What Happened!? Vol. 1 Continued

My feelings about the interview with Marathon Man

Welcome new subscribers! Last week’s newsletter seemed to interest a lot of you. And perfectly timed, because this week’s is a follow up.

(If you have just stumbled on this newsletter, I recommend you go back and read the prior one first, or what follows will make little sense.)

Illustration by my brilliant friend Nicholas Konrad.

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I. How Do You Feel?

After my interview with Marathon Man, I had a group of my closest friends over to my apartment for dinner and drinks. They asked what I’d been up to that day, and so naturally the interview came up. 

This particular group had spent time with me in the midst of my anxiety spiral. At one point, they had even tried to get me to connect my phone to a TV in order to cast my entire conversation with Marathon Man on to giant screen and subject it to their textual analysis. Needless to say, they were now eager to hear the conclusion to the saga.

I ran down the key moments for them, like I would for any interview I’ve been involved with over the last 5 years in my job as a podcast producer.  I described the general mood of the interview: warm with a few moments of tension. I explained the major challenge: getting Marathon Man, who self-admittedly struggles to articulate his thoughts in words, to give me cogent, consistent answers. I recounted one of the funniest moments of our conversation: when Marathon Man revealed he did not remember any of the specifics of the text he took 4 days to respond to, and I repeated the word “wow” 3 times.  (He recalled it as a generic good luck message, all the affection and vulnerability I perceived in it had not made a lasting impression, it seems.) I paused, thinking I’d given my friends a pretty thorough answer, and geared up to change the conversation, when someone else cut in. “But how did the interview make you feel?”  

If you read last week’s essay, you no doubt noticed that I didn’t really answer that question. In fact, if I achieved my goal, I say nothing at all about my reaction to the interview. Part of this was of course to let you, the reader, make your own judgements. But also, if I’m being totally honest, part of it was that I wasn’t totally sure how I felt. 

II. What It Didn’t Offer Me 

It’s maybe easier to start with what it didn’t stir inside of me. 

I can say with some clarity that it didn’t make me feel self-critical or self-conscious. (The fact that thousands of people (ahh!) have now found my newsletter makes me self-conscious!  But not the actual act of conducting the interview.)

This is in part because Marathon Man is a kind and generous person, who despite not wanting to be in a romantic relationship with me, cared a lot, I could tell, about my own emotional wellbeing. His initial reaction to reading the last newsletter, for example, was to say how sorry he was that his lack of response for four days had been so agonizing to me, and to admit that he was now pretty sure he was going to have nightmares about it. 

It is also in part because I didn’t approach the interview as a performance review. My goal was to try to embody his perspective, to peer down at our relationship from a different vantage point. It was never to probe him for insights into my most infuriating traits and somehow apply that knowledge to future dates.

I doubt that the things that didn’t work for Marathon Man  (for example, my excessive interest in telling stories about dates) are likely to be the same things that don’t work for another person. And honestly even if they were, do we really think I could stop talking about dating? On some level, one must accept oneself for who they are.

Another thing I didn’t get from it was the satisfaction that I had hit on some objective, conclusive truth. What if Marathon Man was holding back so as not to hurt my feelings?  What if his own thoughts were still so tangled he couldn’t communicate his true feelings? What if the questions I asked him conformed to a narrative I already had in my head, so I was ultimately just priming him to confirm my existing beliefs? 

Probably all of those things were true of our conversation. When I went back to pull specific quotes, I could hear the frustration in my voice as I asked follow up after follow up, restating my questions when I got an evasive or imprecise answer. And still, despite those efforts, Marathon Man struggled to offer me the clarity I craved. 

Perhaps the reason any two people are incompatible is on some level unknowable and impossible to communicate in words. (I, for one, suspect genes and even the bacteria in our microbiomes play a greater role than we’d like to acknowledge!) But even if it’s not possible to look incompatibility directly in the eyes, I think one can catch glimpses of its shadow.  By the end of our interview, I felt like I had brushed up against an explanation that felt honest and convincing.

III. So where does that leave me?

Last weekend, when I was struggling to finish the newsletter, and trying to figure out what I was taking away from it, I had a conversation with a friend that shook something loose in me. Her reaction to Marathon Man’s answers was defensiveness on my behalf: That’s so annoying that he was so quick to cut you off, to not give the relationship more time to develop. The idea that one wrong thing you say or one day of feeling nervous can change someone’s mind about you makes the whole premise of dating so high stakes! 

Oh, I realized. That is not at all my interpretation of what happened. 

I don’t think there was any one or two or even three things I did that pushed him away. I don’t think my nervousness or my verbalizing that I “didn’t understand” him were the cause of his ambivalence. Those were just the clearest visual and auditory cues that he could point to as evidence that something was off. 

The real issue, I think, was that despite finding each other interesting and attractive, we were somehow speaking different languages. My attempts to understand him made him feel more alone, more misunderstood. It was the same dynamic that played out in our interview. I asked lots of questions because he wasn’t making total sense to me, he tried his best to answer, feeling frustrated that it was so difficult to get his ideas across, and we both were left feeling like: Huh??? Why is this so difficult?

In short, I don’t think Marathon Man wrote me off too quickly. I think he very gradually sensed something deep and enduring about who I was and who he was and what he needed and what I couldn’t provide. 

This realization didn’t make me feel sad as much as it made me feel envy. I was envious that he was so deeply in tune with his gut sense of what it should feel like to be with someone who has the potential to become a long-term partner. Maybe more than just being in tune with it, I was envious that he seemed able to trust it without reservation.

As I Citi-biked home from the coffee shop where we talked, I could feel in some small way, the weight of unrequited desire lift. He was sure a relationship between us would not work, and after doing my absolute best to see things through his eyes, I trusted his assessment. 

Here’s Marathon Man with the final word … sort of.