Cowboy moved in. For one month. We’re letting a friend who lives in Chicago stay in his place while the friend works with me on a project. Cowboy offered. I agreed. Reticently. Because I know that this is a slippery slope.
Living together is the litmus test for the future success or doom of a union. And willingly entering the fray this time around, with only a year under our belts, made me nervous.
A girl I knew once said that she felt that living together didn’t actually move any relationship further, it just made it more complicated. She said this a week after I moved in with her younger brother. The day I moved my stuff into his apartment, I went out to the street and called my Dad from a pay phone. “I can’t do this,” I told him. “I think this might be a terrible idea,” I heave/cried into the phone. My father, bless his heart, knew this could only mean one thing: He would have to help me rent a new apartment because I’d just given mine up and used up the security as my last month of tenancy (I don’t believe that Suze Orman would consider this wise money management). Daddy was looking forward to the calm he would feel with me paying less because I’d ostensibly be sharing rent. Calm that would surely seep back to him because the margin of difference, if I ever needed help, would be much less.
“Sure you can,” he said. “You’ve been planning this all summer. Just enjoy it Caitlin and quit thinking so much.” Quit thinking so much. Words of wisdom which have resurfaced time and time again in my life.
You know the scene in movies where the Dad is walking his daughter down the aisle and she stops and he asks her “Is this what you want to do?” and she says “I don’t know” and he tells her that if she’s not sure then he’ll walk her right back out of the church and into their liveried limo? Well, this is not my Dad. My Dad goes into some form of autopilot. He gets confused. How can his mercurial dramatic actress daughter be saying this now when one week ago this was the thing she absolutely HAD to do? And he has a point.
So, two years later, which I’m sure caused more stress on Daddy than any money pinch could have, my boyfriend and I separated our stuff.
This is what I tell Cowboy. No living together, no stuff. No stuff to separate. Stuff separation — having seen my parents do it, having done it — gives me panic attacks just thinking about it.
So, with Cowboy about to bring over his suitcase and dopp kit (OK the cosmetics part and how they’d fit into my bathroom actually caused the most anxiety) I started thinking too much. I wanted to call my Dad and tell him I was worried that this might fail and if so, what would that mean?
But he was in New Zealand.
