Can we just sit on the phone, even if in silence?

After a long day I scroll through my call list seeking connection. I want to be seen, but only by people who know me. I want to be heard, but only by people who understand me. These days my first call is my sister and then my boyfriend or vice versa. Ten years ago it was a FaceTime to my middle school best friends. Five years ago it was to my mom, or my sophomore year friend group. At first these calls include recaps of the day or the past couple, excitement rushing through to recount events before they are lost to time, but as the clock ticks on and we settle into our homes we get comfortable just sitting on the phone in silence.

I think it was these silences that I cherished the most. Being able to just sit with someone as you are and as they are. No pretenses or pressure, just two people going about their days from afar, yet together. Forgetting about who we pretend to be, who we present to the world and allowing access to a vulnerable part of our lives.

I think some people view marriage as an end goal. For me, the journey is one that both terrifies and thrills me. I think part of me has always understood it’s not the solution to all of my problems. I won’t wake up one day with the ring on my finger and a different man’s last name and be complete. Walking through life with someone choosing them in every action is a practice that I would like to partake in. So it may fail, but what if it doesn’t. What if I get a confidant to travel the world with, to travel through time with?

I feel the same about friendships. Finding companionship and community in any place I can not out of desperation, but through intention. Some of the most interesting people I’ve had the pleasure of calling a friend I’ve only been close to for a season. We’ve kept each other company along the journey. We’re always headed in different directions and to different places but perhaps for this length of the journey we can walk side by side always knowing we can never go back. Knowing that meeting each other is a sign to keep moving forward. We gain tools from each other and wisdoms of how to navigate. Pick up skills we may have never learned on our own. Some friends teach you how to parallel park and some teach you how to pray. Day in and day out who are community is shapes who we become.

Recently, I watched ‘Obsession’ (dir. by Curry Barker) and of the many conversations surrounding the movie the one that stuck with me was the notion of skipping past the awkward stages of intimacy when jumping into relationships. We become attached to the hip to people whose favorite colors we don’t know or “fall in love” with others who we can’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable with. In sickness and in health, for better or for worse were never meant to be just words we repeated over and over until they ceased to mean anything, but standards for how we love. Through the misunderstandings and slip-ups, through the trips and falls. You laugh and cry and hug. You choose to be an active participant and then one day you look at them and realize how interwoven you’ve become. You can’t force it, you can’t skip to the good part, you can’t avoid the conflict.

Love is easy to write about because it is fantastical. What wisdom or advice can I impart on someone when I have not yet lived it. When I have not done all that I could, when I have Goliaths yet to conquer how can I speak of the thrill of the fight. Love is a simple institution in that it is so large. Love encompasses so many things and in finding an avenue to speak on it or about it you are certainly bound to stumble into one. It’s as easy to stumble into as becoming a New York Times Bestselling Author. But for such a broad topic a lot of the narrative is so focused on romantic love. So much to be said about one type of companionship. So much emphasis on the person we are or will become as a result of this venture. As if we are not made of sturdier stuff, as if we are not made for more sturdy stuff. Who I love is so little of what kinda lover I am. How I love, how deeply, how truly, how unwavering and indiscriminate to me is far more fascinating. When I think about the closest companions I have my first thoughts don’t immediately go to the partners, friendships, and relationships they keep, but how they keep them and how they love them. Pouring into something that can’t or won’t accept it doesn’t make your efforts worthless, but rather is a means to learn. Even flowers can be over watered, even gardens can wilt from the rains.

Every other article is about loneliness and how “chuegy” relationships and love have become. The fastest ways to blow up are to disavow love. Whether for pursuit of personal enlightenment or to disparage the opposite gender. We’ve created proxy wars through online discourse. Shaping the everyday of how people choose to live their lives. When the virtual becomes reality it can be hard to discern what attitudes exist in an echochamber versus in our lived communities. For better and for worse we’ve entered into long term commitments with computers. Given our data and likeness away for scraps to emotionless detached entities, and those are just the men we date.

Or the men we create as a proxy to date. Alarmingly, more and more people are creating relationships with AI platforms. I see a lot of people use the verbiage “entering” which I vehemently criticize. There is nothing people are entering except prompts for how to react. Training a computer to love you is not the same as putting in the work to grow into love with someone. You can’t restart your dynamic with your lover once you hit their word limit. Love isn’t supposed to be about who can love you the easiest or who you make love you. You can’t make anyone love you it’s what makes love so human, so fragile, so fickle. Sometimes you love someone who is wrong for you, who you’re not supposed to love, who doesn't love you back. Loving is about taking all of this in stride. Learning that your love is about you, not anyone else.

So what if the guy I built up in my head doesn’t love me back, would we even have a compatible life? All of them men I’ve loved and let go have been for good reason. Because no matter how much you love someone you can’t force them to do anything, even change. Their love is also about them and not you and not the person they choose over you. Every last guy I’ve moved on from hasn’t wanted to settle down in the same cities, have the same amount of kids, had the same view on religion or coffee. We get so wrapped up in the macros of building a life we forget about the micro. I want to wake up every morning with someone, I want to have my own side of the bed, I want to share blankets. We’re so conditioned to changing parts of ourselves that we forget that we don’t have to.

For the right person we can be loud and outrageous, we can be totally mad. For the right person we’re not too skinny or too fat, too short or too tall, too blonde or too brunette. We don’t change for our person we grow to accommodate who they are and who they become. You can see potential, but you shouldn’t wait for it. You have to take what’s there for what it is, take who they are for what they are. And you can want better and wish and pray that they become someone else, but these expectations are unfair to you and to them. Resentment grows when we ask the rose to bloom as a daisy.

Which is why I think the emphasis on community is so important. Your community builds around a shared notion. But everyone can come to it in a different way show up for it in a different way. What binds us together shouldn’t stop us from spreading out. When you ask yourself if you’re a Carrie, Miranda, Joan, Toni, Lynn, Marnie, Shosh, or Rachel or Monica, the tie that binds these friendships isn’t that they all came from the same place or lived life the same way. The biggest lesson to be learned is that our love is big enough to spread out and to share. What matters most isn’t the end, isn’t just the moments where everything works out and the happily ever after begins. It’s the commitment to each other through all the roughs of life; to sit on the phone even if in silence.