This piece originally appeared in the July 2009 issue of the now-defunct magazine Underwired.

Float

Neil and I are standing a few yards into the Atlantic Ocean, letting the waves crash against our bodies. There was a storm the night before, and the ocean is still agitated. For a non-swimmer like me, this is both fun and a little scary. I have a method to enjoying it; I face the waves to gauge their height, then turn my back and brace myself as they approach, legs ready to walk toward the beach if necessary so I don’t get knocked over.

Neil embraces me and kisses me as the water surges around us. I kiss back and then pull free, slightly panicked. I can’t properly steel myself against the waves with his arms around me. “I don’t want to be tied to you,” I sputter.  “No control.”

“Is that what you’re going to say on our wedding day?”

If, for some reason, our circle of friends decided to vote for superlatives, I would no doubt be elected Most Likely to Leave Her Fiancé at the Altar. Unlike most of the couples we know, we did not meet, fall in love, get engaged, and get married.  We met, fell in love, broke up and got back together five or six times, got engaged, broke up again (a terrible ordeal that involved not only the breaking of our engagement but my moving out of the house we’d shared for two and a half years) and finally, a reunion (a joyful ordeal that involved Neil moving into my new apartment so I wouldn’t have to break my lease, finding a renter for his house, and bribing my landlord to accept our Boston terrier and cat). We are getting married in May 2010.

All of this has had almost nothing to do with Neil and almost everything to do with my own restlessness and unfamiliarity with how to act in a stable relationship. “I realized the other day that we’ve been dating for over a month and he has yet to be a jerk to me,” reads a journal entry from February 2005. This was big news. This was practically unprecedented. This freaked me out.

With the possible exception of my first, entirely sweet high school boyfriend, my entire dating life has been one long string of jerks. I drove my friends and family crazy with it and made myself perpetually miserable. My preferred brand of jerk seemed to be the guy who would never actually fall in love with me but would keep me around for other reasons: sex, ego, companionship. 

There were two dynamics at work that kept me in these relationships.  First – one that is all too familiar to many women, I’m sure – was If I Am a Good and Loving Girlfriend, Eventually He Will Love Me. I had a propensity for choosing damaged men, those who had been abused as children or were otherwise emotionally stunted. “I can heal him,” I would tell myself. “I can save him.” Of course, I could do neither. But that never stopped me from trying.

The other dynamic – which I’ve only just been able to see, looking back on years of these crappy relationships – was If He Doesn’t Love Me, I Can Leave Whenever I Want. I felt many things in these relationships – rejected, hurt, angry, frustrated – but I never felt suffocated or trapped. There was a certain perverse freedom in not being loved. When I had eventually had enough, I would leave, with little protest from the other party. In between, I dated and had flings. And the next relationship, the next possibility for love, was always just around the corner.

That possibility was – and is – seductive. Who doesn’t love that moment of certainty when “Is he flirting with me?” turns to “He is totally flirting with me”? I was a junkie for the lingering stare, the casual brush of the hand, the first kiss. It didn’t even matter to me so much that the early infatuation was typically the relationship’s apex and that things would all go down hill from there. It was the romantic equivalent of junk food, indulgently satisfying in the short-term but ultimately containing no nourishment whatsoever.

I met Neil and he was nice. He was steadfast. He called when he said he would, never stood me up, and treated me with respect. I proceeded to flip out. I was having feelings for him, but he also seemed to have feelings for me.  That suddenly felt an awful lot like responsibility. I was in my first year of grad school and not sure what I was going to end up doing or if I even wanted to say in Louisville. He had just bought a house and was quite settled in his job and social circle. I consider myself free-spirited, even impetuous; Neil considers himself cautious.  We had an awful lot of fun together, but it wasn’t long before I felt panicked about the long-term implications of our relationship. It was good, yes, but there were so many other possibilities out there. How could I be sure about any of this? How could I shoulder responsibility for someone else’s happiness when I was still figuring my own stuff out?

Perhaps I come by this hesitance naturally. My mother has told me that even on her wedding day she wasn’t sure about my dad, and it’s evident from their wedding album that she is not joking when she talks about the Valium she had to take to get through the day. They’ve been married 33 years and seem to be more in love with each other every time I see them. This is bizarrely romantic to me and it gives me hope for myself.

When I think of Neil, and our relationship, our four and a half years together and this second engagement that we’re finally going to make good on, I think about going to 4-H camp as a child and trying to learn to swim. I didn’t, but for the first and only time in my life, under the guidance of an incredibly patient instructor, I floated on my back. Tense and flailing, I could not keep my head above the water. The instructor held me up, hands under my back, and coaxed me into relaxing. Eventually she removed her hands, and there I floated.

I am trying to stop flailing. I remain afraid of water and of commitment. The waves thrill and terrify me. I read sample wedding vows and feel sentimental and nauseous. After this long together, the wedding is a formality, a legal affirmation of the partnership we already have. I have no misgivings about spending the rest of my life with Neil, yet somehow the permanence of the act still unsettles me a bit.

I am trying to relax and float.