Please Make Me Love Me (eBook)

A Memoir

Emily Gindlesparger (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
296 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-2958-5 (ISBN)

Infos

For Emily Gindlesparger, the idea of opening up her eight-year relationship was terrifying. Even considering it sent her into a tailspin of jealousy, anxiety, and self-doubt. Except ... maybe she did want it, if she was being brutally honest. By saying yes to an open relationship, Emily realized she could say yes to a new adventure-one in which she could explore desires and versions of herself she'd previously kept hidden. She discovered an assertive, impulsive side that wanted to take risks. Another side, timid and ashamed, that shrank from uncomfortable conversations. And an insatiable side-one that hungered for others to love her more than she knew how to love herself. As she also came to realize that she was queer, forming deep yet troubled relationships with two women, her profound need to feel loved kept her newfound truths locked away. She hid her relationship with one woman from the other. She hid all the new details of her life from her parents. But something else was growing inside her too-a wild, undeniable need to let those small, quiet parts of her have a voice. To expose her darkest secrets, no matter how terrifying. And, ultimately, to know and love every last part of herself-no matter what it might cost.

Textauszug

1. 
There’s This Girl

“So, there’s this girl I’m kind of interested in,” Jordan said one morning.

I got an instant hot flash of panic. My eyes stayed glued to the student papers I’d graded the night before and was shoving in a binder to take to work. I wanted to look up at his face—to see if he was excited, or nervous, or apologetic, or bored with me—but my own face was suddenly made of stone, too heavy to lift.

The eggs Jordan was making sizzled and popped. He turned to the stove to stir them, and then he turned back to me. I kept packing my bag, mechanically, slowly.

Say something, I told myself. The only way through this is to keep him talking so you don’t have time to feel. All you have to do is run out the clock until you have to go to work.

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else.

Jordan scooped eggs and vegetables out of the pan and onto two plates. He ground pepper over them and handed one plate to me. Breakfast looked beautiful. I wanted to cry. The smell of bacon and sweet potato made me feel sick. I stuck a fork in the hash anyway and made myself chew.

“Who is it?” I tried to knock the pitch of my voice down.

“Casey,” Jordan said.

I knew Casey. Or I knew of her. I’d seen her at the dive bar we all liked to frequent. Casey had tons of funky, wild tattoos with great stories behind them, and she wore threadbare T-shirts that were messy and hot. She had dark hair and those short punk bangs that make your eye travel all over someone’s face. She drank well whiskey and soda because the bartenders would pour strong if the drink was simple and she didn’t give a fuck. She was friends with a couple of women who wore ruby-red lipstick and chipped black nail polish, and she always stood out because she was never dolled up.

I was not like Casey. I didn’t have tattoos, especially not the kind on your thigh that people stare at when you sit with your knees apart. Hot summer nights at the dive bar, I wore sundresses and overpaid for blackberry mojitos from one bartender who smashed fresh fruit and mint in the bottom of the glass with a chunk of sugarcane and who always seemed a little proud when he handed the drink over.

I’d never talked to Casey because she always got to the bar late, and I always left early. Each time I got up to go at eight or nine, my friends would try to badger me into staying.

“She needs her sleep,” Jordan would say. “In the morning she’s teaching the youth of America.”

He’d stay out a few more hours and crawl into bed at midnight or one. If I woke up as he shuffled the sheets, he would curl in close and hold me, and I would pull his arm over me to hold his hand against my chest. In the morning he would recap the half-drunk philosophical conversations I’d missed and list who’d shown up after I’d gone.

Casey. She was always there when I wasn’t.

I hadn’t sat down after Jordan handed me the plate. I was standing in the kitchen, holding the plate and a bite on my fork, and I realized:

He’s had a whole life happening in those evenings without me. He could have a whole relationship with Casey that I know nothing about.

The breakfast I was trying to swallow became a lump in my throat. My panic ran a mile-a-minute monologue in my head.

She is so different from you—is that a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe it’s a good thing, because it means he obviously still wants you, and he’s just interested in what it would be like to make out with someone totally not like you. Or maybe it’s a really bad thing, because he’ll realize he picked the totally wrong type of person and he won’t want you at all; how the fuck do you both get out of this crush alive?

“Do you…want to date her?” I choked out.

I ignored the biggest question that was bouncing around my brain: Do you think she’s sexier than me?

“Yeah, I’m interested in that,” Jordan said. My ears started to buzz, drowning out his words that followed. I only picked up snippets of what he said next.

“I don’t feel like I need to do anything about my attraction, though. It’s just that you and I have been having conversations about what it might be like to open our relationship in theory, and I think it’s important to start talking about whether it’s something we actually want to do.”

I flicked my eyes up to his face for just a second. He looked unexpectedly relaxed, leaning back on the counter, but his plate sat untouched next to him. I turned my eyes back to my fork and tried to get more of my breakfast down.

“I need to get to work early this morning to finish prepping one of my lessons,” I lied. I shoveled the last few bites of egg and kale into my mouth and downed a glass of water, hoping it would push everything down. “Let me think about it.”

I put my plate in the dishwasher with a clatter, threw my bag over my shoulder, and picked up my keys. Everything was so loud. Jordan gently grabbed my arm as I reached for the door handle. I turned back, and he kissed me. I kept my lips tight in a peck.

“Have a good day teaching the youth of America,” he said.

I smiled, said nothing, and closed the door.

•  •  •

Driving to work, I gripped the steering wheel so tightly my hands started to go numb. I felt a flood of rage and grief, like I was trying to process a breakup that hadn’t happened yet.

Wasn’t I enough?

Jordan and I had been together eight years by then, and in all that time we’d never talked about attractions we had to other people. We had, however, spent many road trips listening to Dan Savage spout off answers to people’s sex and relationship questions on his advice podcast, Savage Love. We’d talked many times about whether either of us would ever want an open relationship. We’d landed on maybe, maybe not, I don’t know.

I’d read Sex at Dawn, a book by Cacilda Jethá and Christopher Ryan on the biology behind human mating behavior, and I thought there was a compelling case for people not really being built for monogamy. I thought open relationships made logical sense, but now, faced with the idea of actually opening mine up, my emotions rebelled.

No one can be everything for a person, my logical brain reasoned.

My anxiety didn’t give a shit about logic. I kept spinning. What about me isn’t working for Jordan anymore? If we don’t open our relationship and Jordan never gets to explore his feelings, our relationship will wither with resentment and die.

That’s all definitely right, Radio K whispered. There are no other possible explanations for Jordan telling you about another girl.

Ah, Radio K. That’s my pet name for the stream of snide, cynical, egotistical thoughts that run loops in my head. Ann Patchett once described how we have competing narratives, like radio stations, running through our brains, and she calls the destructive, malicious one “Radio K-Fuck.” Radio K as a name for that voice stuck with me.

Once I named him, it was easier to hear him, which sucked because he became really loud, but also helped because I finally knew when he was speaking. Sometimes—only in fleeting moments—I could remember not to give him the last word.

Radio K took great joy in pinging the words around my brain: there’s a girl, a girl, a girl, a girl.

By the time I got home, I’d spiraled so far into my anxiety that I couldn’t bear to bring up the morning’s conversation. Jordan didn’t bring it up either; he seemed to be waiting for the moment I felt comfortable enough to talk. I didn’t want to talk.

The next day, I said nothing to Jordan about Casey, but I was thinking about her all the time. She was a ghost that followed me around the kitchen and into the shower. I took forever to pick out clothes and get dressed. I measured all my wardrobe choices against what Casey would pick.

Be breezy, I thought. If you get weepy or neurotic, he’ll just want to leave.

This was a classic projection, though I couldn’t see it at the time. I didn’t want to feel how I really felt. I didn’t want to be around myself when I was falling apart.

So I convinced myself Jordan wouldn’t be able to handle how I felt, and he was why I had to keep it together.

But I couldn’t remember how to be the breezy, normal, lighthearted version of myself. Do I usually hunch so much? I want to play with Jordan’s hair, but I can’t remember the last time I did that—will it seem like I’m overcompensating?

When I got home from work, I insisted we put on a comedy because I didn’t want to talk and I couldn’t handle anything serious, but I couldn’t remember what I would normally laugh at. All I wanted to do was cry in the bathtub and nuzzle into the center of Jordan’s chest and not talk for a thousand years.

I crawled into bed early to read relationship self-help books. I bought Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity on my Kindle so Jordan couldn’t see the cover of what I was reading. I wanted to make sense of Jordan’s desire without talking to him about it. I was too afraid to hear more about what he wanted with Casey.

Jordan and I didn’t have sex that...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.8.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-2958-9 / 1544529589
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-2958-5 / 9781544529585