We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

You know how when you’re in your mid- to late thirties, and you’re dreaming about where you are going to live hopefully by age forty-two, and you’re picturing your reasonably affordable one-bedroom apartment in a moderately safe and attractive neighborhood: who is living there with you? Is it the withholder? The serial cheater? What about the commitment-phobe, or perhaps the grifter? Yeah, no. It’s none of those. It’s some mythical being you haven’t met yet, one who doesn’t have any suspicious Facebook activity that can trigger hours of pointless scrolling down strangers’ profiles, looking for infidelity clues. I have developed a very special set of skills as a coping mechanism for falling in love with shitty people. I can go days at a time without so much as a smoke signal. I have no problem eating in a restaurant alone or living without physical contact for weeks or believing that a person who definitely was sleeping with several other women was also somehow devoted to me. That’s the deal, right, that it’s not real unless it feels like someone reached into your chest to pull your heart out while you stand by helplessly? I can work with that. I have not, however, figured out what to do when a person I am romantically involved with keeps her word and looks after my feelings. If Mavis showed up at a reading, drunk and inexplicably wet, and heckled me onstage, I would know how to handle that kind of love. I understand a love that argues with you in public and occasionally pu...