Chapter 1: There’s This Girl

“So, there’s this girl I’m kind of interested in,” Jordan said one morning.

I got an instant hot flash of panic. My eyes stayed glued to the student papers I’d graded the night before and was shoving in a binder to take to work. I wanted to look up at his face—to see if he was excited, or nervous, or apologetic, or bored with me—but my own face was suddenly made of stone, too heavy to lift.

The eggs Jordan was making sizzled and popped. He turned to the stove to stir them, and then he turned back to me. I kept packing my bag, mechanically, slowly.

Say something, I told myself. The only way through this is to keep him talking so you don’t have time to feel. All you have to do is run out the clock until you have to go to work.

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else.

Jordan scooped eggs and vegetables out of the pan and onto two plates. He ground pepper over them and handed one plate to me. Breakfast looked beautiful. I wanted to cry. The smell of bacon and sweet potato made me feel sick. I stuck a fork in the hash anyway and made myself chew.

“Who is it?” I tried to knock the pitch of my voice down..

“Casey,” Jordan said.

I knew Casey. Or I knew of her. I’d seen her at the dive bar we all liked to frequent. Casey had tons of funky, wild tattoos with great stories behind them, and she wore threadbare T-shirts that were messy and hot. She had dark hair and those short punk bangs that make your eye travel all over someone’s face. She drank well whiskey and soda because the bartenders would pour strong if the drink was simple and she didn’t give a fuck. She was friends with a couple of women who wore ruby-red lipstick and chipped black nail polish, and she always stood out because she was never dolled up.

I was not like Casey. I didn’t have tattoos, especially not the kind on your thigh that people stare at when you sit with your knees apart. Hot summer nights at the dive bar, I wore sundresses and overpaid for blackberry mojitos from one bartender who smashed fresh fruit and mint in the bottom of the glass with a chunk of sugarcane and who always seemed a little proud when he handed the drink over.

I’d never talked to Casey because she always got to the bar late, and I always left early. Each time I got up to go at eight or nine, my friends would try to badger me into staying.

“She needs her sleep,” Jordan would say. “In the morning she’s teaching the youth of America.”

He’d stay out a few more hours and crawl into bed at midnight or one. If I woke up as he shuffled the sheets, he would curl in close and hold me, and I would pull his arm over me to hold his hand against my chest. In the morning he would recap the half-drunk philosophical conversations I’d missed and list who’d shown up after I’d gone.

Casey. She was always there when I wasn’t.

I hadn’t sat down after Jordan handed me the plate. I was standing in the kitchen, holding the plate and a bite on my fork, and I realized:

He’s had a whole life happening in those evenings without me. He could have a whole relationship with Casey that I know nothing about.

The breakfast I was trying to swallow became a lump in my throat. My panic ran a mile-a-minute monologue in my head.

She is so different from you—is that a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe it’s a good thing, because it means he obviously still wants you, and he’s just interested in what it would be like to make out with someone totally not like you. Or maybe it’s a really bad thing, because he’ll realize he picked the totally wrong type of person and he won’t want you at all, how the fuck do you both get out of this crush alive?

“Do you…want to date her?” I choked out.

I ignored the biggest question that was bouncing around my brain: Do you think she’s sexier than me?

“Yeah, I’m interested in that,” Jordan said. My ears started to buzz, drowning out his words that followed. I only picked up snippets of what he said next.

“I don’t feel like I need to do anything about my attraction, though. It’s just that you and I have been having conversations about what it might be like to open our relationship in theory, and I think it’s important to start talking about whether it’s something we actually want to do.”

I flicked my eyes up to his face for just a second. He looked unexpectedly relaxed, leaning back on the counter, but his plate sat untouched next to him. I turned my eyes back to my fork and tried to get more of my breakfast down.

“I need to get to work early this morning to finish prepping one of my lessons,” I lied. I shoveled the last few bites of egg and kale into my mouth and downed a glass of water, hoping it would push everything down. “Let me think about it.”

I put my plate in the dishwasher with a clatter, threw my bag over my shoulder, and picked up my keys. Everything was so loud. Jordan gently grabbed my arm as I reached for the door handle. I turned back, and he kissed me. I kept my lips tight in a peck.

“Have a good day teaching the youth of America,” he said.

I smiled, said nothing, and closed the door.

***

Driving to work, I gripped the steering wheel so tightly my hands started to go numb. I felt a flood of rage and grief, like I was trying to process a breakup that hadn’t happened yet.

Wasn’t I enough?

Jordan and I had been together eight years by then, and in all that time we’d never talked about attractions we had to other people. We had, however, spent many road trips listening to Dan Savage spout off answers to people’s sex and relationship questions on his advice podcast, Savage Love. We’d talked many times about whether either of us would ever want an open relationship. We’d landed on maybe, maybe not, I don’t know.

I’d read Sex at Dawn, a book by Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan on the biology behind human mating behavior, and I thought there was a compelling case for people not really being built for monogamy. I thought open relationships made logical sense, but now, faced with the idea of actually opening mine up, my emotions rebelled.

No one can be everything for a person, my logical brain reasoned.

My anxiety didn’t give a shit about logic. I kept spinning. What about me isn’t working for Jordan anymore? If we don’t open our relationship and Jordan never gets to explore his feelings, our relationship will wither with resentment and die.

That’s all definitely right, Radio K whispered. There are no other possible explanations for Jordan telling you about another girl.

Ah, Radio K. That’s my pet name for the stream of snide, cynical, egotistical thoughts that run loops in my head. Ann Patchett once described how we have competing narratives, like radio stations, running through our brains, and she calls the destructive, malicious one “Radio K-Fuck.” Radio K as a name for that voice stuck with me.

Once I named him, it was easier to hear him, which sucked because he became really loud, but also helped because I finally knew when he was speaking. Sometimes—only in fleeting moments—I could remember not to give him the last word.

Radio K took great joy in pinging the words around my brain: there’s a girl, a girl, a girl, a girl.

By the time I got home, I’d spiraled so far into my anxiety that I couldn’t bear to bring up the morning’s conversation. Jordan didn’t bring it up either; he seemed to be waiting for the moment I felt comfortable enough to talk. I didn’t want to talk.

The next day, I said nothing to Jordan about Casey, but I was thinking about her all the time. She was a ghost that followed me around the kitchen and into the shower. I took forever to pick out clothes and get dressed. I measured all my wardrobe choices against what Casey would pick.

Be breezy, I thought. If you get weepy or neurotic, he’ll just want to leave.

This was a classic projection, though I couldn’t see it at the time. I didn’t want to feel how I really felt. I didn’t want to be around myself when I was falling apart.

So I convinced myself Jordan wouldn’t be able to handle how I felt and he was why I had to keep it together.

But I couldn’t remember how to be the breezy, normal, lighthearted version of myself. Do I usually hunch so much? I want to play with Jordan’s hair, but I can’t remember the last time I did that—will it seem like I’m overcompensating?

When I got home from work, I insisted we put on a comedy because I didn’t want to talk and I couldn’t handle anything serious, but I couldn’t remember what I would normally laugh at. All I wanted to do was cry in the bathtub and nuzzle into the center of Jordan’s chest and not talk for a thousand years.

I crawled into bed early to read relationship self-help books. I bought Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity on my Kindle so Jordan couldn’t see the cover of what I was reading. I wanted to make sense of Jordan’s desire without talking to him about it. I was too afraid to hear more about what he wanted with Casey.

Jordan and I didn’t have sex that week.

Oh, that’s another thing—don’t forget she’ll probably be better at sex than you, Radio K whispered as I was trying to go to sleep. I mean look at all those tattoos and how she uses her mouth when she talks, and your libido is like this nervous wild rabbit anyway, it never sticks around when you want it to, and once he realizes that he can be with someone who plays it cool and is down for sex anytime, he’ll wonder what the hell he’s doing with you…

Fuck you, Radio K, I thought, but he just started his monologue all over again. He repeated it in my ear the following day as I tried to explain to my students the proper uses of a semicolon.

***

A night or two after Jordan said he was interested in Casey, I lay awake at two in the morning listening to Jordan snoring, feeling a creeping panic wrap its fingers around my rib cage.

I picked up my phone and googled my boyfriend likes another woman what do I do.

I felt stupid, looking to the internet of all things for advice on how I should feel. But I didn’t like how I felt—angry, embarrassed, prudish, pathetic, desperate—and I wanted someone, even a faceless stranger, to tell me how I should feel instead.

I thought if someone could tell me the way out of this hellfire of self-doubt that was raging in my mind, I could just will myself to follow the directions. I could will myself to feel differently.

After several nights of thinking instead of sleeping, I finally burrowed my way down a rabbit hole that led to revelation. I was upset about Jordan’s attraction because I was terrified he would leave me. I thought for sure he would leave, because I could think of no reason he was with me except that I was in the right place at the right time, and maybe Casey had arrived in a better place at a better time.

Somehow I’d constructed a story that Jordan’s love was opportunistic. Did I really believe that the only reason Jordan loved me was because he didn’t love someone else more?

Yes, yes I do.

I could think of nothing intrinsically worth loving about me. And worse, I thought the success of our relationship was the only way to prove I was loved, period.

I rely on Jordan’s love to prove my worth, I realized.

This is not a sustainable plan.

Jordan’s snores had given way to a deep-sleep kind of breathing: smooth long inhale, pause, quick exhale, like the weight of his lungs was too heavy.

I googled how do I feel worthy.

Everything I read seemed hollow and trite and riddled with affirmation practices. I hate affirmation practices. They make big important things feel fake.

I closed my eyes.

Here’s an experiment, I thought. Can I feel where my own love is?

I could feel where I felt unloved, in the tightness of my chest, so heavy the last few days that every deep breath I took was a conscious and deliberate effort. I could feel shame in the heartburn that lightly seared a column from heart to throat. I could feel my fear in my hip flexors that kept me awake because my legs couldn’t settle down.

Jesus, couldn’t I feel my own love somewhere?

I asked this question over and over until I started to feel a little calm in small corners of my body. My elbows. The backs of my arms. The bones of my feet. Maybe one of my many ribs felt untouched by anxiety, I decided. Some parts of my body were opting out of feeling tortured. And because I’d been so sleepless, because I was so tired, I decided this was good enough to pass for love.

I decided those parts loved me.

I fell asleep. And when I woke up, things felt different, and they also didn’t, which was depressing.

Some moments I felt better. In those moments I thought maybe it was a medium-sized risk, not a big one, to just see what it would feel like for us to date other people. We could always pull back, right? We could keep talking and designing what we wanted. Hope flashed at me like the scattered reflection on a pond after you’ve dropped a big rock in and caused all kinds of waves.

Then Radio K started up again.

You can’t learn to love yourself, not really, and plenty of other people are just cruising through life without this kind of dread, and Jordan will find them and build a life with them and leave you, the basket case, to your own devices.

It seemed each time a little light was shed on my demons, they picked up their shovels and dug down somewhere deeper and darker.