emotional darwinism

After a couple weeks of silence and the vow to never hit him up again, there’s a text exchange.

“Happy Thanksgiving”

“I hate all this back-and-forth shit”

“I just want to be next to you”

“Let's do Christmas again”

I know that this connection is not grand enough to be tragic, nor stable enough to be romantic. But it is significant enough to write about-which is probably its own indictment.

He and I don't exist in reality.

He exists in my memory, in text threads and tone shifts, in nostalgia and unresolved tension. It is a bond stitched together from late-night phone calls spanning a decade, a few sprinkled-in weekends, repetition, and possibility.

That’s not a relationship. But it's not nothing either. It's the kind of thing that makes my friends ask reasonable questions: Who the fuck is this guy to you? What do you get out of this? Why are you so invested in seeing him again?

The answer is embarrassingly simple. I’ve known him for a long time. I care about him. I think about him often. He makes me laugh. He makes me think. He’s smart. He’s sweet. He’s entertaining. I have learned a lot from him, even when the lesson isn't the one he's trying to teach.

When we disagree, which typically happens within a week of reconnecting, the same sequence unfolds. We butt heads. We run our mouths just enough to irritate each other. I hold back just enough not to cross a line. He does too. Right before that irritation turns into something bigger, immediate distance. Maybe a couple days, sometimes weeks, other times years. We once went two years without speaking, only to pick up the phone and immediately rehash an argument as if it had just occurred.

He returns to my life. Not with an apology. Not with vulnerability. With a “Yo” and a thesis. A constructed explanation of what happened and why.

And from his POV, I am to blame. I push him away. I don't see other perspectives. I don’t know how to admit when I’m wrong. I can be genuine one day and selfish the next. My backpedaling is triggering. I’m selfish. I’m dramatic. I’m traumatized. A lot of words that often seem to circle the same hidden conclusion: You remind me of someone who hurt me. I’m not doing this again.

The thing is, sometimes he's right. Painfully right. Sometimes he identifies something about me that I haven't fully seen yet. Something uncomfortable and true. Other times, I think he's completely full of shit and projecting. I never know which one it's going to be.

I'd never admit this to him out loud, mostly out of stubbornness, but his words do stay with me. Far longer than he realizes. I sit with them. I turn them over. I examine the parts that sting because they're true and the parts that sting because they aren't. I grow from it. Not because he's some all-knowing authority who knows me and people better than they know themselves, but because I've always believed reflection is a form of self-respect. I am always willing to hold a mirror.

What frustrates me is that he rarely seems willing to stand in front of one himself.

At one point, in total frustration, he proposed a system. An actual system for us to express ourselves. I tell him my grievances and beef with him. He sits with it for 48 hours. Then it's his turn. A scheduled exchange of emotional processing. Like conflict had somehow been converted into a shared calendar invite.

I remember staring at my phone and laughing. Not because it was malicious. Because it was so profoundly him. Most people have feelings. He builds infrastructure around them.

Whenever something emotional entered the room, something analytical would pop up right in front of it. If I felt hurt by him being inconsistent or inconsiderate, we'd end up discussing psychology. If I felt frustrated, we'd somehow land on evolutionary biology. A simple disappointment could become a lecture on adaptation, resilience, or environmental pressures. One time I popped off on him about not calling me back and he gave me a lecture on evolution, as if the fact that I was angry meant I was unevolved. I would come to him with an emotion and leave carrying a theory.

It was impressive. Genuinely impressive. And also deeply annoying. Because beneath all that intelligence, I often found myself wanting something much smaller. Something embarrassingly ordinary. I didn’t want a framework, a model, or an explanation. Just: “Yeah. My bad.”

But then again, I understand his bullshit because I do it too. Maybe that's why I recognize it so easily and forgive it so endlessly. The instinct to observe instead of feel, to understand instead of experience, to intellectualize instead of risk being moved. I do that. I’ve done that over and over with people.

Analysis creates distance. Distance creates safety. No one can touch us when we’re intellectualizing. No one can touch us when we're performing brilliance. He dissects. I narrate. He theorizes. I contextualize. Both of us are trying, in our own way, to stay one step ahead of vulnerability.

And yet the predicament remains…

For now, anyway.