Every time I come home and my dad is around, I feel I must draw up an account of my life. I suspect my dad doesn’t require me to have everything in my life figured out, but it feels to me that he expects the inside of my mind to be like a Yolanda Hadid refrigerator — well-organized, abundantly stocked to cater to expectant visitors, and gracefully poised for the opening of its contents at any moment.
I, too, aspire for a Yolanda Hadid fridge, but it is often not my reality. I feel particularly nervous coming home when the state of my brain resembles a college kitchenette fridge, and there are bits of brain string strewn about from decisions I’ve implicitly made but haven’t yet articulated.
Because I am soon to be a 28-year old unmarried woman, my Chinese father has been most interested in opening the fridge for contents of my romantic life. This essay is about what he’d find.
Vince and I have been friends for long enough that it’s hard for me to imagine a time when we weren’t close. We met when my father and I weren’t on speaking terms. It was my junior year in college, the first time I had let my father on to the fact that the full extent of my desires did not encompass what was prestigious and aligned with his envisaged life for me. I was, I shamelessly announced, declining the Google internship to bike across the United States that summer. After repeated guffaws and requests to confirm it wasn’t a joke, my father told me this was, frankly, impossible. To go from who you are, and then bike — how many miles you said? 70 miles? — a day, all day, what a joke! He ridiculed, threatened, shamed, and guilt-tripped me into giving up this idea, telling me, finally, that he was relieved my favorite grandfather had died a few months prior so he could be spared from witnessing me spend my summer in such a humiliating way.
Even though I tell people that Vince and I met on this bike trip, what I really mean is that Vince met me at the single greatest point of self-actualization I had known. Before college, I had never let myself act on any inconvenient desires. After the 2016 election, I had a deep, if imprecise, desire to understand America’s land and people by biking through its towns and hosting free workshops for the residents. “If we still want to do this a year from now,” my best friend and I decided, “we’ll pull the trigger.” A year later, we secured funding, recruited a team, and were off. The trip ended up being about biking and not much to do with it. It was about teaching kids to program Arduinos in small town libraries and not exactly that either. At the core of it, the trip was the courage to pursue what had nothing to do with prestige, security, and upward mobility. These were, up to this point, the three currents wiring through every decision I’ve made. Though it was just a summer, it was a big deal, for both me and my Dad.
That bike trip was important to me for many reasons. It was the progenitor of my friendship with Vince, my current partner. It was a time when I openly usurped the position of the driver’s seat of my life from my Dad. And it has allowed me to put a finger on how I feel about Vince: a similarly strong desire that does fairly poorly on the explainability scale and has absolutely nothing to do with prestige, security, or approval.
Vince and I are dating now, because I told him after spending a week with him nestled in woody Virginia that I was, again, having anxieties about living in New York. A pause. More silence. Then, after only a bit more prevaricating, I blurted: I’m in love with you. To me: Vince is handsome without a beard, loves his beard, headstrong enough that he wouldn’t take well to me ordering him to shave his beard, loving enough to show up freshly shaven on our first date, and doting enough that I’ve never had to ask him to keep his face smooth when I’m around. He’s also: insistent on giving me foot rubs, never lets me wash the dishes, hides snacks in my backpack, does out-of-unit laundry in secret. Recently, after a pre-diabetes diagnosis, I decided to give up sugar. One morning I asked him about the chocolatín he had for breakfast at the best cafe in town, unable to hide the longing in my voice. “It was very bad,” he says in a serious tone, “One of the worst I’ve ever had.”
But to my parents, he is: a boy who quit his fine-paying job in technology to become what they consider unemployed. He is a full-time musician who hasn’t released a song.1 He is a 26-year old who has moved back in with his parents. And he is a 26-year old, meaning he is two years younger than the 28-year old I will be this year, meaning the already pronounced gender difference in timelines for marriage and conception is working against our favor, meaning, my Dad threatens (and this time my Mom joins), that your eggs will be on the decline.
So the way my parents feel about my decision to date Vince certainly resembles the polemics of my decision to bike across the country all those years ago. You can imagine the caustic backlash and disapproval from my dad, although it is less bad the second time around (it always is). I feel like the younger sibling reaping the benefits paved by the eldest child who sieged the first war and bore the initial blows of disappointment. My Dad ended his last diatribe of how I am wasting my time with something that felt like resignation; that, at the end of the day, this is my life.
But there are more similarities to that bike trip than just the parental unpopularity of my decisions. I also waited about a year between my first twitch of feeling and when I admitted it. I wondered if it was too risky. Above all, what both decisions shared was a keen potency, one that could not, despite my hedging and equivocating, be ignored.
Older people have told me that when you meet the one, you just know. I’ve found this piece of supposed wisdom vexing because of its lack of any specifics, although what bothered me most wasn’t its lack of utility but rather how incredibly insecure it made me feel. Advice that goes something like “trust your intuition” and “follow your curiosity” made me realize how much I lacked a personal compass, the type that others magically seemed to possess and could guide them towards a path that felt right in their bones. Like yes, this is getting warmer. And hm, this feels wondrously right.
In large part driven by this lack of internal intuition, I have always obsessively analyzed love. Why Jane Eyre would choose to be with Rochester; if Reynolds truly loved Alma. I applied this obsession for analyzing what love was, what it should feel like, and what kind of indelible marks could we possibly expect it to leave on us? to my first boyfriend. To his chagrin, I analyzed everything. The more serious our relationship got, the more I scrutinized. We’d go out to a friend’s birthday during which he’d stay silent instead of wooing my friends with brilliant commentary, and I’d stew in thoughts of how I could be with someone who couldn’t bandy with guests at the future dinner parties I wanted to host. I journaled, replayed scenes, mapped out extensions for what this would hold in our future, and otherwise agonized too much about our relationship. I wrote in a later reflection that I was too busy agonizing over the idea of love — whether he was the right one, if my feelings were fine or cause for concern — to love.
I didn’t want to anguish over a relationship. I wanted to live every moment fully present, blissful, appreciative, but for whatever reason I was motored by a compulsion to take apart and inspect every one of my ex-partners’ behaviors. My testimony of their actions was exhaustive, with notes titled Reasons for this Relationship filed in folders, like a replete, well-organized fridge. I outsourced my uncertainty to others I trusted. More than once, I brought a third date to dinner with my Dad so he could assess his merits.
I was coping with my lack of intuition by supplanting it with reason. Like, how could you know if this person is for you? Why isn’t there some sort of test you could run that could tell you? What I understand now is that when you meet the one, you don’t know. You don’t know anything about if this person is your forever person, if things will work out. But you feel strong things, and you stop caring about the imprecision of that certainty. Knowing I love him is like seeing a distant glow in a nocturnal landscape — I can’t yet make out the light source, but it’s certainly there. I’m not sure about its origins or whereabouts or permanence; the only thing I am certain about is its existence. A scientist would ask why it’s there. A scientist would seek evidence, desire to put the relationship through tests not as they organically arise but to validate a hypothesis (falsifiability), and require someone else to reassure them that yes, they see it too (replicability). Knowing I love him, though, is acknowledging the imprecision of my love, and accepting that trying to explain it is pointless. At times it is actually very disconcerting (!) because it asks me to trust my desires, a thing that I traditionally have feared.
Here’s the thing: with Vince, loving him is not open to rational self-interrogation. I’m not saying that all spells of doubt have vanished; they haven’t. But I worry less. I feel my body relax around him. I find myself drawn to him before I have words to describe why. My mind is suspicious about the lack of compulsion to journal after our dates, until I remember I don’t often feel compelled to write about happy things. I still notice Vince’s flaws. And I still experience sudden waves of distraught, a siege of fear and fury that I’ve been so foolish to trust my intuition like this, usually brought on by some silly thing he said offhand. But when I ride the wave and it passes, I see it often stems from an unexpressed fantasy that my happiness be forever secured, as if another person could ever be the guarantor of that.
Many things about that bike trip 7 years ago didn’t turn out how I imagined it. For starters, I didn’t expect to not finish it. I didn’t expect to get into a serious bike crash in Kentucky, eleven days before the end of the trip, and lose my memory of it. I didn’t expect to hate Nevada so fucking much. But also, I didn’t expect to get a job in a new industry because of it. I didn’t expect the university students after me would take on the torch and continue this tradition, which is now in its 7th year. And I certainly did not expect to meet someone whom I’d love like this.
So, to finally give that account to my father about my romantic life, I say that in reality I know little of what will come of my decision to be with him, and I suspect 7 years from now I will be reflecting on this decision of intuition the way I did the last one, although I hope by that point I’ll have made much more of them. I’ve been through and analyzed too many love stories to know that most of them are of intermittent attachment. But there comes a time when the reason you don’t have a rationalization is not because you are not capable of devising one but because doing so feels artificial and backwards, that the prior rationalizations you so proudly purled forth were a way to make you feel safe and justified and in control, and there are some things, the most important things, like your favorite ice cream flavor and who you fall in love with, that are simply felt and desired.
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