Getting married soon

Some notes on world-building

I used to think that falling in love had to look a certain way. Connection was synonymous with breathless, giddy excitement and immediate mutual understanding. It had to be like a sudden explosion. Both the home you’ve always been looking for and the happiness you’d never believed possible, delivered simultaneously. 

I was intimidated by Cate during our first Zoom call. A lot of people are: her pale blue stare, her obvious intelligence, the crisp precision of her communication. She isn’t always given to niceties, because she doesn’t really need them herself, as an independent-minded creature who is perfectly comfortable with life, rarely needing reassurance. We talked about something, my job situation, it didn’t matter.

After the call ended, I didn’t really know what was going on. Then I received the following two messages:

“we should make out”

“just stating a preference”

When we’d started talking, we were both recovering from previous relationships. Both of us were thinking, okay, fuck, let’s not relate for a second or two. But text was a really easy medium for us, so we started slipping into something that wasn’t not a relationship. We traded stories of our wasted years. I said she was gorgeous, and she sent me an unflattering selfie to moderate my expectations. She told me that if I was too promising as a potential match, I might scare her off. Every time she enjoyed one of my texts, she sent me an eyeball emoji, indicating apprehension. I respected this by limiting my communications, instead satisfying myself by trying to summon her essence as I walked around Montreal.

When I flew out to see her, I said I’d usually find a nice restaurant, make a reservation. She said “I don’t care about that, don’t do it.” Soon, she met me at her garden gate. What I expected, after so much collective confession, was for us to charmingly disarm each other. Instead: awkwardness. We sat there like startled animals, wondering what to do. “Should we try kissing?” she said.

Now, we are extremely comfortable together. But it took us about three months to figure out how to talk to each other, even though we were practicing a lot—I moved in during our first date, and basically never left. Her long habitual silences struck me as slightly alienating. I felt left out of an amazing mind. My constant desire for touch and chatting struck her as invasive, too demanding. She hardly spends time around anyone after business hours—in the fashion of some cats, if Cate is sitting there looking at you, she likes you. If she relaxes in your arms, you’ve got a shot at growing old together. She didn’t understand why I wasn’t picking up on that. I had become accustomed to certain kinds of accommodation—flattery, feigned interest in whatever I happened to mention. Also, as a Berkeley resident half-deep in the spiritual scene, I am surrounded by professional emoters. But Cate aspires to complete honesty, especially with people she likes. Early on, we went shopping, and I got a shirt. I emerged from the changing room, expecting some sort of compliment, and she said, “that looks within distribution.”

We said “I love you” before those three months were up, because we did fall in love while still in a state of some mutual bafflement. She said it first, in front of a friend, nonchalantly, simply stating a fact. “I’ve been thinking it, I just decided to say it,” she said. I felt the same way. And yet—did we have “great chemistry” in the early stages? If you saw us on camera, maybe you would have said no. But I was constantly interested. Our moments together weren’t seamless, but they were saturated with aliveness. Her love language was making sure I had a Hazmat suit in case the Ukraine situation went nuclear. Any problem I had, that she could solve, was solved instantly. At night she made these cute weird noises. 

And when we did talk well, it made all other talking seem obsolete. Over dinner, she routinely said things that were so compactly, palpably wise I could feel them hit me in the diaphragm. In return, I found myself being more honest, more complex. There is a person I can be around Cate who does not emerge elsewhere. She has a particular perceptiveness—she did well in poker by, among other things, monitoring her opponents for tiny changes in their breathing. When that sight falls on you, what you are changes. 

There was this one moment early on that really got me. We were talking about her work, which is partially about saving the world from bioterrorism. I know a lot of people who work on good causes, and, often, it seems somewhat guilt-based, like they’re trying to convince themselves that they’re good, by doing a good thing. Or it’s, like, intellectual. They’ve memorized a string of text that goes something like “doing good is important to me.” That’s not a problem or anything. Talking to Cate, though, I saw something else. “You really do feel emotionally responsible for the fate of humanity on a deep level, don’t you?” I asked. She took a second to think about it and nodded, like, yeah, seems that way. In that second, I glimpsed her profound love for our species. She doesn’t care to talk to random people at cocktail parties, but she cares, fiercely, about their lives. The intensity of this was wild and beautiful. The relationship stopped feeling optional around that time.

Previously, my friend Ava had said to me: “It sounds like you typically look for a connection that starts at a 10/10. Maybe what you want is something that starts at a 7/10.” I didn’t like hearing this. But it makes a ton of sense. When you are love-drunk you are also drunk-drunk. You’re not really seeing the person, you’re seeing your own phosphorescence. That can turn out quite well, but it’s a tricky landing. With Cate, I don’t feel like “7/10” is the right way to describe the initial connection. There was intensity. But it wasn’t fluid, it wasn’t this romcom thing. We had to make the momentum ourselves. We were filled with insecurities and baggage, kept being scared that various parts of our previous marriages would turn up. I was definitely seeing a real person, not a fleeting hormonal creation.

In the abstract, I wouldn’t advise any of this—getting into a serious relationship this soon after legally dissolving the previous one, with a person quite different than you, cohabiting from the beginning, spending all of your time together. Some of my friends expressed caution, some of hers did too, and they were right to do this. But there’s no other Cate, so this is how it had to go. 

And this way, we had to build something, bit by bit, from the beginning, it wasn’t just there for us to take. Our relationship is custom. I have no precedent for Cate, I’ve had to rewrite all of my romantic habits. She dislikes idle praise and excessive displays, which is counter to the training I’ve received thus far. Too much attention makes her shrink. Recently I asked her whether she enjoyed the love letters I email her occasionally. “I do. But it’s weird, I don’t know how to respond. I’m like, why is he saying this?” 

The way she expresses herself is just different. Once we stopped at a Burger King in the desert. She was miserable, tired, on crutches from fucking up her knee the day before. She looked at me over her Impossible Whopper and started crying tears of happiness, and reached over to play with my hair. Similarly, it was during a normal work day, the both of us adrift on our laptops in the living room, clicking on whatever, when she said, without prompting from me, “I think we should get married soon.”

I find that I’m a better person than when we met. She is one of the only people who thinks to ask me, when I say something with conviction and panache, “is that true?” It is not always true. She fails to believe in my self-imposed limitations, just like she fails to have any of her own, and this is an influence one wants in the building. She is learning that it is okay to talk about herself and be proud of herself, that she can ask for what she needs, and even be cared for sometimes. 

We get married in two weeks. We are fanatically interested in our relationship. Sometimes we’re just watching TV and I’m quietly freaking out about how totally in love I am. It feels too big for my body, too sprawling to be expressed with any single action. The fact that we’ve gotten here, from where we were, makes me more clueless than ever about what makes relationships work. Jacob Falkovich says that single people often seek out similarity when complementarity is what makes relationships cohere long-term. It’s a great observation. But how to operationalize it? Maybe: look for someone you can’t initially understand, but also don’t feel like walking away from. Now when my friends tell me they went on a couple of dates with someone intriguing and desirable, but it didn’t feel totally natural, I want to tell them that maybe they’re encountering a complicated portal into another way of being. 

I guess two irreducible complexities smash into each other, either co-creating something more or falling to pieces. Patience and listening are good. Some craziness is useful, I think, some faith in the power of your will. Maybe it helps if you date the most fascinating person you’ve ever met, if you always want to hear them say one more word.