Purple routes
I started talking to a guy. The conversation flowed, and he seemed very attractive. I suggested we get a drink. He said yes, and we made plans for a couple of days later.
Honestly, I was pretty excited.
We met at a bar ten minutes from my house. I arrived and we greeted each other.
He was quite handsome, in that classic way that doesn’t usually appeal to me. You know, those guys who are good-looking, but that’s it.
You look at them and just know they love their mothers, shower every morning with the same gel they’ve used for ten years, and say things like, “I love sports.” That was this guy. I didn’t think we’d last more than one beer.
But we started talking, and the conversation flowed. We had two beers and, without even meaning to, started talking about our exes.
Yeah. It makes no sense. But it actually made everything more interesting. Because suddenly, we didn’t have to pretend. We weren’t thinking about the right topics or what to say. We were just two people talking about love, relationships, and how we see them.
And we kept drinking, so we got more and more drunk, and everything felt easier. More fun.
I finished a whole pack of cigarettes. The best way to talk is smoking on a terrace. It’s my favorite activity in the world.
It was a genuinely good conversation. I think being able to lay my ex out on the table and say, “I went through this,” made it so, for the first time, he wasn’t in my head. I spent the date thinking about this new guy and about our conversation. It was completely refreshing.
“Did your ex do purple routes?” “Yeah.” “Wow, that’s intimidating.” “Haha, why?” “It’s like if I play guitar and you tell me your ex was the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” “Haha, don’t worry. You literally need almost nothing to be better than him at everything else.”
That last sentence wasn’t true. Every single word of it was a lie.
I got home after spending nearly five hours with him. I walked into my roommate’s room — she was still awake, half-drunk, eating a chocolate bar in front of her laptop. I stood in her doorway, still wearing makeup.
“I had such a good time!” She laughed a lot. “You’re so happy!” “I’m so happy!” “Oh my god, so embarrassing!” I shouted.
We laughed even more. I said goodnight and went to bed.
Life. The pinnacle of Homo sapiens development are these moments: familiarity, laughter, letting yourself go. It’s a shame that the older you get, the rarer they become.
I was so happy. I sent Laila a voice note.
I made myself a sandwich: cut a slice of bread, added cheese, ham, and mustard. I toasted it with butter. While it was heating, I smoked my last cigarette, standing in the kitchen in my pajamas.
The sandwich was ready. I took it out, put it on a plate. I’d eat it while watching New Girl, thinking about the guy from tonight. He had just sent me a message:
“I want to pinch your nose. See you Wednesday?”
I sat on my bed.
Suddenly, sadness crept in. I don’t know what part of my body produced it, I don’t know where it came from. But I started crying. Like, really crying.
I didn’t even eat the sandwich. I cried.
And cried.
And cried for almost an hour.
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I panicked. I panicked at the very real possibility that someone in my life might not be E. I panicked because I could see, so clearly, that it might not be him.
Don’t get me wrong — I didn’t see myself marrying this guy, or even thinking he’d be my boyfriend. He was just someone I had fun with.
But it made me realize that someday, maybe, I’d have fun with someone who wasn’t E.
And that made me really sad. Because E had been everything I ever wanted.
And the truth is, yes: all men play guitar.
But to me, he was the guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
And he was always there, in that corner of my mind, where I thought I’d never look at anyone or think of anyone the way I looked at and thought of him.
That was when I had to understand.
I had to understand that E did have good qualities.
E was smart. He knew how to listen. He showed love in a way that reached me. He cared. I loved talking to him. I liked his opinions. I liked the plans he wanted to make. He was good in bed. I admired his dedication to the things he loved. He always followed through.
But E wasn’t good for me.
E never gave me peace.
E never made me feel safe.
With E, I was always anxious. I always felt less.
E made me feel like I was too much. Like I never measured up.
That relationship broke me. It took my light. It dragged me to the bottom, and now every day, I have to swim a little to get back to the surface.
Everything was dark.
I don’t even remember it clearly now, because the pain of abandonment and rejection overshadows everything.
But there was a lot of pain for me in that relationship.
It never felt like a safe place.
I remember one day talking to Marc. We were having coffee in his office, looking out the window at people walking across campus.
“You know, you were never happy.” “What?” “You weren’t yourself. You didn’t shine.” “What do you mean?” “M, every time you talked about him, your posture changed. You’d shrink, like you were trying to hide. He took away your confidence. Your joy.”
I went silent.
And it was true.
Seeing him gave me so much dopamine… because I had been deprived of it.
There’s a classic experiment in behavioral psychology, developed by B.F. Skinner. In it, rats are placed in a box with a lever. When they press it, they receive a reward: a food pellet. If they get food every time, they soon lose interest. They only press it when they’re hungry.
But if the reward comes randomly, with no fixed pattern, the rats become obsessive. They press it constantly — even when there’s no food. That unpredictability creates addictive behavior.
It’s called intermittent reinforcement, and it works on humans too. It’s one of the principles behind addiction: from slot machines to certain emotional relationships. When you don’t know if someone will love you or ignore you, when affection is unpredictable, desire intensifies. The reward system lights up even more.
And of course, part of you gets hooked. Because the bond isn’t love anymore — it’s dopamine.
It all had an explanation.
But that didn’t stop me from breaking down in the kitchen, crying while I made my morning coffee.
