we consume, the friends we associate with, and of course, the relationships we find ourselves in.

To wit: I remember one of my earliest relationships in HS was a sordid love triangle between myself and two best girlfriends that, in retrospect, was just a cosplay of the film Cruel Intentions; a kind of psychological game where the point wasn’t to fall in love, it was to toy with each others hearts. The drama was the whole point, we were sneaking around to get caught, cry about it, make up, and then split again. It ended poorly, as you can imagine. I had a handful healthy relationships with girls in HS too, but they were never as engaging for me as the ones that made my head and heart hurt.

My first serious relationship in college was with the literal girl next door on the 11th floor of NYU’s Rubin Hall. Our relationship was a well-kept secret for the first 4 months we were together, mainly because I had previously hooked up with the girl on the other side of my door, the girl across the hall (who happened to be my girlfriend’s best friend), and even my girlfriend’s roommate (before they lived together, but still). We swore our roommates to secrecy, I’d wait for our floormates to go to bed, and then I’d sneak over in the middle of the night, sure to leave early enough that nobody would see me slinking out of her room at 7am.

Telia, Telia, jewel of JDel’s 11th floor domain.

It was an utter disaster when everyone found out, splintering a fairly close-knit friend group in a million directions. I loved it, but it made me feel awful when the dust settled. We broke up after 6 months at the end of freshman year (when she began dating one of my roommate’s best friends, unsurprisingly).

My next serious relationship was the following school year with a girl who had a boyfriend in a band in California (anyone remember Halifax? He was in Halifax). This time around I wasn’t main-charactering as the dorm Casanova who needed a dream girl to rein him in, this time I was sure that she’d leave the drug addled bass player and choose me, the “nice guy” right in front of her. But when she ultimately did leave him after 2 tumultuous years together, I quickly lost interest, turned into a raging asshole, and she went on to immediately marry a guy who I now have to endure in every Ant Man film. Life and bad art, huh.

I had a few other flings and things through my 20s, but I was obtusely aware that my template was broken. I chalked it up to being young and relatively attractive in New York…why get “tied down” when there’s always another OKCupid date to be had or co-worker to sneak off with? At a certain point I became one of those guys “not looking for anything serious” who inevitably found himself in a series of 4-8 month long relationships interspersed with a number of “friends with benefits” situations. They almost all uniformly ended with me finding something to blame on my partner, despite the fact that I now recognize that I was often the one manufacturing that drama for myself.

It was better than nothing, but it wasn’t love.

It was bad framing from years of guy friends and bro culture convincing me that sex was a conquest of male machismo, not an expression of shared love. As a girl friend (who is currently seeing a guy who says doesn’t want to be “tied down”) recently put it, a relationship is supposed to bring out the best in you, not hold you back or tie you down. I couldn’t see that in my twenties, even though we were decades from “the old ball and chain” being a serious term people used to describe their partner.

That kind of framing is impossibly toxic, but it was everywhere we looked. It still is.

At a certain point by my late 20s I kind of stopped seriously dating altogether. “No new friends” I told people. Moving to Vegas was my first real exposure to the one night stand life (and polyamory for that matter, a topic for another day). I was capitalizing on the “What Happens In Vegas” trope and leaning into my unspectacular ability to bring bachelorette parties up to the DJ booth at Marquee, surrounded by girls looking for a good story. And for about 4 months it was fun to play that part. The other 11 months I lived there were some of the loneliest I’ve known.

After Vegas, I kind of vowed that “the next one would be it.” This is when I met Taylor in the dust at Burning Man, a truly beautiful kismet moment where we both were having a blah time in a place we thought we loved. It was misery loving company at its finest, and we made for great company in that moment (though, typical me, it wasn’t without drama: Another guy in her camp tried to “win her over” a mere hour before we ultimately shared our first kiss under an LED tree).

But we persevered, overcame, and she moved in with me a few months later. We spent the next 4 years building a life together, and on the surface we were happy and in love. We got a new place, we got the requisite dog, we named our future children and learned to divvy up the holidays.

Is this love?

It was, but it was a love predicated on an idea we both held of what love was supposed to look like, not a reality we both lived. I was still in a “I can fix her” mindset: Her past experiences had left her in a particularly vulnerable state, and it was my erroneous belief that I could help her work through those things like a crutch, despite having my own shit and resentment piling up on the inside that went wholly unaddressed for years.

I wasn’t listening to my heart as much as I was playing a role in her own healing process, centering her needs and wants while never really making space for my own. If my problem in my 20s was focusing purely on my own pleasure and need for drama, I entered my thirties focusing entirely on someone else’s.

That’s not a recipe for a healthy relationship either, and eventually it drove me back into therapy and codependency support groups, despite the fact that I had spent the better part of the past few years successfully convincing my partner that she needed the therapy, not me (to quote Foster, “there are two kinds of people in New York: People in therapy, and people who should be in therapy”). By the end, she was the former and I was the latter, and while she started making some killer strides, I felt more stuck than ever. We separated in 2021, and while I desperately miss our dog and cherish the memories we made together, I don’t miss how that relationship made me feel: Alone, together.

Which brings us to now. I’ve been “working on myself” and all this messiness I’m articulating here for the last 2 years with a therapist I adore, and through that time I really haven’t dated all that much. A few fumbled situationships here and there, a rekindled flame and some friendly explorations of newfound intimacy among old friends, but nothing truly groundbreaking.

But the truth is, once you recognize the flaws in your own relationship template, there’s kind of a period where you find yourself acting the same while quickly realizing what hit for you once doesn’t hit the same anymore. I’d still seek the drama but recoil immediately from it, like a kid who finally understands the stove is hot, but doesn’t know shit about cooking.

This is wildly frustrating, but also oddly liberating. It gave me a lot of space to focus on me, something I never really allowed myself before. I started to realize that romance is something we get to define for ourselves and with our partners; it isn’t what our friends, our media, or our families tell us it needs to be. Relationships are not mountains to be climbed for someone else, they’re adventures you get to go on with someone who makes you feel more you. And what rings one person’s bell may not ring another’s, so getting attuned to what gets you excited in any given relationship is the only way to show up authentically.

Spring fever is upon us, and for the first time in my life, I’m not stressed out because of a relationship or for lack of one. Once I released the external pressure to provide updates on my love life to my family (who “just want me to be happy;” I assure you, I am), my friends (who “just want me to get laid;” I assure you, this is the wrong mindset) and society (who sees a single middle aged man as some kind of deviant or defective), it got a lot easier to just let things happen as they should. One day at a time, letting the butterflies in my stomach lead, but always mindful of my own bad habits and biases I’ve collected along the way. Just seeing where things go and enjoying every moment of the adventure with people I genuinely enjoy being around…that’s the path, and I’m enjoying the walk.

I may not be able to fully explain what a healthy relationship looks like from lived experience yet, but I’m certain that a 90 minute romcom can’t either. So check your template, ask yourself what makes you happy and no one else, and get those voices out of your head. Build friendships, flirt with everyone, and take it easy. You’re never alone when you find yourself.

Until next week!