Excerpt
If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You
How do I (44M) tell my girlfriend (39F) that I changed my mind about her moving into my house?My gf and I have been dating for 8 years, but I identify as a bachelor.
Diane (I’ll call her Diane) rents a one-bedroom, where she keeps a metric f***ton of plants and a rabbit that looks like a lion. I own my own place in Los Feliz (I was an early hire at a startup that was acquired at an insane overvaluation and before anyone jumps down my throat, I know the American Dream isn’t possible for everyone; it wasn’t possible for Diane).
We used to have this good thing going, where we would spend most of the week at our own places, and the weekend together at my place watching our shows, but during the end of the world we started spending a LOT more time together. Diane only went home to water her plants.
The number one thing you need to understand about rabbits is that they’re not cats. They can’t really be left alone for more than 24 hours, so I let Diane keep a rabbit cage (she calls it a “habitat”) at my house. Owen Wilson (that’s what she calls the rabbit) needs fresh herbs fed TO him. It’s a lot.
So our new baseline became 24/7. I could go in my music room and put on my noise-canceling headphones, but I could still hear her yelling at her elderly father on FaceTime to put in his hearing aids. When she got laid off, I felt as an empath how demoralized she was when she stopped wearing actual pants. At this point, I think she’s supporting herself with credit cards (before anyone accuses ME of being the asshole, I offered to make her a budgeting spreadsheet). I asked myself, how should we sync up on this?
One night, after we split a bottle of a nice Cab from Napa I was saving for a special occasion before special occasions got canceled, I said I had something to ask her. I’m sure she thought I was going to ask her to marry me.
“Would you want to move in?” I said.
Fast forward six weeks. Diane didn’t renew her lease. She read that self-help book that says to throw away anything that doesn’t give good vibes, but while she was packing, I did a holotropic breathwork session and realized that after all this time together, the thing I want is LESS time together, not more. My therapist helped me articulate my needs: I don’t want to share space. I want my space BACK.
Diane is hot. She’s smart and she can take a joke without running to the police. She has this sexy, low-pitched laugh that I love. But I’m sitting here right now with Owen Wilson while Diane follows the guys in the moving truck to my place and my resting heart rate is in the cardio zone. I feel like I’m staring down forever.
TL;DR How do I tell Diane I love her, but this is a huge mistake? I want to go back to what we had before.
You stupid motherf***er was all I could think when I got to the end.
You didn’t think to give Owen Wilson a pseudonym?I was stalled in traffic on the 101, behind the Lopez Bros. moving van. It was Mollie who had sent me the link, followed by a parade of red alarm emojis. If she had already seen it, who else had seen it? I wasn’t going to cry. I never cried. I thought about taking my revenge in the form of a hysterical blurt of happiness:
on my way see you soon can’t wait for our new lives together to begin!!!! I thought about texting him a screenshot of his own Reddit post, no comment. Or maybe a photo of him cuddling O.W., if I could find one on my phone without killing myself in a wreck.
I remembered every detail of the night he’d asked me to move in. In a blind taste test, I would not have been able to tell the difference between that cabernet and a bottle of Yellow Tail Shiraz, but for Luke it was all about the ceremony of selecting the bottle, followed by the ritual of slowly uncorking it, decanting the wine, pouring and swirling and sniffing and reciting the flavor profile: black cherry, vanilla, plum. As a sommelier, Luke was certified. This was the kind of thing Luke did. He was also certified as a power yoga instructor at the two-hundred-hour level.
What he’d actually said to me that night was “I was worried at first that if we spent so much time together, you would get sick of me.”
“I could never get sick of you,” I said. Luke had all these talents. He did oil paintings of our friends’ pets. On YouTube, he taught himself how to refinish hardwood floors. Once he even knit me a hat. It was like he was accumulating skills that would make his summer camp counselor application stand out. But Luke was forty-four years old. He wore a full beard and a baseball cap to hide his balding.
“I’m not sick of you either,” he said, clinking his expensive, delicate glass against mine.
I never would have asked to move in. If I had been the kind of woman who wanted a husband and kids, I would not have devoted my thirties to Luke, who was incapable of committing to anything beyond a thirty-day challenge. I told anyone who asked that I had chosen having a career over having kids, because choices were empowering. The truth was that, in my twenties, my gynecologist had diagnosed me with a condition that would make conception difficult, if not impossible. Working all the time allowed me to inoculate myself against wanting what I couldn’t have.
And then I got laid off for the third time in five years. I’d started my career covering celebrities—their vices, their breakups, their crashes, their comebacks—but once they started using social media, there was less of a need for editorial. Print magazines starved to death. I survived the media industry’s pivot to digital and the pivot to video and the pivot to podcasting, but it was the collapse of live events, after we’d all pivoted to live events, that crushed me. On paper, I was “deeply passionate about community building” and “comfortable in a fast-paced environment,” but my years of experience had become a liability. It signaled to potential employers that I was old and expensive. On my résumé, I deleted my first two jobs out of college and changed the date of my graduation so I appeared to be thirty-four. It still wasn’t enough.
“Why would they hire me when they could get a twenty-two-year-old who, this is a direct quote, ‘lives and breathes social’ and has on-camera experience, and evening and weekend availability to, I quote, ‘mine’ user-generated content from their online community?” I asked Luke as I read a job listing off my phone.
“Dayna, if you need . . .” Luke looked so uncomfortable. I thought he was about to offer me money. This was unforeseen, but not unwelcome. Would it be a loan? Or a gift? Because he’d gotten lucky in tech, he now had a lucrative consulting career, advising founders on cultivating “a culture of lucky.” The income inequality in our relationship typically went politely unacknowledged, but I’d let slip that I’d opened a new credit card so I could transfer the balances from my other credit cards. I felt like the dealer in Monopoly, exchanging one pile of unreal money for another.
“If I need what?”
“Let me start over. Do you want to move in?”
“Why? Because I’m broke?”
“Not because you’re broke. Because I miss you when you’re not here.”
The wine was finished. I’d hardly tasted what I’d drunk. Luke picked up his phone and started playing a Wilco song through the Bluetooth speakers. As we slow-danced to the melancholy violin, my left cheek pressed to his chest, I almost broke down. Luke knew all my favorite songs. I slept so much better at his place than at mine. I thought my life was about to get easier. I thought I’d finally earned a promotion.
Now a beige Corolla ahead on my left had its right turn signal on. I wasn’t even going five miles an hour. She had room to get in my lane. “Go ahead, lady,” I said, out loud, to no one. The exit for Sunset was coming up. Had she put on her signal by mistake? If she didn’t switch lanes soon, I was going to pass her, and no one behind me was going to be nice enough to let her in. She didn’t even know how good she had it. I rolled down my window and stuck out my arm to gesture at her to go ahead already. Exhaust fumes blew in like hot ghosts. By the time the Corolla finally pulled ahead, I’d lost sight of the moving van.
My phone rang. It was Mollie.
“Girl,” she said.
“
He asked
me to move in,” I said.
“Where are you right now?”
“I’m in the car! I’m on my way!”
“Oh my God,” Mollie said.
“What?”
