For someone who conceptually practices non-attachment, it has occurred to me recently how bad I am at actually putting it into practice. I’m afraid that if the lesson is to “let go or be dragged,” I often end up with the badge of scraped, bloody knees, showing my tendency toward the latter.
On the other hand, I have many outward tendencies that show entirely different patterns of avoidance and discomfort with intimacy, but I suppose that’s another essay for another day. For the most part, I’m incredibly nostalgic and deeply sentimental. This is evident in the top drawer of my dresser, which contains a myriad of ephemera, including cards, handwritten letters, rose petals in Ziploc bags, and tiny scraps of paper that mean nothing to anyone but me.
One area of my life I recently struggled to let go of, for far too long, was the heavy burden of shame. I now think shame is a rather useless, and honestly even selfish, emotion, or at least that’s a conclusion I’ve come to consider as of late. Again, another topic for another day. Another specific area I, like many, struggle with non-attachment is my dating life. I love the idea of being friends with my exes. In fact, I am still friends with most of my exes. I follow them on Instagram; I would gladly hug them if I ran into them in the wild. I quite genuinely wish them well. This has historically been easier for me, as in close to, if not all, of the situations, I was the one doing the breaking up. During a somewhat recent reversal of that situation, a man I overall considered a delight broke up with me over the summer. Our time together was sweet and healing, or at least for me, who, during the course of that relationship, was grappling heavily with shame. This man carried more than his fair share of emotional labor during this short chapter, and I’m still so grateful to have shared it with him.
He was also super honest with me throughout our time together about his own struggles with both codependence and avoidance, quite a pair. So while his initial rejection surprised me, it didn’t sting as much as expected. Roughly every three weeks during our dating, after a moment of closeness, he would tell me he was considering moving to a different city. He quoted Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” not once, but twice. A poem whose sentiment I knew well, since I kept it on the dresser for the entire last year of my marriage. Once, he handed me his phone to read a Substack article on learning to love people as they are, and in that moment I inwardly felt there were far too many annotations for my liking. The signs were there, even if I chose not to notice them.
Over the past few years, I’ve grown quite accustomed to navigating change in my life. I’ve been forced to let go of jobs, people, and places. Some of these instances happened softly and quietly, while others came with brute force. I’ve become all too aware of what is and what isn’t actually in my locus of control. “Surely I can be friends with him,” I thought boldly one day, a month later, after texting to see how he was. He responded politely and warmly, mentioning an upcoming trip and offering to reach back out upon his return. I let it go and returned to life as usual. One evening in August, I started considering returning to dating. I gave myself until September to get over it and see how I felt. Being a mother makes you far more discerning, and I’m not one to usually have a revolving door of men in my life, kids or not. In fact, I love being alone. I fought kind of hard for myself. I reopened my Hinge app for the first time in months and considered unpausing, a note of weariness in my heart. I shook my head no, closed the app, and my phone instantly lit up with a text from my ex. “Hey, how are you? Let’s catch up.” As usual, I noted the universe’s sense of humor in the synchronicity. I slept on the text before responding, “Sure”
After some back and forth, we decided to meet at Soup Peddler for lunch, a very non-date setup, I thought. The platonic nature of the meeting was instantly challenged when he stepped out of his truck with flowers in a jar cut from his neighbor’s yard and gave me an up-and-down glance, followed by a suggestive, “You look good.” I felt cautious and curious, and, honestly, a little stirred. Still, almost instantly, we fell into our easy, delightful repartee. I sensed nothing from our previous parting would come up, except for a brief moment when he paused to look longingly out the window. “I’m sorry this took me so long,” he shared. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head as if to say, it’s ok. We changed the subject. I wished he’d said more.
After a few philosophical text exchanges, a couple of weeks later, he offered another plan. This time I felt more hopeful, more attached to an outcome. An outcome where I could present myself as less of a mess, and he could be less fearful, and we could try again with a little more honesty on both sides. The plan for the meeting was similarly platonic, the same as the first. We’d meet for a brief lunch and go to a movie. I was nervous. He seemed nervous too. Similar to before, there was the “you look good, you smell good.” He mentioned two books he was reading. One was a relationship book; the other was about public shaming (I had been publicly shamed a little over a year before). I didn’t offer much in response. Since I was nervous, I did what I usually do when I’m that way, and I yapped my fucking face off. I told anecdotal stories that got laughs. His laugh was my favorite, so it brought me joy, but I was reticent to ask any real questions. I was afraid of the answers. We were skimming the surface. Before we parted, he made a loose promise of a future wakeboarding excursion if I could bring some bikini-clad friends. As he hugged me goodbye, he hit me again with the “nothing gold can stay,” and that’s when I really knew.
Even so, I sat with my feelings for a few days, grappling with the longing not to feel attached, but realizing the truth: I was. That Sunday morning, as I got ready for work, I felt the urge to check the Hinge app again. After we broke up, I checked periodically to see if he changed anything on his profile and satisfy my curiosity about whether he was dating. He never had. This time, I noticed a beating heart next to his name. This wasn’t a feature during my brief stint on the app in January, so I googled to see what it meant. Google shared:
Active Effort: It shows that a person actively replies to messages, sends personalized likes with comments, takes time to look at profiles, and confirms dates rather than ghosting or leaving matches in limbo. The user must be active within the last 30 days.
“Ah, so,” I thought. I realized it was best to tell the truth, so I did. I texted him, owning my lack of platonic feelings, and said that while I wished him well, friendship wasn’t in the cards for me right now. He responded as kindly as he could and wished me well too. “That beating fuckboy heart is a terrible Hinge feature,” I thought to myself, knowing full well that if it hadn’t existed, I would willingly have let myself be dragged by him for at least another week or two. Probably behind a boat on a wakeboard, no less.
Because the universe has quite a sense of humor, and loves to hammer its points home for me, there’s still more to this story, but I will save that part for another essay I may or may not ever pen. I’ll leave you for now with one of my all-time favorite koans in case there’s anything you might need to let go of:
If you let go a little
you will have a little happiness.
If you let go a lot
you will have a lot of happiness
If you let go completely
you will be free.
-Ajahn Chah
Beautiful and evocative writing - like always. ❤️❤️❤️