The Journal of Best Practices (28 page)

Besides the usual birthday parties and family events, I avoided parties until I got to college. Once there, I fell in with a group of nerdy musicians whose “parties” were something I could manage: sing a few songs a cappella toward the beginning of the party while our voices were fresh, then debate the significance of composers like John Cage until someone got so drunk or homesick that they started to cry. That was my posse; that was how we rolled.

I went to college in Miami and never once made it to South Beach. South Beach seemed to be for the population who didn’t tuck their Rush concert T-shirts deep down into their pants, so I figured it was best to avoid it. South Beach was for clubbing. The few times I was invited to go with people, I declined and was branded antisocial. It didn’t seem fair, considering how clubbing is, by its very nature, the single most antisocial activity imaginable. How much interacting and relationship-building can people accomplish standing waist-deep in foam and screaming at each other over Lil Jon?

“I LOVE THIS SONG!”

“WHAT? THE MUSIC IS SO LOUD! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

“HOW ABOUT THAT CHICK?”

“WHAT?”

“THAT CHICK OVER THERE!”

“WOW, THEY’RE DOING MAGIC OVER THERE?! HOW UNEXPECTED!”

But that’s clubbing. At least you can stand for hours without saying a word in a club or sneak out without being noticed. But you can’t do that at a party. At a party, you have to be present. At a party, you have to engage. Mingle. This is where my game falls apart. The social situation at a party falls way outside of my normal daily parameters. Things are not on my terms; events unfold by the terms of the gathering itself. In the midst of this, I feel that all eyes are on me—my own included—monitoring and judging my performance from start to finish.
Don’t do anything wrong or unusual, because everyone will think the worst of you for the rest of your life
. It’s pretty fucked-up in my opinion.

One thing that I find challenging about a gathering is the disruption to my schedule, my routine. If it’s at someone else’s house, we’re doomed, because that’s not where I usually am at four
P.M
. on a Saturday. I’m not familiar with their silverware, their hand towels, the sights and sounds of their home. Maybe they make their stuffing differently, or I’ll be forced to sit on a couch where I have to turn my head to watch their TV, which looks and sounds different from my TV, and whatever sporting event or TBS movie marathon they’re watching on mute might not be worth the stiff neck. If it’s a family event, at least it’s not terrible form to flip the channels. Even then, if the family member lives more than an hour away, their newscasters look different, their weather radars show a different part of the state, their local car dealership commercials are jarringly low-budget, and it all messes me up.

If Kristen and I hold a party at our house, then I’m really screwed. My whole environment is disrupted. Guests tend to hog all the good seats. They make the rooms look different, sound different, feel different. On the day of the party, our refrigerator is crowded with large, sealed bowls and dishes filled with prepared foods that I’m not allowed to touch until the guests arrive. And I don’t know what to do with myself between the moment in which we finish our frantic cleaning and the moment the doorbell rings, so I pace by the front door for hours, wringing my sweaty hands and spying out the front windows to see if they’re here yet. I can’t do anything else. I’m anxious to open the door; invite them in with a well-rehearsed, cordial greeting; and then follow them, inevitably, to the kitchen, where I’ll wait on the periphery of their small talk, looking for the perfect opportunity to escape to a dark, empty room upstairs.

There’s only so much relating I can handle. Usually after six minutes, I’ve had enough. I have to get home, to my own thoughts, to my own TV shows on my own couch. That’s where Kristen and I differ. She thrives on interaction. She derives energy from parties and talking to strangers about their recent trip to Vietnam or what it’s like to be an accountant. For all she knew, I was the same way. For all she knew, I wasn’t the sort of person who would shut down at parties, who would insist that visits be limited to one hour, who would cling to her side during a function, demanding that we leave.

As I geared myself up to approach this Best Practice in the months that followed our performance review, I couldn’t help but think that at one time having fun with Kristen had seemed natural and effortless. We had fun together before my misguided persona ever entered the picture (dressed as he was in a toga and beer helmet). I recalled hanging out as friends. Back then, Kristen stirred everything inside of me, and because I made her laugh, made her feel like talking for hours, made her feel good about herself, I was on her mind a lot, too. We didn’t need any particular reason or occasion to get together and have fun.

I’d call Kristen on a Saturday morning. “I’m going to Ikea, K-Pants. Wanna come?”

“That sounds fun. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

It was as easy as that. Any subsequent discussion about the day’s plans would be mostly for the sake of staying on the phone with each other a little longer. Later, browsing the chaotic furniture displays at Ikea, we would decide we were hungry and have lunch together. We’d follow that up with a two thirty matinee and grab coffee afterward.

Back then I did everything I could think of to get her to invite me places. I probably could have chilled out and let her come to me—a tip that showed up a few times in
Cosmo
—but that wasn’t really my style. When I like somebody, I’d rather latch on like a crab and not let go. “Oh, you’re going to the ob-gyn? What’s the address? Maybe I’ll swing by and we can people-watch.”

My natural personality suited our friendship just fine. But then we started dating and I began psyching myself out, thinking that now she was mine to impress or to offend, to grow old with or to lose. My friend was now my girlfriend.
I’m Kristen’s boyfriend.
Every day felt like an audition. The mantra that I repeated over and over was challenging, if not paralyzing:
I’m Kristen’s boyfriend, and Kristen’s boyfriend must be perfect
. Perfectly dressed. Perfectly groomed. Perfectly behaved. Perfectly fun.

I was, of course, doomed. The house of cards I’d built as a sociable person could never bear the weight of real life. Before we became an item, I had been successful in disguising my social incapacities partially because I could accept or decline any invitation that came my way. Kristen celebrating the first week at her new job? I’m there. My company’s Labor Day picnic? No chance. Fourth of July at Grant Park in Chicago? Please, shoot me in the face. I could go out with my friends and leave after precisely one hour, or sooner if everyone was talking about sports. But when you’re the boyfriend of an amazing woman, you say yes to the Labor Day picnics, you say yes to the throngs of people in Grant Park, and you don’t tell her that you need to leave a party precisely one hour after you arrive.
I must be perfect,
I thought.
Regardless of whether that’s fair to either of us.

After we fell in love I threw caution to the wind and began navigating uncharted social territory (“Sure, I’d like to attend a hippie baby shower. Tell me, will I have to eat the food?”). But I figured that I could force myself to enjoy parties as long as Kristen was there. After all, regardless of where I was, if Kristen was there, I was good. She made me feel so included, so present in social situations. So . . . not lonely. Standing next to her, I would be introduced to everyone in the room, one at a time. She would invite me to share funny stories. She would merge me rather gracefully into other people’s conversations. “Oh, you’re into jazz? Dave and I were just talking about his favorite drummer . . .” I was no longer that weird guy skulking around behind the fern; I was Kristen’s boyfriend, and it was my pleasure to meet you.

By the time we were married, I had come to rely on Kristen to get me through every party and family get-together until we could finally go home, almost like a drug. When she no longer saw the fun in that, we started having problems. She grew tired of carrying every conversation for me, and without her help I would become uncomfortable and want to go home. She couldn’t take the awkward moments I would create—fetching our shoes and coats as more guests arrived, for instance, or sitting by myself, refusing to socialize. We reached a point where if I went anywhere without her—even to the mall—I would feel not unlike a provincial traveler lost in a foreign city without his guide. And when we were out together, I knew she felt as though she were walking across a minefield: Something. Is going. To happen.

After six years, it was enough already. I wanted to be better than that, for her sake. I wanted her to be able to enjoy our relationship.

As luck would have it, my friend B.J. happened to be getting married at the end of June. I was happy for him, but I also couldn’t get over what a perfect opportunity his wedding would be to show Kristen my commitment to bringing back the fun. Call me egocentric.

It helped that he was getting married in Charleston, South Carolina. When the wedding invitation arrived, Kristen asked her mom to keep the weekend clear to watch Emily and Parker. “Mommy’s going on vacation!” she said, marking her calendar. Her message was crystal clear: Mommy needs to have fun.

Unbeknownst to Kristen—had she known what I was up to, she probably would have told me to chill out and stop obsessing—I decided to approach our vacation as an experiment with two objectives. The first was to stop making things less enjoyable, and the second was to actually make things more fun for her. It was a lot to cram into a short vacation, but like anyone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I tend to overpack.

Most people might have preferred to fly to Charleston, but Kristen was perfectly happy to spare me the agony and make a road trip of it.

Knowing how much they would miss us, and how much we would miss them, it was incredibly difficult to say good-bye to the kids when we left. But once we got on the road, Kristen found her vacation energy and I renewed my determination to be fun. When we reached the interstate about an hour east of home, Kristen plugged in my iPod, kicked off her shoes, and read me the menu of snacks available in our travel cooler. We belted out tunes karaoke-style as we buzzed past the Chicago skyline and started in on the snacks somewhere in Indiana. Kristen was in a great mood and my only responsibility was to keep it that way. I hadn’t consciously done that in six years, so it felt both good and unfamiliar—like working out for the first time after years of putting it off. I didn’t go overboard trying to be fun—the drive wasn’t saturated with corny jokes and slide whistles. I just tried to keep myself from being the opposite of fun.

We stopped to eat somewhere in Indianapolis. By that point in the drive—the four-hour mark—Kristen was in an even better mood than when we left. I’d had exactly the same number of negative, anxious thoughts as I would have had in any four-hour period, but I had chosen not to dwell on them (this was hard but so worth the trouble), and I had chosen not to voice them. I had also had the exact same number of happy thoughts, and I’d made the same number of lighthearted observations about the things happening around us that I normally would have made (“How do sneakers get wrapped around those overhead power lines? Do you think the utility crews go out and install the shoes themselves? Is there a guy radioing back to his foreman requesting a pair of size elevens?”). The difference was that I chose to dwell on those things, because positive things kept Kristen in a good mood. Reinvesting all that energy kept our conversations positive and exploratory, rather than depressing and angry sounding. It was enjoyable.

Over lunch, I thought about the fact that all of our lives cannot be spent avoiding the negative things. We had to be able to talk to each other about things that were bothering us. We had to be able to give a voice to our frustration from time to time. But not right then. Not on vacation. Not during my experiment.

It was late in the evening when we arrived in Greenville, South Carolina. Charleston was only a few hours away, but we were tired and happy and decided that Greenville would be a good place to spend the night. We had been in stride all day—not a single freak-out from me and two of the most relaxed bare feet I had seen in years resting on the dashboard above the glove box. I had remained faithful to my experiment, and I’d stumbled upon a very important discovery: Kristen is perfectly capable of having her own fun, and if I prevent myself from derailing it, then she stays happy.
Is that what she means when she tells me to stop worrying about stuff and just let it be?

As we got ready for bed in the hotel room, I made my second discovery of the evening.

“Kristen, did you happen to pack my syringe before we left?”

“No,” she said. “I thought you packed it with your stuff.”

“Hmm,” I said calmly, though my head was starting to stir a little bit. “That’s a shame. I forgot to pack it.”

Kristen stood next to me, finding herself on eggshells for the first time in almost twenty-four hours. She had every reason to feel that way. Normally, this would have become a highly dramatic situation, even though I probably didn’t even need the syringe.

Three weeks before the trip, I had had my wisdom teeth removed. I would have preferred to wait until after our trip, but the pain of my impacted teeth warranted an immediate extraction. The holes were stitched up, my mouth was stuffed with gauze, and I was given very clear instructions: “Use this special syringe to flush the sockets out with water after every meal for two to three weeks to avoid any complications such as dry sockets.”
Dry sockets? Good God, that sounds terrible
. I followed the instructions exactly every day for almost three weeks, until that day.