partnership is not a personality

tales from a recovering codependent

It’s midway past 2am on a Saturday — or, a Sunday, if we’re being technical about it) — the dreadful in-between where french fries and forcemeat are the only sustenance available before sunrise. December is in full force, what with the whining of wind and the knocking of knees in a too-short skirt. Speakers spit a bpm that quickens my pulse in the worst way. A recusant laugh cuts unblunted through the music and I drag my eyes across the room in search of the source. Later, I would kiss the mouth that freed it.

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I met my wife at a zodiac-themed party in 2019; it was Sagittarius season, and the crowd embraced it with a palpable zeal that I’m sure did the sign proud. Black and Brown bodies swam jovially through the rusty murk of red wall washers and smoke machines. With most adhering to the copper dress code, the room shined and sang and spun like a falling penny.

On the flipside, I was less enthusiastic. Already saddled with an everpresent anxiety, I’d just gotten back to New Orleans after years abroad and was having trouble adjusting to the noise, the lights, the muchness of it all. Being able to understand all of the chatter around me felt sharp and unnatural after having been immersed in the ambient murmur of a foreign tongue for so long. Inside my purple Nikes, the Guatemalan soil still sat serried under chipped toenails as I tap-tap-tapped my feet with pique and panic. Just as I called an Uber, my chariot, I caught the laugh that changed my life.

the night we met :’)

The subsequent months were a whirlwind of long-distance typicalities — falling asleep on FaceTime, weekly (sometimes daily) playlist exchanges, text messages that read like novels — and romcom-esque antics — bi-weekly meetups in new cities, a shared calendar, surprise flowers in hotel rooms. In the saccharinity of a ripe romance, the crisp perpetuity of togetherness, it was easy to forget that, by some twisted trick of fate, a homebody had fallen in love with a party promoter.

My wife and I are a covid couple. By now I’m sure that we all know what that means. Because we moved to, and lived in, Mexico for the bulk of the pandemic, it took a little longer for our bubble to pop. We got to know the versions of ourselves that we may not have introduced under “normal” circumstances, showed parts of our faces that we otherwise would have kept smothered in shadow.

We learned each other under the dizzying fog of novelty and adventure and Spanish. When Gem told tales about their life before — subways and polyamory and grad school — it all read like fairytales (or more realistically for me, horror stories). This was the old them, and I was oh so grateful to be experiencing the refined version: the one that liked to read aloud and cook with me and didn’t party much at all. The version that loved board games and the farmer’s market and dancing to disco on the balcony. My version. And I became their Andy —a vegetarian, a metamour, a dazzling hostess.

Isolated and far too comfortable, we developed an “us” that likely looked very different than what an “us” would’ve looked like in a parallel universe, in a covid-less New York City.

Then, we came back to the states.

The truth is that I’ll probably be more equipped to write this in a few years, when I can speak without a traitorous quiver in my voice. I’ll certainly be less speculative and more sure. Confident. Secure. But for now, I bolt the wing onto the plane mid-flight and cross my fingers that it stays put.

A good partner, the right partner, is a home. (I believe this, though all of the books tell me not to make homes of people.) But everyone needs to get out of the house sometimes, right? Even homebodies like me.

I’ve always thrown myself into partnership. It has been a safe space at best and a familiar one at minimum. When I was 18 and freshly partnered, I spent many months sleeping in the bedroom that my then-girlfriend shared with a sibling. While I was obviously not allowed to do this, the fumes of young love gifted (cursed?) me with a girlish audacity and, like clockwork, I would sneak in after moonrise and out before daybreak. I’d essentially sacrificed my comfort and security for this person, though she had not asked me to. And in the years that followed, I would continue to make different versions of the same mistake:

There was the musician that morphed me into a leather and lace-laden hip-hop head. The insecure and antisocial conspiracy theorist that kept me locked away like Rapunzel — I went months without so much as a coffee date. The string of academics that had me sousing my baby brain in literature and theory and philosophy that I simply did not believe in or fully understand. The poet that almost convinced me to consider Christianity (“You have a God-shaped hole, Andy,” they’d said). The gym rat who had me poking and prodding and hating my belly in all its squashiness.

When I came up for air, after this woozy string of could-have-beens, I was greeted with a reckoning that I was doing this to myself. The shrinking, the morphing, the pretending. Throughout my teens and the bulk of my 20s, there was a common thread of falling for folks who were more sure of themselves than I, and this was something that I both admired and, upon further reflection, coveted. The musician didn’t suddenly become a writer like me; she was too busy penning songs. The academics were far too wrapped up in their theses and TED talks to learn to solder silver.

And I would so willingly toss my pen, my blowtorch, myself, to be first in the audience, in the comments, in the studio, their pretty little chameleon.

A partnership is a home, and sometimes it’s a 364-square foot, pest-laden shoebox and sometimes it’s an open concept craftsmen with original pine flooring in a walkable neighborhood. Whatever the walls look like, however it smells, it’s yours, and there’s a cloying fear of the house burning down when you leave it — Did I forget to turn off the oven? Unplug the iron? Did I lock the door?

When my wife and I moved back to the states, there was a gradual realization that the version of them that had “disappeared” with the pandemic? Had only circumstantially been put on pause. Free from barriers — unfamiliar language, unfamiliar people, masks — pieces of that past them began sprouting back up like black bamboo shoots. There were conversations around open relationships, 5am homecomings, fight after fight. All of their actions felt like an intentional pulling away, and I took it all deeply personally; there were weeks when I felt I was living with a phantom.

us now :)

One spring morning: “Do you mind going to the farmer’s market alone today?”

A simple request I now realize, but at the time, this camel’s back could not bear another straw. The rug, hell the whole damn carpet had been ripped from beneath my once so sure feet. My house, beautiful and just-right for me, was ablaze.

That day, about a year ago now, sent me on a voyage of self-exploration. Why has everyone that I’ve loved been so unwilling to compromise themselves for me? Or, better yet, why have I been so willing to compromise myself for them?The easy answer is that latching is easier than confronting. Being a human is hard, emotionally exhausting work, and it’s all so much easier to do together. But “easy” in all her glory, has never been right, has never been prosperous, has never been healthy.

The question remains: Who am I when I’m alone?

Codependency is a nasty word, one that I’m abashed to be associated with. The unlearning is grueling. Leaning into trust (of self) is even harder. I don’t yet have any advice on making either more bearable. But, today is a Sunday in November and I woke up, let my wife sleep in, and went to the market alone.

The kale is beautiful this time of year.