A convergence of events has me thinking about romantic relationships a lot lately. Old ones, new ones, potential ones, hypothetical ones, ending ones, evolving ones, aching ones, scabbed-over ones, nostalgic ones, et cetera.

I live with someone who is still in the early stages of mourning the loss of her husband. When she speaks of him, and their love, their family, the life they built together, and the terrible absence his death left, which she describes as being completely and utterly worse than losing her parents (a prospect that already seems worse than anything I can imagine), I can physically feel the reverberations of her suffering in my own body.

I’ve never felt so sure about the truth of this Faulkner quotation, which I’ve posted before:

“I know the answer to that and I know that I can’t change that answer and I don’t think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.” — The Wild Palms

You never get it cheap. Even if you’re the one to die first, you might have to watch the person who loves you the most watch you die, which might very well be even more horrible. But as horrific as the combination of love and mortality is, it also seems utterly right. I have rarely sat across a table from a crying person and felt so sure that her crying, her pain, her suffering is absolutely appropriate, even beautiful, a true reflection of her love, not something that ought to be fixed or corrected or medicated away or hidden. I also feel like I have learned a vast amount about relationships and romantic love in general just from observing someone else’s grief, and I honestly feel grateful for that, as if I have glimpsed some sacred treasure well before my time.

In the midst of her suffering, my friend insists that it is of the utmost importance that I find someone to share my life with whose eventual death will hurt me just as badly as she’s hurting, someone who sees things the way I see them, who really cares. Even in worst kind of pain she’s ever felt, she says that the alternatives, of either going through life alone or with a person she didn’t have that kind of connection with (and she thinks many marriages fall into that category), are more unthinkable.

It’s really changing the way I think about dating, and it’s making me look back over my own relationship history with different eyes, and really think about what it is I’m looking for in the long-term.

I’m also rethinking The Rules. Yes, I really have read the actual book, prompted by an experience several years ago in which someone I dated for only a month or two, about whom I had gotten really worked up, literally disappeared into thin air and stop returning my calls. (This was the first time I had experienced this relatively common event in the New York dating scene.) As embarrassing as that is to admit (not to mention that one of the The Rules is never to admit that you’ve read or practiced The Rules!), it’s also true that the basic principle behind it all is more or less right. People are just plain more attractive when they seem unattainable, and the more someone pulls away from you, up to a point, the more you want to be near them. This is, I think, just a result of how our egos function. At some hidden (or not so hidden) level, most of us think that we are great and desirable. So, if someone else seems to think that we are actually not that great, we then think that they must be even more great and desirable than we are. Why else wouldn’t they appreciate our greatness and thus be scrambling to be near us all the time?

The Rules are sortof right, and they sortof work, sometimes, particularly in cases where you actually are too busy to see your romantic interest often and not just playing some hard-to-get game. But in light of this grief I’ve observed, they also seem just utterly ridiculous. I mean, seriously? This matter of romantic love is incredibly important. What on earth are we all doing, going out there and playing games with one another’s hearts and messing around and not telling the truth about our feelings and choosing to be involved with people who blatantly abuse us or with whom there is only some tiny microscopic chance of things ever “working out” and all the million other things that go on in dating life all the time? Why are we all so scared of being rejected, when getting rejected is absolutely inevitable in an endeavor in which we are basically tasked with sorting through everyone in the world to find the one or two people (if we’re lucky) with whom we can share this particular type of love?

If I actually thought I had to solve this problem using reason or my ego alone, I probably would have given up a long time ago.

Things I have learned in the last few days:

Regarding party girls: Karaoke is the easiest way to get completely trashed on cheap beer. It is possible to wake up the next morning and not be hungover because you’re actually still drunk. Every single woman my age is looking for an excuse to scream along with Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair songs in public. You should check to make sure the cup is right-side-up before pouring the coffee. Nightlife in New York is more expensive than you ever imagined. If, at 10:30 pm, you are embarrassed to wear your outfit for the animal-themed party on the train, because you are afraid of being mistaken for a furry/hooker, do not fear, because by the time to you arrive at the club, surrounded by people in full-on fetish gear, you will realize what a cute innocent stuffed animal you are in comparison. By 2 am, you will need food so badly you will not even care if the people in the pizza place think you are a furry/hooker. There is no such thing as being too hungover to go to Mass. It’s okay to stay home on the Internet all night; you’re not really missing that much.

Regarding jewelry: The 4 C’s are cut, color, clarity, and carats. A diamond can be “induced,” and that is not a good thing. In order to get jewelry appraised at IGI, you have to go through a series of locking doors without anything really in between them, like in a movie where someone’s accessing an underground vault or a secret room at the FBI or something. Your gemologist will answer her cell phone at least 5 times while assessing your bling. When you write down your address for them to send the report, she will know what street you live on. She will say, in her thick Jersey accent, the one with the pagoda house! You will say, I live in the pagoda house! You can only get about 25% of retail value by selling diamonds in the diamond district, which is on 47th Street.

Here I am dressed up as a wolf in the Lower East Side circa 2:30 in the morning, standing in front of an apartment building next to Crash Mansion. This picture was taken on my girlfriend’s iPhone in the dark.

“‘People are assholes,’ said Haley Joel Osment. ‘You’re going to be angry at me. I think obese people are assholes. They take up more room. Taking up room is stupid. Eating more. People should eat less. And not take up room. And always do what they say. I can’t comprehend how a person can be late.’

‘I’m not angry at you. I will never be angry at you. I’m only angry at myself,’ [said Dakota Fanning.]

‘I can’t comprehend how people can be late or obese,’ said Haley Joel Osment” (66-7).

“Haley Joel Osment said Dakota Fanning should tell the therapist he was a graduate of New York University. Dakota Fanning said she did and the therapist was impressed and said something nice about New York University. Haley Joel Osment said the only purpose of going to New York University was so Dakota Fanning could now say to her therapist in the presence of her mother that Haley Joel Osment had gone to New York University” (77-8).

– Tao Lin, Richard Yates

* * *

I’m a member of the Rumpus Book Club, which is currently discussing Tao Lin‘s newest novel, Richard Yates. The book, which I have not yet finished, concerns the relationship between 22-year-old writer and NYU alum Haley Joel Osment and 16-year-old high school student Dakota Fanning. Haley meets Dakota online, talks to her on Gmail chat constantly, visits her in New Jersey, has illegal sex with her, and treats her like shit, causing her to spiral into bulimia.

Anyone who knows my history will already know that I have a lot to say about this.

Richard Yates is the third book I’ve read by Tao Lin. I’ve also heard him read in NYC. He’s friends with some of my friends. We’ve published in some of the same places.

When I was 14, in Georgia, in 1997, I met a guy online, who was 19, in Michigan. We talked on ICQ, and then AIM, all the time, for hours and hours every day, and all night long. When I was 15, he came to visit me covertly at sleep-away nerd camp. When I was 16, he came to visit me at home in Georgia, with my parents’ permission. When I was 17, I went to visit him in Michigan, with my parents’ permission. I lost my virginity with him. When I was 18, in 2001, I moved from Georgia to New York City, where I started as a freshman at NYU right before September 11th happened. Tao Lin started at NYU that same semester, I think. This was the same time period when students were killing themselves by jumping from the balconies in Bobst Library all the time, before the protective barriers were installed.

In 2002, prompted by infidelity on my part, I dropped out of NYU and ran away with my online boyfriend. I was 18; he was 23. We hitchhiked all over the country together. We panhandled for food. We panhandled to pay for an abortion when I got pregnant. He hit me. I don’t mean he slapped me; I mean he punched me in the face hard enough to knock me down. We stopped hitchhiking, broke up for a few weeks, got back together, and got an apartment together in Washington, DC. He got a job at Whole Foods. I got a job in a bookstore and then a yoga studio. We became vegetarians. We read the labels on everything we ate, and only ate whole grains and organic things. We were so poor, we hardly ate anything. At 5’10, I weighed 120 lbs.

All this was, as you can probably imagine, a disaster and a mindfuck that took me years to get over. I was literally missing for months and my mother was, understandably, a wreck. The police were involved. I, the missing scholarship girl, was on the top of new NYU president John Sexton’s to-do list.

There were aspects of the dynamic between me and my then-boyfriend that resembled that of the fictional Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning very much. It was a mess. I was very, very naive. But, even so, it was so much, SO much, deeper and more real than the relationship the characters in this book have, and our IM conversations were better-written and more “literary” than theirs, by a HUGE factor. And despite the fact that this particular experience of mine is close to some of the horror stories people tell about why kids shouldn’t be online, I am 100% grateful to have had pretty much unfettered access to the Internet while growing up.

Like Tao Lin, I’m 27. I started using the web as a social medium when I was 11. I started making personal websites when I was 14, which was how the ex in question originally got in contact with me. The benefits of having access to a world outside the reaches of the small, Southern town I grew up in far, far, FAR outweighed the negatives. But, as I have mentioned before, the Internet was a very different world in those days than in 2006, when Richard Yates is set. It was much smaller and felt like a private club in some ways. The people I knew IRL usually didn’t know the first thing about the web.

After we broke up, my ex went on the thruhike the Appalachian Trail, and to marry a very nice, very smart, and insecure girl from South Carolina, whom he met on the Internet. She is younger than I am. They are both vegans. He’s held a series of hipster-y jobs in hipster-y towns (e.g., a bike shop in Portland). He currently works at Whole Foods again, and he and his wife are separated. From what I can tell from his web presence, he is a lot happier and healthier than he was when we were together.

After we broke up, I went on to mend my relationship with my family, and to have a long series of power-imbalanced relationships with men who were, on average, 12.5 years older than I was. When I was 21, I went back to NYU and got a full-time job there with tuition remission benefits. I went to school part-time for five years and graduated summa cum laude with no student debt. I wrote about my hitch-hiking experience a lot, in places like The Sun. I’m applying to Ph.D. programs for next year. After eight years of vegetarianism, I recently started eating poultry again.

On the subject of NYU, it is the most expensive university in the world. The financial aid sucks in comparison with most universities on the same tier. What I would have paid, had I not worked here, even with a large scholarship, was completely ridiculous. I’m so glad I didn’t do it. An NYU education is not worth what it costs, period. I’ve heard it said that NYU, the largest private owner of real estate in NYC, could stop collecting tuition for ten years without feeling it. I believe it.

However, as much as NYU screws its students financially, it treats its employees (unless they are grad student TA’s in certain departments..) very, very well. In addition to my salary, as my employer, NYU gave me a high-quality, free education. And NYU’s retirement plan for employees is so generous (if I contribute 5% of my monthly income, NYU contributes 10%) that, at 27 (unless our economy really never recovers) I’ve already put away enough money toward my retirement that I’ll probably be fine when I’m 65.