The Airbnb confirmation arrives as my spouse sleeps beside me and I don’t cancel. Nine days in Spain with my comet partner Johan, who I’d met in real life for less than 48 hours. I tell myself this time will be different. Knowing someone across years and screens must be sufficient scaffolding to construct our future with. I screenshot the Granada listing and send it to Johan. Look at these ceilings, I type, as if architecture could save us.
I am always trying to rescue things with form.
I’ve done some rash, impulsive shit in the name of love—built monuments to things that didn’t last. I mapped out futures for people who never asked for permanence. If there’s a blueprint for modern love, I blame Richard Linklater. His Before trilogy shaped the entirety of what romance could be: ephemeral, cinematic and highly improbable. In Before Sunrise, two twenty-something strangers meet on a train and decide to spend an evening wandering Vienna together. When I first watched it in high school, I absorbed its hyper-romanticism and attempted to infuse its magic into my daily life (which seemed pitiful in comparison). Because I was so young, I failed to understand how nostalgia distorts memory, how yearning becomes a way of life. I thought I was watching instructions and learned to demand romance that moved across time zones and existed mostly in metered dialogue. I didn’t want love: I wanted art—the kind that never gets messy. I craved a rhythm of yearning more than rhythmic breathing beside me in bed. The films taught me to worship the liminal. I mistook slow pacing for depth and quiet for certainty.
Years after all my unfinished cathedrals collapse, a brilliant instructor will introduce me to the concept of hamartia—a character’s fatal error, the lie they believe so fully it drives their narrative towards ruin. Not a flaw, she clarified. A conviction. A compass that spins madly until it carves patterns of misdirection. Mine started off simple: If I love hard enough, it will be enough. In middle school, I’d write love letters to boys who didn’t respond and memorize a crush’s class schedule to bump into her at the snack bar. My love language was obsession dressed up as effort.
Even into adulthood, I thought endurance made it real, that a love earned through exhaustion lasts forever. It was a belief that if I constructed each gesture with enough care, something lasting would take root. And so I unknowingly laid unstable, shaky foundations by myself. Near the end of each relationship, I grew accustomed to their eventual collapse: no one was meant to shoulder the labor of monumental construction alone.
The pattern is familiar: it’s happened before. Once with a handsome medical student in college. We spent a year building intimacy through screens before we finally met in the flesh. Over $1 tacos, he confessed his craving for confidence, though it became clear he would rather I construct a cathedral to his potential. When I asked for a commitment of time, he vanished into the ether—nary a trace, even as I attempted to capture his attention through barrages of text messages and phone calls left unanswered. Aching for a complete blueprint, I took my fledgling architectural skills to Europe on a search for adventure.
I called it my “Sex in Every City” tour. Armed with a backpack and carry-on stuffed with a capsule wardrobe and trinkets to gift my hosts, I would traverse an entire continent in search of a flirtatious stranger to strike up a conversation with on public transportation. In Paris, I hit it off with a French aerospace engineer over drinks. We swiped right into bed together, exchanging intimacies only offered to strangers. In my hotel room, he drew flight patterns on our room service napkins and explained orbital mechanics. “You see? Love is like achieving escape velocity,” he murmured, his accent softening the consonants. Later, he whispered calculations in the crook of my neck—the probability of two people meeting in the City of Love. He kissed me goodbye on the train platform but my desire lingered through Bonn, then roused into hunger in Prague. Hostel hookups sparked around me, but I was too fixated on my French farewell. My new roommates and friends fed my romantic delusion. Their verdict? Unanimous: Go back, you only live once. I did not tell my aerospace engineer I had bought a return ticket. I arrived during a national holiday to surprise him, not realizing he’d seen me as a tourist. He was aghast at my grand gesture—I was not a real romantic prospect. He left me to bed-rot in an overpriced hotel, crying over my misfortune and stockpiling hotel leftovers.
My history with the Dutch began a few days after, where a brief Before Sunrise-esque dalliance in Amsterdam brought me to my knees. Jan and I flirted during dinner and played footsie over beers. I grew impatient as we swung our hands between us on our walk to the train station. “Are you really going to let me leave without a kiss?” He furrowed his brow, weighing his options before crouching down to meet my lips. When we came up for air, we’d missed the last departure. We hailed a cab back to my hotel, practicing devotion in what Céline from the first film says, “this little space in between.” In the scene, she speaks of magic conveyed through the attempt to understand someone, share something—anything. Though our task was impossible, our answer was an evening trying to understand each other’s bodies in a twin-sized bed at an airport motel.
We texted the entire summer. In a fit of delusion, I learned Dutch for Jan—but our time had passed. He convinced me our romance wasn’t realistic: our age gap, the distance, and his unwillingness to travel. He predicted my Dutch future with startling accuracy, and I filed it away as a romantic prophecy. I returned from Europe with fragmentary blueprints: Amsterdam’s canal kisses and Paris’s whispered equations.
Ethan Hawke described the Before trilogy as explorations of what could be, what should have been, and what is. When I matched with Tobi on golden-era OkCupid that same summer, I didn’t realize I was moving deeper into my own trilogy of temporal love, shifting from Amsterdam’s ethereality toward something more grounded.
At first, Tobi’s profile picture haunted me—a shared cleft chin with the ghost of an ex who taught me love was a weapon. We only shared a 76% match compatibility, which frightened me—why should I waste time on someone the algorithm deemed a poor match? But here was someone who understood Dutch efficiency and could decode Jan’s prediction about my future. I took it as fate and messaged first. In time, I stretched conversations across oceans to chat about cycling through the lowlands and the inefficiency of Amtrak compared to Dutch trains. Through our slow, drawn-out correspondence, I felt an inexplicable pull I can only ascribe to homecoming. After I moved to Oakland, we set up our first date in the city. What was intended as just lunch morphed into 12 hours together.
A prevalent visual motif across the Before films examines the almost–touch. During points of tension, one lead will reach towards the other before deciding to hold back. In the first film, Jesse and Celine use this in a flirtatious manner and as viewers, we witness the coyness of young romance. Celine reaches out to brush Jesse’s hair out of his face but drops her hand, casting it off as nothing—besides, he’s too absorbed in his diatribe and the sound of his voice to notice. The second film uses these almost-touches to convey the sorrow of what could have been, with both characters getting a moment to reach out to their loved one before pulling away.
As Tobi and I wandered the coastline on that endless first date, I tried to manufacture this touch. I wanted to see if we possessed that spark in person, because our textual intercourse felt so natural. I leaned in a little closer as our hands swung, our fingers almost touching but not quite, then pulled back. At first, I thought it was just me testing the waters, until I felt the tips of his fingers brush the back of my hand. We continued this game until after midnight.
Then Tobi sent me home in an Uber with nary a kiss, leaving me to wonder if he even liked me.
Of course, in a month we made things official, marking our status with an obligatory Facebook relationship change. Within three months, we planned a Thanksgiving vacation to Chicago. Six months in, we moved in together, San Francisco much too expensive to navigate alone.
We opened up our partnership from the start, but spent five years in construction mode—couples therapy, late-night talks about triggers and boundaries—and built a foundation sturdy enough to shoulder the weight of exploration. We fumbled through with multiple ruptures: nights slept on opposite edges of the bed, air thick with resentments we could not name. But we chose each other. We paused mid-conversation and asked for time and space to process. We combined our possessions and fostered senior dogs who claimed the contentious beanbag chair as their throne. We learned the difference between “I love you” and “I like you,” often wielding both as mottos while we learned to choose commitment over an indulgence of unsustainable passion.
The Before trilogy had taught me to worship beginnings like the couple’s first evening in Vienna, electric with possibility. I still craved that spark with strangers—the rush of a new connection proving I was desirable and worthy of choosing. I thought I had outgrown my Linklater-shaped romanticism, but when Tobi and I embraced polyamory, I found I’d only built a new facade over the worn surface. Tobi’s steady presence could not compete with the rush of dopamine of someone new wanting me. I kept building monuments to potential, kept mistaking intensity for intimacy. Each time I crashed, Tobi was there—holding space for my grief for connections that could not sustain their own weight.
By the time Johan and I rekindled, I wanted to believe I had learned something.
When I planned this holiday in Spain with my comet partner—someone I’d known for years, video-called daily—I knew we would learn things about each other we couldn’t unlearn. It served as a field test. A chance to see if I’d learned to stop translating silence into meaning and interpreting intensity as reciprocity. Six years my junior, he was still finding his footing. Our age gap felt like protection after being consumed whole by another unhappy ending. I relished being the older, more experienced one because I held the agency.
We first met when the world was ending. Johan and I kindled digital intimacy as a means for survival. We’d tether ourselves to our phones for video calls that stretched across time zones and wrestle with our mortality. Through apocalypse logic, we committed to co-creating a highly improbable long-distance relationship. Six months in, I discovered he lied by omission, and his inability to externalize his feelings or advocate for himself left me translating silence into meaning. I was building another cathedral alone.
We needed deliberate space apart to grow into ourselves. Six months of silence: no more video calls or daily check-ins. I dated other people. He learned to name his feelings. When Tobi and I planned our wedding festivities across two continents, I booked a train ticket to Utrecht. I’d spend 48 hours testing whether Johan and I could translate what we rebuilt into reality. I romanticized it as my version of Jesse and Céline’s missed Vienna reunion, the one they spent nine years wondering about. We’d answer that question: What happens when you actually show up?
It was like Amsterdam distilled—familiar architecture but smaller, more intimate. When my train pulled in, he was waiting on the platform with open arms. We wandered across the canals to kill time until we could check in, me lugging my overstuffed backpack. As we crossed a bridge, he pulled out his phone to show me his latest acquisition: a racing shirt signed by Max Verstappen. “I know it’s ridiculous,” he chuckled, “loving something I’ll never do myself.” I found the gap between dream and reality endearing as I watched his face light up. “But I love the physics of it all.”
When we checked in, we discovered each other’s bodies with the horsepower of months of anticipation. Our extended video calls combusted into immediate intensity. Later, he whispered race statistics in my ear when he thought I was asleep. We confirmed that our chemistry was worth pursuing. Spain, however, would determine if we could sustain what had grown beyond the safety of distance and controlled encounters.
Nine days together: Amsterdam, Cordoba, Sevilla, Granada. In our first hours, I noticed Johan’s intense need for closeness when I yearned for separation and space. We laughed over cheap wine with sun-kissed shoulders and wandered over uneven cobblestone streets, but quickly shapeshifted from lovers into siblings, then strangers in the same bed. His desire for control played out as hushed tantrums when I mistranslated a sign, causing us to miss a train by a minute, or when I’d push back against unsolicited commentary about unsafe neighborhoods while passing a crowd of people of color. I found myself desperate for a clarity I couldn’t summon on an evening in Cordoba, where his eyes glazed over when the waiters spoke to him, wordlessly shifting their attention to me, the designated translator.
During our final evening in Cordoba, a harbinger of doom arrived in the form of a text from our Seville host. The air conditioner was broken—but they could bring us a portable unit the next day for our troubles? After three evenings sleeping in the same bed, sharing the same room, listening to his F1 videos drone on while I showered the day’s sweat off, the inequity of our dynamic became impossible to ignore. I’m disabled as shit—my body requires frequent tune-ups and maintenance. Johan is 27, physically fit and neurodivergent. The dynamic should have been clear: he carries the luggage, I handle the social navigation we both find exhausting. He refused both. He’d press forward, hands-free, while I lugged a heavy suitcase through Andalusian heat. Then he’d complain about cab costs, insisting we walk two miles to save seven euros, and in the same breath refuse to speak to anyone. I translated and accommodated while he preserved his comfort at the expense of mine. The irony felt exquisite: a chronically-ill partner shouldering the labor while the able-bodied one complains.
I thought about Jesse and Céline. What if they’d met during their planned reunion in Vienna? What if they’d rushed it, convinced that years of longing meant they were ready to commit? In Before Sunset, Céline tells Jesse they were stupid not to exchange numbers, and she was wrong for leaving their reunion up to chance, because their past selves knew magic only survives in controlled doses. Johan and I thought we’d outgrown that limitation because we’d done the work. But two years can change people, and we found ourselves growing in opposite directions. He’d built a life with a primary partner and developed a dynamic with metamours I found uncomfortable. I’d learned what reciprocity looked like through marriage. It was clear we were no longer the same people who’d fallen in love through Facetime during an apocalypse.
We were becoming incompatible.
In Seville, I’d arranged a visit to the Royal Alcazar and Bell Tower with a purposeful padding of our schedule and discussion of dress codes ahead of time. When we walked over, he pointed down to his shorts and shrugged. He hadn’t brought a spare pair of pants and we had to backtrack an extra 20 minutes to our apartment.
In another moment of misalignment, I trudged around Spain, handling every interaction to protect strangers from his prejudices and Johan from the consequences of voicing them. I had not signed up to teach Anti-Racism 101 to a twenty-something white man who should have known better, but there I was.
When Tobi suggested I needed space, I was relieved. Tobi knows me. He realizes when I’m stretched too thin or when I need room to breathe. After over a decade learning each other’s limits and building systems for when one of us is depleted, he always asks what I need and offers solutions. Tobi creates space without me having to beg for it. This is what co-building looks like: two people shouldering the weight together, adjusting when the loads shifts.
In Granada, we met my friend Stephanie. A colleague turned confidante, she’s the only person who has met all my partners. By then, I was trying to discern if I wanted to call it quits—the relationship, not the trip—and I ached for company that didn’t require constant translation or education about basic human decency.
We toured the Alhambra as a trio. Our guide walked us through the story of Charles V and Isabella of Portugal—their political marriage that turned into passion, how they spent six months in honeymoon delirium, how he commissioned a palace inside the Alhambra for her, for them, for romance itself. When she died young, he couldn’t bring himself to return. Left the whole thing unfinished. Never stepped foot in it again.
I understood the metaphor. Romance builds monuments. Intimacy builds kitchens. Romance commissions palaces one can never enter again once their beloved is gone. Intimacy is Tobi offering to make a mug of hot cocoa in the evenings or Stephanie sitting beside me without requiring performance. Romance is grand and monumental, often collapsing under its own weight. Intimacy feels quieter in its persistence, more communal; more real and prone to survival.
After the tour, Steph and I rushed to our appointment at the hammam, modeled after the original baths of the Alhambra. In the candlelit pools, with her beside me instead of him, I found more solitude and peace with a friend than I experienced during the previous days of forced intimacy with Johan.
Later, I learned how he’d spent his solo afternoon. The bar near our apartment was too crowded, so he wandered twenty minutes to an Irish pub—beer and English, his comfort zones. When hunger struck at 4 PM, McDonald’s it was. “I didn’t want to talk to anyone. They don’t speak the same language.”
I said he could have pointed. He said it wasn’t his problem.
For over a week, I’d made his problems mine. I spoke broken Spanish to confused waiters. I planned itineraries around his forgotten dress codes. I translated signs while he sulked about missed trains. And when he finally had two hours to navigate Spain alone, he chose McDonald’s over pointing at bread. In a country where four-euro jamón plates are abundant, where the corner stands offer warm bread stuffed with aged queso de cabra and pointing at food behind glass cases served as universal language—he chose the golden arches.
The relief flooded through me. I wasn’t unreasonable and my demands weren’t too much. My grief was compounded by the clarity of naming the emotion, and sadness for the weeks I’d spent accommodating someone who couldn’t reciprocate in earnest.
I said okay. I kept my feelings close.
Charles V and I made the same mistakes. We commissioned permanence for what belonged to the ephemeral. His palace remained incomplete because returning meant facing what could never be. I used to think love had to be earned through pain. The more I withstood, the more it meant when things worked out. I held onto massive amounts of hurt with the excuse that endurance equaled devotion. But love is not something to survive—it is something to celebrate and nurture.
Our last day together was stacked with delays as we traveled back to the Netherlands. At the station, he lamented over waiting too long for our connection. On the plane, he grumbled in unison with the other Dutch passengers. Once we checked into our hotel, hungry and desperate for a meal, Johan emerged from the shower with the lone bathrobe, claiming it before I could object.
As we prepared for bed, I couldn’t let the tension fester. I asked how he thought the trip went.
Johan paused, toothbrush in hand. His eyes met mine in the bathroom mirror. “I think we learned a lot about each other.” His voice quivered. “You need a lot of space. This wasn’t what I expected. But I don’t enjoy being alone.”
We circled each other. I told him I needed someone who could function independently, I couldn’t be his translator for life. In return, he said I made him feel stupid, like nothing he did was right. Back and forth, we excavated our incompatibility.
“The way you look at me when I don’t know something,” he said finally. “Like I’m disappointing you.”
“You are disappointing me.” The words escaped before I could filter them. “Not because you don’t know Spanish, but because you won’t try. You’d rather make me responsible for everything than risk feeling uncomfortable.”
The conversation was over, though we resolved nothing. We stated the reality of our situation: It was unfixable.
Loving something doesn’t require permanence. When the tenderness unraveled, we didn’t rip our relationship to shreds. We folded it gently and carefully, chose silence over cruelty and space over resentment.
Johan taught me that durability is not proof of depth. He stayed—physically present in every museum and meal, each humid Seville night confined in that apartment. But he never showed up. Never carried the luggage or learned three words of Spanish. I’d mistaken his presence for participation, but I learned the two are not the same. I still love the Before trilogy and get swept up in Jesse and Céline’s cinematic magic. But I recognize it for what it is: beautiful, hyperromantic fiction that taught me to worship beginnings instead of building middles. Johan and I tried to live inside of that fiction and failed.
In the wake of ceasing construction on my cathedral with Johan, I wondered if my hamartia was never how deeply I loved, but how often I mistake labor for connection. After all, building a cathedral requires many hands.
I flew home to Tobi. When I landed, I walked through the door exhausted, grieving and guilty. Over the proceeding weeks, he listened as I unpacked Spain piece by piece. He asked questions, didn’t say “I told you so,” held me when I cried and reminded me I wasn’t responsible for Johan’s growth.
A month later, someone new messaged me. My old instincts kicked in: the urge to project a future, to imagine what we could build. I caught myself mid-fantasy. “I’m interested,” I told them, “but I move slower now. I need to see if you can carry your own weight before I can consider shouldering ours.” They said they understood but three dates in, they canceled last minute for the second time with no explanation or attempt to reschedule. I did not want to build a shrine to their potential, so I did not chase or make excuses for them. I sent a kind message closing the door, and moved on. It stung less than I expected. I’d learned to examine my materials before laying foundations.
With Tobi, I still do impulsive shit in the name of love. I’ll book trips, plan surprises and nurture grand gestures. But where I once erected shrines alone, we plant seeds as partners—our act of ritual tending. We compost the wreckage of failed attempts, learn which weeds are worth keeping and how to share the watering can. We trust that some things bloom and die in a single season.
I am still polyamorous, drawn to constellations over hierarchy. But I’ve stopped building temples alone. I look for people who bring their skills and tools, and I reserve my effort for those willing to co-create. Love must move at the speed of trust and leave room for stillness and replanting. I need love decolonized from possession, that doesn’t make demands in return.
Jesse and Céline’s love survives because they had to do the dishes together. By Before Midnight, though we never see their mundane routine on-screen, we can hear about the hard work through their shorthand, arguments, and casual cruelties thrown out during conversations. They’ve lived this entire unseen life in the years between films. Céline has given up parts of her career so Jesse can remain a best-selling novelist. They’ve carried the weight of each other’s compromises. One of the last lines in the trilogy is spoken by Jesse, who informs his wife, “If you want love, then this is it. This is real life. It’s not perfect, but it’s real.”
I used to think love lived in the grand gestures, the cinematic moments encapsulated in film. But that’s fiction. Real intimacy exists in what doesn’t make the final cut: quiet tending and daily choosing. I no longer build cathedrals to potential. I build kitchens, gardens, and spaces meant for living. I leave flowers in the rubble, seed-bomb what’s left, and cultivate what still wants to grow. This love is not begging to be kept, but choosing to stay. Heart open, hands steady, seeds shared.
