Patrick is not my boyfriend. He is this great, new person in my life but I am not in any rush to define what we are, now or ever. My friends don’t understand this. “Oh, but he is!” they say. Or “Whatever, don’t even try to deny it.” Really, guys, he’s not my boyfriend. He and I have had entire conversations about how he is not my boyfriend. In fact, if one more person who ought to know better calls him my boyfriend again, I might just have to get a t-shirt that reads “Please remove your label from my relationship.” Because to me, Patrick is Patrick and I’m not really interested in labeling him otherwise.

The problem with “boyfriend” is it suggests some natural progression in romance. You go from “boyfriend” to “fiance” to “husband”. You go from “dating” to “a relationship” to “engagement” to “marriage.” If you’ve been involved with someone for years and you have no plans to get married, people get confused. If you’ve been living together for years and you have no plans to get married, people get confused. If you decide to have children together and still don’t get married, people just write you off as “everything that is wrong with damn liberals these days.” Our society is unable to understand relationships beyond linguistic and legal boundaries, and that’s a problem. And then there’s the implication that there’s supposed to be some uniform set of attributes romantic relationships are supposed to share. My best friend Jason sleeps over at his boyfriend’s place every night. I sleep over at Patrick’s place every night. Therefore, he must be my boyfriend. My girlfriends bring their significant others to social events. I brought Patrick to my friend Tara’s birthday brunch. He must be my boyfriend. Except he’s not.

Certainly, our relationship shares some of the attributes of other people’s relationships, but nothing we do is exclusively what boyfriends and girlfriends do. If he weren’t around and Kennedy were in the country, I’d probably just drag her out to events I wanted to attend, but that wouldn’t make her my girlfriend in the romantic/sexual sense. And what about the things Patrick and I do that no one else does? What people forget with labels is that they fail to capture the uniqueness of individual relationships. I can’t be comfortable calling him my “boyfriend” because in my mind, it reduces our time together to a very limited spectrum of activities. This isn’t a condemnation of other people’s relationships. If you want to call your significant other “boyfriend,” “husband,” or “snuggly-poo,” that’s really up to you. Those terms (especially the last) probably carry a different connotation for you than it does for me. In my opinion, “boyfriend” doesn’t do justice to who he is to me. It sounds stagnant and limiting.

This is not just a problem exclusive to romantic relationships. It took months of delving into each other for me to really appreciate my best friends Jason or Kennedy fully, and at the end of it all, “best friend” seems like such an inadequate term. I wish there were some other way I could describe what they mean to me, because platonic labels, too, are limited. I hate that I refer to them as my best friends, simply because those words do not come close to conveying what I actually mean. But even with them, if I say “This is my friend, but also so much more,” people might understand. With Patrick, if I say “This is the person I sleep with, but also so much more,” the immediate response would be, “Is he your boyfriend?”

Part of the trouble is that “boyfriend” connotes exclusivity, and people seem to really like marking their territory (must be the history of imperialism or something). It’s not just “This is the person I fuck and do xyz with.” It’s “This is the only person I fuck and do xyz with.” It’s alarming to others that I’m not boxing Patrick up and calling him mine because forgoing the term “boyfriend” implies that there’s the possibility he might run off with some other girl or something. Okay, so he might. But if he wanted to do that, then labeling him “mine and only mine forever and always” really isn’t going to prevent that from happening. And I’m not exactly Miss Confidence either. I’m full of insecurities — ask anyone who knows me, Patrick included — but I’ve just come to realize that being able to say he’s my boyfriend is not going to resolve any of those issues.

In lieu of other people’s labels, I have better names for him. And he has many for me. They only make sense in the context of us, but isn’t that the way all things should be? Besides, it’s pointless to call him something when he’ll most likely be something else entirely to me in a matter of months. Maybe I’ll fall head over heels for Patrick this summer and get as close to him as I have with Kennedy or Jason. Maybe at some point, I’ll get sick of the cumbersome series of words “the guy I’m seeing.” Or maybe it’ll be him I get sick of during Week 6 of my 13-week European adventure. Maybe the sex will become boring and the dog will become annoying. Even if I decide that perhaps I don’t need him to pick me up from the airport or move me into my dorm come September, I still wouldn’t want to define what we were. Perhaps the biggest problem with the term “boyfriend” is that when you’re not together anymore, that person becomes your “ex.” That’s what they’ll always be from then on. And even though I’ve only known him for a few months, I think he deserves more than to be left with only two options for what he wants to be in my life.

In a profile of me for her creative writing course, my friend called me the “girl alone in the riot-proof dorm.” That’s what the past year has been for me: solitude, safety, self-sufficiency. It is everything that seemed impossible less than two years ago.

Contentment is harder to express than the depression or rage of my nineteenth year. How do you say “I am happy” in any way but just that? Pain is common, universal, widely felt, and mulled over. Happiness is fleeting and even if everyone’s had a taste, no one really remembers it or knows it beyond the moment. We recall the details and circumstances, but not the feeling. There are just the moments and impressions.

Sunday morning. Early March of this year. I woke up in a soundless riot-proof dorm from nine and a half uninterrupted hours of much needed slumber. I tapped at my laptop and drew my curtains, finding an email from Patrick and unexpected sunniness in the process. The sun blinked back at me, demanding musical accompaniment, so I put iTunes on shuffle and made my way to the bathroom, taking a route littered with wrinkled clothing, unread books, and half-empty cigarette boxes — pieces of a scattered life. Sometime between the scent of jojoba on my cheeks and the opening strains of a Weakerthans tune, I jolted awake when I took in the full extent of my surroundings. Standing there amid my mess of a room, I realized that I had finally cleaned up my mess of a life; that I had done even better than I could’ve ever expected and found a comfort in my own skin I would’ve deemed inconceivable a year ago.

This clarity comes every once in a while, far more frequently this year than last. Some mornings, I will wake up so inexplicably content that I remain flat on my back with eyes stretched wide to take in the cars and morning joggers beyond my window. Everything else can wait while I celebrate this small moment. I like to think of these instances as an expression of my gratitude, as an appreciative reminder of what I have: the ability to be alone and happy. For the girl who used to find it a challenge to merely emerge from her bedroom, this is a veritable triumph over the melancholic ailments to which she was enslaved.

And now, May is today, and I hardly ever spend the night in my riot-proof dorm anymore. Most mornings, I wake up next to a man and his dog. There is no window above my head. The light of dawn streams into his living room but his bedroom remains cloaked in darkness. My Aveda cleanser sits in his bathroom cabinet and he keeps his hardwood floors uncluttered, save for vague evidence of my presence like the occasional earring separated from its twin.

Like my hard-earned felicity, he too is not something I can verbalize. How can one adequately express the experience of someone else? How do I do justice to the hours between dawn and waking, to the broad expanse of his chest, to morning showers with his soapy hands in my hair, to the weight and feel of him through cotton and denim? There are slivers and glimpses, and together, they pile up into impressions. This is the most I can hope for: impressions that come close enough but not quite. Impressions just close enough to extrapolate from and misinterpret or maybe to understand, hopefully to understand.

There are entire nights spent on his living room floor, the two of us face-to-face with me on his lap and his dog splayed out beside us. For minutes at a time, we look. There is looking and more looking and nothing but silence and the occasional peculiar facial expression. Sometimes, after we have maintained prolonged eye contact to the point of absurdity, he will make a cautiously affectionate remark such as “I really enjoy spending time with you.” When it comes to words, I don’t expect anything more from my stoic German. Enjoyment is concession enough. Invariably, one of us will concoct some sort of prank or ridiculous scheme. We are never up to any good, not on our own and certainly not together. More often than not, we will dissolve into laughter at the prospect of carrying out our ludicrous plans aimed at confusing and provoking ludicrous people. That’s what we spend most of our leisure time doing: plotting and giggling. I make this six-foot-something man giggle.

He’s been asking every once in a while how “that piece” is going. He knows that I’ve been having a hard time writing, that I’ve been working on something about him but I cannot manage to finish it. I have been sleeping beside him for weeks yet I cannot bring myself to contemplate what he or this means to me. It is not a conversation I’ve had with him, my friends, or anyone else; it is not even a conversation I’ve had with myself. And until a few nights ago, I wasn’t able to articulate why I was encountering so much trouble.

I’m afraid of getting you wrong, Patrick. I’ve told you before that I am constantly afraid of getting people wrong. That’s why I feel compelled to ask my first subject over and over if it’s okay to put his coarse curls and careless habits down into words. He has always told me to write what I want without worrying what he or other people might think. You say the same thing.

But how can I tell you what you mean when I can’t even tell myself what you mean? Maybe, what I am really scared of is not getting you wrong but getting you right. I don’t want to write about you because it is too much, because words might give you meaning that I have yet to grapple with. And I am not ready for that. Not quite.

There was one morning when I woke up crying in his bed. It wasn’t long after I’d come back from seeing Kennedy in Germany. She was doing fine when I got there, meaning she wasn’t 1) institutionalized or 2) suicidal, which were both improvements from the previous week. When I left Heidelberg, I felt immensely better — even hopeful — about my best friend’s mental state. But for whatever reason, I dreamed of her shortly after and I woke with an image of her pushing me away. I was visibly bothered and he wanted me to talk about it. Usually, I appreciate his willingness to listen but on this particular morning, I hated him for it, for his inability to leave things unsaid. Because here is the thing: I am so used to getting upset over stupid, superficial things that I don’t even know how to get upset over real, important things anymore. I don’t want to cry over pictures of me on the Internet because that would mean I’m weak. So I don’t want to cry over my best friend being incredibly depressed and lost because that too would mean I’m weak. Even if what it really means is that I’m human. And he seems to think I’m human, the silly boy.

Human, in fact, was the last thing I felt like being that morning but I made the mistake of telling him something that led to something else and then everything tumbled out after, little bits at first and finally, entire pieces. I told him about resentment and fear and love and fear and loss. I told him about loss. What I lost. What she lost. What I want so badly that I’m afraid she won’t give. I told him about what it means to be family, what it means to be friends. I told him that sometimes there is no difference, that it is my sister I’m afraid of losing.

He said things and I nodded and I was fine and then I wasn’t and I turned away. I was trembling and naked against the morning.

“Come here,” he said. He touched me, pulled me to him, his voice so soft, my throat so hard. That was all it took. That is all it takes. “Come here,” he always tells me in moments like these and I cannot help but break.

“Hey,” he said again. “Come here.”

So I did, and for a moment, I felt human. When I sobbed, I shook.

The more attention a woman gets, the more stigma is attached to her. There are plenty of famous men with few detractors; there are virtually no famous women without tons of them. Girls who write sex blogs (or dating columns or anything that remotely relates to matters of the heart or pussy) come with extra helpings of stigma. I admit: if I were a guy, I would have some major reservations about dating me. Who wants their girlfriend’s Google search results to include the type of stuff mine does?

My friends and I had a little debate the other night. They (and a lot of people) think that any guy who “deserves” me, who is “perfect for me”, etc. wouldn’t care about the blog or my questionable reputation or any of that stuff. But I think that the weirdness surrounding me is a bit too much for just about anyone to handle upfront. I don’t think that guys who stop calling or who write me off are assholes because they’re freaked out by my very public persona. I simply think that the unconventional aspects of my life — things that have taken a long time for me to be comfortable with — would be difficult for any new acquaintance to get used to, most of all a romantic interest.

To me, it doesn’t make sense to simply say that the perfect guy for me wouldn’t care about things like this, because he should care. I’d be concerned if he didn’t! My daily life and interactions are far from normal, and if someone is going to get involved with me, I’d be worried if he didn’t care about the ramifications of my blog on our relationships. If one of my girlfriends started dating my male equivalent, I’d certainly caution her to be wary too. In fact, in my experience with guys, there is a fine line between being supportive after becoming fully informed of my circumstances and being … weirdly into fame. There are a ton of guys who fall into the latter category, are completely gung-ho about the blog, specifically request to be blogged about, and pretty much eliminate themselves from romantic contention by displaying an unhealthy obsession with obtaining their fifteen minutes.

The more I debated this matter with my friends; the more irritated I got with them. They thought I was being pessimistic about my options. “You don’t know what it’s like!” I said. “People get freaked out. That doesn’t make them bad people or less worthy.” They pointed out a recent example of a guy who was fantastic about it all, who didn’t judge me, who was understanding and patient. If he existed, then everyone who couldn’t do the same as he did simply didn’t deserve me in their minds. But I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think it’s fair to expect that same unreasonable standard of absolute open-mindedness from all men when I only found it in one — and not even one I explored romantic possibility with. Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to handle it after all in the end. “But isn’t love supposed to be rare?” asked Tara. “How many guys do you expect to find? There will only be a few people for anyone.” My point, though, is that a lot of times, I don’t make it past first dates or initial meetings with people, and that’s what’s annoying. I’m not after true, all-consuming love. I’m after … whatever it is people do in college when they’re young and undecided.

I’m quickly finding that this is a game I’m walking into with a major handicap. That sucks, but it doesn’t do much good to blame others. “They can’t help it,” I told Tara. “My life is not normal and any reasonable person should be fairly freaked out.” Maybe I was feeling pessimistic because I just saw Julia and I was starting to think that New York really wasn’t any more forgiving a place (or less of a bubble) than Harvard. “There’s no one who could be expected to handle it. It’s just too much, ” she said to me over brunch. “It’s too much to ask for from someone you just met.” I had to agree. Sure, it sucks that I’m not given a chance to demonstrate that I’m kind and loving and selfless and all those adjectives my friends offer up, but my god, we’re talking about guys I’ve just gotten to know. I’m not going to fault people for being rightfully apprehensive, for wanting to back away slowly from this seeming mess of a girl.

And honestly? It’s hard to be with me, almost as hard as it is to be me. Relationships are difficult enough as they are, but loving me means figuring out how to negotiate between the public and the private, between my habitual neediness and my spurts of defiant independence. There are subtle cues that take forever to learn, that some guys — even the ones I fall hard for — will simply never become familiar with.

My friends have been with me through this whole crazy journey, and they know. They know they shouldn’t take it personally when I don’t want to be touched because I’m anxious (like last night) or feel out of the loop when I blog about something I haven’t first told them. They don’t get freaked out when people recognize me at parties or offended when I leave parties because I’m freaked out. They no longer get surprised or even excited about the crazy shit that comes up, because unless I’m damn excited myself — and visibly so — there’s nothing more irritating than someone else getting ridiculously amped up on my behalf. It’s taken a long time and a lot of improvisation but they know the proper reactions to things, know when and how much to push me (and when not to), and know that my best coping mechanism for when shit gets especially bad is to just resolve stuff on my own. They know I will go to them if I really need to, that otherwise, they won’t get very far by prodding. All of these things, especially the last, are hard to learn, even harder to accept.

And even my patient friends don’t get it right 100% of the time. Our debate is a good example. They love me and so naturally, they want me to be happy. They think that I deserve nothing less than a person who fully accepts me as I am, but they don’t want to recognize that total acceptance — at least initially — is hard to come by with a reputation like mine. When it came to this debate, I wasn’t budging on my position. Like Julia said, “It’s just too much.” I’m not going to fault people for having perfectly valid responses to my freaky deaky life. And even though I’m certain my friends know one of my pet peeves is when others adopt common rhetoric (”Anyone who doesn’t give you a chance does not deserve you”) for my uncommon situation (sex blogging), they couldn’t help but do it anyway. They didn’t want to see me blaming myself and my choices for my bad luck in love. So what I thought was a realistic outlook, they viewed as overly pessimistic.

But I’m not saying that I’m never going to find someone. It’s just going to be much, much harder. And instead of dismissing everyone who doesn’t immediately accept me as someone who’s not worth my time, I should probably take a long look at the previous year and determine if my blog is worth the trouble.

It’s audience participation time!

Received an interesting piece of reader mail yesterday:

Dear Lena,
Nerds come in many [mental] types. I for example am an engineer, my friend a music [composition] nerd and many more computer scientists. I would like to know if you would share your opinions on a possible breakdown of experience you have had with men of different mental strengths in a general sense as to tell us who is better: Art nerds, Engineers, Law, Sciences, Med, etc. I don’t know you’re full experience but I hope it could prove an interesting resolve for this topic. Thanks!

I sent out an email to like 80 of my closest friends asking for their opinion on the matter, and I wanted to see what my readers thought too. So my girls and my boys who like boys, take a moment to respond to my stereotype-affirming poll and leave a comment explaining your preference. I expect this to get feisty! After I get a substantial response, I’ll reveal my own fave geek in a follow-up entry.

By the way, categories are not mutually exclusive but just pick one. I tried to cover the spectrum without falling into career-oriented categories. I’m also defining “geekiness” as a near-unhealthy fixation with something. For example, a doctor might not be a “science geek” if medicine is just a profession to him, but a lawyer who takes on the tobacco industry could be considered an “activist geek”. Think: has the geek given up crucial aspects of life (money, hygiene, social interaction) in the name of his geeky passion? Does this geeky pursuit define a huge portion of who he is?

Remember, this is about dating, not mating — though bedroom know-how certainly factors into relationship material. And geeks, please refrain from voting for yourselves! Instead, you can comment below about why you think your breed of geek is super neat. And yes, I do plan on having a survey about geek girls.

One weekend last June, I was talking about relationships on the phone with my girlfriend CeCe from home when I realized that we’ve hit an age of responsibility for everything in life — not just legal, but interpersonal as well. CeCe had just ended things with my ex-boyfriend from high school who she attended UCSD with, and like most breakups, it was neither easy nor mutual. Advising her on the matter reminded me of what it felt like to break up with him two and a half years ago. At the time, I was a senior in high school, two months removed from early acceptance to Harvard, and completely in love with my now-ex/her current ex. We were high school sweethearts in every sense. But he was also incredibly jealous and possessive and I spent a lot of the relationship trying to not set him off. This only got harder after he realized I wasn’t turning down the Ivy League to spend four years in San Diego with him. Our inevitable breakup came after an excursion with my debate team to Berkeley when I kissed a guy friend and realized how much I liked the taste of freedom. The boyfriend was devastated. But there was nothing that could make me feel terribly guilty about what I’d done. My remorse lasted about as long as the three-hour yelling, screaming, and crying session outside my house in his Mustang. After that, all I could see was college and Cambridge and the rest of my life.

I’m 20 now, and I still don’t look back on what happened at 17 with guilt. He and I are friends; the wounds finished healing last summer when I gave the okay to CeCe — and even encouraged her — to date him. But despite it all, he and I still disagree on what happened in February of 2005. He calls me unfaithful, and hell, I don’t disagree, but I feel like being 17 was a pass on “cheating”. How is fidelity a reasonable expectation at that age — especially under the burden of an overbearing, all-consuming first love? I was young. I was immature. So was he, after all, taking into account his unreasonable behavior. But today, are we any different? Am I?

I write about dating and relationships and falling in love, but the reality of the matter is that I have not been at it for very long. It wasn’t really until college that I started to take myself seriously. When CeCe ended things with my ex, she was 19 and he was a man unrecognizable from the boy I loved two years prior. She didn’t cheat on him but she met someone else during her quarter at Dartmouth and they began dating very soon after. CeCe took great care to be tactful and considerate with the breakup, doing everything I didn’t at age 17. Still, she didn’t have it easy and though she most certainly did not stray while still in a relationship, it didn’t stop people from characterizing the situation that way. She was furious about being misportrayed and understandably so. Besides the accusations being wrong, we’ve also hit an age when these things start to count. What used to be mistakes when we were younger are now character flaws. What used to be slip-ups are now signs of a cheater. As CeCe said herself, being hungover on a Tuesday morning when you’re in college is funny; being hungover on a Tuesday morning when you have work is alcoholism. We can’t blame youth or inexperience. We know better. Or we should.

I’m not worried about CeCe. Like Kennedy, she is one of those morally upright people who make doing good look so easy. But for the rest of us, well, I don’t know if we are ready for this burden. My closest friends are 22 at most but for all intents and purposes, they are still too concerned with figuring out themselves to figure out someone else. Certainly, for many of my friends, serious romantic involvement is an experience they have yet to enjoy (or suffer, depending on your point of view). At the cusp of young adulthood, we seem no better prepared for the responsibility of another’s heart than we were as teenagers. I might as well be 17 again and making out in Berkeley with a boy who is not my boyfriend. Today, I still feel more girl than woman. Even though I try to act the latter, the only difference I’ve found in adulthood is not my better handling of relationships but my hesitance to get involved in them in the first place because of I’ve realized that they are no longer child’s play. The only thing I’ve learned is to be careful.