Relationships

The Charm Was Not a Trick

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  11 min read

The municipal pool opens at six, and at that hour the light comes in low through the high windows and lies across the water in long bars, and the place smells of chlorine and wet concrete.

Rosalie is forty-one and swims a mile four mornings a week, badly and with great consistency. She is on the tiled edge afterward with her cap in one hand, and her friend from the next lane asks the question kindly.

“But looking back — what were the signs?”

Rosalie has an answer ready, because she has been assembling it at four in the morning for a year and a half. He was too intense at the start. She should have noticed how fast it moved. All of it in the flat voice of a woman reciting a sentence she got somewhere else.

Then she stops, looks at the water, and says the true thing instead.

“I don’t actually think there were any.”

Her friend does not know what to do with that, because without signs the story is just: a competent adult trusted a person, and the person stopped.

Of everything I could hand somebody in Rosalie’s position, the most useful is not a longer list of warning signs.

It is permission to stop looking for the ones that were never there.

Trust runs on partial evidence, and that is the design

Being taken in is not a failure of intelligence, judgment, or self-esteem. It is the normal operation of trust, and nearly everybody arrives here believing the opposite.

Trust means acting as though you know things about somebody that you do not yet know. You step off a curb in front of two thousand pounds of moving metal on the strength of a foot easing off a pedal you cannot see, operated by somebody you have never met. You do not experience that as a risk assessment. You experience it as walking.

A system waiting for complete evidence would never let anybody in, which means the capacity that got you hurt is the same one that got you everything else. Remove it and you do not become safe. You become a person alone in a room.

Nothing in it was counterfeit

The attentiveness at the beginning is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, real attentiveness. Somebody remembered the thing you mentioned once, three weeks earlier, in the middle of a longer story — and remembering it required actually hearing it. You cannot fake having heard something three weeks ago.

The compliments are frequently accurate too, which is the piece nobody says out loud: somebody looked at you closely, saw something true, and said it better than anybody had before. What was missing was not sincerity.

Durability. Plain sentence: whether a person keeps doing something after it stops being interesting, and after it starts costing them. Picture two houses going up on the same street in the same month, both handsome, both finished to the same standard, one of them on ground that drains. Nothing in the photographs distinguishes them. The difference appears in the eleventh year, in a wet spring, along one wall.

Emmett falls in love fast, and means all of it

Emmett is thirty-one and has fallen in love fast five times that he counts. In the first two months he is, by every account including those of the women who left him, wonderful: he remembers, he notices, he rearranges his week, and he is not calculating when he says true things people have not heard said before. Somewhere around the fourth month the attentiveness stops arriving, the way a radio station fades out over a long drive, and he is left with an ordinary Tuesday and no idea what to do with one.

He put it this way: he is not in love with anybody, he is in love with the part where he finds out about somebody. He said it looking at the floor, having worked out on his own that this is a thing he has been doing to people rather than with them.

Which brings this series’ question into a piece about dating. Do we love people for who they are, or for the emotional functions they perform for us? Most people reading this have been some version of Emmett at least once, and if you recognized yourself there, that is not a verdict. A person for whom this is a method does not read a passage like that and look at the floor.

And now the sentence that matters for Rosalie. Emmett at week ten is indistinguishable from a man who will still be doing this at year twelve. Not similar. Indistinguishable. There is no observation available in week ten that separates them, because the thing that separates them has not occurred yet.

Fast is not a warning, and not a promise either

Bridie is forty-six. She met her husband at a funeral, they married inside the year, and everybody told her to slow down. They have been married nineteen years. What she found out, she found out in the two years her sister lived with them after the stroke: a hospital bed in the dining room, and a man who got up at three in the morning, repeatedly, for somebody who was not his sister.

That is where the evidence was. Year four and year five, not week nine.

So what is speed? Speed removes the interval — the stretch of time in which you would have found out how somebody behaves.

Speed announces that closeness has already been earned, and your body has no separate channel for earned and announced. It has one channel, and it reports warmth. So the honest sentence is not beware of intensity. It is this: intensity is not evidence, and it feels exactly like evidence.

What there is to do instead of detecting

This is where most books hand you a set of tests, and I am not going to, because a test is something you administer to somebody. Somebody managing you will pass it; somebody good will feel it and be quietly hurt. The only instrument that has ever worked is time under ordinary conditions, so the practice is not detection but protecting your ability to observe. Keep your own people. Do not reorganize your life in month two, and do not move money.

Then notice what happens the first time you are inconvenient. The information lives in a dull moment: you are sick in a way that is not romantic, your mother has a fall on the night of the concert, and for a stretch of weeks you are not fun. What keeps that from being a test is that you never have to arrange it, and you must not. Ordinary life will run it for you.

Rosalie got hers in the second year, when her mother was ill for a long time and the illness was slow. The man who had once driven around three neighborhoods looking for a particular bread because she mentioned it in passing was, in that period, extremely busy. Not cruel. Busy, and full of good reasons, and elsewhere.

She did not miss anything. There was nothing in the bread.

Two injuries, and only one of them has a name

Being lied to is the one everybody understands, and the important part is that it is narratable: you can tell it to your sister in four sentences and she is on your side before you finish.

Being shown something true that later stopped being true has no name and no clean shape. Nobody lied. The attention was real attention, the description of you was accurate, the intention at the moment it was stated was the actual intention. Then it ended, not with a revelation but with an evaporation. What you had is not retrospectively false. It is only over.

That second injury is far more common and much harder to grieve, because grief needs a shape and this one has none. Then two things get done to it by well-meaning people, and both make it worse. The first is being told it was all fake, which lands as a correction to your perception and takes the last thing you had: your own account of your own life. The second is being asked what the signs were — on the edge of a pool at six in the morning, or by yourself at four, for years. That question assumes the answer exists, and searching for it converts something that happened to her into something she did.

You are allowed both halves. The beginning was real and it did not last. He meant it and he stopped. Nothing was counterfeit and you were badly treated. Those are not in tension, and most of the work of the year afterward is getting them into the same room without demoting one. The question was never whether it was genuine. It is only ever whether it kept going once it started to cost him something — and there was no way, none, to know that in March.

Rosalie, Emmett and Bridie are composites; no sentence here belongs to a single person’s history.

If some of this is already in your life — money that is tangled, friendships thinned to almost nothing, pressure about sex you have been quietly explaining to yourself for a while — that is not a problem to be solved by reading more carefully. There are people who do this for a living: an attorney for the money, an advocate who works with this specifically, a therapist who has seen the shape before. A page written for everybody cannot see the particulars of one life, and the particulars are most of what any decision is made of.