Dating : If This Meant Something He Would Tell Me, Wouldn’t He?

Navigating the line of broken love.

Friday afternoons had become ours. The gods of time and space had conspired to land us in the same neighbourhood at the same moment week after week. After almost two years of living on my own, I finally felt comfortable opening my door to him without the pressing sense of guilt that I was a horrible person for leaving my marriage and even horribler for wanting to find a happiness that was my own. I was putting that failed relationship behind me and taking tentative steps towards a new way of being.

This new way involved me making hot soups and spicy chilis to ward off the Montreal winter. Week after week, always on Fridays, he would climb the many stairs to my warm, cheerful apartment. He would remove his frozen boots and brush the snow off his jacket. We would smile shyly at each other. The shyness didn’t stem from unfamiliarity — we’d been through much together these last few years — but from the recognition that this moment, this ritual, this ease I’d found with having him over, was unchartered territory.

Before he could take more than a few steps in, I would be drawn by the magnetic field that exists between us. He would pull me in and I would rest my head against his chest. In that one particular spot. He would rest his cheek on the top of my head and squeeze me a little tighter. I could never get used to feeling so short, to feeling engulfed and protected. I would remind myself to breathe. After two or three breaths I would feel my shoulders drop. After five or six more I would feel my body relax. After seven or eight I would feel like I had arrived somewhere.

I would look up at him, craning my neck, offering a smile that was no longer shy. I would invite him to my table and offer a hot bowl of whatever nourishment I had concocted that week. I would invite him to my bed and offer the softness of my skin. We would wake up hours later, each called back to the reality and responsibility of our own lives. At the door we would lean against each other for three or full full breaths, my head instantly finding that spot on his chest. Our smiles would be shy again after the moment we had just shared.

This ritual became the anchor of my week. Every week, I would question my motivations, my intentions. Every week, I would doubt myself. Every week, I would issue an invitation, not quite clear what we were navigating together. We were not a couple. I was still recovering from a relationship that had spanned my entire adult life. A marriage that had seemed sunny and happy to everybody — including me— but that emitted a quiet hiss of noxious fumes that had poisoned my very sense of self. I knew and I said and I repeated that until I felt solid and whole as myself I couldn’t commit. He said little about his own limitations but he wrote volumes, quite literally, about how he felt about me.

We were not a couple, he and I.

“Vous n’êtes pas rien non plus,” a friend had remarked.

You aren’t nothing either.

We were something. Something that didn’t fit into any boxes that I was familiar with. I had spent the last two years riding an emotional rollercoaster, skittish and uncertain and afraid. He was always there, kind and patient and understanding. This was more than I could bear at times. I felt responsible for him. Did he not see that I wasn’t ready? That I might never be ready? Did he not see that I had allowed myself to become broken in my marriage? That this failure was my fault too? I was clear on one point: until I understood the patterns that I had contributed to my marriage, I could not engage in another relationship. The last thing I wanted to do was to repeat my dysfunctional patterns only to create a new kind of toxicity with someone else.

And so I told him this: I love you. I’m drawn to you. I want to spend time with you. I want to share myself with you. I want to know all about you. I can’t, however, commit. I feel broken and unsure of myself. I need to heal. I need to hear my own voice before I join it to someone else’s. This is what I can give and this is my limit. It is up to you to figure out what you can give and what your limit is. I will make no claims on you and I can’t have claims made on me. I ask for one thing: proactive transparency. Should either of us ever get involved with someone else, in any way that involves feelings or bodies, can we please tell each other? Proactively and transparently and immediately.

He had agreed to this. I felt safe with him. We navigated this line of love and brokenness and transparency. The summer before our Friday ritual had taken root, true to my word, I had informed him that I’d had a one-night stand — my first ever. I gave him the relevant data and emotional space so he could decide for himself how he wanted to process this information. He was unfazed. He scooped me into his arms and held me tight. Lovingly. I had rested there, feeling seen.

Those winter Fridays came after a tumultuous autumn and terrible holiday season. I’d been coping with the final ugly death rattle of my marriage and the decision to cut ties with my mother. I had pushed him and everyone else away as I succumbed to wave after wave of grief, some waves bordering despair. During these months he had been in the thick of his own life, coping with things that I wasn’t aware of, caught up as I was, in my own story.

Welcoming him to my apartment after the bleakest December I had ever experienced felt like a reunion, a revelation of possibilities. He brought with him his usual kindness and patience and understanding as well as the aura of a man who’d been forging his own path, working on his own patterns. I felt myself starting to hope. During those months apart he had also been nurturing connections with others. This was a healthy, beautiful thing: we all need more connection, more friendship.

One week after Friday, came Saturday, and I did something unusual: I invited him back. He had plans, he texted, for supper with a friend in another city. She’d invited him that morning.

My insides quivered: If this meant something he would tell me, wouldn’t he?

The Friday after we had a beautiful moment and then the Friday after that. I extended another invitation for plans over the weekend — neither of us had our children. He couldn’t, his friend from the other city was visiting.

My insides quivered: If this meant something he would tell me, wouldn’t he?

Our deal to be proactively transparent held, didn’t it?

We had another Friday, this one was almost beautiful. There was a quiet despair to the way I offered my touch. I was distracted by the question pounding against my temples that I couldn’t shape with my voice: If this meant something he would tell me, wouldn’t he?

I waited for him to speak. He remained silent on what I needed to know. He only offered words laced with love. Doubt rested next to my head when I searched for that spot on his chest.

Winter deepened.