I convinced myself that Erik was Out There Somewhere, my soul mate. I was a shy, romantic kid who didn't date until I was 16, so Erik was all I had. I pinned all my fairy tale daydreams on the idea that I would find him someday, that he was waiting for me. I drew a picture of him that I kept on my wall, next to my celebrity teen magazine crushes Jonathan Brandis and Claire Danes. In reality the drawing was a copy of a photograph of Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale from Rolling Stone, and due to my limited artistic abilities it more closely resembled Edgar Allan Poe than a 14 year old boy.
My first boyfriend A. wasn't Erik. He only kissed me too hard in the attic above the choir room after school one day, and tried to rape one of my friends. My college boyfriend D. wasn't either, but I fooled myself into thinking I loved him because having a boyfriend made me somebody. Like my friends in high school who took birth control and went to parties, having a boyfriend and having sex somehow made them cooler than the rest of us, cooler than they had been before.
K. wasn't Erik either. She was my first girl. My freshmen year of college she kissed me at a party because she “wondered what it would be like.” When we collapsed under the kitchen table that night I unbuttoned her top and finally knew what had been missing from those early teenage dreams, kisses and gropes. I didn't even like her that much. She ended up dating my housemate and pushing me toward C., who “wasn't gay or anything” but liked me. I fell for C., down the stairs at her house, limping home later with a twisted ankle and a lot of disappointment. Seven years later my ankle still hurts when it rains.
In the three-quarters of a decade since then there have been dates, one-night stands, three-month stands, drunken hookups, girls-I'm-dating, periods of pure singlehood, and one short relationship. There was an N., an M., a few S.'s, a couple L's, some A.'s, a C., a V., a D., a T. and a J. There was even, horror upon horrors, a woman who shared my first name. But none of them were Erik, or his more appropriate counterpart, Erika. Instead of finding the soul mate I so believed in at the age of 13, I've evolved into perpetually single adulthood, scoffing at the very idea of soulmates, pitying my now-married former high school friends still in the midwest, and certainly not making the big “I Do” next week at the Gay Marriage bonanza at City Hall.
How did I get here? When did I give up on the idea of Happily-Ever-After, the princess and the, er, princess, riding off into the castle in the sunset? And when did I start writing like a lesbian Carrie Bradshaw?
Or maybe the question I should ask is, why did I ever believe in that crap in the first place? The One True Love, or One Great Love mythology so permeated my adolescent and teenage expectations that if, at age 16 I had been able to look ten years into my future, I would have been bitterly disappointed. The truth is, I gave up on all that after the first time I fell in love. M. and I had a firey, summer-fall romance my senior year of college, and if anyone I've dated was truly my soul mate, she was it. But if I am to truly believe in soul mates, that means I either negate what I had with M., or spend my 50-some odd years of life after 21 never falling in love again. And that's a long-ass time to be single.
I suppose at this point I could start to go into how these fairy tale ideas are used to control women, make us think we'll be sluts if we sleep with more than one person over the span of our entire lives (and think that being a slut is a bad thing). Or about how they prop up the institution of marriage, which, Supreme Court ruling aside, has historically functioned to prop up patriarchy and homophobia and racism and the class system and just about every other ideology good radicals like me throw molotov cocktails at. And I could point out that not everyone is wired for monogamy, that friends of mine are able to juggle multiple lovers without emotional dishonesty, a fact that makes me grit my teeth and secretly hate them when I haven't been seeing anyone for a couple of months. But the truth is, I don't see how I can believe in the fairy tale ideal anymore because there are just so damn many people out there. Even when I've self-limited my options to lesbian, bisexual, queer, or otherwise-identified-girls-who-are-into-girls, there are still thousands, maybe millions, of potential dating partners out there. And, barring accident, illness, or end of the world (knock on wood), I've still got another good half-century or more on this planet. I'm not saying I'm ruling out marriage (which is now actually an option for me in the state of California) or lifelong partnership, but I don't necessarily expect it anymore. These days when I look at my future, I don't see myself happily coupled off with the same person for decades on end. I don't see myself still single, either, growing bitter and more jaded at every coming year. The truth is, I don't know what to see when I finish up my twenties and head into my thirties, and forties, and fifties. Maybe not knowing is half the fun. Or maybe I should stop speculating, and end this blog.
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