"Despite the hangover curdling my stomach, I felt content knowing I'd held my own as his plus-one at the prior night's wedding. As I untangled myself from the bedsheets, he whispered, "I hope you don't plan to steal all my friends when we break up." This wasn't the first time we had spoken about the dissolution of our relationship, but it was the first time Jake had brought other people into bed with us. I felt a lightning bolt crack through the wall."
"I hadn't planned to date seriously when Jake and I met. Instead, I spent my 20s romantically unattached, organizing book clubs and weekly dinners for the friends I propagated like pothos clippings. I imagined sowing each of these cuttings into a garden, and attentively tending to these sprouting relationships as they nourished, sheltered, and supported me. I didn't see any need for romance with a garden already so full."
The narrator centered friendships over romantic involvement, cultivating social networks and hosting gatherings throughout her twenties. A close friend created an OkCupid profile that introduced Jake, who became the narrator's first boyfriend despite initial ambivalence. The relationship combined shared eccentricities and repeated tensions, frequently teetering toward breakup. Jake raised the prospect of claiming mutual friends after a split, which shocked the narrator and prompted a conciliatory lie. The narrator maintained a deep attachment to her social garden while navigating commitment fears and recurring conflicts within the relationship.
Read at BuzzFeed
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]