I am also an unreliable narrator of my own story. I want to paint myself with a pretty flattering brush in order to escape reflection into the ugliest parts of me. And when I'm being honest, I feel certain I'm actually kind of the worst.
When I really and truly love something, I hoard it. I don't recommend it to people, I don't want to engage in conversation about it, I get aggravated when people are like, "oh have you heard of this band? They're my favorite right now!"
There aren't toooooo many things I'm this greedy about...most of it is music, like Glass Animals and Eels. Rarely is it a restaurant, though my personal recipes I am SUPER guarded about and I do not share them. Sometimes it's art, sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a movie.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is probably the biggest one on my Close To The Chest list.
I know it's silly, this is a really popular move, it's really well known. It isn't some obscure thing that I can be smug about in my own little zeitgeist cloud...it's...it's fuckin' Eternal Sunshine. Who my age and at least twenty years younger hasn't seen this movie and enjoyed it? Fucking ridiculous. I was...I think 19 when it came out, and I remember watching it by myself and thinking that it was such a tragic love story, and I reflected on my own life and understood how miserable I was with my eldest's father, and there was just no love there at all. I was certainly no Clementine, Chris was certainly no Joel, but we were also not two people who lost each other and then chose us again. Ew. We were two people who hated being together and that was that.
My relationship model before Eternal Sunshine was What Dreams May Come. The idea of soulmates, someone you would choose suffering with because you are meant to be together, endured for several years as the paragon of heteronormativity and coupling up. And like...when you strip the idea of soulmates down to something like, "you would choose to suffer with someone because you were meant to be together", you can hear the misogyny of it all...the patriarchy of it. What a shitty idea to sell to mostly AFAB people (since we are the primary consumers of anything displaying romantic love)...that you may suffer, and your partner may abandon you when you need them most, but if they're your soulmate, you'll stick around. Destiny is stronger than autonomy and happiness. It's fucking insidious, and I fell right into it. How could I help it? I saw What Dreams May Come at 13, I think...maybe 14 (I looked it up, I was 14, I saw it the year it came out) and that age is right about the time you're figuring out relationship dynamics and being taught how to perform gender expectations of others and yourself, role expectations related to gender, and how to connect those things together and perform in a relationship.
Soulmates actually fell apart for me fairly quickly (though it is worth mentioning that I still love What Dreams May Come. It's such a sentimental movie, and there is a lot you can feel good about pulling out of it. I took a lot of parenting advice from What Dreams May Come, so while I may no longer believe in soulmates, the movie still holds up. And I will forever want my home to be graced by a wisteria tree at the entryway) once I started being in relationships. Especially because I was in relationships with grown ass men when I was still a child. Society is really and truly failing AFAB kids. So there was this pocket of time where I was ideologically driftless when it came to what to model relationships after. And then came Eternal Sunshine, and I latched on.
I do credit this movie with giving me the audacity to leave my eldest's dad. I saw two deeply flawed people break up, erase each other, find each other again, become aware of who the other is, and then choose each other again with full knowledge of what they were getting into. I knew Chris and I were never going to be that, I knew I had actually despised him from jump, I knew I was not attracted to him, and I knew he treated me terribly. So I left.
I dated. I got into a relationship with Allen.
I found myself adjacently unhappy. I loved Allen this time, I had been attracted to Allen at one point in the past. There was no sense of predatory yuckiness between us, we were bonded in a way that was real and not rooted in me trying to escape trauma. But would I choose Allen again, knowing all of his flaws? Would the bumblebee fly, anyway? No. I wouldn't. I knew it before I acted on it. The idea of staying together for our kid kept me rooted longer than I should have, because splitting from Chris cost me my oldest and I didn't want to go through that again, or put another child through that. I couldn't. Allen and I were together for...five years, I think. I had checked out after three. I knew he wasn't right for me, and I stayed with him, but it didn't really feel like a choice. Eternal Sunshine showed a conscious choice, and I wasn't making a conscious choice. My hand was being more forced than anything else.
I was lucky that Allen and I split so amicably, and we both recognized that we could be friends, and be roommates, and raise our kid together in a way where everybody won.
I dated again.
I met David.
And truly, I think David is where I could have completely diverged from this story and learned the big L lesson that I think Eternal Sunshine really hammers home, but that I didn't catch until a few years ago.
When our relationships end and we reflect on why that person was a bad choice, I think it's fairly safe to assume that we promise ourselves we will never do that again. We will never go for that kind of person again. We list their flaws, we pick apart every single thing we didn't like, and we tell ourselves those are our red flags from here on out. I'm no stranger to that, I've done the relationship autopsy a few times, coming out of it thinking I had learned some amazing lessons about myself and what I was willing to put up with, and where my barriers would be drawn up for next time. I told myself the patterns I allowed the last time, and the different patterns from the time before, no longer had me in a chokehold, and I had grown as a person and as a partner.
David was unlike anybody I had ever dated. David was the first person I broke my "no military partners" rule for. He was a lawyer in the military, something similar to that, perhaps? I know it was something legal adjacent, and I know it was for the military. David was very very very country, very very very white, and very very very earnest. I had legitimately never dated anybody like David in my life. The first date David and I had was supposed to be to this place in the Springs called Marigolds, my favorite bakery/restaurant, and then we were going to go the bar across the street and have a drink or two. But that day was the day Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed, and when I told him my friends wanted to go celebrate at Club Q, could we take a raincheck, he instead said, "well why can't I come celebrate, too? This is a big deal, and if it's important to you and your friends, let's experience that together." And I was just hooked on David from that moment forward. I was still seeing other people, though, because one, I have always been about that ho life and exploring my sex options is extremely rewarding, and because two, I did learn to not put all of my eggs into one basket when it came to partners. That was a mistake I definitely learned from.
One of the people I had been seeing at the same time as David was Dan. I was also seeing Brian and...oh fuck, this other guy...Zach? Jeff? I dunno. But I drifted away from the other few people I was seeing, and then I was just seeing David and Dan.
David was so sweet and charming and transparently into me. He was going to go home and visit his mom, and he wanted to buy an outfit for going to see her, and I had to stay home with my daughter that day, so he sent me pictures of outfits and had me help him pick the one he was going to buy. I remember sitting on my couch thinking that David was perfect, and I was seriously, seriously into him. He called me just to hear my voice, when we were together it felt like we fit. And had always fit. I mean...being with David kind of felt like finding my soulmate. I remember Allen telling me, "that dude wants to wife you up bad, I can tell, and you haven't even been seeing each other that long."
Barrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfffffffffffffffffffffffff.
It isn't like Allen saying that was bad. It wasn't. It isn't like it made me feel a certain way about David. It didn't. I loved it. And I think somewhere, a universe exists where I chose David and we are married, happy, and ranching somewhere, as blissfully into each other as we were in the months we dated.
I didn't choose David, though. I chose Dan.
Where David was forthcoming, Dan was elusive. Where David was sincere, Dan was acerbic and sardonic. Where David was attentive, Dan was aloof. Where David saw my fullness despite any paper trail pedigree, Dan saw what I wasn't and punished me for it.
Somehow, the Dan option was my ambrosia. I tearfully broke things off with David. We were both upset. David was upset I had been seeing other people, and I suppose that's fair, though no exclusivity had ever been discussed, but we were both upset to stop seeing each other because there was a LOT there. David made himself important in my life with intention. David knew I had children, and he was so on board with that. He respected needing to wait until we were serious to meet my daughter, but he met Allen and he met my other friends, and he never made me feel like I had to chase him. He just...showed up every day and loved that I showed up, too. It felt like we had already been an established item, and David telling me that he felt the same way was a gut punch because he wasn't wrong.
But Dan was making me earn it and making me feel like shit the entire way through, and I guess that's the cup of a carpenter.
When Dan and I fell apart because of course we did, I was emotionally shattered, and while I have come to realize that this was NOT because I was desperately in love with Dan in any meaningful way, untethering from that rotten anchor was still really hard.
And I didn't want to go through any of that ever again. I spent a lot of time after my break up with Dan wishing I had chosen David. I realized this about halfway through my relationship with Dan, actually. When Dan was deployed, I reached out to David to apologize to him, and he called me on my bullshit right away. He saw my bullshit before I did, honestly. He told me he had no interest in getting a drink with me, because he guessed whatever relationship I had going on was failing and I wanted to find some sort of safety in him, but he said very firmly that he was nobody's second choice, and I could take my apology and shove it right in my own butt. To his face I was indignant, but he WAS right. I was quietly hoping meeting up for apology and explanation drinks would turn into an "oops, we boned, and now there are all of these feelings again, guess I'll break up with my partner now and we can try again!" David blocked me after that and I never talked to him ever again. I can't even remember his last name to look him up, but I truly and genuinely hope wherever David is, he's happy.
I did a lot of soul searching after Dan. Dan strung me along, and while I definitely was seeing other people after we officially broke up, and I knew he was seeing other people even if he didn't admit it (which he didn't owe me), I was still holding out hope that Dan and I would end up together. THIS was my Eternal Sunshine Era where I still thought it was a love story instead of a cautionary tale. I saw a lot of Dan and I reflected in those characters. Similar to Jim Carrey's Joel, Dan was avoidant, dismissive, judgmental, and passively boring (to me). Similar to Kate Winslet's Clementine, I saw myself as flighty, sure of myself, a little weird, and interesting (to me). Colorful against drab mundanity, exciting to someone who didn't really allow themselves against the grain excitement. I know I wrote blogs during this period where I quoted various Clementine monologues and applied them to my relationship with Dan. Because honestly, I forced it to fit. I was confronted with the reality of who Dan was and how he saw me, and I would have said "okay" if he had chosen me again.
When I met Derek, he was nothing like Dan...he was like David. He was sentimental and earnest and he wasn't ashamed to like me. He didn't make me chase his approval, it was ok for me to be who I was, where I was, in the shape I was in, with the life I lived. And I still didn't want it. I was still chasing Dan, but I was honest about it, and I felt like that was growth.
But the biggest failing that we all have is feeling so certain that knowing what our pitfalls and problems are means we are working on changing and overcoming them; the thing that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind confronts us with is it absolutely does not.
Derek is, for all intents and purposes, Dan. Now I say this with love for my husband, because I DO love him, and I say this with grace for myself, because I have grown...but Eternal Sunshine to me now shows how, had I really understood myself and CHANGED in that understanding, I would have ended up with David. I would have chosen David in a second, and I would have left Dan behind. Or I would have chosen myself and been with nobody, but that's for another day.
Twenty some odd years later, I still love Eternal Sunshine, but it shows how terrible we are at breaking our own patterns and calling that anything other than what it is. Joel and Clementine are miserable together. They may not remember, but their interviews from Lacuna paint a bleak story. They both listen to the trajectory of their past together, and they both make the conscious decision to get back together. They are still the same people. Nothing has changed, they didn't learn lessons from their past relationship because they don't remember it. They walk into the same choice, despite being told by themselves that it's a mistake. That's not romantic, that's a warning. Joel and Clementine are not soulmates. They are two people who are attracted to each other, and that's fine, but they are two people confronted with the idea that they do not work, and they end badly, and they go ahead and make the choice that a version of them understands to be bad. It's a little silly to me now, and I am not rooting for them. My love of the movie comes from the autopsy of memory, and the understanding that even the worst days are ones worth remembering, because there were really great days, too.
I have been sitting on this blog for months, and I opened it today because I had an episode that made me want to email Dan. I found a folder full of our old emails to each other, and I read one of the last pleasant emails we exchanged. It was from Dan, and sadly my email to him that he was responding to wasn't attached. I wish it was, he mentioned a disagreement we had about racism and I'm very curious about what I said. I am kind of guessing I said something pretty casually racist, I know who I was twelve years ago. But everything else he wrote clued me in to two things: one, he held pretty socially progressive views for the small window of him that email showed me; B, I did not pay any attention to him as a person.
I have been really wrestling with this since yesterday.
Not because I feel like Dan got the short end of the stick or anything. I suppose in a way he did, but not in any kind of way that I feel the need to apologize to him. I've been struggling with this because I spent so much time obsessing over Dan and getting over Dan and I can't even tell you the things about him that made letting go so hard. I have blogged before about how I understand that so much of my difficulty in getting over Dan was less about Dan and more about me and how he made me feel about myself, but I don't think I understood how little of it had to do with him. Almost nothing. Because I cannot for the life of me recall anything about Dan socially. Like, I know nothing about him. I was just telling my girlfriend that the two things I can say about Dan for sure are that he was exceptionally smart, and he had a great laugh. His laugh always sounded surprised, like he was laughing in spite of himself, and I loved his laugh. But after reading that email and feeling shock at not recalling any of these things about Dan and forgetting them so hard that I allowed for the space to keep Allen's voice in my head with the assertion that Dan was super conservative (though I do not think I have ever in my life dated a conservative, I said as much then to Allen and I maintain that now), I feel like I have no other choice but to conclude that I didn't love Dan for Dan at all.
My entire relationship with Dan was about seeking his approval, but for no reason other than he refused to give it to me in any meaningful to me way. I chased him and victimized myself because I wanted validation from a person that I did not know enough about to know if this was approval I even wanted. This was not terribly fair to Dan. I am not here to like, make him out to be the victim. I know I did some dirty fuckin' shit while Dan and I were together, I lied to him and misrepresented my victimization in very typical white lady ways, weaponizing my tears and that's gross. It isn't like he didn't make me cry, he definitely did, but I can think of a few times where I played it up WAY harder than necessary just to twist the knife, and I'm not even sure I was holding a knife to begin with. I do not think I was cognizant of any of this in the moment. I do not think I understood at 27, 28, and 29 that I was stuck in limerance without cause, I'm pretty sure this is something that you can only see in hindsight. But I do feel some type of way about it, because I accused Dan of so much shit that hurt me that I think I was doing to him.
Now, several things can be true at once. Did Dan treat me like garbage? Absolutely. Was it valid to feel like Dan was embarrassed of me and to feel like he was right to be and to chase his love and validation? To my recollection yeah. Was Dan cruel to me? Absolutely. By Dan's own admission he was cruel to me, so this is not a projection or more victimizing. He wasn't nice to me. I could have left, but I didn't. I'll never know if he was trying to force my hand, or if this is just the way he behaves. We haven't spoken since 2015. I was considering emailing him today, actually. I've considered emailing him a lot in the last ten years, I think the last time I emailed him was 2016. He didn't respond, which told me a lot, and that's a small part of why I don't think I'll be emailing him in 2026. The other parts are why would I? And I've said deeply uncharitable things about him in these blogs in the last few years, and my biggest personal fear is finding out the ways that he ALSO figured out I was a rotten egg beyond the reasons he had 15 years ago. I've needed to exorcise those demons, but nobody should have to read someone else's moratorium on the ways they are terrible people that we aren't attracted to and that we actually kinda despise. I'm not saying I think he reads my blog currently, but I AM saying that there isn't a small possibility that if I DID email him, he might feel compelled to go read my blog and catch up on what I've done the last eleven years since we spoke. Even if he didn't respond. I know I would be curious. I AM curious about him, and sometimes I do wish there could be a friendship between us, and I think more and more...especially after yesterday...it's because I am quite curious about who he is as a person.
I think it's pretty shitty that I never committed to memory anything tangible about him. It is deeply selfish that all of my pining for him wasn't about HIM. That's freeing as well, though hardly revelatory, I've blogged about that before. I pined for Dan because I wanted to be worthy, but I don't know who I wanted to be worthy for. So the only conclusion is that I wanted to be worthy to ME, which makes so much of my relationship to Dan's approval egotistic and self serving. I honestly cannot say if I wanted Dan to love me, or if I wanted me to love me and I felt like Dan was the finish line of some shitty marathon I never signed up to participate in. I can tell you so much about David, I can tell you so much about Allen, I can even fucking tell you about my oldest's dad. But I cannot tell you much about who Dan was as a person. I don't know him. I didn't know him. I know some of the things he was interested in as hobbies, like I remember he got really into making beer (that tasted like salami and I hated it), he went snowboarding with his friends on weekends, he was a runner...I think he did cross country in high school?...he played video games enough that I felt like window dressing in his life because he'd game for hours while I just kinda hung out....he liked reading. But our interests are just a part of who we are. I can't tell you about his belief system. I think I remember us getting into an argument about things worth dying for, but I more remember him making me feel stupid about my answer than I recall what my answer even WAS, and what he said he thought was worth dying for. I don't feel good about the fact that I was longing for someone who like...didn't even matter enough for me to get to know. He didn't inspire me to educate myself on any topics he discussed with me, he didn't recommend I read anything, he didn't really talk about anything big and important in the news that he was excited by or grossed out by, and while I can attribute this to him not meaking me any part of meaningful staple in his life, I can also say that I never bothered to ask. I did not do any kind of service to Dan. We were bad together because neither of us really fucking cared about the other person, and both of us would have been much better off if we had admitted that to ourselves and then admitted it to the other person.
In defense of myself, I think these are big ideas that you can't really understand in your mid to late twenties. But we always look to excuse ourselves from our grossest failings, so I'm just going to have to sit with that.
I didn't read any of our other emails to each other. I only read the one and then deleted them all. Deleted all of our old conversations. I don't need to see them, I don't need to know who Dan was then, because that chapter of my life is over. Who he was doesn't matter. I mean, it did, and I am apologetic about not figuring him out. Super gross of me.
Since Dan and I stopped talking, I have done a lot of soul searching about the relationship. About my role in it. I know I was not a good person back then. I know that I did not do the best job of communicating things to Dan and advocating for myself. I do not see myself as a massive victim of Dan anymore, though I do still think he was deeply and unnecessarily cruel to me, and as much as I dismissed the reality of him, he dismissed the reality of me in ways that far surpass mine. Though there is no olympics of pain and wrong doing. I've often wondered if there is any blowback from this relationship on Dan's part. I wonder if there is any remorse, or reflection, or sadness about us and the ways that he failed to be decent to me. I wonder if he's uncovered ways that I was cruel and dismissive...because I can think of a few times that I was. I wonder if he's gone through the motions of discovery like I have, or if I just ceased to matter the moment we stopped talking. I wonder if, after so much time, he and I could be friends, because at least for me, there is enough distance and understanding now that it would be like meeting someone new with the knowledge that the intimacy of a romantic relationship wouldn't be on the table in the least. It's what makes me want to reach out and see how he's doing. What keeps me from doing it is maybe I AM a painful memory, and that doesn't even have to be about me personally. Maybe I'm something Dan is ashamed to admit he did to someone, and any reminder of that sucks. Again, not because of ME, but because nobody likes to admit to their callousness and be reminded of it. Or maybe Dan has done the same kind of autopsy of our relationship and figured out that yes, I am a deeply unlikable person and who wants anything to do with someone like that? I have no interest in rehashing our relationship with him, or litigating the wrongs and slights. While I would love to know why certain things went down the way they did, I also know that it won't make anything better. I've dealt with my wounds and nothing Dan could ever say would make things different.
I think I'm just curious about him now. In a way that is completely asexual and devoid of romantic longing. I want to know who Dan is, because I didn't before, and it's fucking nuts to me that I let that slide. This isn't even a "I hope wherever he is, he's happy!" kind of thing, because in the most objective way, his happiness is of no consequence to me. I don't wish him harm, certainly, but whether he's happy or not is not a thing I'm invested in. In the ways where like, we don't care about the happiness of someone we don't know, because we don't know them so why do we care? In an overall human sense, I hope he's happy, but him personally, I'm detached from. And I think if I were to ever try and pursue the wild idea of emailing him that I get from time to time, it's what keeps me grounded in the idea that I was not ever in love with Dan as more than a concept (a thing I lobbed in his general direction as my own J'ACCUSE), and he could be the most interesting person in the world that shares every last one of my social ideals and I would not ever in a million years feel anything more toward him than friendliness.
To bring things full circle, it's not impossible that I would make different choices now. I think, if I were Clementine, I wouldn't choose Joel. I would choose myself. I love Derek, I know who he is, I can tell you everything about him, but I don't know that I would choose him again with the information I've gained over the last twelve years of our relationship. I want to say that the cautionary tale of Eternal Sunshine taught me something finally, and I can examine my habits and choices with a much clearer set of eyes. There is no romance in walking through fire again and again.
