An old flame — if you can call it that
The comfort of falling back into your old self isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
Middle of my sophomore year at the university, I realized I needed to stop making a mistake that seemingly kept haunting me.
Dating men in student government — or going on dates with them, at least.
Enthralled in my first ever wars of journalism vs. elected officials — AKA student media vs. student government — I kept falling into this trap of thinking that dating someone in SG, as we called it, would be fine! I could manage my undying love for journalism with dating someone who may or may not fall into the crosshairs of either my own coverage or that of my friends.
Such a cute thought.
I didn’t realize it the first or second time. Though, I would like to say that — at least to an extent — the first mistake happened before he decided to run for student government. I just … might have reached back out to him again later on out of boredom and a lack of understanding of how cruel it can be to use people.
Maturity happens in phases. I wouldn’t make those choices again given the knowledge I have now.
The third time, however, I walked into the student government trap without even intending to date him. Though, I realized after the fact that he’d been laying the foundation for an attraction to use me to get what he wanted out of a story.
It was then I decided never again. Maybe the pain of being used was my punishment for using that first man.
Fast forward, we reach junior year, fall 2019. I’m dating Reid, and I’m the news editor. Suddenly, I find myself dealing with the fallout of an article that had several mistakes. My associate news editor and I, London, scramble to fix the errors.
All of it ends with a phone call to one of the subjects affected, who proceeds to yell at me over the phone after stepping out of a party. (I, too, had to step out of a party to deal with said phone call.)
This event, having now followed me to present day, has had a wide-ranging fallout. It was the catalyst for reconnecting to Alex, my ex-boyfriend-turned-best friend. He, as Speaker of the Student Government Assembly at the time, helped me deal with the angry parties involved in the situation.
So grateful for his support, I texted Alex a month later asking if he wanted to get coffee and catch up. That turned to drinks after Reid broke up with me. And that turned to what is now four and a half years of one of the best friendships I’ve ever had.
A few weeks into this budding friendship, I get a message from the person who had yelled at me over the phone about that article. It had been four months since. They tell me they find me “highly attractive” and would like to get drinks sometime.
Without flinching, I reply informing them of a rule I had developed more than a year before.
I do not date people involved in Student Government in any form. I don’t care what branch, what job or how long they had been involved. It was not a discussion. I did feel bad for this person — and definitively felt flattered. But I wasn’t walking down that path ever again. It wasn’t worth the heartburn.
Fast forward again, and we hit Monday night this week. Here I am, bored on the couch, swiping on Bumble wondering if I’m going to find my future husband after the boy I wrote about the day before had once again wandered off into oblivion.
Unknowingly, I matched with that same person who had yelled at me over the phone all those years before.
It started out so simple. Me being overly inquisitive, per usual, hoping he wouldn’t find it weird, like some guys do.
We realize we both work at UT, funnily enough on the same floor.
And then it all falls apart.
This, dear reader, is not something that has happened to me since I left The Daily Texan. In fact, it was one of the many things I was thrilled to leave behind upon leaving that paper. No longer would I live in a place where people I hoped to date knew me by my byline.
Little did I know I’d end up in a small beach town where I’d be known as the Gay Sun News Reporter. At least those idiots didn’t know my full name. They’d just heard about me in the dating circles, though they could easily look up my name if they wanted to.
Alas.
Despite failing to remember this specific occurrence of being yelled at over the phone, I didn’t question that it had, in fact, occurred once upon a time.
I was known for being a good reporter at The Texan. I wasn’t known for being a well-liked reporter. The grim reaper. Effective, though not everyone likes the results
“Respected your boundary though laughed at your excuse.”
Yes, my excuse was laughable, but if they had been through what I’d been through, I’m sure they would’ve been led to the same decision one way or another.
Intrigued by the situation, though, I took him up on his offer of a date. We planned drinks for Wednesday. I offered to take him to Tweedy’s, my new Tidal Creek.
We ended up seeing each other sooner, on Tuesday at a baseball game, but there’s more to this story before we get there.
We exchanged numbers around 11:30 p.m. Monday night, though iPhones being what they are, our old messages from five years ago remained. I hadn’t saved his number, for whatever reason. I did this time.
We chatted. He again questioned my logic on not dating Student Government people, but it gave me a good chance to get out the most important thing people should always know about me. I never lie.
Quickly, the conversation turned to the Student Government drama we lived through together. To this day, I have shared everything I knew back then via the stories I wrote, and I don’t believe in getting into anything I couldn’t firmly confirm.
I thought back to that time as we talked about it and it reminded me of how much I wanted to forget — or at least permanently move on — from all that happened. While I didn’t go through the same trauma as the people I wrote about, I took on my own form of it.
Thinking back to my work from then causes me a kind of haunting stress, a poltergeist in my dreams that follows into the daylight. I was a workaholic to the point of being monstrous toward myself.
I rarely ate. Broke my leg at the gym through unrelenting workouts. Spent most of my time stressing about stories, unable to sleep because I feared not being able to finish an article the next day. Filled my time to avoid feeling at all.
It wasn’t until months later I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and it wasn’t until nearly a year later that I finally started taking meds that helped.
None of this, of course, has anything to do with this person. But, as we sat at the baseball game the next day, I couldn’t help but be tormented by what they reminded me of. Yes, I felt a strong sense of comfort as I spouted shady one-liners with the speed of a broken waterline, but am I that person anymore, anyway? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am still very shady, very snarky, full of one-liners.
But like I mentioned briefly earlier, I was merciless back then, more careless about the effects my words had on people.
I didn’t necessarily want to fall back into that. If anything, the beauty of meeting people on dates who don’t know me is I’m forced to take a step back and really think through my words, making me a better person.
Then there was the point when I felt like he understood me in a way a lot of other dates hadn’t.
We talked about our feelings of being on the gender spectrum. They identified as non-binary, whereas I align with the term genderqueer. Both of us use he and they pronouns to varying preferences and extents. It was a moment when I felt like I had found someone who had understood a part of me I didn’t fully understand yet.
Quote of the Week
“You can see with the heart what you cannot see with your eyes.”
—My (preferred) English adaptation of the French quote, “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
I stayed up late that night, nearly three hours later than usual, charmed by the conversation, if not ultimately the person behind them.
The next day, I invited this person to that night’s Texas Baseball game with me. We played LSU, which meant it was a packed house.
The game was tough, if well-matched. LSU, like the other SEC teams, are what I have come to refer to as irritating inconveniences for Texas. We always play them early in the season, though we can’t ever beat them in those days.
I watched the game, but with more stress than usual, as I watched the team pass one inning after another without a run.
I eventually realized it was a mistake to bring this person to the game with me. They kept asking if something was bothering me, or why I wasn’t getting into the game more.
But as my dad knows well, this is how I like to watch the game, sitting there, in peace, not cheering, just studying. People don’t always get it, but they don’t have to get it. It’s my baseball game, not theirs.
The bigger problem, as I sat there with my thoughts, was thinking about all the issues that had floated through the ether the night before that I’d ignored. They simmered further in the game as I dived back into a self from five years ago who felt comfortable but who I hardly knew anymore.
I could tell this person was trying to engage with me, cheering, bumping into me. I’m just not there for it, already having moved on into a space of wondering when I might be able to just be at the game in peace. It’s a spiteful thought, and not one I enjoyed having.
I wondered about when I would tell this person that I just wanted to be friends. I didn’t have the heart to tell them at the game. Or was my reasoning for not telling them right then selfish? Was I really just trying to ensure that my game watching experience remained peaceful?
There’s the other side, too. Had I just brought it up abruptly at some point, it might have looked like I was just trying to erase the problem and get back to the game. A watered down version of breaking up with someone in public.
I’m always the worst judge of trying to figure out which one of those is right. I still don’t know the answer.
We make it to the eighth inning and I, hungry, decide it’s time to leave. So we head out, driving back to my apartment where they had parked. I hug them goodbye and zoom off to grab food.
And I send the text I myself despise receiving.
“Wanna be friends?”
More than just my Love Story
Ok, now fix Ticketmaster: Merrick Garland Is a Huge Taylor Swift Fan. (WSJ)
NYC TikTok Dating Diary Chronicles Love in the Time of Inflation. (Bloomberg)
Too true: The Beauty of Expiration-Date Dating. (NYT)
Further reading: Temporary boyfriends and finding joy with someone you likely won’t see ever again. (17-Minute Date)
Note: The names of the people in my columns have been changed to respect their privacy — and to allow me to spill a bunch of tea about them without remorse.