And so, as if you couldn’t figure it out, I pulled the plug on my romantic love affair with one Mr. Burp Castle. I broke it off over the phone in one of my very favorite places, sitting on the bathroom counter with my feet in the sink. I use this position to pluck my eyebrows or examine my pores and apparently, break up with people.

It went really well. Uh. As far as breaking up with people goes. (Do you call it breaking up with people if you’ve only been dating a month? If not, what do you call it? Breaking it off? Ending things? Giving yourself permission to tonguekiss other people?) This has less to do with me and more to do with the fact that Burp Castle is awesome. He didn’t throw anything at me or accuse me of being afraid of intimacy. (THANK YOU EX-BOYFRIENDS WHO HAVE EXHIBITED THIS BEHAVIOR. IT HELPED.) I believe at one point he even made a joke: “I’m not gonna lie that this sucks. And I kind of hate you right now.” Now that I type that out it sounds mean. But it was funny in the moment.

We parted with good will and best wishes and I even got a voicemail a few weeks later wondering if I’d be up for a friendship since I am a pretty cool cat and it would suck to lose me completely. I’ve only succeeded in befriending one of my ex’s. Just one. But I figure my odds are really good with Burp Castle considering he isn’t really an ex, more like a really adorable dude I dated for awhile. Who knows, though. We haven’t officially made plans to chill as “friends” but we did send some e-mails and BBM’s so…progress?

The problem with being friends with any ex really is that sometimes when they’re talking to you and you’re hanging out, you want to tonguekiss them. I wonder if that urge ever passes for people. I suppose it would if you dated a guy and then you decided to break up and be friends and then he turned into an ogre? So then you hung out and the ogre is all WE ARE FRIENDS and you’re all that’s easy because EW EW OGRES ARE DISGUSTING GOOD THING I DON’T WANT TO MAKE OUT WITH YOU.

Or something.

What?

So, perhaps Burp Castle and I will be friends. I know, at the very least, that he is someone I can reach out to if I ever need anything, a restaurant recommendation, a laugh, a Hulu clip of The Office. In our short span of hanging out, I was really happy to know him if only because he contained a quality that I have since added to my list of Things I’d Like In A Mate and that is a flexibility and a mellowness, a light-hearted quality, if you will. Everything about him was fun and easy and the total opposite of Super Intense Person.

I liked that quality a lot.

Peace Corps Guy does not have it.

…

“You know what you need?” my friend Dan said, sitting across from me at an Italian restaurant, scooping the meat out of a mussel with a fork. “You need to be wooed more.“

“You know what you need?” my cousin Tom said, over the phone at work. “You need a TEACHER maybe. Someone who’s daily life isn’t so monotonous, someone who’s imaginative like an actor but not as batshit CRAZY as an actor. Yeah?”

“You know what I need?” I said to myself while I pulled on a pair of pajama pants and slipped under the covers.

“Dave Annable.”

AWWWWWWWW YEAH.

But he is kind of busy being on a television show and stuff so I decided to date someone else while he figures out that we’re meant to be together.

…

Enter Peace Corps Guy (PCG): an 8th grade English teacher in the New York City public school system who has traveled to Madagascar, Hungary, France, Romania to name a few, who speaks three languages, who reads books, who is five years older than me, who belongs to a writing club, who loves the opera and the theater and music, who, oddly enough, attended class for a few years at my philosophy school.

On our first date, we met for espresso.

We talked about pretty much everything I wrote in the paragraph above. I wasn’t entirely sure he liked me and I wasn’t entirely sure I liked him. But he had super cute dimples and a freckle on his lip and he said some things that made me go, “Hm. Wow.” which was a refreshing reaction.

For our second date, he suggested we go to a play and then head out for Ethiopian food.

I was aware of a slight tinge of panic at the mention of unfamiliar cuisine. I could feel the wheels churning in my head—would I find something to eat? Would I look like an idiot? And the Rigid-Type-A voice lurking there, “This isn’t something I know. This isn’t something that makes me feel comfortable.“

I texted back, “ETHIOPIAN FOOD SOUNDS GREAT.”

And then I turned to my friends for help.

“HE WANTS TO GO OUT FOR ETHIOPIAN FOOD,” I frantically typed in an e-mail to Laurie. “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? WHAT DO I DO!? I DIDN’T KNOW THEY HAD FOOD IN ETHIOPIA.”

“It’s no problem! You eat with your hands and share! It’s totally fine!”

“WHAT!??????????????? MY HANDS?!”

But I told myself that I could be fun and spontaneous. I told myself that I wanted to be the type of person who constantly wants to try new things and be open to new experiences. I told myself I would not fall down more than one time.

So we went.

He ordered us some vegetarian Ethiopian food. And we ate with our hands. And I didn’t fall down until after dinner when I was walking down Amsterdamn Avenue. We stumbled upon a jazz club and stayed until they closed, drinking beers and listening to the crooning of dueling saxophones.

This is what I wanted, I thought on the cab ride home. A person with passion, with interests, with something to say.

Our dates continued to both freak me out and excite me as I took the plunge and vowed to go along with anything he suggested. Ethiopian food! Check! I tried an oyster for the first time. We went to Montauk to climb the stones in front of the lighthouse. I ate at a Peruvian restaurant in Jackson Heights. I read his short stories. I flipped through photo albums of his time in Africa and Hungary.

And yet there was a nagging at my brain. I immediately thought of Burp Castle and the way he laughed at movie quotes and stupid jokes and the sarcastic way he teased. A lightness. An ease. He didn’t whisper anything in my ear in French but he was funny, full of joy.

PCG was darker. A person with an edge. A person who had been through a lot, strained family relationships, death of a father, a constant feeling of being an outsider. I had fun on our adventures but I didn’t find myself laughing very often. A lot of the time I was Serious Laura. And sometimes, I loved it. The way he kissed the top of my head and brought me a cup of tea. The way he scribbled in a journal on the couch while I meditated on the back porch. Someone who was committed to building intimacy, who was constantly giving—cooking me dinners, bringing me flowers, calling to check-in.

And yet there was that gnawing in my head.

I realized over the course of a few weeks that all of our activities were things that he wanted to do.

Conversations we had were about things he wanted to talk about.

I felt a button of mine being pushed, the button that does not like to Not Know Things. Around him, I constantly felt inferior. No, I never had Peruvian food before. No, I had never been to Dumbo, Brooklyn. I felt the mercury in me rise. Did he think I was stupid? Did he care about my interests? What about Thai food? I KNOW A LOT ABOUT THAT.

A DJ spun music in the basement of a club on the Lower East Side. The bass was making the tables vibrate as I attempted to scream small talk over the music to some of PCG’s friends. We were at a farewell party and I should’ve told him I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to meet his friends. I didn’t want to be here. My God, this isn’t my scene. But I didn’t want to not be Spontaneous Awesome Mellow Laura!

Everyone made sarcastic jokes about the two of us dating.

“UH OH!” they kidded. “LOOK OUT FOR HIM! HE’LL LEAVE THE COUNTRY ANY MINUTE!”

I turned to one of his friends with an uncertain smile.

“Everyone’s telling me to run…should I?”

His eyes focused on me.

“No no! Don’t run. The thing about PCG is…he marches to the beat of his own drum. That’s what I like best about him. And I bet that’s what you like too.”

I should’ve said yes, of course, I do. Or I should’ve said no, actually, I don’t like it at all.

But instead I kept silent. Because deep down, I didn’t really know.