The Chemistry That Was Real and Still Not Enough

I met David at a friend's wedding in Toronto when I was 26 and the connection was immediate and genuine in a way that I had learned to trust as significant. We had the conversations that go on too long because neither person wants to stop them.

We had the particular attention for each other that makes other people in the room slightly peripheral. I was not performing interest. I was genuinely interested, in a way that I had not been in several years of dating, and the interest was clearly reciprocal.

We started a relationship that had all of the early indicators of something that was going to matter. What it also had, which neither of us knew in the first months because the chemistry was providing a sufficient alternative explanation for every difficulty, was a fundamental difference in what we each wanted from our daily lives.

He was deeply extroverted in a way that meant his ideal evening was one with other people in it. I was deeply introverted in a way that my ideal evening was almost never that. These are not preferences that can be permanently bridged by care and goodwill.

They produce, over time, a recurring negotiation in which one person is consistently asking for less of what the other person is consistently asking for more of, and the negotiation is never resolved because the underlying difference is not resolvable. We tried for fourteen months. The chemistry was present for all fourteen of them.

The compatibility in the specific dimension that daily life depends on was not. Ending it was the first time I had ended a relationship that I genuinely had feeling in, and the clarity required to do it despite the feeling was the hardest relational work I have done.

I understand now that chemistry is a beginning and not an answer. The answer requires considerably more information.