How to Know if You Should Spend Forever Together

Romance is an act of imagination, fueled by fear. My perfect future husband and I don’t know that yet, as we begin planning our first trip to Europe, scrutinizing blurry photos of hotel rooms in Le Marais and San Sebastián to discern if they’re the suitable mix of sophisticated and scrappy, skimming menus and considering attractions, packing ordinary clothes for these extraordinary places. We have faith that we will become extraordinary on the beaches at Biarritz. We are certain that, in the gorgeous corridors of Barcelona, his eyes will sparkle, my hair will form a luxurious, fluffy frame around my sun-dappled face. As we plan for romance, we are sure that romance will elevate us to a higher level of consciousness and gorgeousness and confidence. We are in love, after all. We have found our person. This is the start of a whole new life. All former selves — intractable, lumpy, ungrateful, repetitive, needy — will be left behind.

Posted 12:31 a.m. Sep 30, 2018 — Updated 12:31 a.m. Sep 30, 2018

Heather Havrilesky

, New York Times

But our former selves disagree. They are packing their bags for their first trip to Europe, too. They know they have the power to ruin everything. Imagine, how romantic it will be, to destroy a very good thing — the best one yet, by far! Our former selves snicker behind their hands as they pack. They cannot wait.

— — —

Some might say the romance of this romantic trip began the morning we left for Paris. As we waited for our cab outside my perfect future husband’s apartment, I felt a leaf in my hair and tried to pull it out, only to find a crushed, furry bee between my fingers.

Others might argue that, as the plane tilted and rumbled across the Atlantic and my wrist swelled to the size of a prune, that was when the real romance began.

Others, though, would zoom in on that first night in the closet-sized Parisian hotel room with the slanted stairs and slanted floors, the room spinning from what I would in retrospect properly label as vertigo, my mind flooding with the dreadful realization that every corner of Paris does not smell like the pages of glossy lady magazines. The romance, they would argue, sprang to life the moment I became aware that when you walk the streets of Paris for the very first time, you do not always feel like a great glowing god, optimistic and invincible.

In fact, it is possible to feel queasy and ugly and stupid on the streets of Paris. It is possible to find the corner cafe too crowded and smoky, to encounter the tiny brasseries and flower stands as cartoonish imitations of a France that might’ve vanished decades ago. It is possible to find the French themselves a teensy bit too French. Not only that, but it is possible to reach into one’s brain for a single sentence from six years of French in junior high and high school and college, and discover an utter void. And after fumbling for words and mumbling something in English like a common tourist who has never been to Paris even once, after the waiter rolls his eyes and theatrically turns on his heel, revealing himself to be a bad imitation of a breed of French waiter that might’ve died off around the time Hemingway last set foot on the continent, after looking down at an idiotic crepe — we might as well be at Universal Studios Hollywood! — after all of that, I looked to my perfect, handsome, smart, amazing future husband for comfort and reassurance, and saw that he was a little bit ... moist. He was looking back with worried eyes, wondering if, like Paris itself, he was a big letdown. And in that exceptionally frightening and thus deeply romantic moment, it was suddenly possible to find this handsome, smart, amazing future husband ... disappointing.

— — —

What’s more disappointing? The fact that he actually cares what you’re feeling, which for some crazy reason makes you angry and self-conscious, or the fact that he doesn’t bluster his way through his nonexistent French so much as cringe and cower visibly? This is what all of your former selves are debating in delighted tones as you take the fast train from Paris to Biarritz, your head spinning and your bee sting, now the size of a plum, throbbing. This is not how your arrogant father behaved when he was traveling, your former selves remind you. Your dad dove in and blustered his way through it all, and you felt safe and secure (if sometimes slightly embarrassed). Your future husband has no bluster. His fears amplify your fears.

“But what do you want?” Your former selves hiss in your ear as the landscape whizzes by and your future husband smiles nervously in your direction. “Do you seriously want a daddy? You’re so pathetic that you can’t travel to Europe for the first time without wanting your future husband to imitate your actual dead father?”

This moment, as the train pulls into Biarritz and your self-hatred starts to upstage your hatred of your amazing future husband, might just be the starting point of the real, true romance. The rain lets up enough for the two of you to find a table by the ocean, and as you sit there, you notice that you are surrounded by a wide range of bored international types with money, families with adult children, all of them with the same triple-processed hair carrying the same Gucci and Hermès bags, all of them trussed up in tight jeans and blousy blouses. You might as well be at The Grove in Los Angeles. You might as well be in Miami or New Jersey or Pleasanton, California.

This is not the real France, the real Europe. You arrived a decade too late — maybe two or three decades too late. You could’ve come as a student and stayed in hostels and gotten drunk on red wine with greasy delicious strangers, but instead you are dragging along with you a disappointing middle-age dope like an unwieldy, oversized suitcase without wheels. He has nothing to say, you can see that now. He tries to make up for it by reading street signs out loud in a cheerful voice, like some kind of confused half-wit. He is awkward and he is wearing — is that a golf shirt?

Here is where the roller coaster starts climbing the really steep hill that will almost certainly bring your death. At this moment when you recognize for the first time that you are wasting a literal fortune just to lug an oversized man-shaped bag through a long-ago-destroyed, overpriced tourist wasteland, as your pulse races and you realize that this misshapen, pointless, charmless mountain of wincing leather will soon propose marriage to you, of all things, that’s when you know in your heart that all lives peter out early and become miserable descents into old age and disappointment. Heterosexual women like yourself only pair up with a man because they know they’re going to be miserable anyway, so they might as well have a guy around to carry things and fetch the car and speed them through customs.

Why a man, though? Your former selves whisper as your oversized luggage orders a second lukewarm beer. Why spend the rest of your life with a man, of all things? Men, you now see clearly, are tedious beasts with nothing to offer and nothing to add. Why not bring your closest female friends to Europe? There’s nothing you’d like better than to have your girlfriends here instead, drinking and snickering with you over the bad waiter. Why do you and your lady friends isolate yourselves into miserable pairs instead? Why not marry your friends? Why not marry a nice dog or a gentle horse? Marrying a man is like ordering an imitation crepe in an imitation of a cafe in an imitation of Paris. Why marry an inadequate replica? You will merely seal yourself into a wax museum of your own creation.

One might presume that the point when you began to write off all monogamous heterosexual human relations from a few centuries back forward to the present moment could mark the apex of the romance in this heady story of romance! One could be forgiven for presuming this. Because as you trudged through the streets of San Sebastián, flanked by soccer — yes, football! — fans pissing on the cobblestone streets, as you boarded an overnight train to Barcelona, your head knocking into the side of the train car for hours, as you finally entered those narrow old streets, sleep-deprived, your vertigo kicking up again, you issued a deeply romantic warning to your future husband.

“I know you’re probably planning to propose on this trip,” you recall yourself saying. “Don’t speak, just listen very closely: Don’t propose when I’m tired and dizzy, like I am today. I’m PMSing right now, just so you know, so don’t propose while I’m still PMSing. Make sure I’m at least showered. And don’t buy me some bubble gum machine ring. I want a real engagement ring. That will take time for you to pick out. So don’t propose anytime soon. But I don’t want to talk about it.”

Your big stumbly non-rolling bag looked at you, disappointed. Handle everything, is what you meant, with confidence, with arrogant self-assurance, with swagger, even. But do it later. Much, much later.

“OK. I hear you.” That’s all he said, because he has literally nothing to say, ever, like all men.

Maybe I was buying myself some time. Maybe I knew by then that our former selves had stowed away on the plane with us, and I didn’t want his self-doubting former self proposing to my hormonal, ugly, resentful former self. I didn’t want him to ask me to marry him with a question mark in his voice, asking not just “Will you marry me?” but also, “Is this a stupid idea?” and “Am I good enough for you?” and “Are you good enough for me, or are you actually completely terrible?”

I wanted him to be sure, because I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure if I was good enough for him or for myself or for marriage. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend forever with anyone, least of all myself. But I was very, very sure, at that particular moment on our trip, that nothing would ever make me happy. I was sure that I would drag him down into hell with me.

I wasn’t wrong about that. Because when we arrived at our hotel north of Valencia, we finally broke into a giant fight — about how tedious and repugnant he insisted on being, maybe, or about choosing the wrong hotel or about something even smaller, who knows? (You can fight with an overpacked bag about anything under the sun, trust me). And I yelled at my perfect future husband. I yelled at him in my bad sleep shorts, with my tangled, ugly hair on my hideous head, and as I yelled I thought, “This will release me from this purgatorial entanglement! I’m free! I am disgusting and I deserve to be alone forever!” My future husband stormed out. Success!

He returned a half-hour later. He sat next to me on the bed, where I was reading. He was apologetic, which was helpful and yet also unattractive. Then he spoke. “There was a jewelry festival of some kind downstairs —” and he started to reach into his pocket.

This time I didn’t just yell. “NO!” I shrieked. “I told you I didn’t want this!” I wailed like someone about to jump off a cruise ship and drown in the salty terrible sea. I screeched like a woman smothering all of her former selves under an avalanche of self-loathing. I howled like a woman murdering the best thing that had ever happened to her, ruining the absolute best relationship with the kindest, most patient, most defensive, most exasperating, most handsome, most hideous man she had ever met. I bellowed and sobbed and snotted into my pillow, in my bad sleep shorts, in my bad hair, and my future husband yelled back, telling me I was terrible, finally admitting that I was awful, awful and unlovable, things I knew all along but wanted to hear out loud, and in English.

My disappointing future husband sat in the bathroom of our disappointing hotel room on a disappointing stretch of Spanish coastline for about 20 minutes. Then he came out. He did not show me the (probably disappointingly bad) ring he’d bought. We talked in ragged tones about what was happening to us. I cried. He sulked. We talked some more. We cuddled ambivalently on the uncomfortable mattress of the bad bed in the bad room, hating ourselves and each other, hating Spain and Europe and the whole planet and the inky black void beyond it.

— — —

The next morning, we drove down the coast, sunshine streaming in the windows of our tiny rental car, over empty, winding roads. “The south of Spain!” a voice inside my head gushed. We stopped at a place called the Auto Grill. Among the bad pieces of pizza and wilted-looking salads, I found a sandwich made of fresh bread (finally!), manchego and jamon iberico wrapped in paper. My future husband found some very good olives and another sandwich with other cured meats involved, and we ate our sandwiches in the front seat of our tiny rental car in the parking lot, and we didn’t talk much.

All of us were there, our former selves and our current selves. We were excited and melancholy and needy and pissy and impatient and satisfied. And that was the most romantic moment of this very romantic story. Because as we sat and chewed, we realized that love had not transformed us into great, glowing gods, optimistic and invincible. Instead, all of our former and current selves would be packed into that tiny car like temperamental clowns, and our agony wouldn’t end when our trip was over. We were in for a rough ride that would last a lifetime, or even longer. Maybe we would even be jammed together like sardines in the afterlife. Anything was possible.

We ate our cured meats in silence and every now and then, we looked into each other’s eyes and we didn’t look away quickly. Because we knew that it was possible to be disgusted and annoyed and bored and still feel love — pounding, elated, passionate. In that moment, we were disheveled and ordinary, and also gorgeous and extraordinary. We belonged together. We were terrified, but we were sure.

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