Boyfriendland

Things are different here than I thought they’d be. I crash landed at Boyfriendland in the middle of March. After three solid years of the dating life from hell, I decided to take a break and focus on myself. Lo and behold, just like those smug bitches always say, it happened when I least fucking expected it.

The day after I met him, he texted me right away and, like an asshole, I let it sit in my inbox for a full 24 hours before answering. In my defense, these things don’t usually work out.

---

“Well. I have a boyfriend.” I told my therapist the Thursday after we decided on it.

“And?” He said.

“It didn’t fix any of my problems. I kind of thought it would. I feel sort of the same, just… with a boyfriend.”

---

I tell my friends. I tell my mom. I soft-launch him on Instagram.

We lie in bed and I make him watch Liza Minelli turn on a lamp, Ann-Margret throw away a piece of paper, and Marnie Michaels perform the worst music video ever created. I feel like a little kid holding up a worm from the dirt.

“See? Do you see? Do you like it? Isn’t it cool?”

---

I show Boyfriend my favorite movie (The Incredible Jessica James) and when Jessica Willams gives Chris O’Dowd a binder of her plays to read, I feel self conscious and embarrassed.

“I’ll never make you read all my work.”

“But I want to,” he says.

I make him a PDF of every play I’ve written (since I got good) and he actually reads it. We sit in our favorite bar and debate about how I could fix the ending of the play I’ve been rewriting for three years.

---

Things are too good, so of course I self destruct. I flirt shamelessly with a friend of a friend at a bar. I stare at my drunk self in the bathroom mirror and smirk at my reflection. How bad am I? Boyfriend won’t know, so there are no consequences!

The guilt eats me alive. I tell him the next day and apologize.

“Well. Did you kiss him?” Boyfriend asks.

“No!”

“Did you want to go home with him?”

“No! I even kept saying, ‘my boyfriend, my boyfriend, my boyfriend…”

“Then it’s fine.” He says, and I can tell he means fine and not, “I’m going to bring this up the next time we have an argument”.

---

“I feel like I should be more obsessed with him?” Back in my therapist’s office, I fidget uncomfortably in my chair.

“Like, because every other time I’ve been with someone, I’ve gone a little crazy. More than a little, actually. Like, I think about them all the time and feel like I can’t think about anything else and I panic and scheme and I’m really afraid they’re going to leave me. But… I just like him. It feels too easy. I’m not afraid he’s going to leave. I like spending time with him all the time. I feel like I think about him a healthy amount. Shouldn’t it be more?”

My therapist smiled.

“Do you think you can learn the difference between infatuation and love?”

---

We kiss in the rain. I take him to parties in Bushwick. I smoke an excess of his cigarettes and every morning after tell him to stop giving them to me when I ask.

I don’t worship him.

I do love him.

He makes me watch Firefly and I actually like it.

I send him tweets I think he’d laugh at.

He tells me I’m beautiful when I least expect it, so often that I start to believe him.

I introduce him obnoxiously to everyone I run into while we’re together.

“Have you met my boyfriend?”

He likes Chekhov.

---

One night, I came over to his apartment and he’s made me a whole chicken. Never in my life has someone cared about me enough to roast a bird. He stood over the stove, slightly panicked (the chicken came out pink at first), slightly sweaty, with a kitchen towel over his shoulder, just like people who cook in the movies do.

I felt myself crack open.

I think this is why they call it falling in love.

I could have been hurtling off the side of a cliff and not known the difference.