“You two are still together?”
It’s a phrase I never get tired of hearing. In the era of hook-ups, speed-dating, one-night-stands and short-term relationships, pairings that happen over the course of years seems to inspire a cocktail of awe, revulsion, apathy and, more rarely, envy.
In this case, it’s almost eight years, to be exact.
I met my current girlfriend, Abby, way back in 2008 through a mutual friend and a convoluted set of events that sometimes seem like divine providence—though, more likely, are just a breathtaking array of happenstance moments. There’s no fairytale setup of how she and I met—in fact, I would probably have to classify it more on the “nerdy” side of life. We met for the first time at my house, after being introduced by Friend online, of all places, in the town I had just moved into after she convinced our mutual friend to allow her to tag-along for her summer trip to visit her grandparents. The idea that someone had managed to arrange an hour and a half trip for the sole purpose of meeting me was something magical—what happened after that initial meeting, though, was even more so.
After our somewhat awkward first introductions, we did the unthinkable: We sat on the floor of my living room and played with my younger brother and sister. I remember, vividly, how struck I was by the sight of someone who minutes before had been a complete stranger to my household life, sitting there on the floor, playing ball with my younger siblings, as if she had always known and cared for them. Any fear I had had of this new friend being uncomfortable in the life of an older brother had flown out the door in the gust of wind as it closed.
And here I am, almost 8 years later.
“You two are still together”, people say, as if it’s odd that two people who know one another so deeply, happily, and sometimes wordlessly, wish to continue to do so to new depths. The problem I have isn’t staying together—it’s what’s to call it. It’s not exactly dating, because we’re beyond the point of nervously scheduling outings to some local restaurant, or waiting for Father’s permission at the door. We’re not “going steady”, because anything that’s only steadily moving for 8 whole years would probably be seen as never going anywhere. We’re not “engaged”, “exclusively seeing one another”, “courting”, “wooing”, “pursuing” or “romancing”. No matter how many times I’ve tried to find the right word, the effort always seems to fail me.
What do you call a state of life when you’re consistently in love with someone who is everything you want in a best friend?
What do you call an outing where you dress formally to go stain your hands in wing sauce at a cheap-end diner?
What do you call feeling just as comfortable at an Italian opera as you do lounging on the couch, watching YouTube together?
What do you call a temporary form of amnesia, because for the life of you, you can’t recall a significant moment when that other person wasn’t in your life?
What do you call constantly being ridiculed not for how you love someone, or who you love, but just how long you’ve loved them?
What do you call knowing nothing is for sure in life but the end of it, and spending what you have of it with one person?
The words within the English language we have at our disposal are expected to encompass all of our experiences. Not many of us can claim to be a Dr. Seuss, where we just sound off a brand new word to give shape to that special twinkle in the eye, or a fantastical creature we conceived of in dreams. Sometimes, though, it seems like new words are needed, especially for this Eight-Years-And-Counting I have. I could tell those who ask we’re just Adventuring, we’re just Exploring, we’re just Losing Count, we’re just Best Friends With No Boundaries. In the Label era, though, there’s no Facebook Status to show how indescribably in love you are with someone, how their existence and continued companionship drives on your ambitions, your work week, your recoveries and your will to wake up, even on the toughest of days. Everyone expects you to boil it down to “Going steady”, “In a serious relationship”, “Single”.
Maybe “It’s complicated” is the closest you ever really get when you’ve lost the ability to describe to others what your relationship is. It’s not just dating anymore, it’s not marriage, it’s not “steady” or “long term” or “serious”. It’s something else entirely, something hard to explain, short of just saying “We just are.” Everyone loves who they love, how they love, when they love and where they love. There are love stories centuries old, decades old, and super-modern. There are hook-ups, break-ups, speed-dates and so much in between. Some of us, though, can fall off the spectrum of all the labels, and we’re left trying to explain, without much success, how you’ve “managed” to see the same person almost every day for almost 3,000 days of the extremely optimistic possibility of 32, 850 days—a cool almost ten-percent of your life, spent with one person out of 7, 484, 325, 476 possible people. In the face of numbers and figures, it does seem somewhat hard to believe—until you’re living it. For those of you who live it, though, who turn car-rides up the street into memorable adventures, who somehow manage to tune out entire entertainment venues because you hear that one person across from you laugh, or see them smile—for those people, though, it really isn’t that hard to believe at all. It’s pretty natural, actually. For those people, and for me, the hardest part of the entire thing is just trying to find that one word to hand to the new friends you meet, so they can understand that, yes, “us two are still together”.
The word hasn’t come along yet, but maybe in a few more decades, when you ask, “You two are still together?”, I’ll have coined a new phrase by then. For now, though, all I can say, happily, is yes.
Yes, we are still together.
