no exit

love is the best kind of trap

Klimt, The Kiss, 1907

Housekeeping: 1) Will do another matchmaking batch in a couple of weeks, and this time if you’ve filled out the Typeform before you can just resubmit. In the meantime, you can sign up for my matchmaking database here :)

2) I really want to help other creators matchmake their subscribers. If you are a Substack writer or some other kind of creator and you’re interested helping people in your community match platonically or romantically, email me at avabearexpress@gmail.com :)

S wasn’t the first person I ever loved, but he was the first person I knew I couldn’t walk away from. Not just because he knew me when I was paying $800 a month for a bedroom that was literally a living room with a divider in the middle, not just because we got married one month before I turned 23, not just because I taught him to ski while we were living in Park City in the middle of the pandemic and pushed him down a black on his third run even though I could barely ski myself. S was the first person who saw me fully as I was—my volatility, distractibility, self-absorption, vanity, evasiveness—and didn’t turn away. He taught me that it was possible for me to be known, that I was ordinary and had ordinary needs in the best possible way. Before him, I had treated my life as one long performance for the benefit of others. I had grown up unable to connect with anyone, and was thrilled to discover in early adulthood that I could connect with absolutely everyone. Possessing no solid sense of self, I floated through omakase dinners, glass-walled houses, Mission burrito restaurants, house parties swarming with AI researchers hoping to demonstrate my youth and invulnerability. I say invulnerability because I was looking, of course, for someone to make me feel vulnerable. Like many young women, I flirted with the idea that I could find vulnerability in pain. Pain is a very literary preoccupation, and it opens you up in an interesting way. But I lost interest in it when I met S, because he was the person who showed me that the ultimate way to feel vulnerable was not to be hurt but to be loved.

S possessed a purity that came from being the intelligent, kind-hearted, morally upstanding child of two intelligent, kind-hearted, morally upstanding people. He liked to listen and I liked to talk. Together, we liked to watch movies, drink, eat too much food at fancy restaurants, gossip, go on long walks, discuss our friends, hold hands, kiss. When we started dating I was wildly insecure because I had been a wonder kid in high school but had totally failed to accomplish a single thing in the years since. At the same time, by dropping out I had situated myself in a peer group where by the time I was 21 I knew multiple people under 30 who were poised to make their first billion. I was like, damn, maybe I just don’t have the sauce. S was like: I think you can be good at anything you want to do. Like what, you think I could be a good startup founder? Yeah. Like what, you think I can be an author? Yeah.

Nobody had ever believed in me like that. Before S, I had a succession of boyfriends who liked my precocity, my verbosity, and my nerve, but they were also kind of like: well, maybe you should go back to school? Maybe you should get a normal job? Maybe you should try to work at OpenAI? (Honestly, the latter was pretty great advice.) Which I get: they were like, wow, my couch costs 20 grand and I’m the best to ever do it at my job, meanwhile this girl is 19 years old, has $35 in her debit account and is sort of unwell. Maybe she’s not The One! They saw me, essentially, the way I saw myself, and were understandably concerned by it. But S saw something in me I did not see in myself. In seeing it, he made it possible for me to become it.

This is the paradox of love: we believe we have to be good to deserve it, but being loved can make us good. Being loved by S made me want to be better. I wanted to live up to his kindness, to become the competent, communicative, well-adjusted girl he saw me as. And when I looked at S, I also saw a version of him that he struggled to believe in. We saw the best in each other, and belief itself was enough to make us want to live it. He was the reason I started writing: I announced that I wanted to become a novelist, and he was like, Sure babe, go for it. I told him I didn’t think I could make money from that and he was like: I think you can make money from writing, no problem. So I went and did it. Because I wanted to, but also because he thought I could, and that made me feel like I could do anything.

I am making S sound like an angel. To be frank, that is how I view him. But also we met when we were 20 and 23 respectively, and our relationship had its own challenges that I won’t go into. The short story is that we became adults together, and struggled to figure out whether our romantic relationship could survive the growing pains. We were together for seven years in total, and spent around two of those years breaking up. During this period of time I would often wake up in the middle of the night and scream silently. I couldn’t understand why we were unhappy when we were so happy. Everywhere I looked, there was conflicting advice: people who told us to break up, people who told us to stay together. It felt like an existential choice. It was an existential choice, because I was half of a whole, because I was the back of the hand and S was the palm, because he was the call in the empty hallway and I was the echo. We use narratives to describe love, but love is beyond narrative.

Part of the problem was that everyone told me that if we broke up we would have to stop talking. He’s toxic if he’s still friends with to his ex, etcetera. And while I had stopped talking to most of the exes I’d had between ages 14 and 21, either because they needed the distance or I did, S was my first experience of loving someone in a way that could not be diminished. He was the person who had bore closest witness to the fragile, experimental, joyful years of my 20s. He was a repository for my emotions, my memories, and my personhood. In the beginning I wanted him, and then some time after that I needed him, because he was the person I loved, who knew the truth about me I could never put into words, which is to say he knew what my soul looked like and he accepted it and me. He loved me when I lied, when I cried, when I was ugly and sick. He loved me when I was beautiful and shining and laughing. His affection and steadiness made it possible for me to wake up every day and try to be more of the person that I was meant to be.

People have a lot of things to say about love and a lot of things to say about breakups. When I started writing advice for a living, I simultaneously stopped believing in it. To be clear, I still give advice all the time, but I also know now that what we need most is not to be told what to do but to grope our way to an answer. I was so desperate for someone to tell us whether we should break up or stay together. I wanted justification. I wanted to be correct. But in the end, nobody told me what to do. We fell through time like fish inexorably washed downstream. Certain things became clear, and certain things still remain murky.

What I understand now is that I could never escape from my love for S, nor would I want to. To be loved by him, to love and care for him, is neither my birthright or destiny. It’s the groove worn into the earth by repetitive pacing over thousands of days. It’s the room I’m locked in that I can never get out of. It’s the room that I would return to if someone forced me out. It’s luck. I can’t believe how lucky I’ve been. To repay luck, I think you have to live in gratitude. I don’t know what my relationship with S will be five years from now. Maybe we’ll be in relationships with other people and not talk to each other. I don’t think we always get to choose how these things play out, and I try to live contentedly in the mystery of life. But I feel grateful always for what I’ve been fortunate enough to experience.

When you love someone, I think the question that you ask is: can I help them be okay? Can I make their life better without ruining my own? What can I do to be there? To me, the heart of love is the acknowledgement that we have little control over how other people live and yet our fate is bound up with theirs. S is not the only person I feel that way about, but he was the one who taught me that permanence is nothing to be afraid of. As Ram Dass puts it, we are here on earth to walk each other home.

When I read what Sally Rooney said about marriage—“Having had this experience of falling in love when I was very young, with somebody who completely transformed my life, and transforms it every day, has allowed me to write stories about people whose lives are transformed by love. Without that, I don't think my work would be recognisable”—I cried and cried. Because my life has been wholly transformed by love, and it is still changing.