Photos and the Future

When I date someone, I like to have very few photos of us together, especially on social media. 
In this post, I go on to mention redheads, dancers, a cat and Beyoncé. 

I’m excited for the next thing. Tom and I were always going to break up sometime, freeing me to have a far better relationship in the future. The abundance of memories is now in the past.

I am definitely not ready to make myself vulnerable to someone again, but at some point, I will be, and I’m curious about what my next guy will be like. First off, I will require that he be a man instead of a teen in a man’s body. With the intention of not repeating recent history, I’ve had silly fantasies in mind, like having the man be an art therapist or a blues guitarist or both, or instead, a dancer, which would be hot: a talented reject from America’s Best Dance Crew could teach me moves and make me playfully competitive at wedding receptions.

Maybe he’ll have big brown eyes and be a proud Native American or come from a strong Italian bloodline with delicious food.

He could be a bearded atheist who owns a house and a dog with a lot of personality, or he could be a clean-shaven man who likes rum and Sam Cooke and ignoring Valentine’s Day.

Or he’s a redhead; there are some good-lookin’ gingers out there and we need more of ‘em.

Maybe he wants to be a father in a few years and doesn’t care how it happens. 

I wonder what these lessons I've learned and this bitterness I feel will mean to me in the future. My dream is to date just one more guy, have just one more relationship, but of course that dream has to be countered with the following question: What if that doesn’t come true? If I have to date around a bit or have three or more boyfriends in my lifetime, how many of my current rules are going to last?

For example, I hate the thought of having a lot of pictures exist of myself and my guy. If that makes me sound weird, too bad. My romantic past involves my knowing, throughout each of those connections, that it either definitely wouldn’t last or was highly unlikely to. The plan has been to have minimal photographic evidence of our affiliation for the sake of protecting my feelings first and ego second, no matter how fun the Tumblr account Beyoncify My Boyfriend can be. 

Beyoncify My Boyfriend

After giving up on a dingbat boyfriend, I had a handful of pictures of us stored on an external hard drive that I had an unpleasant time rediscovering. I felt like a gullible teen who had helped her own boyfriend dupe her. Even when Tom and I had briefly been mutually infatuated, I silently hated having a picture taken of us here or there, at a relative’s engagement party or at a concert, especially when seeing those photos online. Ew. Like I said, evidence = bad. In that relationship specifically, pictures made me feel vulnerable, uncomfortable. I had to remind myself to not reach out to my camera-happy friends who wanted to freeze a moment in time and ask them to not post a shot of me at the party or concert with [Insert Guy Name Here]. Today, I'm still not pleased with the existence of something I find unnecessary and (if I’m being even more honest) overly optimistic, but of course I know that I would look really odd asking those friends to keep those pictures offline if they kept them at all. I have a friend who once gave her significant other the gift of a picture frame full of photos of just the two of them. He had it up on a wall in his living room. That’s very telling of their relationship, I think, and very sweet. But. I would never want a collection of pictures of myself and my boyfriend in one frame or one home unless some of those pictures involved the leaning Tower of Pisa or a lion or Dylan’s Candy Bar – something much more interesting than our faces. This on top of the fact that I would rather, like, not want a lot of proof that I was dating someone who might easily leave me at any time. Why be romantic, head-in-the-clouds hopeful when I don’t have solid reasons for it?

I think that for the entirety of Thing with Tom Part 2, I was overlooking and forgiving (but certainly not forgetting) rude behavior. I was almost trying to condition us both to settle for the wrong match, having managed to fall in some base version of love with someone who realized early on that we were too different to have something solid, to really trust each other, but I kept thinking that we could have more in common in a year or two, as if time would change us that much. That ridiculous hope I used to have currently makes me feel so...immature.

I wonder how normal people get through break-ups, be they equal to or anywhere along the large scale of worse than mine. How do they brush themselves off? And how could someone fall in love multiple times in their life, like Elizabeth Taylor or Drew Barrymore? I don’t have a deep, mutual love to recover from and there is no baggage, no custody issue,

       Sorry, Oliver. Your only scratching post now is Tom.

but the thought of starting over is still scary. My very first boyfriend was my very first love and the only guy I cared to know on a more-than-friends level (on and off) over the course of nine years, so…as much as I shake my head at myself for even thinking the stuff I’ve put into these essays, as if it’s vapid First World crap, I know it’s normal to be overwhelmed by an uncertain future.

  

Cue the LeAnn Rimes:

                                           

                                                                                                                             “How do I liiiiive without yooouuu?”

        

I mean it. I don’t miss the ex but I sometimes miss the cat. Look at that face! Those markings! And the falsely innocent demeanor.

Hey, maybe that next significant someone will listen to me summarize the highlights of my relationship with the ex and respond with, “Yeah, I did that to a girl once” and be admonished by me. Maybe he’ll be culturally Jewish and technically bisexual, anti-kale and terrible at opening blinds.

Throughout all of this, though, there has to be an understanding that we really respect each other as individuals. It’s essential for me to have a romantic entanglement involve sincere admiration and equality. The guy must acknowledge that I have passion and good personality traits and skills and deserve to be treated well, and in return, I want to be a supportive teammate to someone who has those things as well. If he fixes cars or plumbing or runs a dry cleaning business, I plan to encourage and appreciate his work. After a long day as an art consultant or a nurse or a computer geek, his frustration or satisfaction will matter to me. I could kiss his forehead and ask if he wanted to watch that one movie tonight before it disappeared from Netflix at the end of the month. Equality and reciprocity are just too important for me to settle or obsess over the unexciting past.

Correction: February 1, 2017 

Revisited & edited.