She Texted Me 'We're Just Hanging Out.' For Fourteen Months. | The Situationship

The Griot (0:00)

The text came in at 9.41 on a Tuesday night. Hey, you up? I'm at that bar near your place. Wanna come?

I was in my pajamas, which, for the record, were the soft, gray ones with a hole near the knee.

I had washed my hair. I was watching a show I did not even like, because I was waiting. That was the thing nobody tells you. You can wait for a person without admitting you are waiting. Her name was Jordan. We had met on an app two Aprils earlier. It was a good first date, a long one, and at the end of the night, she kissed me on the cheek and said, I'm not looking for anything serious right now. I want to be honest about that. I said I understood, and I did. I told myself I was a grown adult who could handle something light. Fourteen months. In fourteen months, we went to a lake house, twice. We learned each other's coffee orders. She knew I hated cilantro and I knew she could not sleep without a fan on, even in January. She had a toothbrush at my place and a sweater of mine at hers. When my grandmother died, she drove four hours in one night and sat beside me at the funeral, and held my hand the whole time.

If you had looked at us from across a room, you would have said we were a couple. But every time someone asked what we were, she had a sentence ready. We're just hanging out. It was a perfect sentence. It was light enough to hold. And it was a wall. There was an object. And I think it is the whole story. A calendar on her refrigerator door. Every week she wrote out her plans in small, tidy handwriting. Pilates on Mondays. Dinner with her sister Thursdays. A trip to see her college friends in March. I looked at that calendar so many times. In 14 months my name appeared on it exactly twice. Once, a reminder for my birthday. Once, a plain letter T for Tuesday. With no explanation. I told myself it was fine. I told myself I was her favorite, just not her official one. I want to give you a few more of those 14 months because it was not misery. If it had been misery, I would have left in the first month. There was a Sunday in October when she showed up at my door at nine in the morning with two coffees and a paper bag of pastries and said, I had a dream about you, so I came. We spent the whole day on my couch, doing nothing, watching old movies and arguing about whether the ending of one was happy or sad. She fell asleep with her feet in my lap. I remember sitting very still so I would not wake her and thinking, this is it, this is what I want.

There was a night in February when I had the flu, and she brought soup from a place across town and left it on my doorstep with a note that said, do not argue, just eat.

I stood in my doorway in a blanket and cried a little, because nobody had done that for me in a long time. These things were real. I am telling you that because the first thing people say about a situation ship is that it was all one-sided, all lies, all pretend, it is not. That is what makes it so strong. The warm days are real, and they are what you hold up when you start to doubt. But there was a second pattern running underneath, and I did not see it until I started looking at the days without her. The warm days were always on her schedule. She came when she wanted to. She called when it was convenient. If I reached out at a time that did not suit her, I got a short reply, a heart, a promise to catch up soon, and then nothing for two days. If I suggested a plan, she said, I'll let you know, and often she did not. Once in April, I asked her to come with me to my cousin's wedding. It was three months away.

I wrote the invitation carefully, saying, no pressure, just thought it would be fun. She said, that sounds great, I'll check my calendar. That was in April, the wedding was in July, she never answered. In June, I asked again and she said, oh, I forgot, can I let you know? And I said, sure. I went alone. I danced with my aunt. And at one point in the evening, I stepped outside, onto the lawn, and stood under a string of lights. And I realized I had been carrying a question for three months without ever setting it down.