Are You In Love With Him—Or His Potential?

The last time I met up with him, he was waiting for me at the bottom of the train station steps in an SUV I didn’t recognize. In the half-decade we'd been sneaking off together at parties and winding up at each other's doorsteps after the bars closed, he had never once driven me anywhere. So even though I hadn't picked up his calls in a few months, there was something irresistible about the offer that lit up my phone just as it started to rain. "You doing anything? I'll come pick you up."

When we first met as teenagers, and he asked if we could move our stairwell makeout session out of the house party and into my car, I didn't think twice about him not having his own backseat to offer. I was more concerned about the fact that he couldn't stand straight. So I slipped away and returned to my friends. Then, a couple of years later, when we rekindled things after a chance meeting at a traffic light (he rolled down the window of the passenger's side of his best friend's ride and shouted a drunken greeting as I was crossing the road), I thought he was being responsible for having a designated driver.

It was only when I became his private Grab service, picking him up at parties instead of being invited to them, that it occurred to me to ask: If he didn't have access to a car, and he never used public transportation, then how did he get to school? How did he get to work? Turns out, he did neither. I didn't bother to ask how he funded his partying. From what I gathered, his home life was crumbling under the weight of legal, financial, and medical issues, so I took his circumstances to be a result of having poor choices rather than making poor choices. Instead of feeling wary, I felt an overwhelming but tender responsibility towards him. Watching his eyelids flicker as he finally found some rest on my pillow, I took it upon myself to be the one who would always be there for him.

Despite being of age, I was admittedly still a counterfeit adult. All my wisdom had been gathered from indie movies, sad songs, classic novels, and a misunderstanding of a secondhand religion. I thought love was something I could earn through suffering. By showing up for someone else when the world left them behind, even if they weren't interested in showing up for me, I would be entitled to their love. I believed being patient with someone’s chaos meant my love for them was pure and, therefore, special. Worthy. And so I approached any obstacle as an opportunity to amass proof that I was deserving of being loved in return. Between us, he may have been the "fixer-upper," but I was the one bumbling and stumbling over boundaries to demand validation. 

And so when he was callous or even cruel—flirting with my friends in front of me, getting into fist fights then seeking refuge in my car, or "forgetting" he'd invited me over, only to be long gone by the time I showed up—I'd convince myself that his actions were mere potholes on the path towards his full potential. I'd rationalize that his transparency was rooted in respect. That his honesty, no matter how hurtful, was honorable. After all, it was me he chose to call whenever he needed something. It must have meant that I was set apart from everyone else. It was a privilege. And with it came the responsibility of waiting out his storminess. If I did it willingly and gratefully, then someday, I would finally revel in the sunshine of his reciprocated love.

And so I picked up those 2 a.m. phone calls every weekend and withstood his neglect as soon as Monday rolled around. I nodded in agreement whenever my rare protests were met with his usual response: "I don't want a girlfriend. So you're not allowed to get mad like a girlfriend." Fair enough, my still-developing frontal lobe would think, unable to conjure a rebuttal about my needs, desires, and sense of self-respect.

What I was able to conjure, though, were images of the man he could be, the love he might one day be able to express, and the future we would have together if it all aligned. My imagination was validated by glimpses of his sweetness as a big brother and his fierce loyalty as a friend. I also found myself reading into little details: he'd ignore incoming texts when he was with me, as if our time together was sacred; he'd lift his arm whenever we'd watch TV—an invitation for me to rest my head on his chest. One time, I saw he'd saved my phone number under the name "B." Babe, perhaps? I clutched the phone to my chest. He's the one for me, I concluded, refusing to see that I had been filling the cavernous gaps in our non-relationship with blind hope.

But all the willful blindness couldn't deny that, at some point, the silences between his 2 a.m. calls stretched longer and longer. Until one night, pain having hardened into anger, I found the strength to hit Decline.

It became easy, with the clarity of hindsight, to diagnose the issue at hand: I was more in love with who I wanted him to be than who he actually was. And for a long time, I resented him for failing to live up to my expectations. What required a little more effort, though, was to diagnose the issue at heart: I was so busy trying to "fix" this boy’s seemingly broken capacity to love that I had completely overlooked the need to address my own brokenness.

This oversight is why I got into the SUV when he picked me up from the train station, despite being resolved (for months!) to walk away. It's also why I messily invited him into my apartment even though I knew we were both in talks with other parties. It's why I let myself melt into him when he leaned his forehead against mine and said, after years of banishing me to the realm of the booty call: "I still have feelings for you."

The problem wasn't that I picked the wrong person, but that I was the wrong person. All the effort I poured into earning his love was futile. Not because of any flaw in him, but because I was the one operating at a deficit of potential. Instead of a full heart and a desire to share that fullness with another person, I came in with a cracked tank. Any love given to me leaked right back out of my insecurities. And any rejection deepened the fractures. I wouldn't learn this hard lesson for another decade or so, but the love I thought was so pure was not love at all. It was manipulation. I strong-armed my way into a role he didn’t want me in, and got mad when he didn't play the corresponding part.

In fact, I wouldn't learn to love him in a real way until I let him go.

The morning after the train station pick-up was the last time I saw him. I remember watching him sit at the foot of my bed strumming my guitar as he had done plenty of other mornings, plenty of other years. The most recent time before then, I had reached for my Polaroid to capture the moment. But before it even developed, he grabbed the film, crumpled it, and threw it in the trash. I fished it out later and taped it into my journal. It remains the only artifact of our mornings—and of my desperation to possess him.

On that last morning, however, I just listened to his song. The notes that filled the air between us carved out a new space where, finally, he could be him, and I could be me, and we could be together without being anything else to each other. When it was done, I didn't ask for more.