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Dating Diary:
All by myself...
Dear Diary,
WHERE WERE WE?
When I was a teenager, I became a difficult person to deal with, as most teens are when they start to rebel against whatever it is that they find irritating at the moment. My parents and I fought constantly, and when we weren’t fighting, my older sister and I would have a go at it. I had recurring wild fantasies of growing up into a sophisticated adult and finding a place of my own, where I could finally have a taste of privacy and freedom. But being a teenager with a part-time after school job, the most I could ever imagine myself living in, besides a cardboard box with a mouse named Jingles, was a ratty apartment with no air conditioning and a fire escape that drug dealers called their own. Regardless of how horrible my imagined place would be, in the long run it didn’t matter, because this apartment was going to be mine.But when I graduated from university, I was still living at home. Student loans and credit card bills were starting to pile up, and suddenly, having my mother barge into my room at all hours of the day wasn’t so bad when compared to bankruptcy or a cardboard box with a mouse named Jingles. I still planned to leave the nest, but the urgency wasn’t there anymore.
When Bee first mentioned the idea of moving out together, I didn’t know what to say. Part of me was elated that Bee found me inoffensive enough to live with, but a smaller part of me felt like I was giving up a sort of independence that I had from the relationship when Bee and I parted ways at the end of the night.
The concerns started piling up: I knew that living with him would be great, but conversely, it was a huge deal to be living with your boyfriend (and in sin, as my parents like to say). Would I be able to handle living with another person? Would Bee and I end up hating each other? Would he try to smother me in my sleep?
Nevertheless, I pushed these concerns aside and we slowly started the apartment hunt. The more we got into it, the more I became convinced that this was a step in the right direction. Bee and I had already gone on several trips that required us to be with each other for days at a time, and nobody had ended up hurt. So how hard could it be to live with him?
This probing question was answered when we found a place and started discussing furniture options, or rather, our lack of furniture altogether. This is when I quickly discovered that Bee and I had very different stances on furniture: I liked, clean, classic looks, and Bee didn’t. In fact, Bee didn’t like furniture all that much.
The first week together, stuck in a small downtown apartment with no cable, Internet, phone, or couch, was like a long slumber party with no adults. Bee and I loved the novelty of having our own place and someone to talk to at all hours of the day. But as the weeks progressed and we settled in, our slumber party resembled less of a party and now seemed more like an episode of “Survivor.” I realized that in order to live together, we’d have to get used to each other’s idiosyncrasies – fast. In the end, I won out and we did purchase a couch, but not before a lot of teeth pulling and minor tantrums. And I quickly learned that after work, Bee liked to relax instead of listening to my inane chattering about the crazy old man who tried to sell me his pants in exchange for a quarter.
Living with your significant other is an eye-opening experience. It was like living with my best friend, but one who constantly farted and had an aversion to cleaning the toilet. I’m sure Bee’s experience of living with me was no different; my relentless need for attention and the bunched up Kleenex I left around the apartment on every smooth surface I could find was surely no walk in the park for him. But the true challenge came when Bee and I would fight. The usual cooling off period that living apart afforded us was now gone, and we were forced to live together when we couldn’t even stand to look at one another. That was probably the most frustrating thing about living with him. But slowly, eventually, things worked out more than they went wrong and, for the most part, we grew even closer. There was just something so lovely about going to sleep and waking up to find Bee right next to me.
Sadly, our co-habitation bliss was not meant to last. Forced to move out when our landlord sold the condo, we looked at our options. With Bee leaving his job to concentrate on his own projects, he decided that it would be economical to move back home. Faced with the prospect of going back to my old bedroom, with my mother asking me every half hour whether I had eaten and what exactly had I eaten, I decided to find my own place.
When I told my boss about my decision, he was thrilled for me. “You’ll love having your own place,” he said, theorizing that everyone should live alone at least once in his or her life. “I think so,” I agreed. After all, Bee had gone on a two-week vacation in the summer, and that time was spent relatively trouble-free.
But the first night in my tiny bachelor apartment was one of the loneliest nights I’ve had in a long time. When I bid Bee good-bye after our long day of moving, I felt a surprising but overwhelming feeling of solitude wash over me. I was taken aback at my sudden separation anxiety. As I started unpacking our familiar belongings, the sadness became even more intense. The pepper grinder that I gave him as a housewarming gift, the wine glasses we used every Friday night, the couch that we sat on while I forced him watch Resident Evil: Extinction (by the way, Ashanti should keep her day job), all these things brought back bittersweet memories. I didn’t want to be a girl about it, but I actually got a little teary-eyed while begrudgingly unpacking our belongings. It somehow felt like Bee and I had broken up, and in a very loose sense, this was true. It was difficult to go from living with my parents, to living with my boyfriend, to living with no one.
One week later, and the pangs still come and go. With all my things unpacked, this is starting to feel like home, but I still miss living with Bee. Don’t get me wrong, there are many great things about living by myself, like keeping my own schedule, only having to clean up after myself, watching the television shows I want to watch instead of fighting for the remote, and feeling independent for managing to not burn down my apartment while cooking. But with every perk, there’s also a downfall. The freshness of coming home to an empty place or having made up conversations with my teddy bears can only last so long, and I still miss lounging in bed with Bee, talking about absolutely nothing and having a great time.
So now it’s just me, and although I miss Bee tremendously, I’m also embarking on a new journey full of rent cheques, single stints at the grocery store, and trying to figure out how to use the washing machine without shrinking half of my sweaters. Some days are harder than others, but in the end, there’s no greater feeling of accomplishment than doing it on my own. ¤ C.Ho.
Next Month: Christine learns how to install drapes, gives up, and watches reruns of "Beverly Hills, 90210."