Love Stories

Sometimes our truths aren’t always the truth.

This is the thought I’ve landed on after a few days of thinking about relationships. More specifically my own past ones.

It all started this past Sunday, when news of the untimely death of artist Nipsey Hussle spread across my timeline. While I wasn’t too familiar with his music, and only came to learn of his other extremely impressive endeavors upon his death, I knew he was in a longterm relationship with the actress Lauren London, with whom they shared a child and a blended family. The news was tragic for so many reasons, but my immediate thought was how awful it was for her to lose the love of her life. Especially after making sacrifices in her career for their family.

To spend years building a life with someone, only to have it destroyed it in an instant because of a broken individual, is my nightmare.

As I processed that news, and the tributes and images and videos that followed, I did what I now know to be the worst possible thing to do to distract myself: I binge-watched the episodes of “This Is Us” that I’d missed over the past few weeks.

If you’re familiar with this show, then you know that a lot of crying ensued as I watched the Beth and Randall storyline send me on an emotional rollercoaster wondering if they were going to make it, and momentarily understanding why they might possibly not. Honestly, the only thing missing at that point was a bottle of red wine and someone playing “Sometimes It Snows In April” followed up with a montage of Prince footage. I was a wreck.

When I thought about the love story of Nipsey and Lauren, two young lovers just getting started, and the fictional one of “R&B,” where twenty years of sacrifices and compromise had reached a breaking point, I looked deeper into my own stories, and saw just how one-sided they were.

It has been well over a year since the last relationship I embarked on came to an end. Unlike all of my previous ones, this one was amicable, and included an actual verbal conversation that never changed in pitch or volume because growth (and therapy).

But even armed with the full knowledge of signs he wasn’t in the relationship for the long haul, I still spent months afterward asking myself what was it about me that was undesirable. I negotiated in my head that if I had just been more of the fantasy girl than the practical one, perhaps I’d be wearing a ring or something close to being committed.

The scariest realization when I do an inventory of the men who were either considered boyfriends, lovers or sexual partners, is the glaring commonality of how I romanticized the situations (and their ends), knowing full well I’d made horrible judgement calls just to say I was with someone or at least feel like I was with someone.

I took back an ex who broke up with me via text after I confronted him about a non mutually consensual sexual encounter (read: rape); and ultimately decided I’d had enough of him only after he spent weeks dodging me after my father’s death, during which time he’d call me “angry black woman,” went on a weeklong vacation without me and told me his friends would always be more important than me (his actual statement was so vile my therapy group – which consists of a few men – responded angrily). My reasoning was he was charming and made me laugh, he apologized and he was making an effort. My takeaway was learning that true love speaks life into you at times when you’re feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders, and doesn’t abandon you because your circumstances are inconvenient or “a buzz kill.”

I stayed in an off-and-on relationship for nearly six years despite mental, physical and financial abuse, because I had grown close to his family, and he with mine. I was afraid of upsetting that dynamic, was invested in his daughter’s upbringing, and it felt like failure to leave a man that everyone thought was perfect for me (although my uncle did pick up on his controlling persona, but never told me until after it ended). And back then I thought love was struggle. My takeaway from that was the travel bug I developed, a couple of cool girlfriends (and one terrible one, who took advantage of my post-breakup situation for her own gain…twice), and an appreciation for what I bring to the table when I find myself in a healthy relationship.

I’ve been a mistress (knowingly and unknowingly), the booty call, and the friend with benefits. I’ve been the submissive and occasionally the aggressor. I’ve been the accommodating and the one who won’t bend. I’ve left jobs, paid money I didn’t have to spare for flights I shouldn’t have taken, and placed myself in embarrassing and awkward situations where I’ve known I was not the only one because I was hopeful and desperate for a win. Each time, I’d speak of these men and moments as if they were normal ups and downs; not registering that the look I’d get from some of my friends and family was one of genuine concern for my sense of reality and self.

Yes, I’ve misrepresented many epic fails, but one of the worst by far was thinking that a man who’d moved multiple times out of the state we both lived in without ever telling me, was my soul mate. That was pretty stupid.

Almost as stupid as missing a friend’s party because I was sitting in a car for several hours, while the guy I was seeing had a meeting with a contractor in a town out-of-state that wasn’t easily accessible to public transportation.

…Or being so averse to traveling by myself that I spent an unnecessary small fortune on a weekend at a cute bed and breakfast in Boston with a man I’d later walk in on during his “self-love session” after he refused to leave the room with me to go explore the city. (I’ve gotten over my fear of solo travel, but haven’t gone back to Boston since that trip well over a decade and a half ago.)

Sure, you can look at this and say “Damn, girl…you definitely have had bad luck in the relationship department, but these celebrity and television relationships shouldn’t be #goals!” And you’d be absolutely right.

To be clear, I don’t want to be any of them. I don’t even want to be the Michelle to someone else’s Barack Obama. I don’t have that kind of ambition.

But these examples – as tragic, fantastical or exceptional as they may seem – have given me a blueprint that ideally won’t send me down the same path I’d been traveling the last couple of decades as someone who was just trying to fill the void left by absent parents and a childhood marred by sexual abuse.

To be in a committed, communicative, mutually respectful and supportive partnership where I feel valued in the present (because most folks see your value only after you’re gone), should always be the goal. To have someone want to be with you not because of what you do for them as far as appearances, status or reciprocity, but because you find joy in their presence and purpose in your connection. To see better versions of you in each other and have it motivate you each day to be and do better. That wouldn’t suck.

And that’s what I want. No exceptions. No bullshit.

In the meantime, my current truth is that I sleep in the middle of my bed, and indulge in the luxury of long hot baths, weekends blasting everything from jazz to girl power anthems, and revel in the quiet time in my own apartment doing whatever the hell I want because I’ve found true love…right here.

That also doesn’t suck.