Modern Love

Me and MD, 1994

I am sure that when our alien or robot overlords finally come to relieve us of the mess we have made of this third rock from the sun on which we reside, they will spend the rest of eternity trying to make sense of the thing we call love. Our popular songs will be especially perplexing to them. According to those songs, love does many things. 

Love hurts. 

Love is all you need. 

Love bites.

Love will keep us together. 

Love kills. 

They will find themselves asking the same question Haddaway asked us in the 90s, “What is love?” And they will also wonder why he asks his baby not to hurt him. 

And if love is blind, then first loves are like Helen Keller before her breakthrough with Anne Sullivan at the water pump. 

I would say my very first love was in my childhood. He was a boy I desperately wanted to be near, and that’s about all I knew. I was 9, too young for romance, but my crush muscles have always been strong and I spent many nights in my room playing my 45 of Chicago’s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” after he tried to kiss me on the lips and I ran away, thus cursing our love for eternity. 

I had another major crush in high school, but it was a summer crush, and at the end of the summer, even though the loving feeling was still there for me, he went back to school, leaving me again listening to one song over and over, this time “Pictures of You,” by The Cure. 

Love wouldn't really whack me upside the head until I was seventeen years old. I was fresh from my after school special sabbatical, at a new school, and a hot dumpster fire mess when I saw the boy I will call The Modern Dancer across the school parking lot. 

MD was unlike any of the bros and soccer jocks I had known at my old school: he had dark, curly hair, which was cut short in back and left long to fall over one of his beautiful blue eyes. He wore Chuck Taylors with khakis, a baggy sweater, and a devilish grin. I was a goner. 

He made his approach and we found out we were actually both dating other people, me an older Anthony Kiedis circa 1990 type, him a girl who lived in a boarding school an hour away. Oh, and he still technically had a Spanish girlfriend who had left to go home over the summer. I can only account for my lack of concern at his having two girlfriends with my complete lack of real dating experience and also the fact that I was so mesmerized by his lovely blue eyes. 

We hung out one weekend with our dates and mutual friends. Monday morning before class he came over to tell me that he had broken up with the girl at the boarding school. I told him I had ended things with the front man of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We began to hang out. 

Up until this point in my life, I had never dated in the traditional sense of the word and I had certainly never been courted. MD wooed me in an nontraditional, artistic way, but it was wooing all the same. He made me collages and drew me pictures. I showed one of these collages to my cousin. It was John Lennon’s face made out of businessmen. She flipped and and said, “Dude, this is like him giving you his fucking class ring!” She may have been right. 

I got to know his parents, both English professors at the local university. Coming from a blue collar background, they seemed extremely fancy to me, not to mention more than a little intimidating. They ate things I had never heard of, like polenta and chevre. I soon learned to keep my weekly Cheeseburger Helper habit on the DL. 

I call him the Modern Dancer because he fancied himself a modern dancer. I will be honest here: he was technically good, but lacked grace. I never told him that, but it’s how I always felt. At any rate, I hung out with his group of friends, mostly drama club types, and learned that the creative life suited me. I would never have dared consort with such folks at my old school. 

Senior year passed and suddenly MD was talking about going to college. College was something I had barely thought about, what with all of my teenage angst. Other than having no college plans for myself, I was scared to death of losing the boy I loved. I applied to a state school, not knowing what I was doing, while he applied to Ivy League universities. I tried not to think about what would happen after we graduated.

It turned out that the only school that gave him a full scholarship was the same state school I had applied to. He was disgusted, even though he was a National Merit Scholar. I once later accused him of being a “Golden Boy” who had never known true loss, to which he replied, “I didn’t get a scholarship to Harvard, Suzy!” I don’t think he quite realized how that sounded. 

At any rate I was now going to be able to spend the next four years with my true love and off to college we went. 

I didn’t realize until years later that there were a lot of financial perks to MD dating me. I had a fairly reliable car that I took to college. This car enabled him to not have to have one and also to have rides to the grocery store and back to our home town for holidays and summers. 

I also didn’t realize how little common sense he had. On one of these trips between college and home, my fairly reliable 1980s Honda Prelude broke down in a no man’s land on the interstate. This was a time before cell phones and breaking down on the interstate was not just inconvenient, it was downright scary. I opened one of the 8 or so emergency road kits my father had bought me for Christmas and put up a large sign that said something like, “NEED ASSISTANCE.” Two state troopers passed us without stopping, which was not reassuring. 

Eventually, some random guy stopped and approached the car. I’d seen this movie, but without options, I rolled down the window. He offered to drive us to the nearest gas station to get a tow. I looked at MD and he looked at me. He said, “One of us should stay with the car. You go.”

When I told my husband this story, he almost had a stroke. “What kind of pussy ass motherfucker sends their girlfriend off with a strange dude? Jesus.” The good news is I didn’t get kidnapped or killed and this guy turned out to be a good samaritan who drove us all the way back to school. My father bought me a suitcase cell phone the next week. 

Because he was enrolled in an honors program, I decided I would apply for the honors program too. I wound up getting in, and spent my undergraduate career fashioning my own curriculum and working on a thesis. 

MD had studied German in high school, which he was very proud of. I had been a good Spanish student, one of the only subjects I hadn’t struggled with. But when I arrived at my 8am 301 Spanish class, I found it was way too early to keep up with a teacher who refused to speak any English. I went to Drop and Add and the only language class left was, you guessed it, German. 

This is how, when MD decided he was going on a junior year abroad in Germany, I decided I was also going. Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Suzy, you literally followed this dude all over the world.” And I say, “Yes, I did.” I’m not sure he always wanted me along for the ride, but I got to see some pretty cool places as a result of my utter adoration of this man. 

The year abroad was rough, though, both on my mental health and our relationship. I recognize now that I became very depressed and I also recognize that he didn’t want to have anything to do with that. I gained weight, which he was very vocal about not liking, and I generally spiraled into a full blow depressive episode. 

At the time, I would have told you I was just sick and exhausted. I wasn’t sleeping and as my family didn’t believe in being depressed or anxious, I couldn’t be those things. I remember MD’s parents coming to visit and his mother, who was very sweet, pulling me aside to say that her son wasn’t good at dealing with anything unpleasant. She said he was emotionally immature. A part of me agreed, but another part of me still loved him fiercely. 

I wound up coming home a few weeks before MD and didn’t see him for a month or so. I spent a lot of time sleeping and trying to recover for my senior year and my thesis. 

Senior year was a blur of studying and writing. My curriculum centered around first and second language acquisition. MD’s involved philosophy and modern dance. My thesis would be a 100 page study of different 2nd language teaching methods. His was a dance recital based on some philosophy stuff. I’m not saying I worked harder than him, I’m saying I worked a lot harder than him. 

In the midst of all of this work, he told me that he wanted to move to New York when he graduated, and based on the last five years of our lives, I assumed I would go with him. We often talked about it, and while I wasn’t sure what I would do there, I knew I would go if he went. 

So, imagine my surprise when, in flagrante delicto, MD told me he was going to New York without me. He loved me, but he didn’t want me to come with him. 

I have told people this anecdote over the years and it never ceases to amaze me that someone would drop a bomb like this on you while they were in you. Say what you want about MD’s lack of manly skills, but that right there took some serious balls. 

Needless to say, the sex stopped and I started crying. He couldn’t understand why and left me in my studio apartment, as he had a lot of “really hard work” to do with his thesis choreography. 

I also had a lot of work to do, so after I cried myself out, I got myself back together and went to the library. Instead of breaking up, I turned my anger inward and let my depression and self loathing somehow fuel me through graduation. 

Just before we graduated, I was offered a full scholarship to get my Masters degree in German at the big state university. Not knowing where else to go and what else to do, I accepted. It seemed like a good gig, and it was, even if I never figured out what to do with that degree. 

Knowing I would be teaching in the fall, I went ahead and rented an apartment instead of going home to mine and MD’s home town. He stayed with me and worked a call center job and did not, to the best of my memory, pay rent. 

It was a strange summer. On the one hand, I was getting to nest and play house with the man I loved. On the other, I knew he would be gone in a few short months. I chose denial, as I often had, and managed to have a pretty good time. 

Sometime during that summer we went to New Orleans with some friends. Walking into a voodoo shop outside the French Quarter, the woman behind the counter called me over. She told me that my paternal grandmother, Myrtle Dye, was with me everywhere I went and that I couldn’t trust “that one,” pointing over to MD in the corner. I asked her what she meant, and she said, “He will betray you!” She gave me a candle to burn to protect myself and told me to bathe in baking soda and epsom salts as soon as he was gone to “rid yourself of him.” I took this advice seriously, tucked the candle in my bag, and never mentioned the incident to MD. 

I think about this now: my grandma’s spirit following me around, yelling at me to leave this no good guy, and finally finding somebody who could hear her pleas. She must have been so relieved. 

Except I didn’t leave. The night before MD was to fly to New York, I was a wreck, but he was the one who finally cried like a baby. Rocking back and forth on the bed, he kept repeating, “I’m so scared, what am I doing?” After not being soothed by him for 5 years, I found myself unwilling to soothe him now. 

I drove him to the airport the next day and he asked me not to come in with him. I was gutted. I drove home and cried in a bathtub full of epsom salts and baking soda, a voodoo candle burning on my sink. . It couldn’t hurt.

School had started and I was plenty busy with classes and teaching, which was a good thing. Even though he had left, MD and I had decided we wouldn’t necessarily break up, so I planned a trip to see him over Thanksgiving. I was a wreck those few months, not knowing what was going on and feeling lost at sea without him. My mother constantly intimated that he was cheating on me, but I wouldn’t believe it. To try to see if our relationship was solid, I mentioned something about breaking up, not thinking he would go for it. He didn’t just go for it, he took it and ran with it, saying how relieved he was that I wanted to break up too. I realized when I got off the phone that I had just broken up with me for him. 

I had already bought the ticket to see him at Thanksgiving, so we decided I would still come visit.  That was a bittersweet weekend.  I was so happy to see him,but I knew it was goodbye. To make things more confusing, we slept in the same bed, kissed, snuggled and did all the things young lovers do. 

One night we took the subway to Park Slope to visit his dad’s best friend’s daughter. When I saw her, I recognized her as a girl we had visited while in Rome over Christmas break during our year abroad. She wasn’t the polar opposite of me, but she was close: petite and thin with a worldly air and dramatic sense of style. Her father was a poet (my father would not be impressed) and her mother was some kind of seamstress (my mother would have been impressed, but acted shitty about it). They lived in what must have been a beyond expensive brownstone in that tony section of Brooklyn. None of these people had ever eaten an entire skillet of Hamburger Helper by themselves at 11pm at night. 

We walked to a diner and met her friends “from camp.” It turned out that she had gone to a summer camp every summer in upstate New York and these girls had all grown up together. I had nothing in common with them, and they didn’t seem very interested in me. One of them did address me directly to say, “So, I understand you and MD have recently broken up?” It was awkward and seemed mean spirited and I didn’t understand. 

I returned home and was offered a teaching year abroad, all expenses paid with a salary. I immediately signed up, even though my last trip to Germany hadn’t been stellar. I needed to start over and get away from everything and everyone that reminded me of MD. 

A few weeks later I went home for Christmas break. Because we had acted like we weren’t broken up at Thanksgiving, I thought we might act the same at Christmas, but I was mistaken. I took him his Christmas present, a carefully curated collection of Elvis Costello CDs – the only music I could listen to since the break up — and he gave me a coffee mug. 

I have no poker face, so when I saw the mug, MD defensively said, “What? You like coffee.”  I looked up at him, and feeling anger over this situation for the very first time said, “So what is this, my fucking 5 year mug? Date you for 5 years and get a coffee mug?” He said something about me being ridiculous and I left. That coffee mug wound up getting stolen a few weeks later, which was fitting. 

The other thing I found out I was mistaken about that Christmas was our mutual friends. It turned out they were not, in fact, mutual friends at all. They had been MD’s friends first and they would remain his friends. After visiting a friend I hadn’t seen since summer, I learned that there was a brunch planned to which I was not invited because it would be, well, awkward. I left before my friend could see me cry. 

MD stopped by my parents house to return something to me before he left for New York. I tried to hug him and kiss him, and he backed away and said he had to go. He just walked out the door. I’m not being dramatic when I say I collapsed to the floor like a character in a telenovela. I was wrecked. I finally understood that it was really over. 

I spent the next week crying in our living room, much to my father’s chagrin. He had never liked MD and was glad things were over. “Why are you crying over that skinny pipsqueak?” he would say or some variation to try to make me laugh. When he couldn’t make me laugh, he tried to buy me off. He held a hundred dollar bill in front of me and told me he would give it to me if I stopped crying. I wanted that money so damn bad, but my heart and head would not oblige. 

Back home, after Christmas, I received a package from MD for my birthday. It was a framed picture of us in Germany. I was livid. I called him, irate. 

“What the fuck is this picture, MD?”

“What? It’s a nice picture of us.” 

I could hear party noises in the background. I blew up. He didn’t get it. He had never gotten it. He had broken my fucking heart and he didn’t fucking care. His dad was a dick. His grandma was a dick. I hated a lot of his cooking and I really hated his dad’s Van Morrison box set. I said everything I had never said for five whole years. 

When I was done he simply said, “Wow. I never knew you felt that way.”

Fair enough. I hadn’t ever told him. I had been too afraid he would leave me. 

A few months later, I was going through my computer and found a letter he had written to a friend saved on the desktop. It was written the summer before he left and in it, he told the friend his plans to move to New York and break up with me. Even though on some level I knew this had to have been his plan, I got angry all over again. I printed out the letter and mailed it to him. 

He called and left a voicemail asking me if I thought I was Nancy fucking Drew and what was the point of sending that to him? The point was, I now knew I had been a fool. 

I wouldn’t know how big of a fool I had been until I returned from my second year abroad in Germany, a trip I didn’t tell MD about, as I stopped talking to him after the letter mailing incident. 

I was at home for Christmas and a friend mentioned that MD was in town. She said she thought I should know since he was “with Edith” This meant nothing to me until I ran into them at the store. Edith was the girl from Rome. From Park Slope. From summer camp. As my mother would say, “Well, fuck me runnin’.”

To say I had been oblivious to their relationship would be an understatement, but I couldn’t even begin to process the fact that they were together, because as soon as I saw MD across the store I noticed that his lovely, curly, skateboarder hair was…disappearing. In fact, there were about two inches of scalp at the front of his forehead where that hair used to be. Before I could think about what I was doing, I walked up to him, rubbed the barely fuzzy area and said, “Oh my god, you’ve lost your hair!” 

In case you were wondering, this is apparently not the socially appropriate way to greet an ex you haven’t spoken to in two years. I’m also still pleased with myself for saying it. He was not amused, but Edith tripped over herself to smooth things over and make nice with me, which I thought was nice. I mean, for a cheater. 

Because they were cheaters. I have no idea when their relationship started, but I imagine they started talking after they met in Rome and I’m sure things were rolling by the time he moved to New York. Taking me out with her was bold, but I’m guessing she was the reason that he cut me off so completely at Christmas. He had, after all, not completely ended things with his Spanish girlfriend before he took up with me. If there’s one thing I now know to be true, it’s that cheaters gonna cheat. 

And that was that. I’d like to tell you that he cheated on her and went on to be a complete loser, but MD and Edith are married now and they are both very successful with children who I’m sure are lovely. Good for them. I hope she loves bald ass men. 

I only really think of MD now when I remember something cruel he said to me, like did I know that if I did push ups my boobs wouldn’t  sag as much as they did? He said that to me when I was 21 years old. Those boobs were perfectly  perky. They were beautiful. I would kill to have them back.  My husband would pay good money to see my 21 year old boobs. 

Or the time he sent me to the store to get butter and I came back with salted butter and he melted down, saying dinner was ruined and how could be so stupid, didn’t I know real cooks only used unsalted butter? All I knew was that we used “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” and my father called it “I Almost Thought I Was Butter.” 

I could go on. 

If I still sound bitter, it’s because I can’t believe  that I not only stayed with MD for five years and let him treat me like that, but that it also took me way too long to get over him. When the aliens/robots come, we should tell them It is a fact that all love inevitably leads to heartbreak. I think about this every time I look at my dog, who I love with my entire being. One day she will leave me and I will collapse on the kitchen floor again. But it will have been worth it. I don’t know that MD was worth the amount of pain I suffered afterward, but then I remember that through him, I inadvertently learned to cook, went to college, studied abroad, and learned what I didn’t want in a relationship, so I guess that’s something. 

I have a recurring nightmare that we somehow get back together and get married. In this dream, I’m miserable and know I’m with the wrong person, but I don’t know how to leave him. I always wake up grateful for the life I have and the choices I made that led me to a husband I love even more than my dog. Will he break my heart one day? Hell yes, and it will have been worth every single second.