Author: Riley Silverman

I Survived: A Run-in with my Ex

by Riley Silvermanin RELATIONSHIPS

Despite being someone whose list of romantic partners is probably on the lower than average side of the spectrum, I still do find myself running into the occasional ex.  Moving across the country a few years ago really lowered the chances of bumping into the vast majority of them. And not to brag too much, but for the most part I think my exes and I are happy enough to see each other.   But there’s always that one, isn’t there?

Somehow, despite the fact that my “that one,” I’ll call her Sara, lives around the block from two of my friends, and despite the fact that we’ve often gotten pie and all day breakfast at the greasy spoon that is within sight of her front door, it didn’t happen for almost three years.  And it didn’t even happen near their place or at that diner, but rather an ice cream shop several blocks away.   Which frankly is pretty rude of her — like I know she absolutely didn’t plan to see me any more than I planned to see her but still, ice cream was involved. Let’s not initiate sadness please.  This is a safe place.

I desperately hoped she hadn’t seen me when she walked in, and I diverted my eyes away from her and towards my friend while muttering, “Oh God, my ex is here.” I was unsuccessful in that, as we both made accidental eye contact while she diverted her eyes away from me and towards her friend (date?) that she’d seen me.  This became increasingly clear when she decided to be the bigger person and come towards me.  It technically was in violation of the “please never speak to me again” request I had made of her the last time we’d texted, but I suppose no statute of limitation had been defined. That’s on me; important rule to remember for next time.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the history of our relationship, which admittedly was hardly even worth the “R” word. Not long after we parted ways a friend of mine and I were talking about the film 500 Days of Summer, and how in that movie the only real ‘sin’ that Zooey Deschanel’s character commits is that she continued to stay with someone that she didn’t really have feelings for, despite his seemingly strong feelings for her.  That’s really all Sara did with me.  She just chose the worst time in my life to do that.

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Loving with a Secret

by Riley Silvermanin LOVE

When I was a teenager I was one of the legions of cliché kids who thought that our romantic futures would actually play out in the same way as they did for the likes of Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything’s amorous kickboxing enthusiast who doesn’t want to buy, sell, or process anything.  I truly believed that the right girl was out there for me and that we would meet, hit it off, be separated by some turn of events and I would win her back through the cunning use of a move similar to holding up a boombox.

There were two major obstacles and one complication stopping that from being the case. First there’s the very simple fact that most lovestruck Romeos who seem charming and delightful in film would be creepy and overbearing in real life.  Very few real Lloyd Dobler’s have had off-screen conversations between John Cusack and Cameron Crowe in order to decide the perfect song out of that jukebox, nor that same Cameron Crowe writing the woman he’s in love with.  A real life Lloyd Dobler would likely be met by his new friend the restraining order.  Second, there’s the much more pressing obstacle of the fact that unlike Lloyd Dobler, I was not a man.  The added complication: I was the only one who knew that.

There was a significant time in my life when I didn’t actually think this second obstacle would really be one.  This teenage rom com-obsessed version of myself had not fathomed that the idea of coming out could ever or would ever be a thing.  Even using the term “coming out” wasn’t something I’d let enter my thoughts.  I felt, and had convinced myself, that this tiny, inconsequential secret of mine would be one I’d live with my whole life with nary a peep.

I did come out though, at 27 years old.  I want to say it was fortunate that I was single at the time of this revelation but the fact is that I have been single for most of my adult life, with the longest relationship I’ve ever been in lasting a mere five months.  There are plenty of contributing factors towards this.  I’m awkward, I’m geeky, and of course there was that pesky boombox I carried around for way too long.  But the romantic impact of having a deep dark secret cannot be underestimated.

It wasn’t that I never dated, it was that *I* never dated.  The person who would go out on dates with women that I was attracted to wasn’t me; he was this crafted male avatar, the person I presented to the world.  I was a tiny, repressed woman sitting at a console somewhere driving this awkward dude around, so no matter how strongly I felt towards someone, no matter what feelings she may or may not have had back, there was always the fear that she would discover me, think I was a freak, and reject me.  Living in constant fear that someone will reject you, usually is a number one cause of someone ultimately rejecting you.

As an analogy, let me reference something that may also further the case for my singlehood, the board game based on the reboot of the science fiction TV series Battlestar Galactica.  Without going too deeply into the mythology of the series, one of the aspects of it includes robots passing themselves off as humans.  In the board game, at least one player per game is given a card that tells them that they are one of these robots and must attempt to keep that secret hidden throughout the course of play.  Of course, having this secret card informs every interaction you make in the game.  Even if you’re not intentionally sabotaging the other players, every move you make runs the risk of revealing yourself.  Furthermore, every player who isn’t a secret robot is constantly on their guard about these same slip ups and sabotages as well.  In the world of real life, potential partners might not be searching specifically for secret robots but the scrutiny of what you may or may not be hiding is always there.  While this adversarial tension might make for an exciting board game, it is not a recipe that bodes well for long-term relationship success.

Whenever I’ve spoken to former partners or read about some aspect of trans coming out during a relationship, often the gender identity is not the number one thing they cite as the reason the partnership ended.  Almost consistently, the issue has always been, “how could this have been the case all along and I never knew?” The idea that someone so close to us could be keeping such a huge secret usually leads us to believe that they could be keeping more and that we wouldn’t know.  For my part, I was never good at keeping secrets from those close to me, which was why I never let anyone get close to me.  Now, almost six years out of the closet, I don’t even know how to let people in, because I spent 27 years keeping them out. But I think being honest with them is probably a good start.

Romantic Gestures, Do They Pair With Sushi?

by Riley Silvermanin DATING ADVICE, LOVE

Freshman year of high school, I had a crush on a girl that we’ll call Julie. Julie and I had gotten to talking a lot on a choir class trip and we had flirted a bit, although I was 15 and dorky, so by flirting I really just mean she was willing to talk to me.  But we had this joke, the kind of cute inside joke that had me convinced that Julie and I would definitely be together.  At the time there was this weird rumor that green M&Ms were an aphrodisiac.  I barely understood what that meant, but we had joked together on that choir trip about it and shared our green M&Ms with each other and laughed and laughed.

So, come Valentine’s Day, Julie and I had a date planned, and I wanted to get her something special to give her as a valentine at school.  I bought one of those little plastic M&Ms dispensers, and sat down one evening with about a dozen big bags of M&Ms, spending careful amounts of time picking out each and every green one I could find, and re-filling the dispenser with just them.  Let me make it perfectly clear that I did not think that this would make Julie suddenly go into heat and have sex with me right in the cafeteria.  I knew it was a joke.  I thought she would laugh, that was the goal.  But it turned out she laughed not with me, but at me.  She thought it was totally lame and not long after that she decided she wanted to date my best friend Andy instead of me.

I can’t really say that course of events has every really changed in my life.  While I’ve landed pretty firmly in the cynical camp when it comes to romance now, I was for decades a card-carrying Hopeless Romantic. I was prone to wild, random, quirky romantic gestures that I can say never ended well.  Some of them were relatively minor, driving across town to bring ibuprofen to a woman who was stuck at work with a major headache, only to have her barely muster up a thank you.  Hunting down an ‘80s Transformers lunchbox on eBay for an obsessed fan who dumped me the day before I gave it to her.

My very last romantic act which I thought was fairly simple, somehow became the most complicated and convoluted, and likely expedited the breakup that happened less than a week later.  In August 2012 I was dating Katie. She had started a new, stressful job that was demanding far more of her time than she thought it would.  One of the complaints she often shared with me was that she could never get away from her desk long enough for a real lunch and was living off of granola bars and such.  So I decided one day when she’d seemed extra stressed that it would be a really good day to go online and order her some sushi sent to her office.  I picked out her favorite rolls, I tipped the driver in the purchase, and I left a note for the restaurant explaining what was going on.

Here’s the problem: the restaurant didn’t get the note that I gave to the online ordering company.  They then sent a delivery driver who only spoke Japanese.  I had put her name on the order but my phone number, and hadn’t told her it was coming because it was supposed to be a surprise (Note to anyone reading: surprises are almost always a bad idea.)  This leads to me getting a phone call from the driver saying “Food is here,” with him then not understanding me when I explained, “Oh, it’s not for me, it’s a gift.” He responded with a very unsure “Okay,” and then continued to wait in the lobby of her building assuming that what I had said to him was some variation of “I’ll be right down.” 

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Should Relationships End?

by Riley Silvermanin LOVE

Not too long ago I had to listen to a lecture for work reasons that was about the topic of whether or not it was a good idea for a couple to live together before they got married.  The lecture was skewed towards people of faith, so the natural conclusion was that it wasn’t better.  Rather than fall back on the old standard of living in sin, however, the speaker backed his position up with actual numbers, citing evidence that the divorce rates for people who got married after living together were significantly higher for those who “shacked up” versus those who didn’t make Jesus cry. Thus, those who wait till marriage are more likely to have a successful marriage.

These numbers, I should point out, are fiercely debated and a quick Google search on them yields hundreds of different articles questioning what other factors, like age, economics, etc., could have a stronger correlation to the divorce rates than the shacking up does.  I would also argue that a factor to consider is that the very people who would wait till marriage to live together out of fear of their parents or God or both, are the same people who probably aren’t too likely to consider getting a divorce as a really viable option either.  So of course those people have lower divorce rates. But do they necessarily have happier marriages, or are they just more likely to stay in a bad marriage because they won’t consider a divorce?

What if, and just come with me on this, what if we completely threw out the idea that the single greatest marker of a successful marriage, or any relationship, is that it doesn’t end? It seems crazy, I know, but just think about it.  Each and every one of us probably has at least one great relationship in our past with someone who we ultimately didn’t end up staying with.  What if that wasn’t a failed relationship, but was actually a resounding success? …a resounding success that just happened to end at some point.

Maybe, just maybe, the very real possibility exists that great successful but ultimately short-term relationships are not only possible, but in many, many cases they are so by design.  I could think of the amazing, five month long relationship I had with a woman named Hilary that started in 2009 and ended in 2010 when I moved to Los Angeles as a failure I suppose but I don’t see it that way.  I think the two of us helped each other through a strange transitional moment in both of our lives. It was beautiful while it lasted and then it came to an end when it had to.  I can think of the fact that my parents’ marriage, which is going on forty years’ strong, is not my father’s first marriage, and the fact that I wouldn’t exist if he and his first wife had felt they had to make it work.

So often we let the culture teach us that ending a relationship is the result of a personal failure on our part.  We didn’t work hard enough, we didn’t make the right effort, we were too selfish, etc.  And maybe that’s true sometimes.  But I think the reality is that humans are complicated beings with more and more complicated lives and sometimes we’re so complicated that what is best for us one year might not be the next, or five, ten, fifty years down the road.  Sometimes no amount of work, no amount of attention, will make a relationship last.  Sometimes separating from your partner is the most loving thing you can do.

Fascinated with Celebrity Relationships?

by Riley Silvermanin LOVE

I’ve never been one to care much about celebrity gossip. It turns reading entertainment magazines and websites into a bit of a minefield because while you think you’re just reading an article on the new season of Fargo, you’re always just two clicks away from finding out about the most scandalous torrid affair ever of the week. Sometimes the articles are even true!

But as arrogantly as I may scoff at these types of stories, I am not as immune to them as I like to tell myself that I am. Which brings us to Jon Hamm and Jennifer Westfeldt. As a queer girl just entering into adulthood in 2001, I was first made aware of Westfeldt through her almost-lesbian film Kissing Jessica Stein. As Mad Men became a thing and Jon Hamm likewise, one of the things I always liked about him was his long-term relationship with Westfeldt. I felt this way despite having honestly no idea what either of them are like as people outside of charming interviews and podcast appearances. Yet their breakup bummed me out.

Less than a week after that, the internet was abuzz about another celebrity breakup. At first glance it was seemingly a much less significant news story. I’m talking of course about Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy’s breakup, along with the big news that Kermit might have entered into a new relationship. That’s a real sentence I just typed out with words. This story was obviously manufactured as part of a marketing plan for the new The Muppets TV series, and thus was silly fun. We all had a good laugh sharing the story.

Was it such a joke of a story though? The fictional romance between the frog and the pig seemed to be as important to a lot of people as the breakup of the indie darling and the Emmy winner. It landed on the same trending topics pages, it spawned its own legitimate think pieces that deconstructed the very nature of Piggy and Kermit’s relationship to begin with. For a joke, it sure seemed to mimic the process when it is being taken serious.

So the question is, why do any of these stories matter to us? Whether it’s a couple of Muppets or real flesh and blood famous people, there’s some strange connection we make to the relationships of celebrities. We follow the stories as if they were plotlines on our favorite show. We crack jokes about them, make hashtags, pick teams. The advent of social media has only made this type of obsession more and more a casual aspect of our lives.

This technology is new; however, maybe the motivations behind it are anything but. American culture has no aristocracy built into its official hierarchy, and while there are economic class distinctions, the cultural elite don’t seem to directly fall across those lines. Aside from a few outliers like Bill Gates, most people can’t name a lot of major business owners, but almost everyone can rattle off the names of their favorite celebrities. Our curiosity for celebrity gossip may in fact be the same curiosity that the people of England had about what was going on with King Henry and Anne Boleyn in the 1530’s.

Celebrity gossip takes people we see as larger than life figures and makes them relatable to us. Not unlike connecting with a character in a good book, we connect with their stories and find little bits of our own selves in them. By chatting about their lives, talking with friends about them, posting tweets about them, we feel a little bit of kinship with them. Since we put them on a pedestal, this kinship means we put ourselves a little bit on one too.

Maybe this vicarious living through those we have deemed the elites also give us the ability to talk about other peoples lives in a way that makes us feel safe. Most of us are as likely to run into Jon Hamm as we are Kermit, so we don’t really risk much when we talk about either of them. It can be a way for us to vent the frustrations or anxieties we might have about our own love lives, or find things to compare them to, without feeling like we’re ultimately going to hurt anyone else.

Whatever the reason, celebrity gossip is a thriving industry and it doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of going anywhere soon.

What is your take on our fascination with Celebrity relationships?

Doctor Who Taught Me 6 Things About Love

by Riley Silvermanin LOVE

I live as the intersection of a hopeless romantic and die hard geek.  So as obsessed as I am with Doctor Who and as much as I tune into the long running British sci-fi series to watch an anachronistic man fight off salt shakers armed with plungers and egg beaters, sometimes I learn a thing or two.

Here’s just a few things I’ve learned about relationships from the travels of my favorite Time Lord.

  • You can survive your partner’s “regeneration.”

So just about fifty years ago, the partners that be at the BBC concocted a strategy to continue the massively successful series without William Hartnell, the actor portraying him.  His health had begun to interfere with his performance, and they were left with the issue of having to replace the main character.  Their genius move, later dubbed “regeneration,” was to give the character the ability to regenerate, taking on a completely different face and personality.  This move gave the show the ability to grow and change with eras, and is directly responsible for its longevity.

Now, there’s no scientific evidence that human beings can regenerate, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t change.  We grow, we evolve, we discover different things about the world.  We go through profound experiences that alter our personalities.  On the show, companions who witness the Doctor they knew change faces have difficulty adjusting to the new Doctor, unsure if he’s the man they once knew.  This is a pretty relatable sensation for anyone who has known or loved someone for a long time.  How many times have you heard the phrase “He’s not the man I married.”? But just like the characters on the show, we can actually survive the changes in our partner.  When we love and care for someone, we learn to love the way they grow as a person.  If we plan to enter a long term relationship, this is exactly what we’re signing up for, to grow together on a shared journey through time and space.

  • Bow ties are cool.

Every Doctor has his wardrobe eccentricities, and the Eleventh Doctor, portrayed by Matt Smith, had his bow tie. He felt they were cool and he made great effort to make sure we knew that at every opportunity. It was a silly little embellishment that may or may not have been well received by his companions.  Or his wife. Like the Doctor and his bow tie, we all have some little quirks, interests, and hobbies that drive our significant other absolutely bonkers. And our partner has some that do the same to us. But love isn’t about having someone who fits the absolute perfect package and hits every mark on some cosmic checklist. Love is about finding someone who may have a thing or two that doesn’t quite click with you and loving them anyway, or even because of those quirks.

  • The past isn’t always great but the future is in flux.

Anyone who has gone back and tried to watch the classic episodes of Doctor Who prior to the 2005 reboot may discover something: a lot of them are really, really hard to sit through. It can be tough talking to someone who grew up watching the series, because their memories are painted by the nostalgia of their childhood, while my viewing is hard to always reconcile with the modern show that I love. When we meet someone new and develop a relationship with them, sometimes we learn a thing or two about their past that gives us pause.  There may be some things about their history that they aren’t proud of or even regret.  It’s important to remember though that the past is exactly that.  We don’t have a time traveling police box that will let us change history. What’s important instead is to see the person you love now as a result of those old growing pains, and maybe eventually love them as the building blocks they are for who that person is today, and for the future you’ll have together.

  • I just want a mate.

All talk of friendzones aside, sometimes it actually is better to be friends with someone than to have a romantic relationship with them.  Doctor Who returned in 2005 with the early seeds of a romantic subplot between the Doctor and the first new companion, Rose.  As epic as that love story became, and as much as it tied back into the 50th Anniversary special that aired years later, there’s something to be said for the power of a great friendship.  Rose has her place in Doctor Who history, as does the unrequited pining Martha who replaced her, but when things got too dark for the Doctor, what he needed was “a mate,” and he got it in Donna Noble, the brash temp from Chiswick played by Catherine Tate.  The next few companions all moved along the same lines, Amy Pond flirted occasionally but her heart belonged to Rory, and Clara Oswald was shakily written as a romantic interest for Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, not truly shining until she bonded as the closest trusted ally of Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth.  Romantic love is amazing, but sometimes what we need is a friend who we can trust, and have unwavering faith in.

  • The Girl Who Waited and The Last Centurion, aka Patience, Patience, Patience.

“Okay kid, this is where it gets complicated.” Amy Pond was a little girl who met a mad man with a box called the Doctor, who she didn’t see again until she was an adult, making her “The Girl Who Waited.”  Adult Amy has a boyfriend, later husband, who was turned into a plastic double of himself and then also waited outside a box for her for over a thousand years dressed as a Roman Centurion, aka “The Last Centurion.”  What does all this mean? Simple: Patience.

Sometimes we feel an immediate need to rush into something or feel the intense desire for instant gratification.  But I know speaking from personal experience, I’ve ruined many a good thing by being too eager, or by being unable to wait patiently.  Love can’t be rushed.  Even if you had an actual time machine, you couldn’t skip right to the end because the journey, the anticipation, that’s all part of.

  • “The name you choose, it’s like a promise you make.”

The Doctor’s real name is not The Doctor.  The line above is what he tells his companion Clara during the season 7 finale episode “The Name of the Doctor.”  He talks about his name like it’s an ideal, a reminder of the person he’s supposed to be.  Many of the other things on this list have to do with external expectations and actions.  This one is all about ourselves.  For years when I was younger, I wanted a girlfriend.  I wanted to be in a relationship because the concept of that appealed to me.  But I was young, foolish and someone who was silly enough to let her ideas of romance be influenced by the movies and TV shows she watched.

Now I’m 33, probably still a bit foolish, but I know that love is not about having something.  Love is about being something.  It isn’t that I should want to have a girlfriend or a wife, it’s that I want to *be* a girlfriend or wife.  That I want to be the kind of person worthy of someone’s love, that I want to take on the responsibility of sharing their life, of joining it with mine. Being someone’s partner is a promise you make to them, but just as importantly, it’s a promise you make to yourself.

The Orgasm Code

by Riley Silvermanin Sex

I had an actual physical barrier that was keeping me from a climax! I had to investigate this.

There’s a picture of myself that I posted on my Facebook and Instagram about a month or two ago, where I’m holding my hand in front of my mouth and blushing. At the time I posted it, I said there was a sexy secret behind the look on my face. And here that story is, I was buying a vibrator for the first time in my life, and being the intense prude that I am, I was blushing my way through asking some other ladies for advice on what to buy, and a friend of mine demanded I take a selfie immediately. This is that selfie:

selfie

So here’s the thing. I am definitely a prude. When it comes to sex and talking about sex or masturbation even, personally I get very uncomfortable, flustered, and a little giggly. I used to think this was just part of who I am. Some people are more comfortable talking about some subjects than others, and this is one where I struggle a bit. But the truth is, like most things, it never is that simple. Because something happened to me recently that made me realize that I have been utterly clueless about sex and what it means to me for pretty much my entire life. Something that changed everything.

I had an orgasm.

I’m 34 years old and for the first time in my life, I have had real honest to God, bones shaking, earth shattering, throw a pillow over my face to muffle the noise so I don’t disturb the neighbors orgasm. This is a really big deal for me, because it’s something that I honestly never even realized was even missing from my life because I just took it for granted that it wasn’t going to be part of it.

It’s hard to say this next line without sounding like a lying character in an American Pie movie, but I totally have had sex, like quite a few times actually. And for lack of a more delicate term, the process was completed. But there was never any more to it than that. No intense feeling of pleasure, nothing that could really be called a climax, at least not mentally. Just a physical response to some stimulation. When I would be with a partner, the intimacy would turn me on, but often I would almost be disappointed when the action moved from intense makeout sessions into the act itself because the part that I was really enjoying would be ending and soon it would all be over.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in sex, I was. I would pursue and sometimes date women, I would be interested and attracted to them, turned on by them. Despite this, I developed a bit of a sexual hangup, a dysfunction in my late twenties. It wasn’t that I had trouble starting, it was that I had trouble finishing. I’d tell myself that it wasn’t that big of a deal, even tried to spin it positively in my mind. If things remained in action mode it would be a perk for her, right? Of course that’s not the case because nothing kills the mood like an inherent sense that something is wrong.

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Supergirl’s Sister…Why She Is TV’s Most Realistic Coming Out Story

by Riley Silvermanin LOVE

Even when people are good, loving, supportive folks they can screw it up.

It started cute. In the third episode of Supergirl’s second season, Alex Danvers, Supergirl’s sister and tough-as-nails alien fighting government agent met Maggie Sawyer, a detective who is no stranger to alien activity herself. Despite the silliness of their roles on a TV show about a superhero from space, there was something real in the spark between them. In that very first scene I found myself mentally willing them to make out. Later in the same episode, when Maggie nonchalantly discloses her sexuality to Alex, I was in deep.

But here we are five episodes later, and while that giddy queer girl cheerleading is still screaming out from my heart, giving me the feels in a time when I really, really needed it, the storyline has evolved into something I didn’t see coming. On paper it seems so incredibly simple, if you take out the coming out element to it, what you have seems like a fairly common unrequited love storyline. Girl meets girl, they start flirting, girl makes a move, and is rejected, girl is sad. And in a genre of TV like Supergirl’s blend of comic book action with relationship drama, that’s pretty par for the course. Sister show Arrow is full of the bodies of failed relationships (sometimes in the form of literal corpses who may or may not stay dead), and even Supergirl has had some hetero versions of this same arc.

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