If Someone Says "You Complete Me," RUN! (9 page)

T
he beginning of any relationship is that romantic, unrealistic, infatuated, sex-crazed state when you and your new love are sitting in a bubble bath with soft music and candles, drinking champagne, and staring into each other’s eyes. You’re sending flowers and candies and little love notes, and your heart beats fast every time you hear from him, every time you see him. You take out a second mortgage on your house to pay for your new lingerie habit. The two of you don’t leave the bedroom for days. It’s all excitement and romance and anticipation. And it feels wonderful.

Ahhhh. This is the fun part. And we all love it. But…

I hate to burst your bubble, but while the beginning is
heavenly, unfortunately it has nothing to do with reality. It’s all that stuff that, after six or seven months, you’re no longer doing. You’re not still sending the card every week or leaving the little love note on the pillow. Or waking up and kissing the person before you brush your teeth.

The beginning of any relationship is truly a heightened state, and it really is the fun part. Whether it’s your relationship with your first baby, whether it’s your relationship with your first boyfriend or girlfriend, or with your new friend. Everything is heightened. So you want to put the most bullshittian information out there so he doesn’t go away. Since you are in this heightened state of excitement, you are being your very best self, a self that you probably aren’t even close to actually being, and you are putting out your very best effort, and going the extra mile to maintain that heightened state. In the first blush of a relationship, you’re wearing your favorite clothes. You have a new lacy thong for every day of the week. But you’re not really being you—and believe me, neither is the other person. It’s all bullshit, and I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but it isn’t going to last.

Now, we’re talking about relationships between adults. If we’re talking about the relationship you have with your first baby, then no, you’re not you. Your stomach has just been huge and you don’t know what to do, but you’re so glad to get that thing out of there. That first baby—you treat him like he’s perfect and precious. By your second
baby, you are throwing that second baby around and not obsessing over every little burp and diaper. That’s because you know what you are doing this time around and you knew what to expect and were prepared. You are more yourself.

Anytime you begin a relationship, it’s a first relationship. Well, the first time you feel love it’s for the person who’s carrying you around in her arms. That’s the first love of your life—if you’re lucky enough to have a parent anyway. Not everybody gets to have that. When you’re a little kid, love is comfort, love is the person who takes care of you.

Then you have your first love, puppy or young love:

Or whatever. Relationships are pretty much all the same when we are young and when they are new, at least until we become devious about them.

In a new relationship with an adult, even when it’s your second time around or your one-hundredth time
around, you revert to some idealized version of yourself for a short period, perhaps to relive those original puppy loves or out of hope that you are really the wonderful person your new love thinks you are. You are not who you truly are, but rather a heightened version. The version that is the person in all those songs I was talking about earlier. The “Good Morning” and the “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”
That’s
who you are. For a short period you get to be the girl in the movie, and you are the girl in the song, and trying to get that feeling, experiencing it, is such a high that it becomes like a drug. It’s why all those songs and movies are written: to capture that elusive, short-lived feeling that some people—and in my youth I might have been one of those people—think love is supposed to feel like. It is being in love with love.

To you, the other person can do no wrong. Nothing he does is odd. It’s all cute. It’s all really cute.

In the beginning, when you’re with that new person, you can’t let go of the fart, right? Then, when you’ve been with someone forever, you will let it go and stink up the room and you don’t care, but in the beginning you’re holding it in. If one little poop comes out, it’s cute. “Oh, a stinky!” Four years from now it’s like, “What the fuck was that?”

I always say be yourself from the very beginning. So I will let one rip, and then I will always know if the
relationship is going to go past a week. It’s like saying, “If we’re going to be living together or spending a lot of time together, there are some things you are just going to have to deal with.” Now, I’m not going to go and fart at the restaurant, but I am going to tell you when I get up to go to the bathroom, “I’m going to go fart, because I can’t fart here.” To me, that’s natural.

I know lots of people who will never, ever fart in front of the person they are with. Maybe that’s how they were raised, but not me. I’m a farter. I like to be comfortable. But I have learned in my life places to fart and places not to fart. If you’re in my bed, for instance, you have to follow my rules. The only bad part about all this is that my bedmate also has the same freedom. This is why I’m alone. Because I don’t
want
him to have the same freedom.

But that’s neither here nor there.

The first blush of a relationship makes you so different. Your friends are looking at you trying to figure out what’s going on, because the change is happening. You’re not as schlubby as you were, maybe. Or you’re wearing more adornment. You’re better scented. And you walk differently. You walk like “I’m walking on sunshine, oh-ohhhhhhh.” It’s all great, and Bambi is coming up and eating right out of your hand, and little butterflies are flying around, and birds are singing. He or she—or they, depending on if you’re in a threesome—has a halo over them. They are, in those early days, perfection.

A lot of this is just a chemical reaction. All those endorphins and dopamine create a different kind of energy. Chemical reaction or not, though, no one tells the truth in the beginning. You don’t dress that way all the time. You don’t smell like that all the time. You don’t have wear expensive, completely impractical lingerie all the time. You don’t look like that all the time. You don’t comb your hair that often. I can attest to that.

This chemical reaction part subsides much sooner than two or three years. I think it can even subside after a few months.

Do people mistake that newness as love, and are so quick to say, “I love you”? Yes, they do. After all, we’ve been programmed to say those words, that it is the next natural thing that’s supposed to happen in this situation. You meet somebody and have fun with him and really like him and have some nice sex, and then, in a short amount of time, you tell him you love him.

It is a mistake to confuse love with chemistry, or love with that heightened state of infatuation in the beginning. But a lot of people think that’s what love is, and when that initial period is over, so is the relationship. They can’t go to the next level, which is the real level.

I’ll bet if you asked people to describe what love means to them or what love is to them, very few people could do it.

People mistake love for “I really like being with you.”

People mistake love for “We have great times in bed.”

People mistake love for “I need you to protect me.”

And people mistake love for “You take care of me.”

Then, if they stick around, it gets a little weird, because then your face starts to slip. Your whole persona starts to slip. You’re back in the stinky pants. Maybe you’re not as hygienically scented as you’d like to be, or as you were before, so your odor changes. You are wearing your granny pants underwear and a stretched-out bra. And now you’re sort of getting used to how we do this.

The first time you’re in bed with somebody, you’re very nervous and, you know, wondering who is going to start and “What should we do?”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening, how do I look? And blah, blah, blah. Then you figure out whether you’re compatible in the bed. Again, in the beginning, your expectations are very high because everything tells you that you’ve met that special person, so you figure everything else is going to be perfect as well.

But what do you do if that doesn’t work as well as you want it to? You want to train him, don’t you? There are these expectations that you hope the sex is going to be as good as all the romance or the feelings. So you say, “Well, if the sex isn’t great, then I’ll have to teach him.”

You know if somebody can’t satisfy you. You know it.
So you need to show him what to do. And you do it in a way that doesn’t make him feel like he’s an idiot. You do it like, “Let’s try this… let’s try that… what do you like… what do I like?”

But the first blush is really sort of “Oh my God, this is great and wonderful.” “Gee, am I going to be his muse?” “Am I going to be this or that?” It’s all that movie shit.

I don’t know when movies changed—I don’t know if they have, really. But I don’t remember a lot of these issues hitting folks in the 1950s and such. Maybe they were. But you had to meet people one on one, or you had pen pals or whatever. Everything took longer. You had to physically go somewhere to meet the person. You had to get to know each other over a period of time. Or, in some places, the parents arranged the marriage and you went along with it, which is maybe also a good idea for people. Not my favorite thing, but some people find it really helpful because you grow together. You are forced to get to know each other and figure it out.

Times have changed. I remember reading about Barbra Streisand and when she started her relationship with James Brolin. She was away somewhere making a movie—they were in different countries—and she was in the hotel room in the bathroom on the floor, and for hours and hours they spoke on the phone.

People don’t do that anymore.

When I was growing up, I could be on the phone with
my best friends or boyfriends for hours and hours, and it created a connection, a trust, a common language that was important. You just liked hearing the sound of the other person’s voice.

Today everyone texts, and something has been lost. That connection isn’t given a chance to develop when your main form of communication is texting. And texts can be so easily misunderstood and are valued not for being honest but for being cute or clever. All human interaction has been reduced to emojis. Don’t get me wrong, emojis can be cute, but they don’t begin to create a connection that gets two people closer. They are more like a shorthand type of language.

So a connection is built not through emojis but through intimacy. The official definition of
intimacy
is that it’s a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship. It is an understanding of who the other is and creates nice familiarity, warmth, affection. Not necessarily love, but intimacy can certainly lead to love.

But this definition is a little vague, isn’t it? A little stiff. It sounds good, but what does it really mean to you?

Think about your own definition of intimacy, which can probably start with some of the things you want in a relationship. Spelling out your definition of intimacy is taking that to the next level:

The other thing about relationships—and this goes not just for sexual relationships, but relationships in general—is the less interaction you have with people, the harder a relationship with another person is going to be.

It’s very easy to make friends or fall in love with an avatar. It’s like falling in love with a character in a book. It’s not real. You don’t really know this person.

Today, the hardest thing people have to contend with is how to hang out socially. People don’t know how to talk on the phone. They don’t know how to talk on the
iPhone or the A phone or the LMNOP phone or the smartphone or the dumbphone. Because no one has time. And certain social skills and ways to connect are being lost.

Social media have created a whole different way of interacting than what we did years ago, where the phone would ring, you would have to ask your mother can you talk on the phone, and then you would sit and have a conversation. Or you’d sit there waiting for the phone to ring. Was he going to call? Wasn’t he going to call? Now it’s just you text. Everything is a text. Or you wait for an e-mail from somebody. Nobody really has to put themselves out there in an honest or a vulnerable way.

And don’t get me started on online profiles. They’re basically marketing tools.

And then there are these apps—in the gay world, there’s Grindr and Scruff, where you go onto your app and you can see who is in your neighborhood or who is five feet away or ten feet away, and you can either hook up with or talk to that person, but it’s all in an app and you can pretend and hide behind it.

For the straight world there’s Tinder, where you look at a bunch of photos and swipe, swipe, swipe, until you find someone whose looks you like, and then if that person swipes you back, you can hook up. But you don’t even know anything about one another. It’s a superficial connection at best.

Remember, in the very beginning, we talked about patience. Patience is required to have a relationship, a human relationship, a human interaction with someone else. It also means you cannot be self-absorbed. You have to pay attention to the person you’re talking to. That’s whether you are going to be friends or lovers or whatever. But generally, once you get past all the electronics, you still have to do the flesh on flesh. You still have to meet. You still have to connect somehow in a way that is real and meaningful if you are going to make a real friend.