In This Body: Easy to Love
“After we’d fucked for a year, toyed with romance, talked us to death”
Our monthly column "In This Body" is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
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When you are with someone you don’t want to be with, you know. No matter how much you think, or thought, you wanted to be with them, or the amount of time you spent to get into that relationship, there’s a feeling that will tell you until you listen.
That far away from it, it’s hard to pinpoint what it is. A shadow, inside you, cast on the back of your stomach lining. Or a tickle in the back of your skull, kind of tickle that makes you cry before you laugh.
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My first long-term partner, a man much older than me, told me I was easy to fall in love with. He told me this shortly after I broke up with him, he told me to be careful of breaking hearts.
Unsolicited affections are a great responsibility, I’ve given enough of them to know. You have to be direct when you don’t return them, to let that person cry over you and move on. Leave that end open, sugar coat too much, and they could continue to chase. And it will hurt worse.
But that’s not what he meant. He meant that the people I would sleep with would fall in love with me, and that it would be my fault for the broken hearts because I chose to sleep with them. Because I refuse to be emotionally detached in casual encounters, because I’ve adored in different ways each person I’ve slept with.
And he told me I was easy to fall in love with, after I’d chased him so long in the beginning. After it took him that long, to love me back. Swear to hell, it wasn’t easy on my end.
After we’d fucked for a year, toyed with romance, talked us to death—after I turned eighteen—we made it official. We set the Facebook relationship status. At the same time, in his room. Me on my laptop and him at his desk, telling the world of the internet.
Me, on his bed, sunk into his bed. I closed my laptop and pushed it to the side. His big body curled into bed beside me, his skin warm to mine. There was always a tickle in my ribcage when he did that, the kind that made me want to laugh. Smile. Love or the love of the chase, of possibility.
Right then it quieted, became the shadow in the deep of my stomach. That knowing, it was not what I wanted.
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Another feeling, not a knowing, but not far off. That it was me, that my romance was broken, that I’d chase until I’d caught and then I would get bored.
When my second long-term relationship started, it was a chase.
It was almost a year of flirtation before we finally slept together. It was another almost-year of sleeping together before we went on a real date. And one more almost-year of dating before we decided it was official, that we were a couple. And that’s what I’d wanted from the beginning; to be a couple.
I was afraid of it, too. That all that flicker-flutter possibility beneath my skin and bones would fade to shadow. That what we’d built together wasn’t what we’d built together at all, but my own chase, capture, kill.
I waited. To not be excited to see him. To get bored with sex. To see another person who made me want to fall in love, to chase them until they fell in love with me.
Waited for it to turn out that it was me; my nature, my flaws, my fault.
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The first relationship began to end the first time we talked about moving in together. We were on video chat, like we did every night we didn’t spend together—that made me feel trapped, turned my codependence against me till I felt it was my obligation. We talked like he would move into my apartment, into my room.
I’d hoped for it, even after the shadow had crept in. I’d kept hoping for it to move forward, to chase that, to bring back what I felt was love. New possibility.
After we said goodnight, I knew I wanted out. I didn’t want to chase a life together, to live together, or get married and have kids like we’d talked about. I didn’t want to chase what I didn’t want.
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In the second relationship, we began to talk about moving in together. I was afraid again, of the beginning of the end. Maybe it was me—it wasn’t that I was in a bad relationship, an unhealthy relationship, the wrong relationship, before. It was me: I would see commitment and run.
I kept waiting to want to run. To not bust into face-stretching smile when I thought about going to bed with him every night. To not imagine the immense amount of books our apartment would have when we combined our collections. I kept waiting, am still waiting, not to want it.
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No one is easy to fall in love with, not in that general kind of sense. Some people are just easier to look at as a blank slate, to draw your perfect partner onto. It’s maybe why we’re all so obsessed with youth: a state of life we see as malleable, as changing, in people who we can believe could be whomever we want someday. People who don’t know themselves well enough yet to argue when you tell them what they are.
It was me, not my nature or my fault or my flaws or the urge to run, but my youth. It was being loved through eyes that saw me as malleable, who drew their perfect partner onto me and I didn’t know myself well enough to argue.
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To read the previous In This Body: "Women Uncomfortable," go here.
Header images courtesy of Theo Gosselin. To view his photo essay, "Vagabonds" on NAILED, go here.