The Love of Your Life

Who's the love of your life?

A few years ago, my mom told me the man she dated for several years before her and my dad got together was hers. They lived together for a little bit. She counts their relationship as a marriage. She has 27 more years with my dad under her belt than that guy so why him? She said he was an egotistical asshole. She said she caught him posing and checking himself out in the mirror more than once. That revelation, that a man whose picture I've never even seen and, more importantly, IS NOT MY FUCKING DAD, is the love of my mom's, life has clanged in my brain for years but I think I figured it out.

My mom is not an overly emotional person. I don't mean frigid - if I don't see her for more than a week she texts me with, "I MISS U", followed by a litany of sad emojis - but she's not prone to weeping or losing her temper And maybe that's it. Maybe he made her kinda crazy for a while. I remember how crazy I felt with my first real boyfriend. I was jealous and clingy. When I helped him unpack in his new dorm room, five hours away, I cried so much that his mom mumbled something like "por Dios, mi'jita, ya." Enough already, girl. I can't imagine my mom blubbering over anyone like that but from what she's told me about her unofficial second husband, I don't think he respected her and that must be what unglued her.

A guy I liked many years ago told me about how his parents' happy marriage was fractured by his father's imprisonment. He told me they moved on with their lives but still cried for each other. He typed, "be right back", and went silent for several minutes. I figured he'd left to compose himself. I cried, too, and prayed for the universe to put them back together. How could life be so cruel and unfair to True Love? Surely that kind of devotion would see them reunited someday. We're still waiting, last I checked.

My best friend nipped my initial attraction at a mutual friend in the bud, confiding that he was about to visit his girlfriend, a girl I had recently just met, in Spain.

"Really? They're together?" I asked more surprised than disappointed.

"She's the love of his life," he said. That relationship, which was built on years of close friendship, ended so traumatically for the both of them that they can hardly speak each other's names.

 You can love a lot of people in your life, like I have. Or you're in one of those rare, animal kingdom relationships where you've been together since you were kids and half the people that know about it think it's the sweetest romance (you can count me in that category) and the other half are cynical assholes that are sure you're just a couple of codependent dipshits hiding your mutual hatred in the box where you keep your love notes and prom pictures (also me, depending on the day).

I don't know how to answer the question of who the love of my life is because I don't know what qualifies someone for the position and the passage of time inevitably distorts one's perception of past loves for better or worse. I don't know if I'm mistaking jealousy, irrationality, co-dependence, or a list of other pathologies for love. For me, there still exists a gap between wild, passionate, In-Love-love and stable, devoted, Love-love. Maybe not a gap so much as, if the first one works out it cools down into the second one and you just have a boring, comfortable life together.

I am mystified by couples that have stood the test of time and are still wildly in love. I can never seem to get past the 2-year mark without a steady decline of sex and attraction. That's all that In-Love shit is, right? Being drawn to someone so far beyond your control that you have to force yourself not to stare, not to call, to Be Cool so that you don't freak them out with the blinding intensity of your adoration, every tap, comment, text, and Like forming a hydra-headed digital crush beast in the much-lamented age of social media.

Maybe that's what's got me asking in the first place and I'm just another one of the many millennials feeling anxious about romance in the age of WiFi. Our parents probably never got dumped via text so we only have each other to gauge the damage. My mom keeps handwritten love notes my dad wrote her while co-piloting my godfather's little plane over the Bahamas. She never had to suffer the indignity of dick pics in her DMs. A few years ago we were grappling with the question of this online dating shit was even real as happy couples twirled, beamed, and waggled their wedding rings on our TVs during those eHarmony commercials. Today we've resigned ourselves to it, knowing that the next person you fall in love with might have swiped right on your picture while they were taking a shit. How are you supposed to find the love of your life when true romance seems dead?

My Dad Asked Me About Boobs

If you're like me, you can talk to your parents about anything. And if you're like me, sometimes "anything" gets weird and you hear a disembodied A.I. voice in your head advising you to leave or change the subject (for me, it's an English lady robot, like a girl J.A.R.V.I.S.). It got weird this past Sunday when my mom brought up her boss' daughter's reconstructive breast surgery while my dad sat across the patio table from us, sipping scotch on the rocks ("Warning: increasing blood alcohol level detected. Likelihood of yelling is now at 70%. Please proceed cautiously, Miss Cruz.").

Without getting into too much detail, the breast reconstruction in question was in the muddy territory of being both medical and cosmetic, and was the second procedure this poor girl had to endure. I'll admit this was juicy and I ignored the Lady J.A.R.V.I.S. voice politely reminding me that my dad was sloshed and waiting silently on the other side of the patio umbrella like JAWS. 

"Let me ask you something, As A Man." 

"Ma'am," Lady J.A.R.V.I.S. respectfully pleads. 

He adds that last bit a lot. He likes to pause for effect and close his eyes, nodding gently, trance-like, as the thought forms. Usually the more he's had to drink, the longer the pause. I am my father's dramatic-ass daughter but when he does this I feel like screaming. Yeah, yeah, people who live in glass houses, etc. 

"How do you, as women, relate the size of your breasts to how you're seen by other people?"

My mom answered quickly. Whatever it was, I thought it was a good answer and I agreed but I can't remember what it was because it's muffled by Lady J.A.R.V.I.S.' alarms blaring over her voice. I was getting started on my third cocktail (Stoli, Fresca, and a splash of cranberry juice) and, like our flair for the dramatic, my father and I share our low tolerance for booze. And like Tony Stark, who was drunk a lot in his original comic book form and known to regularly ignore the warnings of his own J.A.R.V.I.S. at great personal risk, I rocketed towards the chaos, knowing I might not be able to steer us all back to a civilized chat. I leave my parents' house in tears like one out of every 10 times. I joke about having a standing quarterly appointment to fight with my dad. He's in on the joke, it's cool.

"Hold up," I said, or something like that, with my arms out to Mom at my 10:00, and Dad, ready to lunge at 2:00. I'm a little jealous of how passionately they argue. In their 60s, they're mentally energetic as ever and still very much in love with one another but he's a hothead and she's not scared of a damn thing. She dismantles his arguments and he just responds by getting loud and mean. She gets loud and mean right back and the next morning they're smooching by the coffee maker. #GOALS. 

"Dad, every woman you ask is gonna give you a different answer." 

"Okay," he said, nodding and working his jaw, as though literally chewing on a gristly bit of opinion. We both also grind our teeth until our heads throb.

"Mom and I are from two completely different generations so the way our body images were shaped from, let's say pre-adolescence through college were under totally different circumstances." 

"Exactly, Eli," my mom said quietly over her low ball glass of probably also scotch. That's her go-to, but she and I are both pretty eclectic with our sauce as long as it's not too sweet. She loves my cosmos. I think they're just okay but I know how psyched she gets when I crank out batches of them at parties for her and The Girls. 

I imagined my mom as a willowy teenager in the warm, rosy, soft-focus of the 70s, flipping through a pamphlet about her Changing Body, brows furrowed, eyes ping-ponging between a shittily-drawn diagram and her chest.

"Mom, did you see a lot of nudity when you were a teenager?" 

"No, hardly any. Just my mom," she replied. 

"She wasn't shy about it at all. She would come home from work and undress while talking to us about her day like it was nothing so it just wasn't a big deal." 

"Hold on!" I said, hand still up at Dad. 

"I had cable and the internet and there was porn all over the place. So, Dad, unlike Mom, I've been bombarded with images of the ideal female form since before I hit puberty and when you see the same perfectly round, perky tits with the same pink, quarter-sized areola (Lady J.A.R.V.I.S. is clutching her pearls and I'm like, girl, I know, just bear with me a sec), it kinda fucks you up! You think that's what you're supposed to look like and anything else is gross and wrong and you need to save money for a plastic surgeon to carve you up like a Mrs. Potato Head (note: vodka)!" 

I lowered my hand and gave Dad the floor.

"Okay, okay, okay," he said at least 70 more times. He does that with "wait," too. We joke about it so much that he laughs now when he does it. It's cool. 

I hear buckles clicking and bolts sliding into place in my head as Lady J.A.R.V.I.S. straps me in as she does so often when it's Dad's turn to talk. I think she also turned up some relaxing music because I can't remember too much of what my dad said. I know it started with, "When I see a woman," and the rest had to do with how he felt about boobs and it's a lot of what you expect from a Normal Guy. I didn't really matter. What mattered (read: pissed me off) is that he made it about his boner. What amazed me was how long my parents let me rant, without interruption, about how everything women do in our patriarchal society is seen through the lens of the male gaze and judged accordingly, how exhausting and frustrating it all is. 

And they just listened. He listened. And he agreed. 

It didn't turn into a fight. Lady J.A.R.V.I.S. was silent, probably debating on whether or not to fetch the confetti cannon and calculating if there was enough in my checking account for a celebratory bottle of prosecco.  

He made some ignorant comments, but mostly we agreed about the biology of breasts in the context of sexual attraction, and he didn't protest when I made a point about American women being sexualized at a younger and younger age, and how that's why the Kardashians have taken over the world. 

"Ma'am, I think you've bummed him out!" Lady J.A.R.V.I.S. observed as he looked at the patio floor and nodded. Okay so no confetti cannon. Cancel the prosecco. What's the protocol for pyrrhic victories? Give Dad a long bear hug, say "I love you", go home, and try to think of something fun to talk about next Sunday. Is Mom good? Mom's chilling. Bye, mom. Love you. Let's get outta here, Lady J.