Experimental foreplay — Daniela pt. 3
I had a complex with Daniela. I wanted to be seen as a perfect boyfriend in so many ways. I was constantly chasing the right way to do it.
We expressed our love in our own styles. Daniela grew up in the indie music scene, going to concerts and discovering new bands. Throughout the early years of our relationship when CDs were still a thing, she would make me these mix tapes called Sweet Beats. They’d be a mix of 10 or so songs that were meaningful to her in some way, or that she thought would be meaningful to me. She’d hand-make the CD jacket with collage-style art and pencil crayons, and write a romantic message on the inside. Sometimes the CDs would be a surprise out of nowhere, but when my birthday was coming up, I had a good feeling a new volume of Sweet Beats was on the way.
I was a year-minus-one-week older than her, so for that one week once she’d had her birthday, we were briefly the same age. I would always joke how my one year of experience over her gave me a much wider perspective on the world and wisdom that only someone who was my exact age could possibly attain. Then once she’d had her birthday she could turn the tables, and gloat right back at me that we were the same age and I had no advantage over her anymore. Sweet Beats Vol. #14’s message was one such opportunity for her to let me know how she felt. In scribbled handwriting surrounded by tiny hearts and flowers framing the corners, it read:
Wow, you can barely make it past a week being the same age as me! Ohhh well! Can you believe another set of B-days together? Only for yours it’s going to EPIC this year! I am so, so, so, excited for our trip! It is going to be so lovely having breakfast with you every morning and seeing super neat sights & drinking sangria! There is no one but you I would want to do this with. You make me happy every day. So hoorah to another year! I know it will be amazing!
Love Always Daniela
We took a trip to Europe days later. We ended up not going where I wanted to visit for my actual birthday and had a fight over it, but that’s what happens when you’re only a couple of years into a relationship in your early 20s! You’re trying to figure each other out! And we did. It all got worked out and we rebounded for an amazing trip.
As the years went on, we kept staying attentive to each other’s needs as best we could. She loved to get her back cracked and would lie down in front of me in anticipation of me putting all my weight into her back for a satisfying crunch. But she would just stare straight at the ground and radiate this eager energy, waiting for me, with no confirmation that I was ready to go. So I loved to take too long to do it, ever-so-slightly out of her sight, so she would go “Alan?! Where are you?!” and then I’d swoop in and give her the pop she needed.
Having me wait until the very last moment to participate in something silly became a running joke for us. One time, Daniela overheard someone refer to a woman “starfishing” during sex. She brought it up later to me when we were in bed, and instead wanted to jazz up a new meaning of starfishing all to ourselves. A starfish was too cute of an animal to be used as a derogatory term for lazy sex. Instead, she wanted to lay back, arms and legs spread wide to look like a starfish, and have me lay on top of her in the same manner (both of us completely naked, obviously). We stare at each other, hands held tight, feet touching. Then she would slowly and excitedly count down from three and have us both yell “STAAAAAARFIIIIIIISH” at the top of our lungs. Boom. Starfishing 2.0.
Daniela loved to starfish. But more than starfishing, she loved to make me starfish with her. I, of course, would fake incompetence to tease her the whole way through our charade. I would reluctantly play along, pretend to be confused by the directions, then miss my cue on the countdown, until five attempts later (three of which were our “last attempt, or else”), I would finally get it right as we both screamed “Staaaaarfiiiiiish” together.
This went on for years.
I had to learn a lot too though. I loved telling her how beautiful she looked. I loved flitting in behind her while she was in the kitchen and kissing her while smelling her hair. I’d hold her body tightly to mine and say how she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world. I knew she had some body issues, and I wanted her to always know that she was perfect exactly the way she was. Even if what that was changed a little bit (gained more weight, added more wrinkles, whatever), that was the new perfect, no matter what.
But that can get very tiring from her side!
Especially when it’s happening every day, multiple times a day. And I didn’t realize that right away. Someone can tell you about their love languages, but actually putting them into practice is different. I soon came to understand that shuffling her out of the kitchen so I could do all the dishes instead and clean up was sometimes much better than just saying, “You’re so beautiful.” Or toning down how much I wanted to hold and grab her, and instead picking my spots for when it meant something extra special to her would be received much more thoughtfully. I knew I’d done something right when she’d look at me and do this very quick smile, just a flash of one, but enough to let me take it in. It was a great smile. We slowly built our own language and understanding over time, and it strengthened us greatly.
I’d been listening to Dan Savage’s Lovecast, and he would say that it was important for your partner to see you through the eyes of someone else now and again. It was a way of appreciating them in a new light. Because partners would get so used to seeing what you do day after day, it was easy to forget that some people were pretty impressed by you. And when you see other people saying, “Wow, they’re pretty special,” it can remind your partner that you are truly special, and reinforce that fuzzy feeling that was in you the whole time.
I loved it when Daniela could see me in that light. I’d ask her to come to one of my beer league hockey games per year, so she could see me in my element there. Sometimes I’d help her out with Creative Communications assignments, and she’d be grateful for my insight. She’d say I was really good at clever titles for stories or events, or I’d edit a story she was writing and push it in a new direction, and she’d totally agree with my feedback, and make it ten times better herself afterward.
The best was when I was in my mid-20s and I was coaching my old high school’s improv team. I’d been doing it for a few years and the students really seemed to care about my teaching and wanted my guidance and approval. Then, a former student of mine changed schools to the University of Winnipeg Collegiate, a private school. He said they wanted to join the Manitoba Improv League where these high school students could compete. They were brand new though, and had no coach. He wanted to know: could I coach them too?
I loved coaching and seeing students get better and better over a year. This was all volunteer time, after school (or after work, for me), and coaching one school was a lot of work. Two schools? Yikes. But I said OK, and coached both schools at the same time (until I could hand off coaching the Collegiate to someone else).
One day, Daniela and I had to go somewhere in the evening, and the only way it made sense for our schedule was that she would have to come to my practice at the Collegiate and see me coach improv. I’d dragged her to embarrassing improv shows that I’d performed in before, so she knew a little about this stuff. But this was the first and only time she would see me actually coaching. It was a total behind-the-scenes look. We got to practice, and I told my 10 students that they’d have a special guest audience member, but to act like it was any other day.
Once practice started, I was in charge of the room. We did some goofy warm-ups together, then I got them to start performing improv scenes. After every scene, I’d give feedback, encourage them to try different options and provide whatever insights I had. And for 90 minutes I did just that. Once it was over, they all said goodbye, and I looked at Daniela.
She was looking at me completely differently.
“Wow. They really respect you,” she said. “And they like you! It’s crazy.”
She’d seen a lot of weirdo theatre kids from my other improv shows, so she was used to improvisers being dorks. But these students were different. These were a bunch of teenage hipsters… and they thought I was cool. It was wild. Daniela was seeing me through their eyes. And the picture was sublime.
Daniela seeing me be good at what I did felt so great to me. Part of this was because Daniela had a friend named Zane. And I’d always see her look at Zane the way I wanted her to look at me.
Not in a romantic way! It wasn’t like that at all.
This was about respecting someone’s talent. What they brought to the table. Daniela and Zane had been incredibly close in high school and soon became boyfriend and girlfriend. Zane eventually came out as gay to the surprise of no one except Daniela. They had some drama, adjusted, worked it all out, and eventually became tight friends again. So Zane was zero threat in a romantic sense, and Daniela never once made me second-guess that, with Zane or anyone else.
But I’ll just say straight up: I did not like Zane. A thin, pale hipster with a superiority complex, he was mainly concerned with finding whatever was cooler than what you were into. He was a bully, loved to start petty drama bullshit with anyone, thought he was brilliant rather than a dime-a-dozen artist, and exuded condescension like it was his body odour. The main problem with him: Daniela thought he was the greatest. Zane could do no wrong in Daniela’s eyes. Even when he was very much in the wrong. Which was often. One time he got so upset he punched a wall and broke his hand. Was this seen as a precursor to a need for anger management, or a red flag of future potential abuse? Nope, all that resulted was a shitty “visual poem” of how people judged him for being a passionate person, centering himself as a victim.
Zane was an experimental filmmaker, which essentially meant trying to emulate renowned Manitoba filmmaker Guy Maddin in whatever new way he could think of. He was certainly a hustler though, and ran an underground film festival, where he and his too-cool-for-school friends could hold onto a little power by approving who else got into their precious festival (and saying “no” to those who didn’t). Bad behaviour among this in-crowd was always forgiven if you were cool enough. Someone purposefully hitting their girlfriend with their car when they were wasted? No big deal! Someone starting drama with the minority filmmaker in your “diversity” film program? Who cares! Someone caught using slurs about marginalized groups? Whatever! These people were kings of an incredibly niche art scene that 99.9% of people didn’t care about. But for that 0.1%, they were untouchable.
I could see that Daniela wanted desperately to embed herself more and more into this world. It was a similar vibe to her days being so plugged into the indie music scene. She saw that working on set on real film and TV productions just wasn’t for her. But being adjacent to Zane meant she had caché. To me, it seemed like instead of working in film, she could just make herself part of this in-crowd, and that could be enough to satisfy those dreams she had been looking for in Toronto.
Daniela was also a completely different person around Zane. We would go to experimental film showings and watch random unconnected images fart around on screen for minutes on end while the sounds of records scratching and microphone feedback assaulted our senses with no end in sight (this accurately describes 70% of the dozens of experimental films I saw at these festivals). It sometimes felt like I was in a badly written 90s sitcom where I was the straight-man who’d been roped into some arthouse cinema, surrounded by these unrealistic caricatures of pompous artists… except that it was literally happening. Seriously, just imagine the most pretentious hipster bullshit possible — that was probably the featured film at the end. But all of their little fans, Daniela included, would flock to them like sycophants at the end, chirping about how great it all was.
Daniela knew I didn’t get along great with Zane. But I was a team player. Zane was important to Daniela, so I would make an effort. I’d be supportive on the outside, and keep my thoughts to myself. So I dutifully went to festival after festival, showing after showing, complimenting whatever aspects of his films that I could.
One day, there was an improv semi-final in the Manitoba Improv League. I had coached another year and was incredibly proud of the growth I’d seen from my students. Daniela came to watch the show with me and brought Zane. For most of the show, they were fine. I could accept a little snickering at what was going on. Improv does have a cult-like vibe to it. Everyone on stage and most people in the audience really buy into the whole energy. It’s a bunch of theatre kids expressing themselves and trying to be silly, after all. They’re going to be a bit weird. So I get it.
These were playoffs though, and judges were giving points out. Every team performed four scenes and was graded by three judges who had a big rubric of points to dole out. Teams could end up with anywhere from 300 to 600 points. This was night two, so we already knew the scores from five other teams.
After everyone had performed and it was the end of the night, the host announced the points. He was going scene by scene, and I was trying to do the math in my head. He announced the points for our final scene, and our team tied with a team from the night before for the last spot in the finals.
I was losing it! This was so unprecedented! A tie, what even happens in a tie?
I was still the coach, after all. I had to get to my team and figure this out. The host announced that both teams would have five minutes to prepare for a winner-take-all final scene to determine who made it to the championship. I could hear Daniela and Zane saying something, but I couldn’t process it in the chaos and raced off backstage to find my team and help them out.
I gave my team a pep talk, got them focused, and tried to inspire them as much as I could. And, of course, they went out and killed it, easily qualifying for the finals with an incredible improv scene.
It was so exhilarating, so nerve-wracking. I was covered in sweat and pumping with adrenaline. I hugged my team and got back to Daniela and Zane. I was so excited. I was expecting a reaction like when Daniela had seen me coach that one practice. I felt like a conquering hero!
“Can you believe what just happened?!” I said.
They could not have given less of a shit.
They were in the middle of laughing at everyone for caring about what was going on, with me at the top of that list. I guess when I noticed that my team had tied to go to sudden death overtime for improv, I got quite excited and animated, and they both seemed to find this hilarious. For the next few minutes, they recreated some choice moments of lameness from me, the improvisers, the hosts, and even the crowd. It was a total 180 from when Daniela had seen me coach those kids at the Collegiate.
It turned out that some niche art forms were cool. And some were not.
The Creative Communications program at Red River College was known for being very intense. They seemed to delight in their exclusive reputation. Many attempted to get in but only a select number were accepted. And even of those who made it, plenty would be dropping out over the two-year program. They pushed tales of their dreaded “autofail,” where if you wrote any person or organization’s proper name incorrectly, you instantly failed your assignment. You thought Tim Hortons was spelled “Tim Horton’s” instead? Autofail. Did you forget the dash in Coca-Cola? Autofail. You better have capitalized the b in eBay otherwise… autofail. Any other grammatical error was 10% off as well. They partly did all of this because they truly wanted high standards, but also to dissuade those who weren’t serious about the program. It was intense and they wanted students who reflected that by being locked in and fully focused on delivering their best work.
This also meant lots of stress. People cried. They broke down. They got overwhelmed by the incredible workload and either painfully persevered or became completely catatonic. The promise at the end of the rainbow? A solid career in an emerging field that paid well enough to be worth surviving two years of pain. The program spat out new graduates with a reputation for being meticulous, imaginative, and driven.
Daniela’s first year started well enough. I heard the usual stories from her about how intense things were, and how bad everyone did on the first few assignments as people began to learn the standards. What surprised me most though was how little Daniela seemed to like her fellow classmates. There was always a bit of a range of ages, and when I had gone I was on the older end much like she was. But I knew how personable she was, so I found it so strange. In nearly every other situation I’d seen her in, she was beloved by everyone who met her and made friends so easily.
I figured she had matured enough that she didn’t have much patience anymore for teens or people in their early 20s. Partly a dislike of youthful naivety and maybe not being in the in-crowd anymore? It spoke to a difference in us: I was never as popular or well-liked as Daniela was among her friends; they all seemed to love her and appreciate her for the gem she was. I, on the other hand, enjoyed a smattering of acquaintance-level friendships. I was nobody’s “best friend,” whereas Daniela had three or four friendships that were stronger than any of mine. She could easily be a bridesmaid to ten different friends. Me? I wouldn’t even get invites from most of my friends. I just wasn’t an inner circle friend in general. But I seemed to be able to handle casual new people more easily now.
That became obvious in one distinct episode. A few months earlier I had gotten Daniela a job at an escape room where I’d been casually working a day per week for around a year. I was brushing up against age 30 while some of my colleagues were in high school — and a few of those were technically my superiors there. Most were around 20 years old.
But I got along great with them. It was easy to not take things too seriously at an escape room, so there was lots of time to joke around with each other and goof off. They even let me geek out once when Canada’s junior hockey team came for a team-building exercise. No one else knew anything about hockey, but I recognized some old players who were now coaches (Ryan Smyth and Freddie Braithwaite) and got to sit with them for an hour as we watched their group of players continue to miserably fail through our pirate-themed room with generous hint after generous hint. My colleagues could tell I was thrilled to talk hockey with NHL stars.
Eventually, Daniela needed to make some extra money, and we figured her getting a job at the escape room couldn’t hurt. Within a week she said she was not enjoying the experience at all and especially didn’t like any of her coworkers. She found them dumb and juvenile and not very friendly. I told her to give it a little more time, and that while they were an acquired taste since they were all fairly geeky and into this niche hobby, they were all good people at heart.
A week later she was fired. She just never really wanted to be there and it showed. I couldn’t believe it. I quit soon after in what I thought was a move of solidarity. Could I really keep working at this place after they fired my partner? Daniela would probably be hurt if I stayed, I figured. So I left behind a job I loved. I told Daniela the reason was that I’d rather have my full weekends back. Oh well.
Now that she was in Creative Communications, I was hearing these same sorts of tales about her new classmates. She didn’t like a lot of her fellow students and was simply trying to focus on doing good work over making friends. She could pick out one or two people that she could stand, but otherwise, she said she found most of them unbearable.
In my year, we all became so close right away and created friendships that continued well past our graduation. And it sounded like everyone else was doing that in her year, except with Daniela on the outskirts. But I understood the idea of putting all her focus on the work. That’s why she joined and why we thought this program was a good idea after all. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done as well.
There soon became two different sorts of nights in our apartment. Nights when she needed me to sit beside her and actively help her through an assignment piece by piece. Or nights when she needed me to sit near her and just be there in case she had a quick question. I suddenly stopped having much to do in the evenings.
Part of me somewhat enjoyed this arrangement. I enjoyed being needed. I appreciated that my expertise was helpful to her. And I was proud to see her learn more and improve by going through difficult assignments and coming out the other side with a great piece of work.
But there was a lot of tension. And frustration. And the target of the animosity slowly moved away from things in the program like the assignments, the teachers or the other students and began to shift to me. Suddenly, I wasn’t being helpful. I wasn’t doing things at her pace. I wasn’t listening to what she was asking. “Yes, I see that typo, Alan, but if you point out every single one then I can’t keep writing.”
I started to get very resentful. I felt I was being seen less as a boyfriend and more as a school resource. But getting an assignment done and de-stressing Daniela meant we could get back to normal for the rest of any given night. So I was still highly motivated to help her with every assignment that I could, even as I took more and more scoldings. I would sometimes sit beside her knowing if I said anything it could set her off, but if I got up and left it would be viewed as very disrespectful in the middle of her assignment, so I’d just sit there. Silently.
She’d often remark to me how she remembered when I took the program, I didn’t react nearly the same as this. “How did you do it?” she’d say, shaking her head.
She couldn’t remember me stressing out about assignments or losing my cool in front of her. That was partly because by the end I was simply aiming for C’s and D’s, but early on I got my fair share of A’s. I just didn’t take out my stress on the people around me.
But she was getting through it. We were getting through it. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. And we’d take any break we could get. The last Christmas break of her second year was a much-needed breath of fresh air. This prelude of schooling that would transition into the next part of our lives was almost over, and then it would be a distant, forgotten memory.
During that Christmas break, Zane and another of Daniela’s friends, Lily, came by one night. Daniela generally hated boardgames, unless it was one Zane liked, of course, and Zane wanted to play Scattergories (I loved boardgames, if you can believe it). My brother, Grant, also happened to be in town for the holidays. Daniela and my brother had a close relationship, and I really valued that for both of them. He wasn’t with anyone at the moment and was sitting at home with my parents, presumably bored, possibly lonely. I asked Daniela if he should join us. She happily told him to come along.
I was a little hesitant about it though. Grant was not the type of “cool” that Zane was used to. If I was a square, Grant was a… cube. But the more the merrier for a board game, right?
The five of us played a round and chatted, and it was all going fine. In Scattergories, you try to come up with answers all starting with the same letter to fit a category. So sometimes you have to use some creative thinking. At one point, Grant had a Scattergories answer that was debatable, so Zane challenged it, as is part of the rules.
Because Zane wasn’t here to have fun. He was here to win at Scattergories, and prove how much smarter he was than everyone else. Each player made their case. I voted with my brother. Zane voted against, as Lily shot up her hand too. We all looked to Daniela. She hesitated, then voted with Zane.
Fair enough. It’s just one vote, I thought.
But Zane saw something.
He noticed he had two people wrapped around his finger that would vote with him, no matter what.
As the game continued on, Zane began to challenge more and more answers. He honed in on Grant’s answers especially. If anything was remotely creative or used lateral thinking, it was getting shot down instantly. He’d call a vote, look to Lily, then look to Daniela. Daniela thought about it every time, but she just couldn’t help herself. Against. Against. Against.
Eventually, this became less of a boardgame and more of a protracted bullying and torture against Grant. I was disgusted. This is what Daniela thought would help out a lonely guy around Christmas? I knew Zane would stoop to this sort of thing. But the fact that Daniela had voted, each and every time against Grant, just because Zane implicitly told her to? It drove me crazy. I was so disappointed in her. She was such a loving person in general who cared about others and was kind and delicate. But when Zane was around… she was just different.
I wasn’t sure if Grant could tell the dynamics of what was going on, and I decided not to fill him in later once the night was over. But I hated every minute of it. Once the night ended, I just threw it in my memory hole though, not wanting to make a big deal about it. Really, it was such typical behaviour from both Zane and Daniela at this point that it was hardly noteworthy.
Somehow though, we were getting to the end of her Creative Communications program. And she was doing well. She won an award for a news story she wrote. She ran a big fundraising event and it went off incredibly. She was excelling just like I thought she would, and I knew that our being back to our bliss was just around the corner. Sure there were smaller issues, like I still felt a bit taken for granted and as though I was sometimes treated more like a chauffeur and errand boy than a respected boyfriend. But the massive tension of school would be gone. These smaller issues were things we could deal with through healthy conversation.
She graduated and got a job promoting women in tech. And suddenly it was amazing all over again.
For almost a year we were back to being in our stride. I would finish work and walk to her office so we could walk home together, chatting back and forth the whole way about our busy days. Or in winter I’d drop her off and pick her up, trying to keep the car as warm as possible for our chilly drive. One day we accidentally took each other’s lunches, so we walked towards each other at lunchtime and met in the middle so we could switch lunches (and I could give her a cheeky kiss in the middle of the street, of course). It felt like things were finally getting back to normal.
Then I got laid off.
And within months, everything in my life turned upside down.
