Bomb to Balm

“I got my heart’s desire, and there my troubles began.” 

Lev Grossman
The Magicians

I have abandonment issues. Maybe it was some peculiar loneliness of my childhood, maybe I was just born with a high maintenance personality. I feel like I’ve been this way forever. A part of me finds it hard to believe that the people not in the room with me right now will ever come back, or that they ever wanted to be in my life to begin with.

This insecurity flourished during my adolescent explorations of love and sex. I never expected anyone to stick around, and they rarely did. My ex-husband came at me in a way I hadn’t known was an option before. From our first kiss, he was at my side pretty much any time he wasn’t at work. He didn’t hesitate to tell people we were an item. It was more than that, though. He was romantic on a level that I hadn’t known was a possibility. It was dizzying.

We’d been seeing each other for a month when he started talking about someday, like it was a given that someday I’d meet his family, someday we’d get married. He’d call me every night after work and take me out every weekend. It was exciting and also overwhelming. It was like a carnival dark ride, where the car keeps turning this way and that, and before you can really process what you just saw, there are three more things to process. This was fun when they were all good things but more problematic when it became huge romantic gestures crowding out any space to address very real  problems. I learned the hard way that rushing into commitment isn’t about love, it’s about distraction.

So, to recap, I began with abandonment issues, and then I learned the hard way that love bombing is not as wonderful as it seems on the surface. My marriage left me skittish. I’ve run away from every threat of a relationship since then. I panic if things are going too fast but I still don’t want to waste my time on anything that isn’t aiming to be something.

The Work Bestie never pushed for more than I was offering. He never ran away from me, either. He was always rock steady no matter what storm I was caught in. I ran to him, and he was there. I ran from him, and he was still there. In the beginning, I was all over the place, but he was so calm and consistent. He never abandoned me. He never trapped me. No matter what I did, he kept coming back. He was always there for me. I’d finally found myself a slow and steady love. 

Still, being me, sometimes I’d panic. As the reality of going away to college set in I tried to grapple with what that meant for our relationship. Being 124 miles apart had been challenging to our relationship. Being 465 miles apart would surely prove fatal. I grew increasingly distraught about going our separate ways. He was going to forget all about me. Somewhere in the midst of my melodramatic catastrophizing, the Work Bestie had me set up a group text. Just him, and me, and my mom. My mom is even less into small talk than I am, and she’s certainly not much of a texter, but I set it up. It worked. I calmed down.

You have to be a special kind of malicious to get someone’s mom involved if you’re not serious. I mean, it had always seemed unlikely that he would have spent so many years being my friend just to play me. There were plenty of women who he could have hooked up with if he wanted something casual. I had explicitly encouraged him to sow his wild oats before we started anything. I’d want anyone I was involved with to have that all out of their system. Still, it wasn’t until he initiated a group chat with my mom that I exhaled into trusting the Work Bestie to stick around.

With his girlfriend before me, you couldn’t know him for five minutes without knowing he had a girlfriend and that he loved her very much. The way he’d light up talking about her when we first became friends was so endearing. He knew how to commit and how to love deeply. That was important to me. This was what made him someone I was willing to start things with, the belief that he could follow through.

Yeah, sometimes I wanted more romance, more explicit commitment, but I knew from experience that grand gestures aren’t a relationship. Maybe he’d been just as mysterious in his last relationship. It would explain why his girlfriend had been so jealous even though he was always loyal. He may not have made his loyalty as obvious to her as he did to the rest of us.

It was hard being so far apart, but maybe when I felt alone, neglected, and forgotten, he was somewhere talking about me and lighting up. His love for his last girlfriend had been easy to see as his friend, but maybe it was hard to see from her perspective. He’s a private person who chooses to play his cards close to his chest. Maybe this was how he loved me. I would have liked it if he’d used his words more and if I wasn’t always guessing where I stood.

Still, slow and steady is a good way to be loved. When he’s gone, he feels so gone, but when we’re together he’s perfect. Nobody soothes me as easily as the Work Bestie. I always believed him when he held me and told me it would all be okay. That alone is a miracle.

Kiss me goodbye when I’m on my own
But you know that I’d rather be home

It’s a question of lust, it’s a question of trust
It’s a question of not letting what we’ve built up crumble to dust
It is all of these things and more
That keep us together

Depeche Mode
A Question of Trust