My turn, your turn. Back and forth.
So this was how it happened. This was how you built an intimate relationship. Word by word. Story by story. Revelation by revelation.
Just like group.
He invited me up to his apartment after the jazz club. “I want to show you the view from my southern balcony.” He put one arm around me as he pointed out the Big Dipper. With the stars as our witness, we shared our first kiss. When he pressed his perfect lips against mine, I swallowed starlight, and my heart began to glow. He walked me up to my place. “There will be more,” he said, kissing me again.
If this was the gift of the advanced group, I’d stay forever.
Alex was wonderful. Our dates were the stuff of my deepest longing. I could hardly believe how much I enjoyed being with him. The only downside was the low-grade anxiety I felt all the time about how to make it last. I agonized about how and when the relationship would sour or fizzle or implode.
I brought my anxiety to group. “This can’t last,” I insisted. “Tell me what to do to keep this thing going.”
“Can you let go of your need to control it?” Dr. Rosen said.
“No.” Dr. Rosen didn’t understand. Alex’s body was near perfect, he smelled like fresh sport deodorant, and I could see my sexual prime on the horizon. If I gave in to this relationship and let myself believe it was something real, then what if it failed? Would that destroy me?
“Can you let go of your expectation of failure?”
“I’ll try.”
Life with Alex, who had signed up for two triathlons for later in the summer and a marathon in the fall, meant early morning runs and bike rides before work, followed by swims at the gym or in Lake Michigan after work. Within a month of dating, he began inviting me to join him most mornings and evenings. One Saturday, he knocked on my door at six in the morning. He had a race bib pinned to his fleece jacket and his hands stuffed into thin black gloves. He fastened my bib to my shirt and handed me a water bottle. At the starting line of the ten-mile race he signed us up for, he rubbed my shoulders when he noticed I was shaking from the cold. Patches of snow still clung to the ground by the running path, and only several hundred runners had showed up for the lakefront race, where the wind promised to slap our exposed faces. I’d never run a ten-mile race, but my body had taken on a new buoyancy since dating Alex, which was part anxiety, part joy. A loopy willingness to try anything, including this freezing-cold road race, made me say yes to whatever he was offering.
Each time we walked to dinner after work or ran on the lake, a featherweight optimism knocked on my heart, inviting me to let go of projecting the failure of the relationship. Maybe every relationship wouldn’t end with me huddled in the group room crying into a rag. Maybe every relationship wouldn’t end at all. Maybe it would last.
After the race, my hamstrings ached and my shoulder stung where my sports bra strap dug into it. But with Alex, the pain gave way to pure joy.
Dr. Rosen held up a picture for everyone to see one Monday morning. Patrice slipped on her reading glasses and Max leaned forward. “This is what it means to get unblocked,” Dr. Rosen said. It was a picture of me and Alex: I wore a pink cocktail dress, and Alex wore a tux. We’d gone to a gala for the Joffrey Ballet. In the darkened theater, the dancers twirled in brilliant tulle and Alex held my hand in both of his. I inched closer to him in my red velvet seat, until our legs were touching. During dinner in the giant, gilded Hilton ballroom, he rubbed my back and played with the clasp of my necklace. On the dance floor, he held me close as the band covered Otis Redding. Later, he kissed me again on his balcony. “It feels like you’re my girlfriend,” he said. I leaned into him and exhaled.
Grandma Maggie pointed at the picture and then tapped her wedding ring. “You’re next, kiddo.”
Alex, who was so comfortable in his skin, made me feel like I could be too. With complete ease, he talked about all the things we would do in the future. A boat trip on the Chicago River with his firm in June. A sprint distance triathlon in July. A trip to visit his sister in Iowa at some point over the summer. A comedy show, a concert, a trip to the zoo. He acted as if we had a future, and I slowly let myself imagine us being a couple for more than a few months.
“Seriously, what’s the catch?” I asked my group mates and Dr. Rosen.
“You tell us,” Max said.
I shook my head. The situation with his parents sounded tricky, but he didn’t come across as secretly hobbled by trauma or afraid of a relationship. His workout schedule bordered on obsessive, but it never depleted him to the point he was too exhausted to hang out or have sex with me. His taste in books struck me as a tad immature, but plenty of people loved Harry Potter—that wasn’t a valid reason to discount someone as wonderful as Alex. I was just afraid.
One morning, Alex and I stopped at Corner Bakery for breakfast before
