The year and a half we spent together was made of such moments. There were long drives with no destination beyond finding a decent breakfast place, nights when I fell asleep on his shoulder during movies, and mornings when he left notes reminding me that my lunch was in the refrigerator. There were small arguments about dishes, schedules, and whether we should spend money on a trip or put it aside for an apartment. We usually resolved them by speaking plainly, taking time when necessary, and returning to the subject once we could hear each other. I had been given the sort of relationship I once claimed I wanted, and for a while I knew what a gift that was.
Then I started spending more of my evenings watching other people's edited versions of love. It did not happen on one extraordinary night. It happened during the ten minutes before bed, while I was eating cereal after work, and in the short gaps between meetings when my phone offered me an easier way to feel something than finishing a difficult task. I watched women describe men who had crossed state lines to win them back, men who bought jewelry after arguments, men who refused to accept a breakup because their devotion was supposedly stronger than the word no. Each story arrived complete with music, captions, and thousands of strangers applauding the intensity.
The videos were rarely about what happened the next morning. They did not show the reconciliation conversations, the boundaries negotiated afterward, or the uncertainty of whether the dramatic gesture had solved anything. I was professionally trained to know that stories were edited to produce reactions, yet I began using them as a measure of what was missing from my own life. Donovan would send me a photograph of a crooked tomato growing in his parents' garden, and I would smile at it before opening a video of a man buying a luxury watch for his girlfriend. One kind of love existed in my actual day; the other existed on a glowing screen, and I began letting the screen grade the day.
I did not tell Donovan that I had started keeping score. I could not have explained what I was scoring even if he had asked. It was not whether he was kind, honest, faithful, or willing to make sacrifices, because he had shown me those things repeatedly. I was measuring whether his love could be made visible to people who did not know either of us. I wanted evidence that would look dramatic enough to silence doubts I was generating myself.
The comparisons changed the questions I asked him. Once, while we were washing dishes, I asked whether he would ever fly across the country if I suddenly said I needed him. He set a clean plate on the rack and said he would want to know what had happened, whether I was safe, and what kind of help would actually make things better. "You wouldn't just come?" I asked. "If you needed me, yes," he said. "But if there was an emergency, I'd want to understand it instead of making the trip about proving something."