Love Stories: Finding Solace Offline - Shondaland.com

Sitting on the curb with a friend, sticky with sweat and annihilating the best slice of pizza of my life, we waited for our designated driver to arrive. I locked eyes with a gangly, tattooed blond in the back of a gray pickup truck adorned with a Misfits skull logo. I presumed he was in his mid-20s and probably a skater (I’d soon learn both assumptions were correct) as I watched him laugh with a friend alongside their BMX bikes in the bed of the truck. It was my sophomore year of college, and I’d been drinking in the middle of rapidly gentrifying Williamsburg. I slur-yelled through the heavy August air, “Where are you from, Ohio?” — failing to notice the New York license plate on his truck, which would have informed me otherwise.

Quizzing non-New Yorkers about their origins and proceeding to prove why we had more “cred” in these parts had become a way for my juvenile flock of idiot friends — Brooklyn and Queens townies, if you will — to entertain ourselves on nights out. There I was, six rum and Cokes in, hoping one of my standard lines would work as an awkward flirty opening.

What it did do, at least, was get me a name: Orren. Armed with only that name and the blurry memory of a face framed with shaggy, greasy, sun-kissed hair, I ran to my computer as soon as I got home. A preliminary search on Friendster — an early-aughts social-media site — yielded just one Orren who lived in Queens. I sent him a message at 3 in the morning, and we met up the next weekend for dinner and drinks. I learned that he lived a 20-minute walk from me in a house he owned with his mother and brother where each had their own floor. He loved animals with a passion that rivaled mine; his family’s cats and small dogs scurried about the house.

Equal parts BMXer and HVAC mechanic, Orren had the perfect mix of rough-and-tumble, jaded working-class sensibility and a finger on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist. He was kind, generous to a fault, and quick to fistfight a stranger who called his friend a racial slur. His presence felt like family, with a Queens accent like mine, which surfaced only when among fellow native New Yorkers in drunken or passionate conversation.

Orren had snobbish-leaning tastes and, based on looks alone, was your prototypical Brooklyn hipster, but smelled of patchouli and had assembled a mosaic of chewed-up wads of gum on his bedroom wall. When his house was overrun with mice, he would retrieve the sticky trap an unlucky rodent had found themselves the victim of, grab a plastic fork and a pair of gloves, and free the pathetic creature by placing it in a shoebox and driving it to a nearby field, where we’d let it run off.

I was 20 years old and had never been more in love in my life.

In an era when dating sites were still nestled in the Venn diagram between “intriguing” and “depressing,” Orren and I had Friendster. It had everything: testimonials written in third person (“Brian is a great friend and even better bowler!”), a five-photo limit (better choose wisely which highly pixelated options to upload from your digital camera!), and exclusivity (a code you needed from a friend to sign up). And more than that, this site was the launchpad for our loving relationship; connecting on such a profound level during the nascence of social media still felt serendipitous.

The novelty of Friendster faded as soon as MySpace stepped into the scene and enamored millennials and Gen Xers with more features and customization options. Orren and I, like everyone under 30, had MySpace profiles, but he rarely signed in to his and even more rarely updated it — maybe twice over a five-year span. I, on the other hand, was happily using HTML codes to create a yellow font against a deep-purple background, switching up my theme song monthly, and making profiles for all my pets.

When Facebook launched, of course everyone said it was like MySpace, only better. Better than MySpace? I was wholly unconvinced, but I signed up anyway. And when Facebook opened the floodgates and allowed anyone with a pulse to sign up, Orren shrugged his shoulders and carried on. I was simultaneously annoyed and in awe of him — annoyed mostly because it made me reflect on why I cared so much. Facebook was where I could have a forever record of small joys that peppered the doldrums of everyday life: I’d post updates of every inane thought (“really feeling Phil Collins tonight”), write quippy one-liners on friends’ walls referencing inside jokes, and document the adventures of my rabbit discovering goji berries.

Three years into our relationship, we moved in together. We adopted a cat and went on a dozen trips to Ikea without so much as a friendly disagreement. Thanks to our paper-thin walls, he’d wear headphones while playing Xbox to prevent disturbing me in the next room. He was a mess; I liked to clean up. We were both morning people but loved hosting friends late into the night. I wrote him a handwritten letter about how he’d taught me more about living in the first year we were together than in the two decades I’d been alive; I can’t remember if I ever gave it to him.

In an era when dating sites were still nestled in the Venn diagram between “intriguing” and “depressing,” Orren and I had Friendster.

But then, perhaps inevitably, the years passed — four, then five, then six — and we grew into people who still loved each other and still loved those late, raucous nights in Brooklyn, but people who were not as in love as they once were. I realized I preferred the company of my friends over his company. He lied about where he was going one night; I lied about where I was going on several nights. We often wondered if the other drank just a bit too much. He wanted children, and I was fairly sure I didn’t. I basked in the freedom of having an empty apartment for an entire week while he went on a family vacation. I enjoyed the solitude much more than I thought I should have.

I knew Orren deserved someone who would prioritize him, and I was certain that someone was not me. Acting on that certainty was, perhaps, the single most difficult decision of my adult life. We broke up, and the silver lining was, in his words, “now we’ll be in each other’s lives forever, as friends.”

A clean break didn’t quite happen, and we continued to see each other on and off for the next few months until I moved to London for grad school; Orren and a friend came to visit for two days shortly into my stay, on a detour to Ireland. We slept in the same small bed and kissed, maybe once, maybe twice. Weeks later, we were both dating new people, though neither of us knew this at the time. I texted him from a venue in Hammersmith, “I miss you.” “Miss you too,” he wrote back, too quickly. I blinked the tears away, and later I thought about him as I lay in bed with my new sort-of boyfriend.

When I came back to New York for Christmas, four months after living abroad, we met at one of our favorite bars in Williamsburg. This is where I learned he had a new girlfriend — a girlfriend who would later become his wife and the mother of his two children. I was deeply happy for him and incredibly sorry for myself. We got pizza at that same pizzeria I’d sat in front of six years prior, where I first accused him of being from Ohio, but tonight I was so sick to my stomach, I could barely finish half a slice. It was one of the last times we’d ever see each other.

I wish I could’ve clicked “unfriend” or “unfollow” to signal my brain that it was time to let go. I wish I’d had a definitive first step in the healing process to point to, so my mind and heart could swiftly follow the lead of my fingertips. But I never had to unfriend him on Facebook; I never had to unfollow him on Twitter. Instagram wouldn’t exist for another year. I couldn’t measure my emotional fortitude by how much time had elapsed before I didn’t care if he’d added an attractive new friend or liked a suggestive picture of a woman I did not know. I mourned for years.

When memories don’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t make getting over a profoundly loved partner any easier. There are no Instagram videos of our rodent rescue missions, no Facebook comment threads asking for recommendations of what to do on our upcoming trip to Italy, no sarcastic subtweets chronicling trivial arguments. Our online friendship — and the proof of a relationship — never made it past the MySpace age. No foundation exists on which to build the casual virtual friendship so many people I know seem to maintain with ex-partners, even as they marry, move away, and have families.

Years later, I met my fiancé on Tinder. Though my opening line was a simple “Hi!” he liked that, unlike most others on the app, I had a full profile filled out: a curated version of myself that served as a lighthouse for whom I wanted to be. I followed him on Instagram the night we met, Facebook two weeks later, Twitter weeks after that. Social media facilitated an intensifying connection, and we fell in love with a gravitational pull so strong, it made me, for the first time, understand what people mean when they say the cringe-inducing “when you know, you know.” It was a love that entirely erased the nearly decade-long haunting feeling that maybe Orren was the true love of my life but that I was too young, too inexperienced, or too uninhibited to realize it in time. I don’t dream about him anymore; I no longer wake up searching for my breath.

Still, I think of the friendship Orren and I could’ve had following our falling out of love, and how social media might have normalized communication at some juncture. Breakups are intrinsically strange, so unnatural. Friendships dissolve as more and more time passes between brunches together, but the person whose existence was interwoven with yours for years, whose flesh pressed up against yours for thousands of nights, whose simple presence was having like your own personal suit of armor, is plucked cold turkey from your life, like it was all a dream.

I want to watch Orren’s life unfold and feel joy for him, the way I feel joy for the high school friend I haven’t seen in two decades but whose pregnancy announcement I still like and comment on. I want to share the memes that would resonate with his infectiously silly, lowbrow sense of humor. I want to know if he still tries to brew his own beer and collects shelves’ worth of sneakers. I want to leave my two cents as a way to pay respect to the fact that, at one time, the other’s two cents mattered a lot.

I’ve texted him sporadically over the past decade, most recently a congratulations on the birth of his daughter, pictured in a mutual friend’s Instagram. This led to a brief, lively exchange of what we’d both been up to. On a sunny autumn morning, nearly 10 years to the day since we broke up, I requested to follow his private Instagram account.

The request was never accepted. I was disappointed. But maybe the silver lining isn’t the lasting friendship, but that I’ll always remember what is worth remembering, when I want to remember it — and not when an unsolicited photo pops up in my Facebook Memories of two wide-eyed 20-somethings, falling in love in the back of a pickup truck.

Emmy Favilla is a New York-based writer and editor and the author ofA World Without “Whom” (Bloomsbury, 2017), a book about the intersection of language and technology. Her essays, reported pieces, reviews, and weird lists have appeared in BuzzFeed, CNN, Teen Vogue, Catapult, Pigeon Pages, and other outlets. You can find her on Twitter @em_dash3.

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