The Seventh Year of Loving a Younger Man

I was standing in the kitchen of our apartment on Beacon Street when Julian said he was bored. It was a Tuesday evening in late March, and the rain had been falling since morning, the kind of gray drizzle that made Boston feel like a city holding its breath. I had come home early from the museum where I worked as a registrar, cataloging nineteenth-century maritime paintings for an exhibition that would open in June. My feet ached from standing on the marble floors of the archives all day, and I had stopped at the market on Charles Street to buy the ingredients for the lemon chicken he liked. I was thirty-two years old. He was twenty-six. We had been together for seven years. "I'm bored," he said, leaning against the granite counter with his phone in his hand, not looking at me. "I don't think I want to do this anymore." I set down the paper bag of lemons. The rain tapped against the window like a polite stranger. "What do you mean, you don't want to do this anymore?" He looked up then. Julian had the kind of face that made people trust him immediately, open and boyish, with a jaw that hadn't quite hardened and eyes that always seemed to be looking at something just past your shoulder. I had fallen in love with that face when I was twenty-five and he was nineteen, a sophomore in my art history seminar at the university. He had stayed after class to ask about a painting of a shipwreck, and I had explained the symbolism of the storm, and he had looked at me as if I were the most interesting person in the world. Seven years later, I still remembered the exact shade of the light through the seminar room windows. "I mean us," he said. "I'm bored. We're not going anywhere." The wedding was in four weeks. The invitations had gone out two weeks ago, cream-colored cards with a watercolor of the harbor that I had painted myself. My mother had cried when she saw them. His parents had offered to pay for the flowers. I had already picked up my dress from the tailor, a simple ivory gown with a lace overlay that made me feel elegant rather than young. I was thirty-two. I had never been married. I had spent most of my adult life believing that Julian was the person I would grow old with, and now he was standing in our kitchen telling me that he was bored. "Julian," I said, and my voice came out steady, which surprised me. "The wedding is in a month." He shrugged. He actually shrugged. "I know. I've been thinking about it for a while. I didn't want to say anything until I was sure." "You've been thinking about it for a while." "Yeah." The lemon chicken would have taken forty minutes to cook. I would never make it in that kitchen again. I looked at him, at the boy I had taught to make risotto, the boy whose thesis I had proofread at two in the morning, the boy who had held my hand at my father's funeral three years ago and told me that he would always be there. I looked at him and I felt something shift inside me, a door closing quietly, the way a door closes when you don't want to wake a sleeping child. "You're bored," I repeated. "I'm sorry," he said. "I really am. But I don't want to spend the rest of my life feeling like this." "Feeling like what?" "Like I already know what's going to happen next." I thought about the seven years. I thought about the nights I had sat up with him while he studied for exams, the summer we had spent in Maine painting the coastline, the small apartment on Commonwealth Avenue where we had first lived together and where the radiator had clanged all winter. I thought about how I had waited for him to grow up, and how I had told myself that the age difference didn't matter, that love was patient, that I was building something permanent. I thought about the fact that I was thirty-two and he was twenty-six and he had never had to be patient for anything in his life. "Get out," I said. He blinked. "What?" "Get out of the apartment. Take your things. I want you gone by the time I get back." I picked up my keys from the counter and walked out into the rain. I didn't take a coat. I walked down Beacon Street toward the river, and the rain soaked through my blouse, and I didn't cry until I reached the esplanade and stood looking at the gray water of the Charles. Then I cried, hard and ugly, with my hands pressed against my mouth, because I had spent seven years loving someone who had just told me that my life was not interesting enough for him. I was thirty-two years old. I was a week away from my wedding. And I was standing in the rain, learning that the person I had built my future around had decided that I was boring. I should have seen it. That was the thing I kept coming back to. I should have seen it. Julian had been pulling away for months. There had been the nights he came home late from his job at the architecture firm, the weekends he spent at his friend Derek's place watching games, the way he had stopped asking me about my work. There had been the woman I had seen him with at a coffee shop in the South End two months ago, a tall blonde with a laugh that carried across the room. He had told me she was a colleague. He had told me I was being paranoid. He had told me that I was letting my insecurities get the better of me, and I had believed him, because I was thirty-two and I was afraid of being alone, and because I had loved him for so long that I didn't know how to stop. But that was later. That was for the days and weeks that came after. In that moment, standing in the rain with my shoes filling with water, all I knew was that Julian was leaving and that I had not seen it coming. I stayed on the esplanade until the rain stopped, and then I started walking. I walked through Back Bay, past the brownstones and the small expensive shops, past the church where we were supposed to be married, past the florist where I had ordered the peonies. I walked until my feet stopped hurting and then started hurting again in a new way. I walked until I couldn't feel the cold anymore. And I thought about what I was going to do next. I was thirty-two years old. I was a registrar at a museum. I had a graduate degree in art history and a small rent-controlled apartment in Beacon Hill that I had kept in my own name because I had always believed in having a place to go. I had friends. I had a mother who loved me. I had a life that Julian had decided was not enough for him. The thing about being thirty-two and having your life fall apart is that you don't have the luxury of believing that it's the end of the world. You've been through enough endings to know that they're just beginnings in disguise. You've learned that grief is a process and that you get through it one hour at a time, one cup of coffee at a time, one small decision at a time. So when I finally got home, and found that Julian had packed his things and left, and saw that he had taken the painting I had made of the harbor, the one that was supposed to hang in the entryway of our new apartment, I did not sit down and cry. I made myself a cup of tea. I called my mother. I told her the wedding was off. I listened to her cry and then I told her it was going to be fine, even though I didn't know if it was going to be fine. I told her I loved her and that I would call her tomorrow. Then I sat on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by the boxes of wedding gifts that had already started arriving, and I thought about what Julian had said. He was bored. He had been with me for seven years and he was bored. And I realized, in that moment, that I had been bored too. Not of him, but of the person I had become with him. I had spent seven years making myself smaller, quieter, more accommodating, so that I could fit into the life that he wanted. I had stopped painting. I had stopped going to galleries. I had stopped being the woman who had once told her friends that she would rather be alone than be with someone who didn't see her. I had let Julian define me. And when he said he was bored, he was telling me that I had done a very good job of becoming someone boring. That was the first thing I decided to change.