Charlotte Green

Kiss him. Pull him towards you when the two of you are sitting in his car.

Throw yourself into the degree, the promotion, the internship, or the backpacking tour of Asia that you have always dreamed of doing but knew that you couldn’t do if anyone else was depending on you.

I would lay down in the crook of your arm and feel like I was finally somewhere that wanted to have me. I never felt more beautiful, more desired, more comfortable in my environment.

My apartment had never seemed more cold. It had never felt less like the place I actually lived, or more like a vague insult to my current state of aloneness.

I want to be in love. I want to get it over with so that I can move along to all of the other parts of life that seem so easy to achieve when someone at home cares about you.

You have absolutely no energy to start getting to know someone all over again, you just want to be with someone you already know perfectly well.

You become part of a team and can understand disagreeing about something even though, at the end of the day, you both just want what the other one wants.

Maybe they don’t even realize it. They have grown up for so long in the cage of their beauty and have come to imagine that everyone is afforded their treatment.

Answering a phone call while still in their bed and telling your friend “I can’t talk right now, I’ll tell you about it later.”

There’s nothing dirty about it, no, but there is something complicated. There is something which demands more of you, which implicates you, which makes extricating yourself a more involved ordeal than slipping on your tennis shoes and catching the train.

Things didn’t work out a first time, why in the world would they work out a second? You both say that you are different, but do we ever really have enough perspective to say such a thing about ourselves?

The idea is that, whether or not you want to be in a couple, everyone around you is going to be increasingly centered around their partnered status.

It has been so long since you last had sex that neither of you are really willing to bring up the subject because you both know the discussion is going to be extremely embarrassing and awkward.

You spend several hours extra getting ready — possibly even buying new clothes — when you know that there is a chance you might see them tonight.

There is also the familiarity. It becomes like a kind of drug, something you can’t take big enough hits of when you are looking for something, anything, to make sense to you.

You show that you have not been beaten into a patriarchal pulp by all of these ridiculous expectations that you don’t show how you actually feel.

And we are afraid to be open with this need, with this passion, because we don’t want to lose you. That is really the crux of it.

Something truly ugly happens in people when we feel that we’re losing something we love, something that we put in the work for and cared for, such as our significant other.