You Can't Go Back Again: To New Orleans, or Otherwise

But you can stay friends after dating! Here's how.

It’s not that I wanted to go back. Not fully, not really. It was a vision I had of things being a little easier, softer somehow. It was the idea of being able to communicate with everyone in the room, the way I can’t in Paris because I don’t speak French yet—I mean, I do, but at the level of, what, an eight-year-old? And maybe that’s being generous? It was the idea of being able to hop back and forth between Paris and New Orleans for months at a time, living in two places at once, seeing all my friends. It was the idea of being able to still be a poet, a writer, in the United States. Maintaining that connection, giving readings, telling presses that might publish my second book of poetry that, yes, I’m an American poet, I live in the States (because sometimes they care about that sort of thing), that I have a poetry community, people who will buy books (because they do, in fact, care about that sort of thing.)

Oh, who am I kidding. It was the idea of love.

But a version of love based on the past. A man I knew twelve years ago, when he was married, when I was a friend of the family who would babysit the couple’s kids. I was 27 or 28, teaching at Loyola University, New Orleans. He was 33 or 34, I loved his insanely adorable kids, his wife, him, their creative life, their intellectual world, I loved the whole unit of them. And then they divorced and the whole friendship group fell apart, divided as usually happens during a divorce, but he and I stayed friends while he had another relationship that lasted many years.

I probably liked him the whole time but didn’t dwell on it. Nothing ever happened between us. Once he bit me. (In a joking way.) He used to be like that, silly and strange. Of course I wrote it into a poem. (Of course he is still like that.)

This past April, when I popped into New Orleans quickly for the launch party of my brilliant book editing client (for whom I now do social media marketing), this man and I, over drinks, realized we were both single. At the same time. After all these years. You know how the story goes.

He flew to Paris for a week, all these long FaceTime calls for months, blah blah. In short, I believed. I jumped in.

Writing with cats: one month with my petsitting charges.

I arranged to spend two months in New Orleans to cat-sit for Argerie and dog-sit for Courtney and see some clients and rent out my apartment to Brandi during the Olympics to make some much-needed extra cash. But mostly to see if this might work.

Turns out it won’t work, for reasons both very complicated that I still can’t wrap my head around and for very obvious there-all-along reasons that anyone could have seen from a mile away.

So, we’ll stay friends. (I am very good at this part.)

How to stay friends with someone you dated and liked, you ask? It can sometimes take years to reach a true friendship zone. If there was a very deep wound then it’s unlikely. But if you can be mature, honest, respectful of each other, if you can acknowledge when it just isn’t right, that, as Gertrude Stein once wrote of a place not a relationship, “there is no there there,” or if the timing is off, but mostly if no one’s heart has been ripped to shreds and no one’s ego too badly bruised—it is possible to transition into friendship. I do it all the time. I’ve even seen it happen with ex-spouses. It helps to see the other person as real. Flawed, complex, human. And searching for something—a certain version of love—that maybe you are not equipped to give.

It helps to repeat a mantra. You can borrow mine: There is always another love.

I grabbed hold of this mantra in 2006, during my first year at Louisiana State University’s MFA program in creative writing. I was 22, anorexic skinny, and engaged to my then-fiancé, the first person I’d ever slept with. I was assigned to work as a TA for Rick Blackwood’s literature class, “Sex and Violence in Cinema.”

We watched Psycho, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Lolita, Belle de Jour, Terminator, Dr. Strangelove, Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness, The Deer Hunter. We read Plato, Freud, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Marx, Nietzsche. I attended Rick’s lectures, watched the films, and led weekly discussion sections with my small class, whose papers I graded. I was a student as much as I was the “teacher” for my little break-out group of undergrads.

Rick’s thesis for the class was that in film, as in life, “there is always another love.” It was kismet; I was already looking for a way out of the engagement. These words have become the motto of my life. There is always another love. Someone is always arriving on the horizon. Parents divorce and then remarry. One love ends and another begins.

It’s hard to get too worked up about a relationship ending when you live with this sort of optimism.

(It’s hard to pick one flawed, complex, deeply human person when you live with this sort of optimism.)

So, look, you move on because you must. But first you have to try, and then because you are likely quite picky and that is why you are single at 40 (or 47, or 53, or 28), you have to just laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Here is my advice for how to stay friends after dating, based on my own rules, having dated for [checks calendar], yep, two decades:

1. Have a lot of respect for yourself and for others.

2. Everyone is always doing their best.

3. Do your best. Above all else, be kind.

4. We are all here for the first time. No one knows what they are doing.

5. Have high expectations of how you ought to be treated. Communicate your needs and expectations. Stop as soon as the other person is clear (through words or actions) that they cannot meet your needs or expectations.

6. Laugh about how strange dating is. Use it to make, at the very least, a bunch of new friends.

7. There is always another love.

8. You can’t go backward in life. (I mean, you might as a senile old person, but that’s a worst case scenario.)

I feel grateful that I have dated men who hold themselves and me to these maxims.

What I think happened for me over the last four months is that, maybe, the version of this man I wanted him to be is the version of himself in 2011. Perhaps it was the unit, the whole family I was obsessed with, wanted. The idea of it, of belonging. But no one is the same person they were a decade ago. Nor should they stay one way, unchanged.

For example, I’ve changed: I moved to France. Started learning French. Became a freelance copywriter, began my own business. Published a poetry book. Tried (trying) to figure out how my life might look as a writer, as a person eschewing the status quo—but still wanting to belong, to a person or a place.

Something about a hallway, about a poem, about the past.

Lately my friends keep saying they’re proud of me for “opening my heart.” For putting myself “back out there,” for trying, over and over again. My heart is not, to quote the Frank O’Hara poem, “closing like a fist.”

To be honest, I mostly feel embarrassed. I hate how naïve I can be. I hate repeating patterns. Especially when I know the problem lies with me—not with any of these men.

I date as if I have a pet-sitting gig in another town. I fly in and dazzle the animal, then cry a bit and leave.

I date as if conducting a business negotiation: do you, too, want this type of life that I want? No? Well, what if it looked like this? Still no? Okay, shall we keep doing business together or cut our losses? Circle back in the future, perhaps?

Transaction. Self-protection. Loving someone else’s housecats, kids. Running home to safety: i.e. being alone. Taking only the tiniest little temporary risks.

Loving other women’s men. I mean, loving the men whom other women turned into husbands, fathers, one part of a pair.

But also loving sailors, business owners, dreamers, dads, the ones who hurt me and the ones who let me run into their arms.

I give back to the world the men who don’t want to, who can’t, fall in love with me. There’s no reason to force what isn’t there. (That’s my practical side.) But I also admit that we share a little love. (That’s the poetry.) Love is exchanged. Love is in the fabric of it. Love is in the heartache, the tears, the frustration. Love is in the honest conversations, the men who really see who I am, the harrowing reveal, the invitation to return. The men who show me who they really are: that’s love. And more so, who they can’t be. Who they can’t go back to being.

It is love when I say I understand, even though I’m sad, and I can’t go backward either, nor can I lower my expectations.

We move forward, searching, in a sea of there is always another love. We’re alive. This is life! We’re swimming in love. It’s like that Kabir poem (to quote the Robert Bly translation): “I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.”

Maybe we don’t move on—we swim on, mouths open, gulping down water as if it’s in the very air we breathe.

Sunlight, raindrops, refracted light.