NYT’s Modern Love: The College Essay Contest

Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define

By MARGUERITE FIELDS

RECENTLY my mother asked me to clarify what I meant when I said I was
dating someone, versus when I was hooking up with someone, versus when
I was seeing someone. And I had trouble answering her because the many
options overlap and blur in my mind. But at one point, four years ago,
I had a boyfriend. And I know he was my boyfriend because he said, “I
want you to be my girlfriend,” and I said, “O.K.”

He and I dated for over a year, and when we broke up I thought my
angsty heart was going to spit itself right up out of my sore throat.
Afterward, I moved out of my mother’s house in Brooklyn and into an
apartment in the East Village, and from there it becomes confusing.

So, a few days after the chat with my mom, when I found myself
downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he
thought about dating. He has a long-term girlfriend, and I was curious
how he viewed their relationship.

“The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other
people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to
hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really
have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be
anybody’s.”

I sucked my teeth and looked over at the next table, where two men sat
opposite each other. One looked over his shoulder and gave me a
closed-mouth grin.

Steven explained that it’s not a question of faithfulness but of
expectation. He can’t be expected not to want to sleep with other
people, so he can’t expect her to think differently. They are both
young and living in New York, and as everyone in New York knows,
there’s the possibility of meeting anyone, everywhere, all the time.

For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’ll say I’ve dated a lot of
guys. It’s not that I’ve gone out anywhere with a lot of these guys,
or been physical with most of them, or even seen them more than once.
But there have been many, many encounters.

I’ve met guys in the park, at the deli, at galleries, at parties and
on the Internet. The Internet idea came from thinking that if I could
sift through people’s profiles, like applications, I could eliminate
the obvious lunatics.

And that didn’t work out very well. One leaned across the table an
hour into dinner and screamed: “You love me! I know you do!” Another
stood outside my apartment with one finger on the buzzer and another
covering the peephole, occasionally banging his fist, until he finally
exhausted himself and left.

As for the guys I first met in person, there was the construction
worker I ran into on the train twice before saying anything, kissed
the third time, kissed the fourth time, got stood up by the fifth time
and never saw again. Then there was the guy with tattooed knuckles,
the young Republican, the Irishman on vacation and the guy who stole
$300 from me to buy drugs. There was the activist, the actor, the
librarian, the waiter and the bond trader.

So when my friends and I started having a conversation about the
nature of monogamy, I thought I knew something about monogamy.
Because, despite the fleeting nature of most of my encounters, and
despite my own role in their short duration, I think what I have been
seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence.

Sometimes I don’t like them, or am scared of them, and a lot of times
I’m just bored by them. But my fear or dislike or boredom never seems
to diminish my underlying desire for a guy to stay, or at least to say
he is going to stay, for a very long time.

And even when I don’t want him to stay — even when he and I find each
other as strangers and remain strangers until we stop doing whatever
it is we are doing — I still want to believe that two people can meet
and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without
the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other
noncommittal slogans.

But noncommittal is what we’re all about.

There was the guy with red hair and big steaklike hands that walked
with me arm in arm through Washington Square Park, kissed me on the
stoop of my mother’s brownstone and said he wanted to be my boyfriend.
Until our next walk, when he kept his hands to himself and said he
meant boyfriend “in the theoretical sense of the word.”

Then there was the installer of soy insulation who cooked soggy pasta
and made me watch football and whimpered and kicked in his sleep. In
the spring there was the guy 12 years older than me who shared an
apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park with an antediluvian man
who walked around in graying long underwear.

There was the guy who wore more makeup than I did, and the one who
waxed his eyebrows clean off his face. And the one who slept with a
guy when he was drunk, then with another when he was sober. (But he
insisted he wasn’t gay, just curious, and since when was I so uptight
anyway?)

Over the summer there was the Jesuit taking a break from the seminary
who stopped calling after I said I wouldn’t sleep with him on our
third date. In the fall, back at school, there was the banjo player
from the woods of New England who took me home to meet his family,
then moved away and told me to wait for him. And I did, for months,
until he called to say he was falling in love with me, and oh, man, I
had to come see him right away (“Buy your ticket tonight!”), before he
called again to say it was moving too fast and he wasn’t ready.

And on, and on, and on.

Then this winter I met a guy while waiting to have my computer fixed.
He had big blue eyes and a wide red mouth and delicate hands and
greasy brown hair. He sat down and asked what I was reading and did I
have a boyfriend because he was asking me out. He smelled like incense
and clean linen, and I was overwhelmingly and instantaneously smitten.
Among other things, I liked his indifference, confidence and knowledge
of foreign film directors.

On our first date he explained his theory of exclusive relationships,
which was that they shouldn’t exist. We talked about our (and all of
our friends’) divorced parents, about how marriage was nothing but a
pragmatic financial venture, and about the last time we cheated on
someone. He said that his disregard for monogamy wasn’t a chauvinistic
throwback, but quite the opposite: the ultimate nod to feminism.

On our second date we watched coverage of the Iowa caucus, and later,
after listening to jazz at his apartment, he crawled onto his bed,
leaned against the headboard and said he didn’t burn artificial light
after dark. I sighed and edged into bed next to him.

During the night he kicked and snored, grabbing greedily at me with
his well-moisturized hands like a child snatching at free candy.

We overslept. In the morning I watched him dress frantically, the way
a drifter would (gray pants and shirt tucked in and tie and vest and
brown wingtip shoes and gray sweater and red scarf and jacket: it was
lovely). He looked up occasionally from his scrambling to give a big
toothy smile. I made the bed and drank the orange juice he bought for
me the night before. We left his apartment and tried to find a cab.

As we crossed Hudson Street, we waded through a passing stream of
preschool children walking in pairs, holding hands. I watched their
teachers — one at the front of the line, one in the middle, one at the
back — while he hailed a taxi.

A week passed before I saw him again. I was about to go back to school
in Vermont, and he was headed to Jamaica on vacation. When I entered
the restaurant, he said: “The nice part about having a shoddy memory
is I forget how pretty some people are. You look beautiful.”

As we ate, we theorized about the effects of pornography on romantic
relationships. Dinner ended; he had to go pack for his trip. I asked
casually when I was going to see him again.

He sighed. “That’s a loaded question.”

I asked what he meant, because I thought the question was fairly
straightforward.

Then it came. The story. The long, boring, aggravatingly rehearsed and
condescending story. It spewed, overflowed and dripped off our table
and onto the floor and underneath the shoes of the other patrons and
into the street.

He said he had just gotten out of a long relationship, and now he was
single and didn’t really know how this whole dating thing works, but
he was seeing a lot of other people, and he liked me; he thought I was
special. Cross my heart, he actually called me special.

WHEN he was done, he asked: “That’s what you were talking about,
right? Seeing me again and the nature of our relationship? Like, what
are we to each other?”

I said I just meant to ask when we were going to see each other again,
because I thought that was the polite thing to do after a few dates,
and I wondered if he wanted to make time for me to come back to New
York to see him. And he said no, that was “too much, too soon,” but if
I’m ever in town I should call him. He would love to see me.

We left. It was raining, he hailed a cab for me, and we hugged without
looking at each other. I got into the cab and rode away.

And tried to process it. And tried to remind myself that when we first
met I thought he was an arrogant, presumptuous little man. I tried to
think about my conversation with Steven. I tried to remember that I
was actively seeking to practice some Zenlike form of nonattachment. I
tried to remember that no one is my property and neither am I theirs,
and so I should just enjoy the time we spend together, because in the
end it’s our collected experiences that add up to a rich and
fulfilling life. I tried to tell myself that I’m young, that this is
the time to be casual, careless, lighthearted and fun; don’t ruin it.

Marguerite Fields is a junior at Marlboro College in Vermont