chemistry, compatibility, capacity

+ reading recommendations

Zhang Enli, Red and Green Circles, 2016

I really like Rachel’s tweet: “Every relationship starts off as a chemistry test, then a compatibility test, and later becomes a test of capacity.” When I fall in love, two main questions tend to present themselves:

1. Is this, in fact, The Real Thing?

   • (A large percentage of people, unfortunately, get stuck on this question for many years.)

2. If it is, can we do it justice?

*
Some years ago, I met a friend and it was instant magic. I remember standing in the kitchen maybe five hours after we met with a bunch of other people and thinking, knowing that he was special. It was in the way he moved, the way he walked. I wasn’t attracted to him but it didn’t matter. With certain people it doesn’t matter because what’s compelling about them totally transcends the body, and then in time you learn to love the body. Heretical to say as someone who is supposedly devoted to being a good animal. But it’s what I know to be true.

We talked passionately. Upon meeting him, I realized that all I’ve ever wanted is to talk passionately. We were cheerfully, intently, sloppily enthusiastic about each other. We both liked to walk all over the city.

But I also had this extreme hesitation about whether the relationship could ever be successfully romantic. Because I hated, hated, hated how he handled the relationships in his life. The way he dealt with conflict, disappointment made me sad.

It’s taken me many years to understand that I was right on both fronts. He was, is special. I liked the way he used language, we had similar conceptions of what made for a good story and a good walk, similar enthusiasms about certain animals. In the photos I have of him he’s beaming, and when I look at them time collapses like a crushed can: I can see the boy he was, and the man he has become, a person I no longer know. But he was not the person for me.

*

Capacity is so hard to talk about, and so unfair. People might change very little in a year but transform over the course of a decade. Instead of making predictions about someone’s absolute capacity for change, I like to talk about it in terms of ability to journey with each other. Can we remain side by side over the weeks and the years? How close should we be?

*
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever truly doubted that what I’m looking for exists. I know that it does. But I’ve certainly felt discouraged and anxious. To be loved and cared for in a way that suits me, to feel a deep and abiding sense of connection, to be able to grow together—these are deep desires with no guarantee of satisfaction.

*

Obviously, I can recognize The Real Thing. It’s the way the air in the car feels when you’re driving. It’s a pleasure that presents as panic in its intensity, abruptness and force. How it’s difficult only because it’s easy. The sense of extreme relief after, and the eagerness bordering on nausea before.

*

I’m 17, wiping A’s sweat off my forehead after losing my virginity with affection and disgust. I’m 20, eating a spam and egg sandwich in Hong Kong across from K, lovelorn but aware that I shouldn’t be. I’m 22 and S still kisses me with his mouth open and we order the Impossible steak at Prairie on Friday evenings. I’m 23, high on mushrooms in Park City. I’m 24, picking Akko up from the airport and rocking him to sleep in my arms. I’m 27, living in an apartment in San Francisco on Oak St, the first place I’ve ever decorated myself.

The place is a country I can never live in again. I met you right when I was ready to, not a minute sooner. I used to think you were the only one changing, but I see now that so many pieces of myself have become unrecognizable. I’m so much less scared than I used to be. I’m more honest, and it takes less effort.

*
From Lives of the Saints: “There’s a famous line in a story where there is a married couple and it is observed about them that she had none of the world’s dark magic for him, but he couldn’t live without her for six consecutive hours. My feeling for Claude was like the reverse: I could live without his presence—as I had just done, when I was away at college—for a whole duration of years between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. But he had the world’s dark magic.”