The Forever Thing | Industry | March 2015

New column is up over at Issuu.com.

I love the title. It sounds like the warm bath feeling of love. In reality, the formalized dance of the dating scene is a joke.

And, ironically, as we get older and have less finite time, it takes longer to know someone. More of our time is in the past, adding to our history, and the more just information there is to digest about the other. I spent lots of early relationships looking for that climax and denouement, the forever thing. Now, forever unfolds gradually.

Excerptified.

Still, I liked having a couple of guys on the go at once, for once. It was like applying for lots of jobs, so it didn’t sting as much if I didn’t get one. Maybe that downgraded the individual jobs in my mind a bit. It was successful, though, in that it short-circuited something in me. In the past I would just get so excited about a person, it seemed perversely automatic. Now I was forcing myself to be patient. My former self would’ve seen me as soulless or holding back.

One morning I woke to a rattling thought; “What if they’re both wrong, and I’m setting up a binary in my head… can’t see anything because I’m only comparing them with each other?”

Later that day, over a cup of coffee, my mom sighed. “You know, you don’t owe anyone anything.”

I looked at her strangely. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Read the rest of Forever here.

This is my last column for Industry for awhile, I’m taking a break from relationship writing. Gotta let that ground go fallow.

It’s been amazing growing as a writer alongside this mag! Also, Julianne Moore looks great on the cover this month. Those eyes…

Thanks to everyone at Industry for this opportunity!