What Love Looks Like

What Love Looks Like

BY
LARA MONDOUX

Copyright
© 2013 Lara Mondoux

All
rights reserved.

ISBN:

ISBN-13:

DEDICATION

FOR MY HUSBAND SCOTT, WHO NEVER CEASES TO
AMAZE ME WITH HIS UNWAVERING SUPPORT OF ALL THAT I DO. I’M SO FORTUNATE TO HAVE
FOUND YOU. EVERYTHING I DO IS FOR YOU.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my editor, Caroline Kaiser for your
hard work and honest feedback.

Thanks to Tye Lombardi, my cover designer for
your creativity and efficiency.

Thanks to my parents for your wisdom and
solidity.

Thanks to my brother and sister for being my
best friends.

1

 
My eyes opened and immediately found the clock; it was a
little after four in the morning. I was in my bed, and I wasn't alone. The fine
points were unclear, but vaguely I remembered meeting him at Sugar, dragging
him to Spice, and ending up with him on my sofa. He was a stranger, but didn’t
we all start out as strangers?

I blamed my friend Jenna. She’d asked
me to meet her for a drink after work, and that particular night, I was feeling
a little more like Kate Moss than Kate Middleton; my conscience said stay home
but my ego urged me to head out for a bit of debauchery. It was already nine
o'clock, and though my moral code screamed no, Jenna begged harder than I
protested. I was lonely, and so against my better judgment, I trudged three
dark city blocks and met her at Sugar.

After about an hour, the bartender let
me know that the fellow at the end of the bar had backed up my drink. Even in
my inebriated state, I knew that I didn't stand a chance. I’d always been a
sucker for a handsome guy in a pinstripe suit who sent me cocktails from the
corner of a dark bar. I loved the attention, I loved the cinematic quality of
it, and I loved men in suits.

He was in finance. He was tall, dark
haired, and dark eyed, and he had an air of arrogance. He was all of my
weaknesses to the male species wrapped up into one handsome package, buying me
drinks. Once it was clear that he wasn’t a serial killer, Jenna left us and
went home to her husband. I dragged Mr. Pinstripe Suit to the next bar, and
there we drank for another two hours. Shortly after slurping down most of drink
number four, I invited him up to my apartment. He obliged without a moment’s
hesitation.

It bugged me when characters in movies
invited someone of the opposite sex up for “coffee” after a late night out. I’d
never offer a guest coffee after four o’clock in the afternoon. It wasn't my
intention to sleep with him, though; I just didn’t want to spend another night
alone. It had been so long since I’d met anyone new, and a man in my bed was a
welcome change from the typical state of solitary confinement that was my life.

I recalled very little past kissing
him on my sofa but was pretty sure that we'd consummated our incredibly brief
relationship sometime around midnight. Now, as I stared at him, it was well
into the early morning. Even though it was dark, I could see that he was
attractive. He smelled like a combination of spearmint and Crown Royal, which
conjured up vague memories of our rendezvous. But I was ready for him to go. I
gently nudged his shoulder, feigning that I'd accidentally bumped him in my
sleep. He didn't move. I nudged a little harder, and his breath naturally sped
up. I felt his limbs move around, his brain no doubt trying to gather the facts
of his whereabouts the same way mine had moments earlier.

“Hey,” I said. I thought his name was
Josh, but I couldn't chance getting it wrong, so I omitted it entirely.

“Hi.” He smiled.

“Listen, last night was great. But I
have to get up in, like, three hours.” That part was the truth.

“Okay, then get some sleep,” he said,
laying his head back down.

“No, I mean—”

“Oh.” He looked shocked. “I get it.
You want me to leave.”

“I'm sorry, I just really need some
rest. I drank way too much.”

“No, it's cool.” His voice was raspy
from sleep. “I'll take off.” He got dressed quietly.

We were both silent, apart from my
offering him a bottle of water for the road, which he declined. It was a clean
and cordial parting of ways. I never intended that Josh—if that was his
name—should suffer the collateral damage of my trials and tribulations,
but I was too old for a one-night stand. And the sooner the evidence of one
left my apartment, the better.

 
After he left I wasn’t able to return to sleep. Instead I lay
awake and stared at the ceiling. A sense of dissatisfaction washed over me, one
that was all too familiar. It was the same alarming realization that had woken
me so many nights over the past six months. There were ways to say it that
didn’t make it sound nearly as bad as it was: twenty-eight years young,
twenty-eight trips around the sun, four hundred and sixty-four candles blown
out, including those that were there merely for good luck. I could easily have
chosen any one of these ways, or come up with a dozen anecdotes that sounded
cleverer. Or I could have faced the facts and simply said that I was getting
uncomfortably close to turning thirty.

Facing a milestone birthday wouldn’t
have been quite so unpleasant had my life been on a different trajectory, but I
was single, without a prospect for love in sight. Moreover, I had an
insufferable job as a corporate event planner in a down economy, and there was
little likelihood of a promotion or a lateral move elsewhere. I’d never really
traveled anywhere all that remarkable and was pretty certain that I’d never
really been in love.

While my circadian rhythm continued to
fail me, I switched on my bedside lamp and picked up an old issue of
Elle
magazine, one from several months
earlier that I hadn’t yet torn the plastic off of. I hoped that reading might
tire my eyes, but one of the cover stories had the opposite effect. Strangely
enough, the story featured psychologists discussing why some twenty-something
American women had such a hard time growing up. The experts asserted that there
were five so-called landmarks of adulthood, and based on these criteria, I
wasn’t measuring up. 1) Finishing education. Okay, I’d completed college,
though barely. 2) Declaring financial independence. Did it count if I used the
emergency credit card—given to me by my father—only for actual
emergencies? 3) Getting married. I think we established that one—I was as
single as the day was long. 4) Having a child. See previous statement. 5)
Leaving home. Okay, another point for me.

My ego stung with the understanding
that I’d become a statistic. I tossed the magazine onto the floor before
finishing the article, furious that such a well-regarded publication—and
one that bore my name at that—would publish such offensive propaganda. I didn’t
need to see another word; I already knew what I’d become. At twenty-eight years
of age, I’d completed two out of the five landmarks of adulthood. In school,
that would have earned me a failing grade. Do not pass go, and do not collect
two hundred dollars.

Mathematically, it meant that I was
only forty percent grown up. I supposed that my inability to meet the criteria
made me some sort of adult-child hybrid—a kidult, perhaps. I was well
aware that the twenties were a decade for finding yourself, and I agreed that
doing so had a certain romanticism. But in a world with so many stimuli at
every turn (two million people on Match.com; thousands of Facebook friends
posting only the top 10 percent of their life experiences, causing the rest of
us self-doubt; and constant encouragement from the media that multiple sex
partners wasn’t a bad thing), I was on stimulation overload. I was like a
desktop with too many windows open—I was frozen, in need of rebooting.

I tried discussing my frustration with
friends on several occasions, but they didn’t seem to relate to my situation.
It was possible, though, that the demographic I’d selected to confide in was
skewed. I lived in Columbus, after all, a small city where women went to
school, graduated, four years later graduated again, and (finally) got married.
Suffice it to say that most of my peers had already tied the knot, found their
dream jobs, and given up on exploring themselves.

But even back in college, I worried
about ending up alone. Everyone around me seemed to find love a lot more easily
than I did, and it wasn’t for lack of wanting to find it. To see if my peers
shared any of my trepidation, my twenty-one-year-old self brought up the
subject of marriage to my then college-junior friends.

“Did you know that the median age for
a first marriage for women is twenty-eight in New York?” I said. I was reading
from Forbes (college kids still read actual print publications back then). “For
men it’s thirty.” I added.

“That’s crazy old,” my then-roommate
Erica said. The other girls nodded in agreement.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“I’m definitely going to be married by
the time I’m twenty-four,” Stacey, another of my housemates, said. She didn’t
bother to look up at me as she spoke. She was filing her nails in preparation
for painting them. Stacey was
always
doing
her nails. In fact, I couldn’t recall a time when she wasn’t primping some part
of her body, except for rare occasions when she actually went to class or the
more frequent occurrences in which she went out and got hammered.

“Elle, what’s the average age for
women in Ohio?” Erica asked.

“Uh, twenty-six.” I said, scanning the
list state by state.

Fast-forwarding to the present day,
Stacey was married, Erica was engaged, and I was none of the above. It was seven
years later, and I was now two years past the age that statistically I was
expected to be a wife.

I felt youthful physically. But when I
compared myself to the data and to those around me, I’d unquestionably fallen
behind. As I lay there, the other side of my bed still warm from Josh’s
departure, I wondered what it was like to have that revered and seemingly
unattainable thing that so many women my age already had: a husband. Let me
preface this by saying I wasn’t on some sort of wild fiancé hunt. I didn’t sit
around waiting for just anyone to fill the now empty side of my bed. Nor did I
ache to become betrothed by a preselected time to someone I hadn’t even met
yet. I never wanted to go through the motions of a relationship just to meet
some bullshit psychological criteria—probably conceived a century before
I was—that certified I was a grown-up. And I knew that there was no
longer a stigma attached to being an unwed woman of a certain age. I just knew
that I wanted to be happy.

When my mother was twenty-eight, she’d
been married for three years and had two college degrees. She’d had one child
(my older brother), and was pregnant with another (me). She’d have a third
before she turned thirty (my younger sister). She also had a mortgage, in-laws,
and a whole host of life experiences that I couldn’t even fathom. By contrast,
my path was so unclear, and such ambiguity came with a chilling thought: it was
one thing to have life come together by thirty but quite another to start
building it at thirty.

Curled into the fetal position, I
cursed the fact that I was still required to barhop in order to meet new
people. But my married friends ventured downtown only rarely. Only when they
hosted a dinner to impress us all with their newfound domestic prowess did I actually
have the chance to catch up with them. And when I did, we reflected on how once
upon a time we were all so young and game for whatever life handed us. Like
most coeds, we were guilty of getting wickedly drunk, passing out in unfamiliar
places, smoking pot with strangers, and having one-night stands. But unlike me,
they’d abandoned collecting strange and rotating bedfellows for permanent
fixtures, their spouses.
 
In
conversation, they’d incessantly refer to their men as their
husbands
, as if I’d never even met the
guys. Their first names had been kicked to the pavement for a new title,
husband.

 
The harsh facts were indisputable: I was lonely, and I’d just
stooped to the level of sleeping with a man I didn’t know from Adam to help me
forget about my loneliness. The line between post adolescent and grown-up
looked blurry from where I stood. I still ran to my parents whenever anything
went wrong, and they’d inevitably coddle me with encouragement or money, whichever
the situation warranted. All the while I looked on as my friends led mature,
responsible, fairy-tale lives. Most of my evenings consisted of laundry, forced
exercise, and mind-numbing marathons of
Keeping
Up with the Kardashians
.

For better or worse, I lived a
lifestyle typically reserved for a twenty-something single woman. Managing cash
was not my strong suit, but I was still at the age where I could pass off my
financial cluelessness as cute. I wasn’t married, but I was still young enough
to not be considered pitiable. But I knew that the tipping point was fast
approaching, at which point my delayed “landmarks of adulthood” would morph
into plain old failure.

Adding fuel to my fire was my job as
an event planner, which was particularly demanding. It required me to put in
over sixty hours a week, which didn’t allow much time to go on dates. I did
meet men, mostly young professionals, weekly through work events and when I
went out socially. And it wasn’t that I never got attention from them; I
sometimes did, but almost never did I meet one that I was drawn to. Josh was a
rare exception because physically he fit the bill. But as hypocritical as it
was, I didn’t want to end up with a guy who was out looking for a one-night
stand the way Josh clearly was. No matter how much I longed for something more
permanent than a fling, I refused to settle for just an average boyfriend. I’d
rather be at home with my dog every night than having dinner with a guy who
didn’t stimulate me intellectually, emotionally, and of course, physically.