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When I finally stopped talking, Layne shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “That fucking sucks.”
And then she made like she was going to go back to the beans.
“Wait! What should I do? I mean, do you have any advice? I’d love your opinion.”
She sat back down, apparently only comfortable giving advice when directly asked.
Layne blew out a breath. “Well. A couple things. When you asked him if you were together, what did you mean? Because there are a lot of ways to be in someone’s life. Being in a monogamous partnership is only one way, and it’s not the default mode for everyone. So, if that’s the only kind of relationship you’re interested and it’s not the kind that Will wants, then that’s a pretty basic incompatibility. You need to figure out what you want. And why you want it.”
“Why I want it?”
“Well, yeah. Like, if monogamy is what you want, do you want it because it’s the only thing you’ve considered, or because it’s normal so you assume you want it? Do you want it because monogamy is something you actively desire or value? Do you want it because you’re jealous thinking of Will with someone else? Or because you aren’t confident about his feelings for you? Et cetera. You know?”
I nodded, wishing I had a pen and paper to write this all down.
“Even if you figure out what you want, though, that doesn’t mean that the other person will want the same thing. And it sucks when that happens, but you have to radically recognize the truth before you can hope to either change or accept it.”
“What do you mean, radically recognize it?”
“Well, sometimes recognizing the truth requires stripping away what you want to be true, which is hard for a lot of people. You seem, um….”
“What? Just say it.”
“You seem like a romantic, I guess. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily,” she said quickly. “But being a romantic means choosing to see the world as ordered by a central force, or around a central person. And for someone who’s romantic, it’s maybe harder to acknowledge data that doesn’t fit with the fantasy view you have, even if that fantasy’s just hope.”
I’d never thought of hope as a fantasy before. And, jeez, I couldn’t believe Layne, whose only contact with me was at work, had come to the same conclusion about me as Will.
“It’s the same in political movement building, really,” she went on. This, I knew, was Layne’s passion. “There’s the romance of the work that you’re doing. ‘Making the world a better place.’” She made air quotes around the phrase. “But if you’re too focused on the romance of it, you forget that someone has to file the paperwork, and get a port-a-potty, and make hundreds of hours of phone calls. And march in the cold and the rain. And you forget that those things aren’t supplementary—they’re every bit as important and central as making inspiring speeches or seeing that your bill passed in the Senate.
“If you get too caught up in yourself as being a part of that romance you forget that it’s not actually about you. That the point isn’t for you to feel good about the work you do, but to do the work because it’s right and necessary. But that requires you to radically recognize the truth, even when it erases the romance you have or the romance you think you’re a part of. I have to recognize that when I go to a Black Lives Matter protest, I’m a white person taking up space, and my very presence there might do harm. That my intentions don’t matter, at the most basic material level.
“That’s the radical truth: that I might care a whole hell of a lot, but my level of feeling doesn’t affect the fact that other people might experience me and the world differently than me, and that no romantic grand narrative I bring into the space, learned from years and years of absorbing the world through headlines and sound bites, is going to change the fact that some people will look at me and feel just the same as if I were some ignorant NYU freshman who jumped on the protest thinking it was a parade I could Instagram.”
I gaped at her, never having heard her say more than a casually tossed-off comment here or there about anything but coffee or scheduling or mopping the floors.
She opened her mouth to continue, but paused. I didn’t know what my face was doing, but my surprise must’ve been evident. I gestured that she should continue.
“Practically speaking, thinking about your situation, you need to recognize whatshisname’s truth too. Will’s. Like, who is he, really? What can you expect? How much is it reasonable to expect someone to change? Is that expectation generous? It means stripping away the romance from them, from your vision of them. It’s really hard to see people as they are, sometimes. We have a lot invested in seeing them in relation to ourselves.”
