Modern Love: An anxious woman tries to relax

The year after I stopped drinking, I fell in love with my neighbor.

I was 27 years old, working as a copywriter and living in a studio on Gay Street in the West Village that fit my California King bed and almost nothing else.

He lived across the street in a larger apartment that had beautiful morning light, but suffered from an infestation of mice.

One afternoon he found me sitting on his stairs smoking a cigarette and sat next to me, looking like a young Paul Newman.

We talked for a while and I found out that he owned a local restaurant and had recently broken up with his girlfriend.

Finally, we went up to his apartment, where we kissed until we felt that in the whole city only we and the mice on his walls were awake.

By the time he walked me back to my building, it was after midnight, and I had already decided that our wedding should be right there on Gay Street.

I was figuring out what kind of city permits I'd need when he put a hand on my shoulder.

“I really like you,” he said.

"But the restaurant keeps me pretty busy, and I want to make it clear that I'm not looking for a relationship right now."

I stared at him in the yellow glow of the street light and did what so many hopeful bachelors have done before me: I told a lie, wishing it were true.

“I'm not looking for anything serious either,” I replied.

Her face softened.

“That's great. So can we have something casual?"

I smiled.

“I'm a very casual person. You will see".

He wouldn't see it.

What followed was a two-year tug-of-war.

He couldn't commit and I couldn't accept it.

I tried every tool in my arsenal to get him to be my boyfriend:

I was charming, I seduced him, I cajoled him, I negotiated and I raged.

In the end, nothing could change the fact that we didn't want the same thing.

However, instead of freeing ourselves from this incompatibility, we seemed tied to it.

Every time we decided to stop seeing each other, one of us would end up leaving the light on all night, knowing that the other would see it from the street below and send a message for her to come up, restarting the cycle.

It was my first experience of falling in love while sober, and though I didn't know it at the time, I was repeating a familiar pattern.

I grew up looking for the love of my father, a man who, like my neighbor, could be loving or absent depending on the day.

Now, I was chasing my neighbor with the same fervor.

The more space he wanted, the closer I longed to be.

I would pretend I had no needs and then feel distressed when he didn't meet them.

He would drug me with his attention and then collapse when he distanced me.

I would later learn that this dynamic is called the “anxious-avoidant” relationship.

At the time, all I knew was that it hurt.

And, for the first time in my adult life, I had no alcohol to lull me to sleep.

So I went to an ashram upstate and prayed that the obsession would go away.

I changed its name on my phone to “prosecco” to remember the emotional hangover I felt after watching it.

I went to a weekly meditation group led by a Buddhist teacher with more than a decade of sobriety who introduced me to attachment theory and, at the risk of sounding dramatic, changed my life forever.

It taught me that anxious and avoidant people often connect quickly and powerfully, but their relationships are challenging at best and doomed to fail at worst.

“You need to be with someone for sure,” he said.

"You mean boring."

He smiled.

“Security is not boring. You will see".

In the end, what bored me was obsessing over my neighbor, trying to go out to dinner with someone who thinks reservations are “limiting,” and watching my friends stop paying attention to me every time I complained, for the umpteenth time, that I had canceled an appointment.

I stopped keeping the light on all night, started sleeping well, found a therapist, and opened up to the possibility of meeting someone else.

That someone was Henry, a friend of a friend I met at a movie screening.

She had freckles all over her face and a big, unapologetic smile.

He was British, like me, but the similarities ended there.

He was obsessed with being outdoors, loved to cook, and was a moderate drinker.

In contrast, I considered a trip to Central Park to be hiking, I bought my meals (sushi, muffins, pre-cut fruit) at a deli and was not moderate at all.

I liked him instantly, but I didn't fantasize about marrying him.

On one of our first dates, Henry made reservations at three restaurants and let me choose which one to go to.

In another, we watched a documentary about the ills of salmon farming.

In the following months, we arranged to meet once or twice a week to eat, go to the theater or see an exhibition.

There was no waiting until late for him or wondering if he was going to stand me up or not.

I was used to drenching a person like I drank an entire glass in one gulp, but with Henry, I just sipped it.

He surprised me with his juggling skills (he had been taught that as a child to help with his dyslexia) and told me about his role as a peacemaker between his older brother and younger sister.

Later, he told me about his friend who was killed by a car during his freshman year of college, the shock and pain it caused him.

Every new thing I found out seemed precious to me.

However, I didn't feel safe.

Where was the electricity?

The emotion? P

I thought falling in love with someone must be like having an orgasm and a heart attack at the same time.

“Shouldn't it be harder than this?” I asked my therapist.

“In real life, good things are allowed to come easy,” he said.

“Trust it.”

Within a few months of seeing each other, I gave Henry an illustrated animal fact book, hoping he would appreciate it as a thoughtful though not especially noteworthy gesture.

“It's the best gift ever,” he told me.

Sitting cross-legged on my California bed, he flipped through the book page by page, beautifully repeating the best bits out loud:

“Hummingbirds beat their wings up to 200 times per second!”

Henry didn't need things to be dramatic to feel alive because he paid attention to the little details that make life feel miraculous.

Both his capacity for enjoyment and his capacity for wonder, seemingly limitless, were among the first things that fascinated me about him. But at the time I didn't know.

My previous experiences of falling in love had been like being put in a barrel and thrown down a waterfall, a blind fall, as euphoric as it was terrifying.

Falling in love with Henry was like being transported down a calm river to the sea.

Not all was without conflict, of course.

After all, I was still me, I was still anxious.

For the first few months, every morning that Henry left my apartment to go home, I would get out of bed and insist on walking the block to the subway with him.

His departure aroused in me a diffuse panic that triggered that childish fear of abandonment, of love going out the window.

Of course, she had never confessed that to anyone she dated.

Until one day Henry turned to me at the subway entrance, gave me an amused smile and said:

“Why do you always want to come with me? I sense that it's important to you, but I don't know why."

My first instinct was to tell a lie, wishing it were true.

Instead, I took a deep breath.

“The truth is that I feel a lot of anxiety when we separate.”

I ran a hand across my chest. "I think I'm afraid you won't come back."

Henry gave me a long look and my heart plummeted.

I waited for him to plunge headfirst down the subway stairs, away from me.

“I see,” he said, taking my hand.

“Would it make you feel less anxious if we walked around the block together one more time?”

I could have laughed with relief.

I could have covered my eyes with my hands and cried like a child.

But I caught myself and nodded.

We walked one more time around the block and then he hopped on the subway and I went about my day.

A year later, we moved in together.

Six months later, we got married.

Today we live in a house in Los Angeles with a small garden where hummingbirds frequently visit us.

“Up to 200 flaps per second!” Henry likes to remind me.

“Isn't that amazing?”

It is.

c.2021 The New York Times Company

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