Nothing punches the gut like breaking tense eye contact with your colleague to look down at their wedding ring—a shiny, platinum reminder of impossibility. Or deleting that perfect text from someone hours away because otherwise, you’ll neglect responsibilities to re-read it 1,000 times. And man, is it hard to delete once you’ve almost nailed what it’d sound like in their voice.
Chemistry is a she-devil whose presence is notoriously inopportune. Clad in thigh-high boots and a short skirt, she applies magnetic force to an unsuspecting dyad and licks her chops at the prospect of implosion.
In matters of genuine chemistry, my off button is dysfunctional. I crave a rare connection that makes my heart move faster than my head. My emotional self is at peak performance when I meet someone for whom I know within minutes I’d cross an ocean on a dime. Can’t relate? You’re probably too rational to read this blog.
I could spend hours unpacking the ill-timed flashes of romantic promise that have left me curled up in bed, bereft of hope. Many a Sunday I’ve succumbed to the dismal ennui of a drunken kiss with no numbers exchanged. Rihanna may have found love in a hopeless place, but most of us just end up resentfully watching their Instagram stories every day until we die. Let’s break the cycle, shall we?
Lately I’ve been choosing to make constructive use of these intimate experiences—a sort of “don’t get bitter, just get better,” utilitarian approach to chemistry that actually works if you can surrender to cliche.
When my relationships end, my knee-jerk reaction is believing I’ll never find someone as compatible as the person I just left.
I could never feel this comfortable again.
No one could ever make me laugh like this again.
I’ll never be this googly-eyed, can’t-keep-my-hands-off-of-him attracted again.
I may endure sparkless rebound dates with guys who think watching The Office is a personality trait and whose emotional range culminated when the Birds won the Super Bowl, but at some point, I am always proven wrong. Someone cartwheels into my DMs with a crystal chalice of Love Potion No. 9 and I lap it up like a Golden Retriever in July.
When my partner and I split in April, I was convinced I’d never love again. I threw in the towel, filthy with the grease of polishing the unpolishable, and told myself it was all downhill from there. A couple weeks later, fate whispered, “hold my beer.”
I had a chance encounter with a stranger whom I knew I’d never see again. Saving the outlandish details for another time, our night together was so refreshing it restored my faith in what’s out there—the antidote to my post-breakup cynicism. We shared countless “you too?” moments and palpable attraction over a pile of buffalo wings. There’s something dreamily connective about two simple people with nothing to hide. Sure, it felt like karmic injustice knowing he’d be en route to another city within 12 hours and another one 12 hours after that. But that night I realized it’s not chemistry’s outcome that always matters, but what it represents, which is the capacity to feel in a way that makes time stand still. That alone is enough to give me hope without dwelling on “what could have been.”
In most cases, anyway, “what could have been” is a product of the imagination. It’s easy to romanticize those proverbial butterflies. But with practice comes the knowledge that chemistry, in its infancy, is a surface level emotional experience. It doesn’t account for his tendency to gaslight women or her patterns of infidelity. Repeat after me: not everyone you click with is meant to love you.
I’d always had a bad habit of treating feelings like currency, i.e. I give you my exclusive interest, you give me commitment. I’d get so caught up in the transactional end game that I couldn’t enjoy chemistry for what it was. When you free yourself from the expectation that something needs to escalate to make it meaningful, you can see the world for its true hugeness and the inevitability that you will feel that way again, and again, annnnnnd again, and that one day, when you dig deeper than chemistry to find a core match, it’s going to stick.