Indie Love - Sometimes you’re wrong

I have to admit, the story on the Indyish About page is not quite true. When El and I met, there were sparks and bright lights (at least in my brain) and we did fall in love awful quick and start scheming almost immediately, but actually, at very first, we were totally wrong.

Good friends who knew me almost 7 years ago when I met El working at an indie boutique in Toronto still tease us for how insistent we were that this was NOT going to be a relationship. Just friends. Ok maybe friends with chemistry, but decidedly not going to last, or be monogamy, or even dating because we’d both been a little wild in months previous, and turns out it had left us both with a hesitancy, and desire for something waaay more, or nuthin.

The very first time I hung out with Elran, I told him I wasn’t looking for any kind of anything, and he seconded that emotion. We were queasy from looking for love in all the wrong places. The only reason I’d agreed to spend any time with him at all, when I’d sidestepped friendly invites from other guys we worked with, was that he hadn’t tried to impress me, which is soothing when you’re a little seasick from the buffeting egos of the singles scene. He had shown immediate and genuine concern for me as a fellow Montrealer recently arrived and broke in Toronto, and he was funny in an irritating but addictive way where you mostly missed his conversational deadpan jokes, but if you started to pay attention you’d find out he was cracking them, and cracking you up, constantly. Funny and considerate and undemanding is a guy I’ll watch a movie with, at the very least. And if he’s willing to do shots in the shower with me and my crazy/brilliant roommate and her giant stuffed snow-tiger to celebrate her amazing tiling and painting job well, all the better.

(That’s El with dreads, and Serah, subsequent founder of Worn Fashion Journal, and me in Serah’s hat, in the bathroom of our Toronto, Kensington Market basement flat, June 2001.)

Still, this wasn’t enough to dispel our mutual notion that this was NOT going to be a relationship. Ha! In some ways I think that that honest but misguided conversation from our very first un-date was the rosetta stone of the next seven years of our good lovin’. In telling him the truth of where I was at, and what I didn’t like about the kinds of fun I’d been having, and having him respond with his own complex emotions, unsorted, similar, opened a next door into further complicated honesty. It was like we mutually agreed to drop our guard and pretense, to not put ourselves down or build ourselves up unnecessarily, and to not try to act like we knew everything about everything. To be ok with being wrong, try to legitimately learn about each other and, while we were still having a good time, to keep hanging out. That’s pretty much still our deal.

The willingness to tell the complicated honesty, the one where you reveal that you don’t quite know what you think yet but can trace the shades and outlines of what you most profoundly want, communicates trust. In the moment it feels like a death-defying act of independence, to hang yourself out on the line like that, all unfinished and prickly, but someone who loves you will love that you took that leap towards them, will feel honour-bound to meet your trust, and care for it, even if it means they have to admit being wrong about you. They will enjoy your surprises, prickliness and oddities, and even the mistakes you make, in the way only love can… and that’s how you’ll know.