What Love Looks Like Read online

  What Love Looks Like

  BY LARA MONDOUX

  Copyright © 2013 Lara Mondoux

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN:

  ISBN-13:

  DEDICATION

  FOR MY HUSBAND SCOTT, WHO NEVER CEASES TO AMAZE ME WITH HIS UNWAVERING SUPPORT OF ALL THAT I DO. I’M SO FORTUNATE TO HAVE FOUND YOU. EVERYTHING I DO IS FOR YOU.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my editor, Caroline Kaiser for your hard work and honest feedback.

  Thanks to Tye Lombardi, my cover designer for your creativity and efficiency.

  Thanks to my parents for your wisdom and solidity.

  Thanks to my brother and sister for being my best friends.

  1

  My eyes opened and immediately found the clock; it was a little after four in the morning. I was in my bed, and I wasn't alone. The fine points were unclear, but vaguely I remembered meeting him at Sugar, dragging him to Spice, and ending up with him on my sofa. He was a stranger, but didn’t we all start out as strangers?

  I blamed my friend Jenna. She’d asked me to meet her for a drink after work, and that particular night, I was feeling a little more like Kate Moss than Kate Middleton; my conscience said stay home but my ego urged me to head out for a bit of debauchery. It was already nine o'clock, and though my moral code screamed no, Jenna begged harder than I protested. I was lonely, and so against my better judgment, I trudged three dark city blocks and met her at Sugar.

  After about an hour, the bartender let me know that the fellow at the end of the bar had backed up my drink. Even in my inebriated state, I knew that I didn't stand a chance. I’d always been a sucker for a handsome guy in a pinstripe suit who sent me cocktails from the corner of a dark bar. I loved the attention, I loved the cinematic quality of it, and I loved men in suits.

  He was in finance. He was tall, dark haired, and dark eyed, and he had an air of arrogance. He was all of my weaknesses to the male species wrapped up into one handsome package, buying me drinks. Once it was clear that he wasn’t a serial killer, Jenna left us and went home to her husband. I dragged Mr. Pinstripe Suit to the next bar, and there we drank for another two hours. Shortly after slurping down most of drink number four, I invited him up to my apartment. He obliged without a moment’s hesitation.

  It bugged me when characters in movies invited someone of the opposite sex up for “coffee” after a late night out. I’d never offer a guest coffee after four o’clock in the afternoon. It wasn't my intention to sleep with him, though; I just didn’t want to spend another night alone. It had been so long since I’d met anyone new, and a man in my bed was a welcome change from the typical state of solitary confinement that was my life.

  I recalled very little past kissing him on my sofa but was pretty sure that we'd consummated our incredibly brief relationship sometime around midnight. Now, as I stared at him, it was well into the early morning. Even though it was dark, I could see that he was attractive. He smelled like a combination of spearmint and Crown Royal, which conjured up vague memories of our rendezvous. But I was ready for him to go. I gently nudged his shoulder, feigning that I'd accidentally bumped him in my sleep. He didn't move. I nudged a little harder, and his breath naturally sped up. I felt his limbs move around, his brain no doubt trying to gather the facts of his whereabouts the same way mine had moments earlier.

  “Hey,” I said. I thought his name was Josh, but I couldn't chance getting it wrong, so I omitted it entirely.

  “Hi.” He smiled.

  “Listen, last night was great. But I have to get up in, like, three hours.” That part was the truth.

  “Okay, then get some sleep,” he said, laying his head back down.

  “No, I mean—”

  “Oh.” He looked shocked. “I get it. You want me to leave.”

  “I'm sorry, I just really need some rest. I drank way too much.”

  “No, it's cool.” His voice was raspy from sleep. “I'll take off.” He got dressed quietly.

  We were both silent, apart from my offering him a bottle of water for the road, which he declined. It was a clean and cordial parting of ways. I never intended that Josh—if that was his name—should suffer the collateral damage of my trials and tribulations, but I was too old for a one-night stand. And the sooner the evidence of one left my apartment, the better.

  After he left I wasn’t able to return to sleep. Instead I lay awake and stared at the ceiling. A sense of dissatisfaction washed over me, one that was all too familiar. It was the same alarming realization that had woken me so many nights over the past six months. There were ways to say it that didn’t make it sound nearly as bad as it was: twenty-eight years young, twenty-eight trips around the sun, four hundred and sixty-four candles blown out, including those that were there merely for good luck. I could easily have chosen any one of these ways, or come up with a dozen anecdotes that sounded cleverer. Or I could have faced the facts and simply said that I was getting uncomfortably close to turning thirty.

  Facing a milestone birthday wouldn’t have been quite so unpleasant had my life been on a different trajectory, but I was single, without a prospect for love in sight. Moreover, I had an insufferable job as a corporate event planner in a down economy, and there was little likelihood of a promotion or a lateral move elsewhere. I’d never really traveled anywhere all that remarkable and was pretty certain that I’d never really been in love.

  While my circadian rhythm continued to fail me, I switched on my bedside lamp and picked up an old issue of Elle magazine, one from several months earlier that I hadn’t yet torn the plastic off of. I hoped that reading might tire my eyes, but one of the cover stories had the opposite effect. Strangely enough, the story featured psychologists discussing why some twenty-something American women had such a hard time growing up. The experts asserted that there were five so-called landmarks of adulthood, and based on these criteria, I wasn’t measuring up. 1) Finishing education. Okay, I’d completed college, though barely. 2) Declaring financial independence. Did it count if I used the emergency credit card—given to me by my father—only for actual emergencies? 3) Getting married. I think we established that one—I was as single as the day was long. 4) Having a child. See previous statement. 5) Leaving home. Okay, another point for me.

  My ego stung with the understanding that I’d become a statistic. I tossed the magazine onto the floor before finishing the article, furious that such a well-regarded publication—and one that bore my name at that—would publish such offensive propaganda. I didn’t need to see another word; I already knew what I’d become. At twenty-eight years of age, I’d completed two out of the five landmarks of adulthood. In school, that would have earned me a failing grade. Do not pass go, and do not collect two hundred dollars.

  Mathematically, it meant that I was only forty percent grown up. I supposed that my inability to meet the criteria made me some sort of adult-child hybrid—a kidult, perhaps. I was well aware that the twenties were a decade for finding yourself, and I agreed that doing so had a certain romanticism. But in a world with so many stimuli at every turn (two million people on Match.com; thousands of Facebook friends posting only the top 10 percent of their life experiences, causing the rest of us self-doubt; and constant encouragement from the media that multiple sex partners wasn’t a bad thing), I was on stimulation overload. I was like a desktop with too many windows open—I was frozen, in need of rebooting.

  I tried discussing my frustration with friends on several occasions, but they didn’t seem to relate to my situation. It was possible, though, that the demographic I’d selected to confide in was skewed. I lived in Columbus, after all, a small city where women went to school, graduated, four years later graduated again, and (finally) got marr
ied. Suffice it to say that most of my peers had already tied the knot, found their dream jobs, and given up on exploring themselves.

  But even back in college, I worried about ending up alone. Everyone around me seemed to find love a lot more easily than I did, and it wasn’t for lack of wanting to find it. To see if my peers shared any of my trepidation, my twenty-one-year-old self brought up the subject of marriage to my then college-junior friends.

  “Did you know that the median age for a first marriage for women is twenty-eight in New York?” I said. I was reading from Forbes (college kids still read actual print publications back then). “For men it’s thirty.” I added.

  “That’s crazy old,” my then-roommate Erica said. The other girls nodded in agreement.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “I’m definitely going to be married by the time I’m twenty-four,” Stacey, another of my housemates, said. She didn’t bother to look up at me as she spoke. She was filing her nails in preparation for painting them. Stacey was always doing her nails. In fact, I couldn’t recall a time when she wasn’t primping some part of her body, except for rare occasions when she actually went to class or the more frequent occurrences in which she went out and got hammered.

  “Elle, what’s the average age for women in Ohio?” Erica asked.

  “Uh, twenty-six.” I said, scanning the list state by state.

  Fast-forwarding to the present day, Stacey was married, Erica was engaged, and I was none of the above. It was seven years later, and I was now two years past the age that statistically I was expected to be a wife.

  I felt youthful physically. But when I compared myself to the data and to those around me, I’d unquestionably fallen behind. As I lay there, the other side of my bed still warm from Josh’s departure, I wondered what it was like to have that revered and seemingly unattainable thing that so many women my age already had: a husband. Let me preface this by saying I wasn’t on some sort of wild fiancé hunt. I didn’t sit around waiting for just anyone to fill the now empty side of my bed. Nor did I ache to become betrothed by a preselected time to someone I hadn’t even met yet. I never wanted to go through the motions of a relationship just to meet some bullshit psychological criteria—probably conceived a century before I was—that certified I was a grown-up. And I knew that there was no longer a stigma attached to being an unwed woman of a certain age. I just knew that I wanted to be happy.

  When my mother was twenty-eight, she’d been married for three years and had two college degrees. She’d had one child (my older brother), and was pregnant with another (me). She’d have a third before she turned thirty (my younger sister). She also had a mortgage, in-laws, and a whole host of life experiences that I couldn’t even fathom. By contrast, my path was so unclear, and such ambiguity came with a chilling thought: it was one thing to have life come together by thirty but quite another to start building it at thirty.

  Curled into the fetal position, I cursed the fact that I was still required to barhop in order to meet new people. But my married friends ventured downtown only rarely. Only when they hosted a dinner to impress us all with their newfound domestic prowess did I actually have the chance to catch up with them. And when I did, we reflected on how once upon a time we were all so young and game for whatever life handed us. Like most coeds, we were guilty of getting wickedly drunk, passing out in unfamiliar places, smoking pot with strangers, and having one-night stands. But unlike me, they’d abandoned collecting strange and rotating bedfellows for permanent fixtures, their spouses. In conversation, they’d incessantly refer to their men as their husbands, as if I’d never even met the guys. Their first names had been kicked to the pavement for a new title, husband.

  The harsh facts were indisputable: I was lonely, and I’d just stooped to the level of sleeping with a man I didn’t know from Adam to help me forget about my loneliness. The line between post adolescent and grown-up looked blurry from where I stood. I still ran to my parents whenever anything went wrong, and they’d inevitably coddle me with encouragement or money, whichever the situation warranted. All the while I looked on as my friends led mature, responsible, fairy-tale lives. Most of my evenings consisted of laundry, forced exercise, and mind-numbing marathons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

  For better or worse, I lived a lifestyle typically reserved for a twenty-something single woman. Managing cash was not my strong suit, but I was still at the age where I could pass off my financial cluelessness as cute. I wasn’t married, but I was still young enough to not be considered pitiable. But I knew that the tipping point was fast approaching, at which point my delayed “landmarks of adulthood” would morph into plain old failure.

  Adding fuel to my fire was my job as an event planner, which was particularly demanding. It required me to put in over sixty hours a week, which didn’t allow much time to go on dates. I did meet men, mostly young professionals, weekly through work events and when I went out socially. And it wasn’t that I never got attention from them; I sometimes did, but almost never did I meet one that I was drawn to. Josh was a rare exception because physically he fit the bill. But as hypocritical as it was, I didn’t want to end up with a guy who was out looking for a one-night stand the way Josh clearly was. No matter how much I longed for something more permanent than a fling, I refused to settle for just an average boyfriend. I’d rather be at home with my dog every night than having dinner with a guy who didn’t stimulate me intellectually, emotionally, and of course, physically.

  Waking in the middle of the night had become commonplace. My apartment was downtown, and my already poor sleep habits were at the mercy of city noise. And living in the heart of the city had its own set of challenges. It was four thirty in the morning, and I was already dreading the hours ahead of me. As I did every morning, I knew I’d feel like just another set of feet scurrying into the coffee shop, another groggy-eyed person scraping ice off of her car on a freezing January morning. I felt that I was one of millions just trying to get through the day. I was sometimes plagued by the notion that I could go twenty-four full hours without talking to anyone. There was so much anonymity, and not the peaceful sort that celebrities sought from paparazzi, but rather the type where you have an accident and die in your apartment and no one finds your body until a week later. Morbid, yes, but those were the alarming images my forlorn psyche created.

  Apart from the background city noise, which had become a dull roar around the clock, silence dominated my life, and I habitually looked to things outside myself to get away from the incessant quiet. Whenever I shopped, I got a rush from overspending. I’d either consume junk food excessively or go days with very little food at all. I still had a penchant for martinis, which I’d developed in college, and drank to excess at least a few nights per week. Hemingway said he drank to make other people seem more interesting; I drank to make myself seem more interesting. And judging by my most recent offense, the occasional one-night stand wasn’t foreign to me.

  I regularly found myself in need of a little pick-me-up, so on any given day I drowned my problems in my compulsion du jour. While Josh and my other vices did provide moments of pleasure and escapism, I felt no happiness upon waking. I was always chasing my next high; I always needed something to get me going. My life didn’t excite me whatsoever, so I filled my inner void in any way I could. And living in such a way was terrifying, if only for my inability to sustain it.

  Trying to make peace with my self-destructive inclinations was an ongoing balancing act. I always feared that a new dress that I’d dropped a few hundred dollars on wouldn’t fit by the time the time Monday rolled around if I’d gone on a bad enough junk food bender, or that I’d fall into bed with the wrong person after having one too many free drinks. But I’d spent years finding ways to compensate for overindulging in my vices, and I could usually fit both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into my life, though not without consequence.

  2

  “Yes, Mom,” I said. “I promise.” I sat in my car in the o
ffice parking lot trying to get my mother off the phone.

  “You always say that.”

  “Well, this time I really mean it. I’ll get out to see you in the next couple of weeks.”

  “That’s not soon enough!” she said.

  “It’s the best I can do. I’m working overtime every week.”

  “What are you doing with the dog all those hours? Leaving her alone isn't fair to her.”

  “I have a very good, very expensive dog walker that comes over twice a day.”

  “I don’t get it. Your brother and sister both have free time to see their mother. Why don’t you?”

  “Max works for Dad, and you babysit his kid all the time,” I said, “and Emily’s a student. Plus she lives with you. It’s not a fair comparison. Listen, I have to go. I’m going to be late. Love you, Mom.”

  “Bye, darling. See you soon!”

  The morning after my impromptu sleepover was agonizing to say the least, and my mother’s nagging made me feel even worse.

  With dark circles under my eyes and unwashed hair, I dragged myself to work on less than five hours of sleep. My nausea was a hefty price to pay for simply wanting some company the previous evening. What made me feel worse was that my office environment was the opposite of energizing. Monotonous, droning, and dreary were all more accurate descriptions for where I spent most of my waking hours. Fluorescent lights highlighted stains on the drab beige walls, and the office-pink carpet that was coming up slightly was a throwback to the early nineties.

  Whenever I mentioned to a new acquaintance that I planned events for a living, they’d ooh and aah, assuming that I had some sort of glamorous career. On the contrary, the bulk of my time at work was spent in front of a computer in a cold, dingy office. During those countless hours, I focused an inordinate amount of time on completing reports that were really just busywork. My coworkers and I were herded like sheep, pressured to turn our reports in on time, immediately implement new policies that came down from corporate, and satisfy our customers by “thinking big” and coming up with new ideas—just nothing good enough to warrant a raise.