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"Once, when we were walking down the street on a Sunday morning, Paul* launched himself into the neighborhood kids' game of cops and robbers. One second we were both upright, and the next he was splayed out on the sidewalk performing a Spaghetti Western-worthy death scene. Then he popped up, just as suddenly, and we continued on our stroll like nothing out of the ordinary just happened.\n\nThat was Paul\u2014imaginative and exciting, if a little unpredictable. We met through mutual friends junior year of college. Even though I'd dated other guys, he was the first one I thought about with any actual seriousness. We stayed up all night the day we met, ambling around the lake shore. I remember at some point my teeth started chattering and he tucked me inside his jacket. I remember his nose was startlingly cold the first time we kissed.\n\nHe was completely different from anyone I'd gone out with before. We spent entire afternoons scouring used bookstores together, got yelled at for making out in the Baha'i Temple gardens, and skinny dipped in the lake with friends while pretending nothing special was going on between us. Senior year, we booked plane tickets to Florida and camped out next to the beach for a week before deciding to stick together after graduation. We said our goodbyes to Chicago in June and drove down to Atlanta before backpacking through Italy. The following fall we took a cross-country road trip to Southern California, and a couple months later rented an apartment in Los Angeles.\n\nThere are things no one mentions when you move in with the person you think might be the love of your life\u2014probably because it's unlikely you'll listen, and definitely because it's obvious you don't want to hear it. Days after setting up shop in our historic bungalow in a less-than-desirable area of town (one of the things that drew us to it in the first place: there was an actual ice box in the kitchen), little fractures in the way we navigated our day-to-day relationship started springing up.\n\nWe were great at adventuring, but it's the mundane, in-between moments when you really get to know someone, and it's in those moments where you discover that maybe they aren't the someone for you. These are also the moments where you start being conscious of your own habits and patterns and learn which ones are breakable and which ones are just who you are, inside of not just your relationship, but your own skin.\n\nI learned a lot of things during the year and a half we lived together, and some of those lessons were more lasting than others. I learned that you should figure out how to talk about money early on, instead of waiting until there's something that needs to be talked about. I learned that it actually is important that two people want to do the same thing most Saturday nights.\n\nI learned that there are things you can apologize for but you can never take back, and that every relationship is delicate: Not fragile, as in it could break at any moment, but delicate\u2014deserving of care however you can give it. I learned that while fun is important and imagination is paramount, I place higher value on the ability to just go with the flow (trust me, those are very different qualities). And somewhere along the way, I learned that we weren't right for each other, which is the hardest lesson of all when you really love someone.\n\nEighteen months after moving in, we left our little apartment in LA. Paul and I moved his things into a new place, and I shipped my bos of books to Brooklyn. We saw one another a few times after that, convinced that maybe we could still make things work, but space has a way of showing you what you actually want by shining a light on what you're willing (or unwilling) to do to get it. We learned that things end, and that it's OK when they do.\n\nI don't hear much from Paul these days, but he called me once last winter when I was in the midst of some family troubles. One thread of conversation led to another, and we ended up plainly discussing what went wrong with us. We laughed about some of our most comically awful arguments; we agreed that when things were great, they were really great. And when I hung up the phone, I felt grateful for having discovered so much, together.\n\n*Name has been changed"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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