Erica's (full) story, part 1

If you're reading this, I assume you've read yesterday's "short version," the fifteen-minute incarnation of Erica's story that is about hesitation. I'm not going to retell the story from the beginning as I delve into the full version. There's too much that's relevant to both versions, and I won't ask you to read the same story twice. I will, however, ask you to reconstrue it. You see, the fifty-minute version of Erica's story is only indirectly about hesitation. When one person hesitates to ask another on a date, it's not just a missed opportunity; it's a failure of communication. And it's a story about communication and its breakdowns that Erica unfolds to me now.

"He needed to think of it as a short-term relationship?"

"Yeah."

"How about you, were you thinking of it as a short-term relationship?"

"I thought I could change his mind!"

Erica's talking to me about her breakup with Leonard. They argued about it more than once. I ask if they yelled, and Erica shakes her head. "Just heated debate. And then it would end up with me being all quiet and sensitive." They'd gone into the romance with different expectations, a word we'll be seeing again. Erica's expectation, even when she understood that Leonard planned to end things, was that she should be able to change his mind.

But Leonard was firm, and Erica left the relationship mad. "I was really angry at him," she says. "Angry that he didn't change his mind. Angry that it [the breakup] happened at all." And that anger helped lead her into her next relationship. She shares this new story with remarkable frankness, as you'll see, in every detail but one: "I don't like to say his name." This second relationship left a bad taste in her mouth. I suggest she could give him a fake name, like I do in these stories. She chooses Jorge. "Totally a made-up name. It's a comical name. He's not even Hispanic."

Jorge shared an apartment with Erica and her friend. He first asked her out by text message, which seemed just about as classless to Erica as it did to me. She texted him back to tell him to wait until she got home, "and he got all whiny and pouty, and didn't want to talk to me, like offended." Whiny is another word we'll be seeing again. But in his defense, she adds, "it's probably because I led him on." I ask her about that, and she expands: "I led him on because I was mad at Leonard and I felt like having fun, I guess. So I did. We would like lay on the couch together and watch TV, stuff like that." In the interest of science, I ask how much of this came from anger at Leonard and how much from attraction to Jorge. Erica considers. "Well, it was fifty-fifty. I'm repulsed by him now, but I was attracted to him."

Attracted to him or not, Erica says she was guilted into being Jorge's girlfriend. Not so much because she'd led him on, but "because he was being ridiculous." He wouldn't listen to her when she said she wasn't over Leonard yet. She says she agreed in order to get him to stop whining. Their relationship lasted for just over three months and was full of arguments. I ask what they argued about. "Anything," says Erica. "He was a baby." What's more, in contrast to Erica's few arguments with Leonard, when she argued with Jorge "we would yell."

Still, if Erica hadn't found Jorge especially compelling at the outset, she grew to feel that way quickly. "I was telling him I loved him and all this stuff 'cuz eventually I did become so attached that I thought I loved him." Erica adds, reflectively, that this is a mistake she's made in all her past relationships. Is that the most important lesson the relationship with Jorge taught her? "There was another," she answers, feeling her way carefully. "He taught me how a relationship should be. How this guy was completely one-sided and selfish, pretty much. And showed me how good my relationship with Leonard had been, because Leonard was so practical." She means that Leonard didn't let silly things upset him, in contrast to Jorge, who snapped at Erica because she grabbed his white undershirt during what she describes as a play fight.

I wouldn't envy a person whose job it was to sit in judgment over this relationship. Maybe Erica sent mixed messages; maybe Jorge took her too much for granted. Maybe Erica didn't make her needs and expectations clear; maybe Jorge was "just plain jerk" (as Erica describes him) for being unreasonable in what he wanted and expected. Fortunately, Erica eventually came across an idea that helped her understand what was going wrong. But it would be a little while, and by that time her relationship with Jorge was over.