In another vein, while attending a party at my best friend’s house, we actually instigated a fight between another couple. It wasn’t on purpose! Basically, the girl-half of the couple was obsessed with “how in love” we were, constantly snapping photos of us (not as creepy as it sounds, but still creepy) and saying how she wished she were in a relationship like ours while giving major side eye to the dude she was sleeping with. The next day, my best friend filled me in on how, after Lawrence and I left , that couple got into a fight about their status. We were rolling our eyes because we all knew the guy just wasn’t serious about this girl, so her repeated attempts to try and turn it into something more was just upsetting. But no matter whose side you were on in the fight , it couldn’t be argued: By being happily married, I’d caused emotional turmoil. So I censor myself. I like to think I’ve trained my Facebook friends to only expect lovey-dovey things during a short span of days in late October/early November, when I commemorate the day Lawrence and I met and our anniversary. Sometimes I get cutesy on his birthday. To me, these seem like reasonable times to acknowledge my marriage with the fervor I feel on a regular basis—a little reprieve from my “Oh, yeah, that dude I happened to marry ” schtick that I hope signals my marital status while letting people know it’s not a huge deal and they don’t need to worry about me boring them with all the details. Even though I would love to. Because, spoiler alert , I love my husband. He’s amazing and incredibly supportive, and I find myself loving him to pieces even on the days when I want to beat him senseless with his stupid, cranky, vomiting-and-pissing-all-over-my-stuff jerk of a cat . But don’t worry. I’ll never tell you any of that . Except for the cat part—that dude sucks. Numerous Minutes Wasted In middle school and high school, if I was the first person to finish a test , I stayed in my seat and doodled on the exam papers until someone else was done. It just wouldn’t do for anyone to think I was showing off my intelligence. Countless Texts Unanswered If I’m having a text conversation with you, after a certain point , I’m going to stop responding. Am I a forgetful person? Yes. But that only accounts for some of the times I go AFK. Really, it’s that I just can’t stand being the last person to say something. I didn’t always have this tick. I once foolishly believed that friends were always available to you, always ready to bend an ear—or scroll through a monster text—and keep a conversation going for hours. But this was woefully ignorant of me. In case it wasn’t immediately clear where this was going, let me sum up: I’ve been bailed on a lot . Friends have quietly slipped off my radar or actively thrown a match onto our relationship and watched it burn. Whatever their strategy, the story at the end of the day was the same: They were gone, and I had to wonder what I did wrong. I came to the conclusion that I was being too vulnerable with people. I was (am) an oversharer, and I relied on people a lot , which it turns out high schoolers only like for a little while. When I went through a dark time in college and either shut down communication or went on depressing stream-of-consciousness diatribes about the state of my life, I became even more confused about how friends communicate. Thank God no one I knew had read receipts turned on (is that something that’s even
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