A Love Story For The Ages

Classic inebriated boy meets inebriated girl.

Molly,

I’ve been fucking one of my best friends for over a year now. And in between the sex, there’ve been dinner dates and screaming fights and meeting his family and drunken declarations of feelings and hooking up with other people out of spite and trying to end it only to wind up back together after a couple of weeks of not speaking. Basically we’ve been wavering between friends with benefits and full on relationship for a year now, never able to fully commit to either end of the spectrum. As much as it pains me to admit this, I fell for the guy. Shocker, right? I am completely in love with this man, despite (or maybe because of) the intensity of our relationship. I am unsure if he knows. Feelings are things we only discuss when intoxicated, and then they are never mentioned again, either because one of us was too inebriated to remember or because we never want to revisit those conversations again. Only thing is, I am moving at the end of the month to take a year-long job in Sydney, Australia. Whatever gray area we have been living in for a year is about to change with my absence. I really would like to move on - a year without a title or commitment means it will probably never surface. But part of me really wants to throw an “I love you” in his face before I leave. Leave him with those words while I disappear to the other side of the world, leave him to sit with what I have felt for the majority of our “relationship” and maybe feel regret, maybe wish he had done things differently. Set up the stage for things to be different when I return. Get everything off my chest so I can maybe begin new life and get over him for good. But is this idiotic? Should I just keep my mouth shut and wish him well and never let him know just how much of an impact he has on my life? I can’t decide which is the best course of action.

Too Late to Say I Love You

Dear TLTSILY,

Oh, how I swooned as I read your whirlwind tale of true love! The fucking, the screaming fights, the long silences, the inebriated declarations of vague feelings, the avoidance, the spiteful fucking of other people! Good old-fashioned romance is so hard to come by these days. It warms my heart when two people find it somehow, against all odds!

Of course you should run to his arms and confess your love before you leave for the Australian continent! Consider wearing a long, flowing white dress. Think “My Brilliant Career.” You’re a young Judy Davis, pushing Sam Neill away so you can be a writer. (Ohhhh, Judy Davis. What a woman! This was before the pale eyes and the dark sneering lips of “Naked Lunch.” More than a decade before! But there was a sneer simmering behind those saucer eyes, oh yes there was!) All Sam Neill wants is you! You’ll throw an “I love you” in his face and then board your big ship and disappear over the horizon. He’ll be left weeping into his hands. “She loved me all along!” he’ll say to himself over a stiff drink.

Then he’ll get drunk and fuck someone new. And you’ll go to Sydney and fuck someone new. And good old-fashioned romance will be yours, yet again! At first you’ll think that it’s impossible to have all of that glorious screaming and avoidance and spite-fucking you had with your one true love, but miraculously, all of that magic will be yours, all over again!

Because the good old-fashioned romance of Raymond Carver short stories is always just a few stiff drinks away. When you can only feel your feelings while drunk, you confuse getting drunk with someone with being in love with them. You confuse silence and avoidance with suspense. You confuse screaming fights with honest communication. You confuse the person you’re fucking with someone who actually gives a fuck about you. You confuse giant predatory insects with caring lovers.

You confuse real life with old movies. You confuse throwing an “I love you” in someone’s face with throwing a punch at his face. You confuse disappearing over the horizon with mattering, with being at the center of everything, with inciting love and longing in another person where none existed before.

So. (This is where the insect says Rub a little of that powder on my lips.) You were born with too many feelings and you’ve learned to shut them off. You’re a fallen romantic, and now you think that the boozy echoes of feelings are the same thing as feelings themselves. You’re hallucinating, William S. Burroughs. But it’s very hard for you to feel optimistic, isn’t it? It’s very hard for you to speak honestly without undercutting everything you say with jokes. It’s very hard to imagine that you have value to a guy unless you’re either fighting with him, fucking him, or disappearing over the horizon.

“Naked Lunch” is a movie about a writer who wants to get fucked up and escape. It’s pretty trippy and exciting. The scene with the giant scary insect fucking the young guy is worth the price of admission alone. In contrast, “My Brilliant Career” is a movie about a woman who knows that she wants to be a writer, but she also knows that it’ll take a lot of work to get there. When I saw it in the theater at the age of 9, I was incredibly bored. That’s how real life sometimes feels, too. It’s mostly hard work. Sometimes it’s boring. There aren’t a lot of screaming fights or giant predatory insects. And when you stop drinking too much and stop hanging out with people who couldn’t give less of a shit about you, beyond a loose friendship and the loose promise of sex, everything feels flat and dead and you have to face your own shame. That’s grueling work and it’s not remotely sexy or romantic.

It will crush you to face yourself and realize that you’re not wearing a flowing white dress like Judy Davis, and no one is watching you disappear or thinking about you after you leave. It will make you weep into your hands, to see your confusion clearly, to feel your true feelings – dread and self-loathing and fear of being irreparably broken. But if you do the hard work, and you accept that hard work is a huge part of survival, you’ll start to feel joy without getting drunk. You’ll start to feel genuinely good about yourself and your life instead of telling swaggery stories that barely obscure the insecurity and longing just beneath the surface. You’ll say “I love you” to someone and it won’t mean “Kiss my ass, I’m outta here.”

Bottom line? Dude. You need therapy.

Sydney is great, though. I was there in March. If you have the money to spend the night at the zoo, do it. The view from the zoo at sunset is incredible. But Sydney is made of great views. Go to the places with the great views often. Go to all of them, over and over.

You’ll enjoy those views more once you stop running away from who you are. You’re just a squashy little baby, full of too much love. Oversensitive. Neurotic. Keep the jokes, jokes are good. I would add more jokes here but your letter actually made me sad. I was just like you when I was younger. It was very, very lonely.

Learn to feel now, is all I can say. Don’t wait. It’s not uncool to feel things. People who believe that are sad insects and they only get worse with age. Tell this idiot you love him or not, it doesn’t matter because he won’t feel it either way. Trust me. He isn’t invested, because he’s a drunk and he could stay that way for another week or he could stay that way forever. Don’t be like him. Learn to be honest without feeling embarrassed by it. Tell all the jokes you want, but don’t use them to undercut your feelings. Dare to be a true romantic – clear-eyed, earnest, spilling over with bad poetry. Become the thing that embarrasses you the most.

You won’t lose your edge, trust me. Feelings will make your edge even edgier. Just look at Judy Davis. Say it with me: Pale eyes, dark lips, can’t lose.

Molly

What embarrasses you the most? Write to askmolly at protonmail and she’ll tell you what should embarrass you the most, anyway.