Love As Paralysis, Love As Pause

I’d never been to Detroit before. Not that it mattered much, but the city seemed like a forlorn relic of the old Midwest: its sad streets harbored man’s first flirtation with the automobile, his amorous love affair with jazz music, and an innocent love-hate relationship with the Windy City across the water.

As my date and I rode into Detroit with a bus full of fellow college freshmen, I felt like a character straight out of a Sinclair Lewis novel – kitschy, afraid, but most of all, excited.

The whole evening was spent in a sort of nervous frenzy. I’d dressed wrong. I’d decided to go to this mid-December date party at the last minute. I’d forgotten most of my money in my dorm room and had to plead for a drink with whoever had the (falsified) means of doling out Long Island iced teas at the bar.

“What do I do?” I had asked my roommate before embarking on the bus ride. “What does one do at a college date party?”

“Smile a lot,” he answered truthfully. “Beyond that it’s really just you and your date trying to connect.”

Connect, I thought. Now there’s an unusual way to describe a booze-soaked, sexed up, Instagram-ridden endeavor.

But I gave it a shot.

I’d known my date since the day I moved into my dorm room. She was a lovely girl with dark hair, dark eyes, intelligence, a sense of humor, and, above all, I knew she was too good for me. I often had the sinking feeling that she knew this too, but if she did, she never let it matter.

We spent weeknights hanging out in different friends’ dorm rooms around campus, talking about music and movies and TV shows. We shared a taste for David Bowie and played “Moonage Daydream” after long nights in the library. In coffee shops and house parties, in hallways and on the sidewalk, I would catch her eye and feel my life suddenly sharpen into focus. She made the desires and dreams in my mind clearer and more meaningful.

“How are classes going?” I asked her while we were riding into Detroit. The couples sitting in front of and behind us were sprawled horizontally across their seats, clinging together like sexual magnets, creating friction as though the engine of the bus depended on their embrace.

“Good,” she said, smiling, “they’re a lot of work, but good. Everyone’s so smart.”

I tried listening to her, but I suddenly felt out of place sitting there. Not because I didn’t have the confidence to be with her, not because I didn’t believe that we could have one hell of a night together, but because I didn’t have the urge to do with her what all the couples around us were doing. I just couldn’t understand it.

The bus eventually rolled to a stop outside a nightclub at the edge of the city. Couple by couple, we filed from the bus into the shadowy, musky interior of the place, the walls of which shook with the sloppy drum-stomp of dancing feet and the energized charge in the music’s bass. I took my date’s hand and whispered carefully to her, “Let’s just have fun tonight.”

Between drinks, silly conversations, and selfies, she and I stole a few sincere moments together. In the strange wash of blue and purple lighting, her eyes glistened intently with happiness and excitement. We snuck kisses at high tables, danced wildly to a few nondescript ‘80s songs, and talked about junk food with some of her friends.

“Can I ask you something?” I said while we were alone.

“Absolutely,” she replied, “anything.”

“Does it bother you that we weren’t hooking up like the other couples on the bus?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, does it bother you that we didn’t do that?”

“Well, to be honest, no, it doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because we like each other,” she said, taking her chin into both of her hands and looking at me. “I care about you.”

That was when I could start to see it, what my roommate had said about making a connection: it’s not just some base physical, mental, or emotional attraction. It’s a real, identifiable energy – a something.

As we talked with other couples throughout the night, this idea became more evident. Though each couple had a different backstory as to how they met or why they were attending the date party together, they all mentioned one determining factor: time.

For students in their late teens and early twenties, this is the age of competition, one in which every graded assignment and group activity seems to hold incredible significance to job prospects and higher education. Applying to college is now akin to entering some major sweepstakes, while searching for a summer internship can feel like deep sea diving for a lost shirt button. Every answer matters; every test alters a numerical average, which determines your promise as a gainful employee, which determines your happiness as an adult. As competition and the need for self-micromanagement grow, the capacity to enjoy personal time shrinks.

The more I talked with my date’s friends and the more I thought about our own situation, I realized that students now feel as though they don’t have time to date or really fall in love.

“I’ve spent 70 of the last 100 hours in the library,” someone said while we talked about our workloads for the semester. “It’s almost funny in a way.”

“Yeah, it’s been fun trying to balance two part-time jobs and 16 credit hours,” someone else added with sarcasm.

After a while, when I would scan the nightclub and see various couples dancing or hooking up without shame, I could only see our collective commingling as the affective, lust-packed encounters that they were. So much of the night was artificial and surface-level engagement, so impersonal.

But, at the same time, it was hard to take full blame for this kind of interaction. If the deeper nuances and challenges of real romance were to be explored, it would mean a complete sacrifice of time and focus.

Gradually, my mind drifted back to the concept of forming a connection with this girl, this wonderful friend and date who wanted to spend her night with me. When we would nestle together in a cozy booth or retreat from the dance floor in elated hysteria, I swore I could feel something moving me toward her. Like gravity that only we shared, this mysterious force kept us circling in its draw.

There’s a semi-renowned Twitter account called Horse ebooks, which perfectly characterized this double-sided sense of motion: “Everything happens so much.”

The fact of the matter is that students fill their days with social media gazing, classes, and extracurricular activities that each conspire into a huge, whirling frenzy of experience. It can hardly be worked through, much less understood. Add to this the emotional flux that’s inherent to living on your own, and students seem almost destined to spin out of control.

What’s the antidote, then, to such mania, such feverous and perpetual rushing of, well, everything?

A short Nirvana lyric helps, in part, to explain the cure: “Love you so much, makes me sick.”

While it’s rather simple, this line illustrates the student love of today, the kind of love that has survived and persevered: love as paralysis and pause. Love that stops the frantic rush of things, the “everything” that happens all the time. Love like a towering inferno that ignites coincidence, circumstance, and sets the rigidity of time ablaze. Love that envelops you, cocoons you, and withdraws you. Love the enormous electric plane of energy that mercifully zaps our sense of competition. Love as paralysis, love as pause.

The bus ride back from the Detroit nightclub was quiet. People were asleep, and those who couldn’t sleep spoke softly of the impassioned hours to come. My date was resting her head on my shoulder.

“I really loved tonight,” she said.

“What was your favorite part?” I asked.

“When you tried to dance like a robot,” she replied, laughing a little, “and then a lawnmower, a sprinkler, a tiger, and God only knows what else.”

“A dentist.”

“Right, I forgot about that one. Who even knew that was possible?”

When we got back to our dorm, we went and sat in the hallway lounge for a while. She was tired but flirty, and I couldn’t pull myself away from her. It wasn’t long before our deliriousness caught up with us, as we exchanged one senseless joke after the other. By the time my brain stopped forming coherent sentences, she was keeled over in laughter.

Then it hit me.

Her bright, smiling face, blissfully contorted and half tear-stricken, seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world. I felt helpless, I couldn’t move. Through a sea of emotion I lost my sense of time and worry, while the moment bore in its booming generosity the gift of pure, decontextualized joy. I resigned everything to her, all of it completely to her.

“I love you,” I heard myself say.

She stopped laughing and adjusted her posture, the corners of her mouth curling upward as she looked at me for what felt like several minutes.

“I love you too,” she answered finally, and leapt across the lounge chairs to claim her kiss.

“Is there a way to make tonight last just a little longer?” she continued.

“No,” I said. “But it’s worth every try, isn’t it?”