Too Many Cups

When I was in my early twenties, I went through a best-friendship unraveling that absolutely devastated me. I remember telling my counsellor, with the appropriate amount of early-twenties melodrama, that I would NEVER FIND A BEST FRIEND AGAIN.

She asked me why I needed one.

Rude.

She introduced me to what she called the cup theory. The idea was that I have a lot of different facets in my personality and a lot of different cups I want filled, and there is no particular reason one person needs to fill all of them.

I can have a friend at the gym who I wave to and talk to about my upcoming sets. I can have a friend I barely see but travel with once a year. I can have people I call when I want to talk about ideas and completely different people I call when I want to complain about work.

At the time, this was mind blowing to me. My very black-and-white brain had been treating interpersonal relationships like there were a handful of available positions and each one had to be filled. BEST FRIEND. PARTNER. ACQUAINTANCE.

I learned to start seeing relationships in shades. People could fill different cups. Nobody had to be everything.

I learned this lesson but never managed to apply it to romance.

Despite being a fairly unconventional person who has approached very little of my life conventionally, I have maintained an oddly 1950s definition of a successful romantic relationship.

You meet someone. You fall in love. You live together. You raise children together. You travel together. You spend enormous amounts of time together. You merge your routines and your homes and your lives.

This is particularly strange because I am also a person who needs an enormous amount of time to do my own thing.

I've tried, though. I have really, really tried.

And I keep finding myself confused about why something that is supposed to make me happy can make me feel so trapped.

I'm starting to wonder if the lesson I learned about friendship ten years ago was one I was supposed to apply here too.

Romance doesn't have to fill all the cups.

I can travel alone or with the friend I see once a year. I can have gym friends. I can have people I talk to about work and people I call when something terrible happens. I don't actually need to find one human being who can be my lover, best friend, co-parent, travel companion, roommate, emotional support system, activity partner and preferred person to sit beside every single evening.

Maybe what I actually want from romance is much smaller and, at the same time, much more specific.

Sex. Intellectual connection. Someone I'm genuinely excited to see.

Someone who has their own very full, rich, sparkly life and doesn't need to be absorbed into mine. Someone I might see a few times a month and really, really want to see when I do.

There is something hilarious about spending my entire adult life rejecting conventionality only to discover that, in this one particular area, I've been relentlessly trying to make myself want the most conventional arrangement possible.

I'm learning that living together isn't the prize. That spending every night together isn't evidence that a relationship is more serious or more successful. Maybe two people can love each other a ton without creating one shared life on the backs of their two separate ones.

I don't think I want less love.

I think I might just want fewer cups assigned to it.