Charlotte Green

I have to admit that I was pretty scared when I first caught you out of the corner of my eye. My whole body was overtaken with this incredible, terrible nervousness and I wondered how I could possibly open a conversation.

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.

I am standing in the bathroom, brushing my hair, completely naked. You walk up behind me and tell me that I look good like that, that I should go naked more often, that the light is particularly flattering on my back side.

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.

I would follow you home. You would open the door, and I would have to stop myself from leaping for joy. I would have to pretend to be less excited than I was, pretend that I don’t need you the way I have needed you for so long now.

Know the day where the speech is coming. Feel it in your bones when they call you and ask you to meet them somewhere — somewhere public enough that you won’t make a scene.

No expectations about how big this should be, or how shaved that should be, that will ruin the whole thing if it’s not quite up to your standards.

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.

Is that really the point of these conversations — to get me to stop being upset by reminding me that men still find me attractive, that I still have some kind of worth in this world, as judged by others?

People tell us all the time that we should be together, that we would make such a good couple, that we’re “basically already dating.” What does that mean?