Relationship Building

I, undeserving earthling, have somehow managed to find an amazing friend, Courtney.

Courtney and I couldn’t be more different on paper, she loves sundresses and picnics, she sees the best in people (esp. me), she likes boys and she grew up in little old Emporia, Kansas.

We met for the first time at an art gallery called The Olive in downtown Lawrence, Kansas. My buddy, Nico, and I had gone to this art gallery because some friends of his were doing a group show with a local kid.

Truthfully, Nico and I really went to the gallery for same reason we always go to gallery shows (including our own) for the free alcohol.

Courtney was there to see the kid art. (Admittedly, the kid art was much more interesting than the grown-up art.)

The artists from that night now have a fancy agent in NYC where they have regular shows like real artists, but Nico, who is also now a NYC urbanite, says the work is still just as boring.

It was a period in my life when chain-smoking was more important than eating and Nico kept the little plastic glasses of cheap wine coming out to my spot on the front steps next to the two ridiculously well-behaved dogs and overlooking the animated punk-types who felt stifled inside the gallery space and came outside to jump on things.

Punk is the word for the evening. Everything was punk or neo-punk or hipster-punk. The art was punk. The musicians, who harmonized and had a squeezebox were punk, all the kids in the gallery were punk. My teacher is punk. Nico was tré punk. Everything, that is except for me. And Courtney.

I think I may have been lamenting my decided lack of punk as I lit one cig from the spent embers of another. Someone came outside and hailed me as I sat face pushed down into butted butts.

For the life of me I can’t remember who it was that introduced us. But as I stood there talking to this friend she or he introduced me to Courtney. First impressions are telling, hence my building up this moment: Courtney was doing something very sound-of-music-like, swinging around a tree, and she was wearing a sundress. She had long curly hair. She seemed happy. Not happy to be at the gallery or happy to be with her friends. She was happy to be alive.

This was at an emotional low-point in my life and I remember thinking, “Oh Jesus, just let me get through the next ten minutes without ripping this poor kid a new asshole.” I loathed happy people. Happy people didn’t know what it was like to have fucked up your life. Happy people didn’t understand codependent relationships. Happy people didn’t get aggressive sex. I also loathed happy people because of the kind of faces they would make when I talked. All my best jokes, the ones about my toilet of a relationship, my mom who regularly forgot about me, about my scary childhood neighborhood, about my ridiculous catholic school, about my fat ass, my abusive babysitter, my poverty, my gender, my gay sex life were ALL lost on happy people. They would look at me while I talked and be shocked, troubled and awe-struck by the things that came out of my mouth. Incredulous gaping-mouth smiles would come over them and when we parted ways, which usually happened with them leaving together tittering and me lighting another cigarette, I couldn’t help but feel that the real joke was always on me.

As Courtney rounded the tree in her sundress, loose fabric and long wavy locks flowing behind her, she hopped forwards and put out her hand in the universal pleased-to-meet-you fashion. “Well this is going to suck,” I thought to myself and shook it with a smile.

I looked at her closely. I couldn’t figure out how she fit into the scene inside or outside. Maybe she thought the same thing about me. As a group of us huddled around and talked I got the distinct impression that Courtney was treated with kid gloves by her friend. This may be why she was ignoring the conversation, or at least she appeared to be. I figured she was thinking about butterflies and brave prairie boys. But I felt bad for her, suddenly, like she didn’t have access to the real conversation because folks were scared of offending her. I often felt like people treated me the same way, being, believe it or not, the only queer in our fairly large circle of art friends.

. . .

A few weeks later the web communications manager at work hired a new student to help out with the site. When I popped my head in to meet the new student I knew instantly that I recognized her from somewhere. I said as much, but couldn’t remember where.

I started down the stairs to my area in the video editing suite and turned around and went back in the web room.

Me: “I met you before, at the Olive Gallery, you were wearing a blue sundress with yellow flowers on it and your hair was down.”
Courtney: “Yes, you are friends with Nico.”
Web Communications Manager: “You remember what she was wearing?”
Me: “Yes, it was a pretty dress.”
Courtney: “Thank you, I like it a lot, too.”
Me: “Well, it is nice to see you again. Glad you are joining us.”

. . .

If you take one golden nugget of goodness from this entry let it be this: Start every relationship with a compliment. (Read on if golden nuggets aren’t your bag.)

. . .

Eventually I got moved to a desk right next to Courtney’s. We would look over each other’s shoulder, share funny things we found online, proof each other’s work. Soon we started going to Veggie Lunches at the Ecumenical Christian Ministries right next to campus. Yes, Courtney from Emporia got me to step foot inside of a functioning church. My defense then was that it is a radical church with free vegan lunch.

It seemed as though EVERYONE at Veggie Lunch knew Courtney. She had volunteered with this one, gone on a retreat with that one, sat on a committee with a third. These were not all church types, either. They were radical vegan kids who did things like tie themselves to trees and whatnot, or at least they dreamed of doing those types of things. Courtney walked the room with a sort of reverent boredom. She told me she was "so over" the Veggie Lunch scene. She confessed to being tired of volunteering for college projects. She was about to graduate and she didn’t want to get sucked into planning any more weekend trips or other events that only really benefited the bourgeious middle-class college kids who got to feel as though they did something “really important” before becoming completely shit-headed adults.

Before we left that first Veggie Lunch we snuck downstairs to look at a mural Courtney had helped find an artist to paint. The church required that the mural “represent all races, genders, sexualities, body types and have a pregnant woman.”

Yeah, wow.

I thought to myself, “What the hell kind of hippy church is this?” I was a bit confounded as we walked back to work. My church would never have commissioned a mural. Murals are for radicals. They certainly wouldn’t have commissioned this mural: A group of hairy, fat people of color embracing each other, naked. That is actually pretty much the opposite of what my church would commission: a dark, richly-dressed Roman soldier stabbing a scrawny, helpless, bleeding crucified white guy wearing a dirty loin clothe.

Courtney and I began talking over our lunch breaks. The hot topic at the time was the project we were working on at the University and how psycho a select group (ie all) of our coworkers were.

Eventually we wore through work chat and began talking more generally about life. One night Courtney invited me to attend a series of lectures about relationships and sex at the Ecumenical Church. I agreed to go not so much for the lecture, but for the company.

I had just broken up with my partner of seven years. I was lost, confused, freer, but the weird freedom that comes without a purpose. There were three lectures in the series: Jealousy, Communication, and How Gay Rights Effect Straight People’s Sex (positively).

I just about shit a brick in the Jealousy lecture. It wasn’t at all what I thought it would be. There were my ex-partner and I’s problems all laid out for me on a piece of paper. I won’t go into these problems out of fairness to my ex, but we both were displaying some classic behaviors of people dealing with insecurities, the resulting jealousy and finally the backlash from jealousy-induced behaviors. Basically, we went into our relationship with an unrealistic idea of what a relationship is. We thought we were soul mates. When the soul mate thing started to fall apart I felt hurt and betrayed. I distanced myself to protect myself. She sensed this distancing and got scared and angry. The anger induced me retreat further. This induced her to get angrier. You get the idea. We ended up having these fights . . . I call them fights, but they were pretty one-sided. She would try to goad me into arguing with her. I would taunt her with a shut down. She would become genuinely upset and yell at me saying increasingly ridiculous things until I lashed out at her or walked away which really fucking pissed her off. We were both at fault for not taking action to confront our real problems and letting ourselves fall into this pattern.

After this lecture Courtney and I went to a coffee house and I talked for over an hour about my relationship with my ex and how I felt it was at a point that was beyond repair.

We had been fighting for too long.

Courtney sat and listened quietly. She asked incredibly pointed questions. I kept talking. All my other friends avoided my ex like the plague. They were scared of her. It was hard for me to talk to them about her because she did her darndest to alienate them. When I was with my friends I sometimes pretended she didn’t exist. None of them had ever been in a long-term relationship, certainly not a 7-year relationship, so I felt it was pointless to try to talk to them. In the world of 3-month trysts, if someone insults your mom or makes you cry - you bail. In the world of 7-year partnerships if you bail you lose your best friend and 7 years of memories and hard work. Or, in our case, not quite hard enough work. They thought I was crazy for staying with her. I didn’t think there was anything else I could do.

It was so nice to have someone new and interested to talk to.

Courtney and I attended the next lecture, Communication in Relationships. Yup, my ex and I were pretty pathetic at that too. I was starting to see a pattern. There really wasn’t too much we had been doing well. After two lectures and a few cups of coffee Courtney knew more about how I felt than I could communicate to my ex.

Courtney and I started a dialogue about relationships in that period. We have been discussing them ever since. She has now seen me in three-ish relationships and a couple of, uhm, well, flings.

We have become good friends. She is on the list of people to save should the van go over the bridge, or to invite into the bunker in the event of a nuclear bomb. But, oddly, I often feel as though I don’t know her very well at all. I sometimes wish that she would talk more. I feel like there are a million little things she keeps to herself. She always shares things she has read somewhere or heard someone say, and she is good at getting me to say things, but she very rarely tells me what she thinks. One day I would like to get the unfiltered version.

Today Courtney typed a letter to me that said, “I am so sick of silly boys singing songs to silly girls. A flower in the rain? Give me a break.”

My initial impressions of her were so off, and at the same time so on. I wonder what has induced her cynicism. I secretly fear it was me, because I know she has helped to build my happiness. It is built soundly, good foundation, good materials, room to grow.

I enter relationships now like they are work projects. It isn't as clinical as it sounds. I realize that I have the power to lay the groundwork for a great partnership or partnerships. I take this job seriously because I have learned that doing right by someone is the only reason to do anything with them.