Like Wine

I fell in love—real love—for the first time when I was 19. He was my first of many significant things. He changed me. I thought for the worst. For nearly four years, he was my example of an intimate relationship. I believed what he said. Age had afforded him more experiences from which to draw, and to me, age was like wine. Surely, he was better.

Passion is the best word to use to describe our relationship. Everything we did was done with passion to its highest to degree. When we argued, we did so passionately, heated and fumed by the need to be right. When we loved, passion prevented us to from keeping our hands to ourselves. Blindly, I believed that our foundation of passion would be enough, that it would sustain us. But in this blind hope, I accepted things that, ordinarily, would have been deal-breakers.

He never gave me the full truth. I had to ask the “right” questions in order to receive specific answers. Even when he knew what I was asking. I could ask him something simple like, “Where are you?” His response: “at a friend’s.” A few months later, during a conversation on the topic of friends and exes still hanging out, I’d find out that the “friend’s house” was his ex’s and that “nothing happened though.” I felt like an attorney questioning a witness every time I talked to him. That was our relationship.

But he could never commit to being in a relationship with me. Too many other factors were at play for him. He came up with something every day. Then he came up with a counter-something the next day. And a week later, he came up with something that shut down both of the initial somethings. If you’re confused by all of this, imagine how the hell I felt.

So when he broke my heart the first time, two days after my twentieth birthday, I vowed to leave him alone. He had been caught in his deception—“something did happen”—in what could have been a life-threatening situation for me, and I told myself we were beyond repair. So we didn’t speak for a couple of months. I poured through my journals of our past year, assessing our relationship and finally came to the conclusion that, although I had been naïve, none of what transpired had been my fault. And our end was for the best. So I resolved to move on. Eventually, we attempted a friendship that still teetered on intimacy, but that was short-lived when I found out (through the grapevine as usual) that he was dating his ex again. I asked him about it. He confirmed. And then, I guess to spare my feelings, professed to me how “difficult it is to love two people at the same time,” but that “time had committed him to her.” I cursed him out, then hung up the phone. And I had to begin my healing process all over again.

The next time we spoke to each other, whole entire seasons had passed. Having graduated the year before, he came back to Cornell with some of his students so that they could do some college exploration. I, along with three other current students, agreed to be part of a panel where we talked about college life. When he saw me, I could see the stars in his eyes. At first, I was unmoved. He thanked me for the favor and asked if he could call me sometime. I told him, “alright.”

He called me that night. But it didn’t mean anything. At least, not for me.

The school year ended a month later, and I planned to spend the summer preparing to go to London the following semester. I was focused on securing a job and saving up money. And I did that. But as I worked at the Willis Tower, he worked to gain back my affection. Then he made his grandest act of all: he flew out to Chicago to visit me and extended his stay.

Before I knew it, I was video-chatting with him every night while I was in London, waking up the next morning to him asleep on my webcam. When I got back to the States, we brought in the New Year together in Chicago. I even introduced him to my friends and family. When I got back to Cornell to finish out my last year, we took turns taking the four-hour trip between the City and Ithaca to see each other. We confessed our love for one another and vowed to make this time work because it “felt meant to be.”

But it wasn’t. Old habits die hard, I guess, because no matter what, he couldn’t shake his own insecurities. Passion, alone, could not sustain his vacillated attitude about our relationship. And I found myself falling back into the trap of thinking that I was to blame, that because I was younger and less experienced I needed to change.

Towards the end of the summer, he broke up with me. In a four-paged text message. Then he removed me from Facebook. And stopped answering my calls and texts.

To say it hurt would be an understatement. It rocked my core. But thank God for Grad School because I had an outlet. And I threw myself into it once it started. By the beginning of the New Year, I could say his name without feeling my heart drop into my stomach.

And just like a bad movie, when I healed, he made his way back into my life. This time, I swore, we would only be friends. I made this perfectly clear to him. While I enjoyed his presence in my life, I was not interested in throwing away all the hard work I had done to get over him. He said he understood, and for the next few months, we talked every so often via texts or the phone. Sometimes we dabbled in the “what if” arena, which everybody knows (Phaedra from Atlanta Housewives voice) can be problematic territory for exes. But we always agreed that we couldn’t work because we had very different views of relationships.

And then he tried to make another big, but oddly familiar, gesture: to visit me. To be honest, at first I entertained it, thinking mainly of…well…sex. Then I realized that I had grown out of that cycle, and in choosing to go back down that road would only make me stand to lose more than just my virginity and inexperience. It would cost me my focus, my drive, and possibly my friends. I’d lose someone who had become special to me over the summer (I guess this is the part where I give Brittany, Simone and Ashlee a shout out, but they already have big enough heads. So let’s not). It was then that I knew that I’d grown, and that he, despite his years of experience on me, possibly had not. When I shared my realization with him, it turned into an argument (one-sided because I didn’t care enough to argue, and I really wanted to get off the phone and watch Scandal). He decided not to come.

We don't really speak anymore. I’ve accepted that it’s probably for the best. After all, when you’re wine, water pales in comparison.

-AP