Erica's story, conclusion

"We stayed up talking for two or three hours, just laying there, and we got to talking about how, he's like, 'it's nice that you can just lay here with me and expect that I'm not going to take advantage of you,' probably alluding to how I hated men for a while and they all use you."

"Was that amazing to you, that you could trust him that much?"

"No, it wasn't amazing, it's natural. It was normal to me. Out of anybody I would feel most comfortable doing that with him. Even as just friends, even when we were just friends. And he's like, why do you think that is? And I go: Oh, well, it's 'cuz I love you. And I rolled over."

Less than a year after finally breaking it off forever with Jorge, Erica found herself in bed with Leonard again. Here's how it happened.

The February after Erica's October breakup, Leonard, still Erica's friend, sent her a Valentine's card. ("He said he sent Valentine's cards out to everybody, but he especially picked one for me.") Soon afterward, while visiting from Orlando, he tried to kiss her as they sat on her couch watching TV. Erica reacted with abhorrence; remember, this was when she hated guys. "I saw that as another guy trying to use me," she explains. She browbeat him for it, apologized the next day, and that was the last she saw of Leonard during that visit.

I'm a little surprised when Erica tells me that when she next saw Leonard, in May, she had started dating again. "That was a rebound," she explains. "That was what I needed to get me out of --" "Out of Jorge mode?" I helpfully suggest. "Out of guys-are-jerks mode," she answers. Apparently it worked. On the night that Erica finally saw Leonard again, she greeted him like "a breath of fresh air" and immediately realized that "I think I love him, like for real this time... and that I probably should do something about it." That very night, Erica found in her email inbox what under the circumstances seemed a "miracle:" a breakup note from her then-boyfriend. She was nice, he said, but they didn't click. She wrote back to agree, adding, "...and next time you break up with somebody, I would suggest doing it in person, or at least over the phone." (It later turned out that he felt he had to write down these feelings to make them clear and make sure they got expressed, which Erica says is good as far as it goes, "but then at least read it to me!" The medium of communication matters to Erica; I think of her annoyance at Jorge's texting earlier and the ambiguities that grew out of chain emails with Leonard before that.)

Erica wasted no time in taking advantage of her good luck, cajoling Leonard into a dinner date the very next night. There she dropped the hint: "So I think, like, I'm over Jorge and feeling much better about men again. . . . He's like, oh, that's good. He didn't know exactly where I was going with what I was saying --" "He didn't want to assume too much, I guess," I say, remembering the episode about expectations from earlier. "I guess so, yeah," Erica agrees. Dinner with Leonard gave way to a party at a mutual friend's house, which turned into heavy drinking, which led to Erica throwing up in the toilet as Leonard stood beside her -- "which was amazing to me" -- and at last, their host suggested that Erica, tired and intoxicated, should stay the night. "Also trying to push me and Leonard together," she smiles. They slept in the same bed, which brings us to where we started tonight's installment. No sex, no cuddling, just two longtime friends sharing a night together. Not without some tension, though. Erica said I love you. Leonard said I love you back -- "I don't know if he meant it at that time, but he said it. And I think we went to sleep. We didn't talk about it."

"What needed to be said got said, I guess."

"Yes. Finally. Took all night. Liquid courage."

Leonard kissed her the next morning, under the pretext that he "wanted to test something." He never explained what; probably it doesn't need explaining. He called her the next day, as he was leaving Fort Myers. He said "he's not going to particularly ask me out or anything like that, but just know that he does care about me and blah blah blah, and that," Erica explains, "was him asking me out. That was the beginning of a relationship."

I profess surprise. After all, Leonard had broken the relationship off in the first place because he was moving to Orlando, and he still lived there. I ask when he changed his mind. Erica giggles sincerely, "When he realized that I'm awesome? More awesomer than any other girl?" She continues more seriously: "I think that was one of the requirements when he called me that Sunday and 'asked me out,' we talked about conditions, and --" "Expectations?" I ask, putting words in people's mouths like usual. "Expectations, yeah," Erica nods. "The reason he broke up the first time was that he didn't want to break my heart and have all the complications that a long-distance relationship could have, and that he knows that it's hard more on girls than on guys, and he didn't want to hurt me in that way, but if I could handle it then he would be okay with it too."

"I see, so this time instead of deciding himself to break it off he left it up to you."

"He did!"

And that's how Erica and Leonard started dating again. Both approached the second relationship differently from the first, bringing with them new experiences and perhaps new communication styles. Erica doesn't even remember the conversation that kicked off the first relationship, but the second began with two I love yous and a dialogue about conditions and expectations. There is change here, perhaps growth, and that growth is what makes this part of the story -- even with all the vomiting and negotiations -- more romantic in some ways than the first part. Mr. Darcy's second proposal to Elizabeth was romantic because of how it was different from his first proposal to Elizabeth. Erica's story is broadly similar.

I ask Erica what her expectations of Leonard are going forward. She growls that she expects him "to propose pretty soon," though he wants to wait until they're out of school. (They're each now in their sixth year of college.) She expects to have his kids; he says he wants fifty. And she expects to be able to move around with him. "I like change," she explains. It's a good thing.

Erica's story, part 2

"I think I did say, okay, now we're agreeing we're just using each other. And we did talk about just agreeing on that. But then I would expect more. I would expect... something else."

"So it was hard for you to keep your expectations under control?"

"Yeah. That's always been my problem."

There's a striking symmetry between the tail end of Erica's relationships with Leonard and Jorge: both the guys went off to college in other parts of the state. The difference is that Leonard, bound for Orlando, left his romance in Fort Myers; Jorge, headed for West Palm Beach, took his relationship with him. Erica and Jorge did the long-distance thing for nearly two months, seeing each other every couple weekends. "And because he had no money it was me going over there and sometimes getting him, driving back here [to Fort Myers] for the weekend, and then driving him back. It was kind of dumb," Erica says. I observe that she must have liked him okay to go to all that trouble, and Erica cops to that, but adds, "Not enough, though."

After that acknowledgment one might think Erica would have been eager to break up with Jorge, but in fact it was Jorge who finally cut the thread. It's not working out, he said over the phone. "I said I agree," Erica recalls. "I said I agree that we should totally break up, and I continued to be hung up on that relationship for at least three months afterwards."

One of the challenges of doing an interview is that you never know what it's okay to assume. When Erica says she was hung up on Jorge, I assume she just means she was pining for him. It's not for several minutes that the conversation returns to Jorge and Erica says thoughtfully, "Two times after Jorge and I broke up, I begged for him to come back because I missed sex. Two times he drove over from West Palm Beach just for that." I'm taken by surprise and bust out with "Oh my gosh, really?" -- which if Erica had been a stranger might have been off-putting at just that moment. I wince listening to it on the tape. Fortunately, Erica takes it in stride and continues, saying that her encounters with Jorge "even more so made me hate him, because I would tell him, oh, I love you, blah blah blah, and he would stone-cold not say anything back. Like refuse to." Erica told herself he was just holding back, that really he still loved her, even though they'd already agreed they were only using each other. Sadly, if he did, he never gave any indication of it. This episode makes me feel a little better about my gaffe earlier. Erica and I are partners in being confused about what to expect.

As if on cue, Erica muses about a relevant conversation she had the other day with a girl she says she doesn't know that well -- "an amazing, amazing girl, she's a Christian and everything, she speaks in a country accent, and to me she's a perfect Christian, she should be a saint. . . . She was telling me that it's a really good idea to communicate expectations with whoever you're with. Like in the morning or at night before you start the next day, say 'What are your expectations for tomorrow?'" Erica's face lights up as she talks about this chat; she's hit on something important and she knows it. I observe that this only works if both people are honest about what they expect. Erica nods emphatically. "That was a major thing, too. I don't think Jorge was totally honest. And Leonard was."

But this epiphany about expectations would come later. When I ask Erica what lesson she learned from her time with Jorge, she gives two answers: "How [not] to treat people in a relationship, and that men are jerks."

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.

Erica's story in 15 minutes

I had an interview Sunday evening with another friend of mine, whom I'll call Erica. Like my interview with Alice, this one turned out to be long, about fifty minutes. This time, though, I tried to sculpt the conversation in a way that made sure to outline something interesting within the first fifteen minutes. I'm going to see how well I did by telling Erica's story two different ways. Today I'll pretend that Erica had to leave after fifteen minutes; I'll write her story based on only that part of the interview. Starting tomorrow I'll tell all fifty minutes of her story, reorganizing the first fifteen to fit the broader narrative. First, though, a technical issue. I've heard now from two of my readers that you've had trouble logging in to comment on the blog. I've now switched to a form of commenting that won't require you to log in. The disadvantage of this system is that the comments section might get spammed; if that becomes a problem I'll have to switch back, but for now commenting should be easy. You can also always write to me at the email address on my business card. Now, without further ado, the short version of Erica's story...

"The whole semester I got the feeling, okay, I really like him, is there something I need to do about this or what, and I waited the whole semester . . . and it never went away, so at the end of the semester I finally told him that that's how I had been feeling."

"So you were thinking maybe there's something there, and you want to explore that?"

"Yeah. I guess I put it in his hands, or something like that."

Erica and I are sitting on a bench outside a hair salon. We talk against a backdrop of traffic noise and chattering pedestrians. Everyone in the shopping center is going somewhere except us. Our travel takes place through memory.

Erica first met her boyfriend, Leonard, in middle school but didn't begin dating him until her fourth year of college. "We dated twice," she explains; the fourth year of college was the first time. I wonder out loud when, in that interval of about nine years, Erica and Leonard realized they had feelings for each other. Erica recalls an email she got in high school -- "it was one of those stupid chain forwards. And one of the questions was, Do you like the person who sent this to you? They were so dumb, but I remember writing something like... I plead the Fifth. 'Cuz Leonard sent it to me and I didn't want to say I like him."

What brings me to attention here is that Erica was given an opportunity to say how she felt, but instead said "maybe, maybe not." We could write this off as typical for high schoolers, but of course adults do it too. It's hard to take action. We pass the buck instead. Erica passed the buck back to Leonard. Leonard wrote something similarly vague back to her. And that is how two teenagers knew and liked each other for nine years before they started dating -- by which time they weren't teenagers anymore.

Erica says affectionately that Leonard "was always a wuss. He wasn't man enough to ever do anything about any girls." He didn't do anything when the two exchanged chain emails; he didn't do anything when he found Erica making out with her then-boyfriend at a Christmas party at Leonard's house. Not that the two were in constant contact. "There were some times when a year or maybe even more went by without us talking," says Erica, "but we could always pick up the phone and talk like no time had gone by."

At last something happened that does not always happen in true stories: someone made the first move. It was Erica. To earn their degrees, Erica and Leonard both needed to take statistics, a subject that was Erica's bane. Erica called him to remind him to sign up for classes -- "cuz he'd always wait till the last minute" -- and suggested that they take the course together. During that semester Erica felt her feelings strengthen, and at the end she told Leonard how she felt about him. "And what did he say?" I ask. "I don't even remember exactly how it happened," she answers. "Basically we both decided, okay, we'll start going out."

There was still more buck-passing to come. Leonard was studying to earn an associate's degree so he could transfer to a college three hours away. He didn't plan on pursuing a long-distance relationship, and he dropped hints about it to Erica but nothing more. The relationship was as full of false ends as it had once been of false starts. It took the intervention of Erica's best friend to force Leonard's hand: "She said, if you're planning on breaking up with her you'd better do it soon, because it's not good of you to string her on like that." Soon afterward, Leonard made the last move, where Erica had made the first. The romance had lasted just three months.

The cliche vision of romance is love at first sight, a chance encounter that leads almost instantly to one person leaping into the other's arms and both whispering "forever." But in real life the first kiss, at least in a potentially serious relationship, is so often a pearl years in the making, its story full of hesitations and ambivalences. So is the last kiss. And that's Erica's story.

At 11:38 PM, Brian glanced at his bookmarks.

Urgh, I forgot all about blogging today. Too many other things on my mind, I guess. I've been feeling lonelier than usual. Happily, I've got some stuff set up this weekend: a ball game with my dad tomorrow, and with any luck an interview on Sunday. But for today I have twenty minutes to write a blog entry, which means either I take a pass or I write something half-assed about something I happen to be thinking about, like Go or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. And frankly either there's a blog entry in those topics or there isn't, and if there is I'd prefer to wait until I have time to write something full-assed about them like usual. So I'll take the pass.

There is a topic I've been meaning to write about that I can say something about in the remaining thirteen minutes, though, and it's not something I feel is especially expandable. It's my tendency to begin sentences with coordinating conjunctions. The last three sentences of my previous paragraph all began with conjunctions, and I didn't do it on purpose. My AP English teacher always jumped all over me for that. He said it subordinated the sentence to the previous sentence and turned it into a fragment. Syntactically he's probably right if these conjunctions are treated as the same words as the ones that are used with commas to tie sentences together. But that's just how I think. Each thought is tied to the previous one with a statement about how they're related. Do they contradict each other? Does the second expand on the first? Am I drawing a conclusion? There are no better words than the conjunctions for invisibly guiding you as you try to reconstruct my thoughts from these symbols on a computer screen. I could say "however" and "furthermore" and "consequently," and sometimes I do that too. But those are big words that connote big ideas. Some days my ideas are small, and on those days my words should be too.

This, obviously, is one of those days. So that's today's post. And you see, I did end up talking a little about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after all.

Two kinds of card

These came about a week ago, when I was in the middle of Alice's story. Five hundred of them plus a shiny business card holder for $7.99 plus shipping. Take out the gray interior border and this is exactly what the cards look like. Simple, pretty, informal rather than professional. I think they send the message I want to send, which is a friendly "this is a real thing and here's how to get in touch with me." If I ask someone for a story and they want to know whether I'm for real, I can say "sure, here's my card." Having a card means you're for real. I guess it's reasonable for someone who's been asked a personal question to want something tangible to guarantee that this isn't a scam and that if it is they know who to sue. Part of what I have to do is reassure people and encourage them to visit the blog, and this card accomplishes both those things. No cell phone number, though. I hate telephones, especially cells, and I'm going to be doing enough talking to strangers without also finding them on the other end of the phone line.

For the record, I got the cards from an Internet company called VistaPrint in what I think was a first-time special; if you need a bunch of business cards cheap I recommend them. (Just be willing to wade through a few pages of marketing -- no, I don't want the same image on a coffee mug or postcard -- before they let you actually place your order.)

I also visited Verizon today to find out if their nationwide-Internet deal is any better than AT&T's. Nope. The same bandwidth at the same price with the same minimum two-year commitment if you want the rebate on the same very expensive card. There might as well just be one company offering this service. It may just turn out to be necessary to pay full price for the card, because I'm not sure what percentage of budget inns offer wireless networking.

Disappearing railroad blues

Happy April! I don't have any pranks for you today, though I'm tempted to announce that I'll make my trip using BMW's new Magnetic Tow Technology, advertised today here. If this were real it would be a sweet way to ride.

And speaking of riding, I need to figure out soon whether I'm going to go by car or train. I was leaning towards going by train, but then it occurred to me that because I'd be riding in short hops, each leg would be no more than a day trip. I'd still be overnighting more or less entirely at hotels, so the train fare doesn't replace a hotel stay. No money saved on food, either, because the dining car charges unless you've made an exorbitantly upgraded reservation, which is only worth doing on long rides. I don't have to make car payments, but I do have to pay for rentals if I want to get anywhere within the cities I visit. The train looked appealing when I thought it was going to be more convenient and less expensive; I'm not sure how I feel now that it looks more convenient and more expensive.

The two biggest advantages of trains remain what they were: not having to focus on moving for long stretches at a time, and having a ready-made place to look for interviewees where we're all on equal terms. These should not be essential but are really tempting. I'm unfortunately aware that the higher the bar I set for myself, the greater the probability that I'm going to lose my nerve and abandon the whole project, consigning myself to spending June through August tutoring the odd few students who want tutoring during the summer, like I did last year and the year before that. I'd rather not do that again. But what price am I willing to pay, in dollars and romance, to lower the bar?