“I've been thinking about your relationships,” my friend Mia told me during one of our regular morning coffee breaks. “I have the perfect solution.”

We were sitting on a patch of grass, taking in the sun, sipping on our coffees and smoking. I looked up at her from under the brim of my oversized hat.

“You've been thinking about my relationships?” I asked her, a little surprised.

“Yes,” she responded. “I think what you need is to date someone in New York.”

“What?”

“Maybe not New York, but someone outside of Los Angeles,” she clarified. “What you want is a low-maintenance relationship that fills you but doesn't take up all your time, right? The distance will force it to go slowly and not take over your life.”

As I walked home after our coffee, I thought about this. There is something incredibly unsettling about having to cross the country to have the sort of relationship I want. Mind you, I know incredible men in Manhattan, but to actively seek a lover across the country to have a functional relationship is more than a little weird.

 

 

Speaking of Manhattan—at around the same time, my friend Atherton was having a jazz brunch at the Algonquin's Oak Room. This is a new tradition of his, what he calls his “little staycations,” a time to disconnect from the web, work and the demands of his life and focus on himself.

But today, Atherton was having a hard time disconnecting. His baby arugula salad sat untouched before him as he examined the page of the daily he had picked up on his way to the hotel. There, on one of the regular columns, was a man he'd recently become involved with.

“I don't think he's out,” he said to me when I picked up my phone.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, I don't think he's told anyone he's gay.”

“Oh, dear,” I replied.

“I can't do it,” Atherton told me. “I can't be with someone who isn't going to be able to really be with me.”

Their affair had started innocently enough—don't they always?—with a couple of comments across a largely empty venue about Atherton's ironic choice of the traditionally English Bubble and Squeak for brunch on the Fourth of July.

“So what's a nice little American bloke like you doing on this Independence Day?” the stranger had asked Atherton, walking toward him until he was standing before him, his crotch nearly in Atherton's face. “Watching the fireworks over The Hudson?”

“No,” Atherton had replied. The stranger's body language had been undeniable; without hesitation, Atherton had a finger hooked on one of the man's belt loops. Tug. Tug. Tug. “I'm just hanging out in my suite all day.”

A few hours later, Atherton found himself hanging in a swing from the chandelier of his suite engaged in sex so intense and so desperate, it needs a whole new word to describe it.

And now, there he was, avoiding his salad at brunch, with a gossip column in his hands.

“Are you going to see him again?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “Tonight. I can't help it. I like him.”

 

 

It was another night in Los Angeles and the line outside the Falcon was epic—just looking at it threatened to give me a nosebleed.

I walked to the front of the line and past the velvet rope. Inside, the patio was considerably less crowded. Los Angeles' young, beautiful and purportedly talented were lounging on couches and standing around smoking, drinking and talking.

I bumped into a couple of friends on the steps. They introduced me to the founder of a charitable organization whom I already knew parasocially—that is, by watching what he's been doing on the internet. My friend Zack was there, too. He looked distracted.

“Can you talk?” he asked me after a brief round of chit-chat.

“I was just stepping away for a cigarette,” I replied, taking his hand and pulling him aside. “What's going on?”

“I need relationship advice,” he said quietly.

“Oh, well, you've come to the right place,” I joked, lighting a cigarette. “There is no advice like that imparted by a woman at the tail-end of her divorce.”

He laughed.

“Where's Hannah?” I asked, referring to the woman he's seeing.

“She had another thing,” he said. “That's fine. I mean, we're busy. But I don't know. We've been seeing each other for months and I don't know where it's going. I don't know if we're an item or if we're seeing other people—I mean, I'm not. But I don't know if she is?”

Zack sipped his drink nervously.

“Have you talked to her about it?”

“Sort of,” he told me. “I mean, she knows I'm not seeing anyone else but she hasn't said anything about her situation. I know she doesn't want to disclose our relationship because she's in entertainment and it's better for her to appear available. I get that, but I want to know where she stands, you know? I just don't want to invest in something if she's not going to do the same. I'm really beginning to like her.”

“You should talk to her,” I said. “You should tell her what you want. Do you know what you want?”

“Yeah,” he told me. “I want her to be my girlfriend.”

“Talk to her.”

He sighed. I took a long drag from my cigarette.

Mia came out the side door.

“Let's dance!” she exclaimed, taking my hand.

I had just enough time to put out my cigarette and take Zack by the arm before Mia pulled us inside. On the dance floor, sandwiched between Mia and some other friends, Zack leaned close again and said, “if nothing has changed by my birthday, I'm going to talk to her.”

 

 

I get home late that night, but instead of going to bed, I get on Facebook. Zack's birthday is in December. He's going to wait five more months to figure out whether his desires are compatible with Hannah's? That's like Atherton seeing his paramour again despite his rising suspicion that he can't give him the kind of relationship he wants. That's like me looking to date someone across the country because I can't figure out a way to have the kind of relationship I want. All these situations have something in common: they involve people who can't communicate what they need.

At some point after my divorce, Maryanne Camaroto's PR agent sent me a copy of her book Hindsight: What You Need To Know Before You Drop Your Drawers. It took me a while to get into it because I wasn't in the right space, as I am now. Funny how that goes. Books don't speak to you until you're in a place where you can listen.

We're very different, Camaroto and I, but we do agree on one thing: defining our wants. I realized, as I was reading, that while I had a few things down (must love sex, must be interesting), I had never really taken the time out with myself to think about this.

Sitting crosslegged on my bed with my laptop before me, I caught my reflection in the mirror and was suddenly reminded of an essay by Jeanette Winterson about seeing a painting that had more power to stop her in her tracks than she had to walk away:

I had never given a picture my full attention for even one hour.

What was I to do?

Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. There are the paintings, the marvelous speaking works, definite, independent, each with a Self it would be possible to ignore, if... if... it were possible to see it. I do not only mean the crowds and the guards and the low lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the thick curtain of irrelevancies that screen the painting from the viewer. Increasingly, galleries have a habit of saying when they acquired a painting and how much it cost...

Millions! The viewer does not see the colors on the canvas, he sees the color of the money. Is the painting famous? Yes! Think of all the people who have carefully spared one minute of their lives to stand in front of it. Is the painting Authority? Does the guidebook tell us that it is part of The Canon? If Yes, then half the viewers will admire it on principle, while the other half will dismiss it on principle. Who painted it? What do we know about his/her sexual practices and have we seen anything about them on the television? If not, the museum will likely have a video full of schoolboy facts and tabloid gossip. Where is the tearoom/toilet/gift shop?

Where is the painting in any of this?

Looking at yourself is like this. Like art, we are hung for review, labeled appropriately—where we originated, how we arrived to where we are, how much we're worth, all of these external factors that have only so much to do with who we are. If we were to sit alone with our reflections for an hour, would we break down and weep as Winterson did at that little Amsterdam gallery?

“What do you want?” I asked my mirror image.

I want a partnership; that is, someone who will foster my growth and not hold me back as I explore the corridors of possibility. I want someone who is not in a hurry to make something out of our connection. Someone who will give it as much nurturing as space for it to grow in the direction of our goals. Someone who knows what he wants and has his life in order. Someone who will understand that I write and I travel and that sometimes I need to be alone. Someone who can follow my more abstract tangents. I want someone who doesn't need me, but who wants to be with me. Someone who knows what it's like to live in public, and knows how to hide, too. Someone who is passionate about what he does, but knows how to take a break. Someone who is healthy but won't try to get me to quit smoking.

Dare I ask for a smoker? Sure, why not? Is that what I want? Someone to share a cigarette in bed with me? Why am I so scared of defining my desires? Am I scared it will limit me?

Yes. Yes, I am.

Suddenly I think about an incident that happened one day at my old high school. I had graduated but my little sister still attended and I was waiting for her outside reading The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind when one of the teaching assistants—a really hot guy in his mid-twenties—said to me, “aren't you afraid that what you're reading may alienate men who want to talk to you? I don't even know what non-local means.”

I looked up briefly and said, “on the contrary, I think it does half the job for me.” Then I got back to reading.

Where the hell did that girl go? I had absolutely no qualms about stating what I wanted and how. Yes, I spent a large part of high school and the first two years of college unattached, but that never bothered me.

If anyone had told that girl that she would one day compromise everything she was for a series relationships, all of which were doomed to fail anyway (because they were built on a compromised foundation which inevitably threatens their integrity), she would have laughed.

Well, I'm going to get her back.

 

 

This was on Atherton's mind, too. But when his stranger phoned him to see him that Sunday, Atherton didn't refuse him.

“What do you want in a man?” the man asked Atherton as they lounged in the darkness of their suite.

“Fearlessness,” Atherton responded.

“Do I have it?”

“No.”

“Teach me?” the stranger asked him.

“Fearlessness can't be taught,” Atherton told him. “It must be won.”

The meaning of his own words hit Atherton hard, but still he didn't tell the man who shared his bed what he really wanted from a lover. It would have destroyed the moment.

That's the thing. It's not our lovers who necessarily do tragic things to us. It's us who, consumed by the moment, betray ourselves. During my marriage, I used to always say to my husband that love was not enough. It made him crazy, but it's true. Love isn't enough to make a relationship work. Chemistry isn't enough. Communication isn't enough.

You think I'm cynical? Try doing a three-legged race with someone who's stopping to smell the roses—in the opposite direction—and you'll see what I mean. Whether you think life is a race or a stroll, we need someone who is going at the same pace and in the same direction as we are. Human beings are not static, of course, so our wants will change over time, but it does help to start off at least in the same direction and at the same pace.

Let's start with ourselves. What do we want?

 

BLOGGIE TREATS

Fellow BlogHer contributor Liz Rizzo analyzes what she wants and how she's working to quit compromising herself in Taught to Serve Man: Struggling with Relationship Compromise: “The lesson that my needs come second in a relationship is something I've continued to struggle with. Because it's completely internalized. I do it without thinking—sometimes requiring me to backtrack or 'change my mind.' Like I get off the phone and think, Wait a minute, that's not what I want. So I call back and change what I said before. And that's just confusing to everyone. But I can't help it. Sometimes I just compromise what I want without thinking.”

Suzanne Reisman hates the advice in Steve Harvey's relationship book. In Do You Need to "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man" for Love? she elaborates on why she feels this way and closes with her own advice: “I should write my own relationship guide. Unfortunately, it will be very short. It will say, 'Be yourself. Find someone who respects that, and who you respect. Have fun.'”

In When He Just Wants To Get Into You, Alessia suggests a little honesty to men in response to another blogger's comments: “If all a man wants is to get laid, why doesn’t he walk up to a woman & say so? 'Hi, I’m Bob and all I want to do is screw you.' He doesn’t do it because he’s afraid of the, 'No way, Jose,' response. So he decides to lie to get his lay. And then complains about what happens.” This isn't a male problem. It's about not knowing or not properly disclosing your intent.