You Can’t Lie to Yourself About How Your Body Flinches

You can lie to yourself about the weather, about whether you're happy at your job, about what you actually ate for lunch. You can lie about the rent and the dentist and your aunt's terrible new boyfriend. You cannot lie to yourself about the way your body flinches when he walks into the room.

There is a particular kind of silence that happens right after you've been crying in a parking lot. Not the dramatic kind. The small, useless silence of someone who just sat there long enough for the defrost to kick in until the steering wheel stopped feeling wet. Long enough for whatever was in their chest to go from sharp to dull.

I sat there for a long time that Tuesday. Or maybe it was a Thursday. There was a granola bar wrapper fallen between the seat and the door, orange with a bit of foil showing, and I kept looking at it instead of starting the car. The month had started to blur into beige, the way months do when you're inside something and not quite sure if it's a love story or a hostage situation. The car smelled like old coffee and the lavender air freshener I'd clipped to the vent three boyfriends ago, which I never bothered to remove because pulling it down would mean admitting I'd kept it that long. That I was the kind of woman who let a fake lavender tree outlast three whole relationships.

I was thinking about whether he loved me.

I know how that sounds. Maybe I am a little wrecked. Maybe that's the whole problem. I keep asking the same question to a different bartender every few months, and they always give me the same look, the kind where they stop wiping the glass for a second and just kind of nod, like, yeah, I know, you don't have to finish the sentence.

The truth is, you can feel it. That's what everyone says. The internet says it. The magazines say it. The well-meaning women at the wine bar say it between sips of something pink and expensive. You'll know. You'll feel it in your bones. And maybe that's true for some people. Maybe there are women out there walking around with this clean, unscratched compass.

I don't think I'm one of them. I think the women who claim to be are mostly just better at the trick.

I dated a man once, Benjamin, who would bring me soup when I was sick. Actual soup. From the Vietnamese place on Ninth mentioned once during a conversation about weather. He remembered. He drove across town. He sat on the edge of my bed and watched me eat it, this strange, patient look on his face, the kind of look you give something you're genuinely relieved hasn't broken yet.

He also read my journal when I was in the shower. I found out two years later. I was on my kitchen floor eating Honey Nut Cheerios out of the box because I'd lost a spoon, and there was a long crack in the counter you just kept staring at. The milk going warm in the bowl, the whole morning smelling like cardboard. The cardboard smell was the worst part. It got into my hair. I didn't shower until noon.

I bring this up because I've been thinking about how we try to make love legible. How we are desperate, all of us, to translate this enormous, animal feeling into a checklist. Does he bring soup. Does he help me move. And I get it. The world is terrifying and people are slippery. We want a manual. A rubric. Someone to tell us that if he does the right things in the right order, the thing we're feeling is real and not just the same dumb trick we've been pulling on ourselves since we were old enough to want someone.

But the soup man read my journal. And he also loved me. Both of those were true on the same Tuesday in October. I still don't know what to do with that, and I think I'm supposed to by now.

I think about that a lot now, sitting across from my current partner, watching him scroll through his phone while I tell him about my friend Sandra, who got blindsided by a divorce. He looks up. He says the right thing, mostly. He doesn't always remember the Vietnamese place, but he remembers other things. He remembers the name of my childhood dog, which I only told him about once. He remembers I hate the sound of plastic bags. He carries the heavier bag at the grocery store without making a show of it.

And yet.

I've been with people who would have died for me cinematically but who couldn't sit with me for more than a few minutes in silence without checking their phone or picking a fight. And I've been with people who could hold my silence beautifully. But those people, the quiet ones, the patient ones. They were also sometimes the ones who left without warning. Who vanished into a regular Tuesday and never explained why. You can't appeal a mystery.

So when the advice columns tell me I should be able to feel whether someone loves me, I want to throw the magazine into the ocean. Because I've felt it. I've felt it a hundred times. From people who would have gutted me if I'd let them. From people who genuinely meant it. The feeling is the same. That's the terrifying part. The feeling is almost always the same.

I want love to come with a notarized signature, and I know that's a stupid thing to want.

I have a friend, Helen, who's been married longer than I've known her, who once told me through tears that she was absolutely sure her husband did not love her anymore. I said the things you say. How can you be sure. People show love differently. Maybe he's just tired. Maybe he's depressed. And she looked at me with this clarity I will never forget, and she said, no, it's not, I'm not making this up, I don't know. I just stopped. There was a man at his office everyone joked about, and I kept waiting to feel it, that old hot wire, and it just didn't come. I didn't care. I think that's when I knew.

And I thought, okay. So jealousy is the barometer. Except I've felt jealous of women I knew he wasn't interested in. His coworkers. An old college friend he hadn't spoken to in years, who I've never even met. So what does that prove. Only that I am a person who gets jealous. Not that I am a person who is loved.

We use these proxies because the real thing is too slippery. We build these little shrines of evidence and pray at them. But underneath every shrine is the same old question: Is this real or am I making it up because I'm afraid to be alone.

I don't have an answer. Anyone who tells you they have an answer is selling something. A course or a podcast, and they are probably just as lost as the rest of us.

What I've noticed is that the people who really love us tend to do something we don't expect. Not the grand gesture. That's easy and performative and basically for the audience. The real thing is small and specific and impossible to Google.

My mother, who I have complicated feelings about, used to leave the hallway light on for me when I came home late. She just knew I was coming home and she wanted the door to be easier to open. Not because I asked. Not because I was afraid of the dark. The bulb was one of those warm ones, the warm hallway bulb, the kind they don't really sell at Target anymore, and I can still picture it, the orange smudge the bulb threw on the rug. I can't tell you what my father bought me for any birthday. I can tell you about the bulb.

And the thing about a light left on is that you can explain it away. She just had a habit. She just didn't want me to trip on the shoes. We can deflate any love if we try hard enough.

So maybe the only honest thing I can say is that you will never really be fully certain. Not in the way you want to be. The women who tell you they are certain are either lying, or they haven't been in it long enough yet. Or maybe they just haven't had the specific kind of Tuesday yet that teaches you.

Can you live inside the feeling without making it prove itself? Can you sit with the not-knowing without dragging the person you love into some late-night trial in your own head?

I still don't know if he loves me. Some days I think I do. I catch him looking at me across the kitchen in this way that makes no sense, this way that gains him nothing, and I think okay. Maybe the light is on.

Other days I'm sure he doesn't. Or I'm sure he does, but it's the wrong kind of love, the kind that's mostly about not being alone. I've seen that kind up close. It eats you from the inside out. You don't even notice until somebody points at a photograph and says, honey, look at your face.

There is no clean ending. There's the chipped-handle coffee mug he left on the counter again this morning. I put it in the sink without saying anything. I just didn't want to deal with the dishwasher.

The light was on when I got home last night. I didn't ask why. I'm not going to ask why. I think asking is how I'd lose it.