Welcome to can’t relate, a newsletter from me, Maria Del Russo, that I write biweekly. Here, you can expect essays from me where I grapple with the weight of relationships — romantic, familial, friendly, and everything in between. If you like what you’ve read, consider subscribing so you’ll be notified whenever I publish.
xxMDR
As if it weren’t abundantly clear from my last newsletter, I’m going through a bit of an unwinding these days. I guess I’ve been feeling like every little thing I spent my 20s barreling toward — namely to be whatever “successful” is — is slowly disappearing into the ether. It’s like I was on the track for success, and I got derailed because of a few unsuspecting bumps (a layoff, a deep depressive period, a still-in-progress global pandemic), so now I’m a few miles off track of where I thought I’d be. I woke up today and realized that I pretty much haven’t written anything in the past nine months. I took a pregnancy-length of time off of writing. And while part of me feels panicked and desperate to get back to where I’m meant to be, another part of me is feeling like she wants to pull out a map and start exploring this new area life has landed her in.
(Cue the inner voice in my head that’s screaming: You are 31 and way too old to be exploring. I’m still working on not letting her run wild in there.)
On the surface, nothing has changed. But underneath, I’m squishier. I’m softer with timelines. I feel less rigid about the “shoulds” and the “supposed to’s” and more willing to go with the flow of things a bit. If history serves, this slowdown won’t last. But I’m really working on trying to stay here, on this more meandering road, instead of the eight-lane highway I’ve been barreling down for the past 30 years.
So I’m biking a lot. I’m taking walks. I’m throwing myself into cooking. And every morning I wake up, do a quick workout, and then go outside and check my tomato garden. We have a tiny patio that my landlords let me grow two tomato plants on, along with a small herb garden. It is my pride and joy. I water the soil, check the buds for new growth, and rub my hands on the papery leaves so that they smell sweet until I shower. My therapist suggested the garden after I told her I was feeling adrift and ungrounded. She offered that it might help if I get my hands in some dirt. “Connect to the earth,” she said. “Maybe it will shake something loose.”
My little garden routine in the morning has become a little meditation, and it’s where I recently came to a pretty seismic realization about myself; specifically, why I sometimes feel so unsatisfied in my relationships. This truth about me is that I am a relationship manager. Whether it’s a romantic relationship, a friendship, or my relationships with my parents, I feel the need to stage direct the interactions, helping them move from point A to point B.
It makes sense how I wound up here — romantically, at least. After years of dates, I became very clear with what I wanted: I wanted a partner who knew they wanted to be in a serious, long-term relationship, who didn’t play games, who wanted kids, and who wanted to be married one day. I’d gotten to this point after bending over backward to change myself into the partner I thought people in my life wanted. Doing that for long enough had left me feeling exhausted, used, and without a clear sense of what I actually wanted. So I set about course-correcting, and, in the process, realized what I wanted out of relationships. Mostly, I wanted to feel like an equal participant and not someone who was just being strung along by the whims and desires of the person I was with.
So, in an effort to cut out the bullshit, I started putting my cards on the table very early. Like date two early. I’d lay out all of my garbage and ask the person sitting across from me whether or not they actually wanted a long-term relationship, too. Because if not, I didn’t want to waste my time. I thought that by doing this, I was putting myself firmly in control of the situation. How could I see it as anything else? I was presenting myself as a totally cool, in-control girl who knew what she wanted and was asking the guy across from me to get in line.
Looking back now, I can see that this dynamic set up a situation where I was still the one managing things. I was the one calling the shots. I was the one moving things along. I was the one asking if a guy was sleeping with anyone else, or if we were exclusive, or whether or not he wanted kids — way too early on. It wasn’t the best approach for setting up an equal partnership. Instead of bending over backward to fit an ideal, I was the one setting up an ideal and telling anyone who didn’t fit into it perfectly to not waste my time. Instead of waiting for a person to slowly reveal themselves and their desires and their thoughts and feelings about a relationship, I’d puke my guts out over red wine and tell them to put up or leave. I totally flipped it and came up with this truly bizarre way to handle the beginning of relationships. I’d completely over-corrected in my quest for clarity.
This behavior really presented itself most aggressively in my romantic relationships, but looking back, I can see that I used to behave this way with friends and family, too. When I was in my early 20s, I’d constantly be worried about whether or not my friends actually liked me. I actually think I’d gravitate toward “friends” who tended to keep me guessing. (This tracks with my romantic life, too, now that I think of it — wooof, Maria.) It’s understandable why. The whole I-didn’t-fit-in-as-a-kid-so-I-overcompensated-as-an-adult cliché is a cliché for a reason. I'm an overthinker and a people pleaser. Mix that together, and you get someone who feels like they need to constantly be performing the “right” way.
And I am exhausted by all of it. The whole bag of neurosis. Time seems to have course-corrected this behavior with friends, and those connections are the closest I’ve ever had. But I’m burnt out on the last vestiges of this thought process. I’m ready to let it go.
Maybe that’s what’s finally clicking. Maybe that’s the settling that all my friends who hit their 30s before I did were talking about. Maybe this past year has just taught us all that we don’t have to perform, and we can be soft, and squishy, and unsure of what we want. Maybe you don’t have to manage your relationships, and you can just let things come as they will, the way a cat only curls up on your lap once you sit perfectly still. What’s the fucking rush, anyway?
All of this hit me, all at once, while I was drinking my coffee on my cracked patio, looking at my tomatoes. And after I sat with it for a bit longer, I got up, and rubbed my hands on the tomato leaves, and pressed them to my nose. I tried to stay in that moment for just one second, not thinking about what I had to do, or what I should be doing. And then I went inside and started my day a little bit lighter.