Six Feet Away on the Couch, Looking at His Phone

He was sitting six feet away on the couch, half-watching a documentary, half-scrolling his phone. I might as well have been a lamp.

I'd cooked his favorite carbonara. I'd put on the navy dress he once told me made me look like a "real woman." I'd stood there waiting for him to look up.

He never looked up.

The plate was getting cold in my hands. I could feel the grease starting to congeal on the rim. Somewhere outside, a neighbor's dog was barking — that low, frustrated bark dogs do when they're stuck inside and they know you're stuck inside too. I just stood there. I don't know how long. The bacon had gone that waxy, half-rubbery thing it does when it sits too long, and I was watching it happen like it was the most interesting thing in the room. It wasn't.

And then I thought about Helen.

My old friend. The one with the whole scarcity playbook memorized. The one who made herself impossible to pin down. The one who, by every rule in the dating handbook, was supposed to win.

She did win. Ring, house in the suburbs, kids. Two, I think. She also got something else, and that's the thing I can't stop chewing on.

You know the advice. Mother to daughter, older sister to the younger one over mimosas at a bridal shower where everyone's already a little drunk: don't give yourself away too easily, make him work for it, be the prize not the gift.

It sounds like empowerment. After centuries of women being traded like livestock, it's a relief to hear we have leverage. That our attention is currency. That we can sit back and let them chase.

And honestly, the psychology isn't made up. When something is scarce, our brains give it more value. When you have to chase, dopamine spikes. We're wired to want what we can't have.

But nobody warns you about the other side. The thing that makes a man pursue you is also the thing that makes sure he never stops pursuing you. Even after the ring. Even after the carbonara's gone cold.

There's no exit ramp on this playbook.

I met Helen in graduate school. She had this thing where she'd walk into a room and everyone would quietly recalibrate.

She wasn't loud, exactly. She wasn't trying to be pretty either, though she was that, too.

She was the most contained.

She had rules. Her central one: never be fully available. Never let them have all of you at once.

She didn't return texts for exactly long enough to be noticeable. She had hobbies she'd mention casually, like pottery, I think, and some running group, and something with a community garden, so he always knew there was something more interesting she might be doing instead. She didn't introduce him to family until the relationship was "real enough," and "real enough" kept moving.

Men lost their minds over her.

I watched it happen. I want to say three times because three sounds tidy. Honestly, the exact number is fading into static, and it was just a long blur. They sent flowers. They planned dates the kind where you can tell a man has googled "romantic things." They wrote her letters, which felt almost embarrassing to witness. They called her fascinating, mysterious, electric.

The thing about Helen was that she wasn't any of those things. She was just guarded. Different thing entirely. Most men couldn't see it, and neither could she.

She eventually married the second one. A kind-eyed architect named John who had chased her for over a year before she said yes. He cried at the wedding. Her father told me later he'd never seen a man look so relieved to be picked.

Here's what happens after the wedding, when the playbook keeps running because nobody thought to turn it off:

John would come home from work exhausted and try to tell Helen about his day. She'd nod in a way that looked interested but wasn't quite. He'd lean in for a kiss and she'd turn her cheek at the last second — playful, she thought — and say something like, "You missed me that much, huh?"

She was still making him earn it. Years into the marriage.

And he was still earning. He planned surprises. He booked trips. He kept trying to outrun her unavailability with more availability. He became, in some terrible way, a full-time performer of his own devotion.

But something else was happening under all that effort.

John was lonely.

I know because I ran into him at a coffee shop one rainy night. He talked at length about nothing in particular. Weather. A documentary about deep-sea fish. Some problem at work he couldn't quite explain. He wasn't asking for advice. He wasn't complaining about Helen, not directly. He was just talking, the way a man talks when he's been holding his breath for years and finally finds a person who'll let him exhale.

I asked him, gently, if he was happy.

He went quiet for a while. Then he said, "I'm happy when she's in the room. But she never quite gets in the room with me."

I didn't know what to say to that. I still don't.

I need to talk about my own marriage now, because this isn't really about Helen. It's about what happens when two people have read the same playbook and just highlighted different pages.

I was the opposite. I was the woman with the carbonara in the navy dress. I texted back fast. I said I love you first. I moved into his apartment before he asked because waiting felt stupid. I cried openly during a movie about a dog who dies, which he found mortifying and which I still don't entirely apologize for.

I gave myself away like I had an unlimited supply.

And yes, my husband took me for granted in ways that made me want to scream into a throw pillow in the middle of the night. He stopped noticing small things. He stopped trying the way he used to. He assumed I'd always be there, the way you assume the sun bothering to come up.

But here's the part I didn't expect.

He also told me things. Real things. The fears he hadn't told anyone. Grief about his mother that came out sideways, in a sentence about a song on the radio. A weird recurring dream about drowning in a parking lot. He handed me the ugly parts of himself. The soft, unpolished stuff. The parts John never got to hand anyone because Helen was always slightly out of reach, always turning her cheek, always just a little too interesting to fully land.

I had given myself away too freely. That's still true. I undersold myself in ways I'm not sure I can fully add up.

But I had also been there. In the room. Actually in it.

The scarcity playbook teaches us to perform. To ration ourselves like wartime supplies. To treat love like a hostile negotiation where the person who needs less wins. It teaches us that our value is backwards, that the more we withhold, the more we are worth.

And it works, for a while. A man who's been kept just slightly out of reach can mistake the chase for devotion, and you can't really fault him for it. Mid-pursuit looks a lot like the real thing from the inside of a marriage.

But the playbook never teaches you how to stop.

A woman who has spent a decade making herself difficult to reach is, by the end of it, just difficult to reach. The performance hardens into her actual personality. She can't let anyone in, because letting someone in was never part of the blueprint.

The man who chased her gets proximity without intimacy. A marriage that looks, from the outside, like the most romantic story in the room.

And inside, he's sitting in a coffee shop, telling a near-stranger about deep-sea fish, because she's the first person in years who let him finish a sentence.

And before I let the rest of us off the hook: the women who cooked the carbonara and put on the navy dress and waited. The women who confused availability with worth. Who believed somewhere deep down that love was something you earned by being the least demanding version of yourself.

I have been this woman. I am, on certain bad Tuesdays, still this woman.

And the cost is real. Because a man who never had to work for your presence will eventually treat your presence like weather. Like a subscription he forgot to cancel.

But, and this is the part that kept me up last night, a man who has access to your actual self also has access to something the scarcity women can never offer. He has access to a human being. Not a performance, not a strategy. Just a person who cries during dog movies, says I love you first, and actually shows up.

Being loved as a strategy isn't the same thing as being loved as an assumption, and neither one feels like the real thing when you're the one on the receiving end.

Helen was loved as a strategy, and John was happy to keep running it. From the outside it looked like devotion. From where he stood it felt like worship. Underneath, it was a man in love with his own pursuit of her, not with her.

I was loved as an assumption. My husband assumes I'll always be in the room. He doesn't have to work to keep me there. But that assumption has made him lazy in ways that have nearly ended us more than once.

Maybe the scarcity playbook and the self-sacrifice playbook were never actually opposites. Just two different ways of screaming we don't believe we're worth picking without a gimmick.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table in a sweater that's too small. There's a greasy smear on the counter I keep staring at instead of writing. I just ate leftover carbonara out of the pan, standing up, because the plate was dirty and I didn't feel like washing it. The pan is still sitting in the sink.

My husband is asleep on the couch. The TV is still on. I should probably wake him up. I probably won't.

I don't even know which one I am on any given Thursday. I'm just tired of pretending I figured it out, and I'm tired of pretending the playbook is the problem when really, the problem is maybe I never learned I could just stand in the room without earning my spot first.

The dog is still barking outside. It's been going long enough that it's just part of the room by now. It can bark all night if it wants.