A Crush
Let’s call him M. He materialized as a resume submitted to my Silicon Valley internet company. His resume listed a personal website, which turned out to be a bare-bones HTML page of reptile jokes. A thirty-something programmer who presented himself as a repository of cheesy kids’ jokes? He caught my attention, although not in the kind of way that predicted I’d someday call him my boyfriend — particularly since I was married.
The interview entailed an hour or so of trying to determine if he was sufficiently bright, capable, and personable. He demonstrated bright and capable easily. As for personable, he commented on my Newbury Comics shirt: he had grown up near Boston, where I was desperate to move, having grown listless and discontented living in California.
I was sold on him, but he didn’t appear to be sold on the company. He’d been so reserved that I was startled to hear he’d accepted the job; we became coworkers within a few weeks. When I commented at home one night, “The new guy at work is pretty cute,” my husband remained at ease; my schoolgirl crushes amuse us both.
Every pop song on the radio is suddenly speaking to me. —“Superhero”
M and I must have made small talk occasionally, but for months, he had little impact on my life, just a tiny extra flutter of nerves when we spoke. We crossed paths daily at work, but it takes an external force to get two introverted people to willingly interact with each other.
This external force arrived in the form of acceptance to grad school. It wasn’t Boston, but it was America’s easternmost time zone, and that was good enough for the moment. Classes didn’t begin until August, but I refused to spend another summer in California, and my husband graciously agreed to leave as soon as we got logistics in order. That left a matter of weeks.
With my situational depression lifted, my slight social tendencies asserted themselves. M and I already took part in a regular poker game, which was where he and my husband met and became casually friendly. I made more effort to chat with M on these nights and to suggest lunch at work alone instead of with our entire team. I don’t remember many of these conversations, but they would have been full of work talk, poker talk, probably some Boston talk. I joined a second, less-fun poker night he attended. This one was full of different coworkers who were oddly cavalier about probability, for engineers. The only one I recall is “Two-Seven Mike,” who repeatedly bet on that most awful of hands. The night before my last day at work, I figured M and I had become friendly enough that he couldn’t refuse me some kind of goodbye, so we had dinner.
I am leaving in the morning, so let’s not be shy. — “Shy”
Dinner was a casual affair; we walked down the street after work for indeterminate Asian food and beers. Halfway through dinner, his girlfriend texted to say she’d seen him walking with a strange woman and wanted to know if he would be coming home. Taken aback, I cringed at her presumed insecurity, mistaking a casual friendship between coworkers for an affair.
A drink or two later, tipsy and sentimental, thinking I’d never see him after the next day, I confessed that I found him attractive and that my husband and I had been discussing having an open relationship. We had decided not to go down that path right now, which made this a hypothetical but still ill-advised conversation. He took this all in impassively.
When I recounted dinner to my husband, he was less than pleased I’d blurted all of this out, but he let it pass. He already knew I’m susceptible to overwrought goodbyes, and we’d be leaving town soon enough.
A Pen Pal
For the year and a half I spent in grad school, M’s and my relationship formed a pattern suspiciously similar to a long-distance romance. It began slowly, exchanging emails every few days as my husband and I drove across the country and settled into a new life.
M and I became the kind of friends who know each other’s going on day-to-day in each others’ lives. My husband grew to recognize my expression as I composed emails every few days, staring off into the distance, screen full of text. When I traveled, we switched to text messages. The high was perhaps several dozen messages in a day, paltry for a modern teenager, but too much for my phone plan to handle.
We never spoke on the phone or tried video chat, content with written words. At some point he mailed me a book, which I read and mailed back. We watched a movie together once: we both rented 500 Days of Summer, then signed online and pressed play simultaneously, chatting our reactions. We got to know each other asynchronously, as many long-distance couples do.
Just blame it all on me, say I was shameless. — “Shameless”
Shortly after moving, I picked up a part-time job and flew to Manhattan to meet a client. The meeting was a disaster: he didn’t believe in my skills, and I didn’t know how to sell myself. The assignment fell through, but a mixup on the flight led to me getting a $300 flight voucher and realizing that the only place I wanted to go was back to my despised California.
I planned to spend a weekend, staying in M’s guest room, our actual plans hazy. I ended up taking a different flight than anticipated, one that arrived half a day earlier, so I avoided sending him my actual flight information and wandered Berkeley for the day, afraid to impose on him by arriving any earlier than I’d said.
Arriving at his house only increased my uncertainty. I had forgotten how reserved he was; I was used to having time to mull over my thoughts and compose an email, not sitting next to him on the couch, mind blank. I was relieved to have shown up late at night, going to bed fairly soon after showing up.
I joined him at work for lunch the next day, pleased to see old coworkers. If they found it strange I was visiting him; they kept quiet. We met up with friends of his for poker and I stuck close to him, shy of people I knew even less well than him. The awkwardness thawed that evening and as we spent the rest of the weekend lounging at the beach, going out to eat, and watching DVDs. He drove me the hour to San Francisco to catch my departing flight, so we could spend one more hour talking.
She’s bent over from the business of begging forgiveness. — “School Night”
My husband expressed some reservations about me visiting M; my confession of attraction had been a sore point. We historically disagreed on what was acceptable with other people when it came to the gray world of not-quite-sexual, not-quite-platonic conversation and behavior. However, we were in perfect agreement on what constituted infidelity: anything sexual, beginning with a kiss, was unacceptable and could risk the entire marriage. In agreement on the big things, he left the littler ones to my judgment.
That judgment is fallible, which is probably why people talk about avoiding questionable situations in the first place. Watching movies with M, at first I felt innocent curled up next to him; affection with a friend felt normal. I usually don’t spend a full evening in such close proximity to a single friend, though, and eventually felt the scale tip from “pleasant” to “too much.” I stood up and headed for bed, he apologized, and life went on.
Fearing marital conflict, I did not describe the brief inappropriateness for some time after returning, which only served to increase that conflict. The blowup was large enough that M took for granted he and I were finished being friends. However, my husband is not one to tell me to cut people off, and we went back to being pen pals, though arguments over this trip would resurface in my marriage periodically for some time to come.
You’ll say it’s really nice to see you, you’ll say I missed you horribly. — “You Had Time”
While M and I fell back into our kind-of-dating-long-distance relationship, traveling to visit each other was no longer a subject of conversation. Since we’d met, I’d nursed hope that we’d both eventually end up in Boston. We had talked about it idly: he had grown up in the area, and I still planned to move there after school. I cheered inwardly when he quit our old company, then cursed when he stayed in California and joined a startup instead of heading east. The startup didn’t get enough traction to be worth his while, so he packed up headed for Massachusetts.
One day he was leaving California, the next he was sending photos from Arizona or New Mexico, and a day or two after that he was in my city. We met up at a diner near his hotel; he and my husband were too suspicious of each other for him to stay with us. I shook from anticipation and from having just gotten lost in a rough neighborhood. His voice was a shock, after a year, but otherwise, seeing him felt natural. He stopped by my campus before leaving town and briefly lent a hand with my coursework; a photo of him helping out appears in the documentation for one of my final projects that semester. To my classmates, he was a friend passing through. So much and so little that word contained, “friend.”
A Boyfriend
That M moved to Boston, arriving shortly before I finally made it there, seemed to me a small miracle. My husband saw it in a less rosy light, alternating between tolerant and concerned. I stopped seeking advice about M except from one or two close friends, because the advice was universal and unbearable: spouse is jealous of friend? End the friendship, do it now, now, NOW. There was no question that my marriage was worth more than this friendship, or whatever it was, far more. But that didn’t make M worthless, and I was willing to weather some conflict to keep him in my life. My husband, to his everlasting credit, acknowledged that this friendship was important to me, and he, too, was willing to work through our disagreements rather than ask me to give it up. “It seems you have a new best friend,” he said early in our Boston days, some time before we both fell into referring to M as my boyfriend.
“We better have a good explanation for all the fun we had.” — “Shameless”
In Boston, M and I saw each other a couple of times a month, most often for dinner. We watched a lot of movies, sometimes in theaters, more often at his apartment. We played with his cats, went for walks in the city, took in Red Sox games, and tried some museums. His tolerance for theater was higher than my husband’s, but his tolerance for hippie restaurants was lower. Occasionally we’d spend a full Saturday or Sunday together instead of a weeknight, and a few times we went further afield than Boston. We spoke at least once of spending a weekend in Manhattan, but I didn’t think my husband would be comfortable with an overnight and therefore let that idea go. Mostly, we talked.
The map of Boston with M is largely separate from the rest of my Boston. Fenway appears in both places, as do many of the sidewalks of Cambridge and Boston. But even though for most of the time we knew each other, he worked in my neighborhood and lived only a few miles away, we generally went to different restaurants, saw different parts of the city than I see with other people.
I tried to arrange time with M when my husband had plans with other friends — never as a secret, just a courtesy. He’s more social than I am, with a much wider network of friends, so it worked well enough for him to see a different set of friends each week, while I’d spend most of those nights with M. In terms of both time and space, he generally occupied his own unique part of my life.
As M and I grew closer, I hoped that he and my husband could be friends. They were both good people and had some common interests: poker, Python, some amount of science fiction, and their beloved Red Sox. Close friends might be too much to hope for, but perhaps friendly acquaintances. This was a fantasy: at best, they tolerated each other.
M and I each got to know many of the people important to the other one, but we were never woven into each others’ lives the way that I have been with actual boyfriends. We met some of each other’s friends, though neither of us ever became really integrated into the other’s social life. I don’t know if his parents thought it odd that their son brought a married woman to have dinner with them. My own parents would certainly have thought it odd, so he never met them and I rarely mentioned him by name. I attended his company holiday party, while my husband came to mine. We had dinner on his birthday, but I spent my birthday with my husband and other friends.
See an eyelash on my cheek, pick it off and make a wish. — “Deep Dish”
Physical touch is the most common way to talk about monogamy. Nudity, sex, these are easy enough to define. Emotion is harder, but even affection can be nebulous. I took M’s hand in crowds but felt guilty keeping it walking down the street. In public and in private, we were casually physically intimate in the way of couples all over, a light touch substituting for “Glad to see you” or “Don’t step in front of that bus.” Any touch that made my brain say, “Sex?” was out. Anything I could in good faith call “affection” was in, though some kind of hourglass tipped over after too long.
Like sex, certain spoken words were too explicit for this semi-romance. We never said, “I love you,” and I didn’t even think about it at the time. We mattered to each other, that was clear, and that was enough. We spoke affectionately to each other, but no pet names, no magic words.
For most of the time we knew each other, he was single. When we’d met, he’d mentioned strain in his relationship, the woman who had texted him at dinner to ask if he was coming home. I received a string of nasty messages from her one morning, telling me I was pathetic and she pitied my husband. M said they’d broken up, she’d read his email and apparently questioned my morals. I re-read the few emails he and I had exchanged up to that point and felt puzzled but not guilty. A close reader could infer that I was getting rather fond of him, but nothing inappropriate had happened, and I wrapped myself in this defense.
We talked a few times about whether or not my presence in his life prevented him from getting a “real” relationship — if I took the edge off of loneliness, like a rice cake for a dieter, enabling him to do without richer things. He maintained that this was a fallacy, that he was a highly introverted person who wanted a lot of time to himself, that full-time relationships weren’t really his thing. I was skeptical of this, but I couldn’t pretend I knew better than he knew himself.
An Ex
All of my official romantic relationships, as well as my less-official hookups, have ended because I met someone else, and monogamy demands choice. M and I had no such exclusivity, so we might have held on a while longer, except that he broke up with me, and I didn’t fight to get him back.
You’ll probably think this was just my big excuse. — “School Night”
It may well have just been that the infatuation wore off and we had no commitment to fall back on. His apathy, which I’d been impervious to when I’d felt like an exception to it, began to grate on me. I thought he might be depressed; he maintained that he wasn’t, but if I thought he was, I should have reacted by spending more time with him. Instead I was spending less, having grown more invested in work.
I mentioned a coworker making something of a pass at me, and he reacted with what sounded like jealousy. He ended up stating that if he and I were ever in an actual romantic relationship — a hypothetical we rarely discussed, as my husband and I had settled on monogamy indefinitely — he wouldn’t stand for me having relationships with men other than my husband.
I recoiled at this. Although maintaining a marriage and two additional romantic relationships would likely strain my organizational skills, I felt like he was demanding a privilege — that of being the last relationship — that my husband wouldn’t have, which felt disrespectful. Never mind that this was hypothetical; perhaps I just wanted an excuse to recoil.
Over six months or so, we drifted apart, him pointing out one day that the last time we’d gone so long without speaking, it had been because I hadn’t been in the continental United States. He was correct; in almost four years, the longest we’d been out of touch had been a week where I’d been on a boat off the shores of Alaska. This time it was two weeks, and I had no geographical excuse. Still, I was defensive and reacted badly. When he reached out again, it may have been to make amends, but I thought he wanted an apology and didn’t feel I had wronged him, so instead, it was the last time we spoke.
Closure is hardly my strong suit. I have annoyed ex-boyfriends and ex-not-quite-boyfriends nearly to death, bleating “But don’t you want to be friends?” long after they’ve finished with me. But with M, the end was clearly the end. I note his birthday, I know how long it’s been, but I have no expectation of hearing from him and no plan to reach out to him. The relationship ran its course.
There was no endgame for us, no relationship escalator. We were together, in some sense, for four years, but there had never been talk of the future. Secretly, I hoped we’d be lifelong friends. I never figured out how to succinctly explain him to other people. For most people — coworkers, casual friends — calling M my friend sufficed. Close friends observed that he was special, and they grew to ask about him when we’d catch up, in the same way they asked about my marriage, work, and family. My husband finally settled on “boyfriend” in our private conversations. The word is incongruous with the idea of marriage I grew up with, but it remains the most accurate descriptor of this unexpected relationship.
