The Beauty of Dating With an Expiration Date

“As a neurology nurse, what would you never do?Finbar asked me.

No one had ever asked me that question. “Cycling without a helmet,” I replied. “Or try cocaine.

It happened last June at a bar in Burlington, Vermont, where I was studying nursing and Finbar… well, I didn’t know exactly what he was doing. We met that night through mutual friends. Around eleven o’clock at night, when the group decided to end the night, I said to him: “I’m going to eat a pizza near my house. You want to come?”.

” Of course ! he replied.

We bought two portions and sat on the windowsill of a restaurant that had already closed for the night. Our skin acclimated to the humid air when Finbar told me about the late summer sailing trip he was preparing for. He asked me how to prepare myself medically.

“Do you know the symptoms of appendicitis? I asked him.

“No, what should I look for? »

“Fever,” I replied. “A pain that usually begins in the abdomen and then localizes to the lower right quadrant.”

“What if I get appendicitis but can’t land for two weeks?

I took a bite of pizza. “Slowly but surely you will die of sepsis.”

Finbar said he couldn’t eat pizza anymore; my mouth was too dry. Thinking my terrifying medical opinion was the cause, I assured her she would be fine and the chances of her suddenly getting appendicitis were slim, but maybe she should bring some antibiotics, just in case. . Then I told him I was going home.

“You want me to come with you?”.

“No, I’m fine, thank you. I live around the block.”

A few days later, Finbar told me that I thought we were gonna have a one night stand and therefore his mouth was dry; I was nervous.

I laughed. “What made you think we were going to sleep?”

“Because you said, ‘The pizzeria that’s near my house.’ I thought you were inviting me to your house.”

“Oh I see. But it didn’t go like that”.

Finbar was an eccentric guy in his twenties who lived on a sailboat and he kept asking me out, and I kept accepting him. I can’t say exactly what drew me to him. Perhaps it was the way he referred to his ship as “a safe space for emotions”. Maybe it was because he played Irish music every Wednesday night and called his best friend Rob his soul mate. He wasn’t friendly at all, but he was very easy to spend time with.

One Saturday night, he texted me: “Do you want to do something tonight?”.

“Yes,” I replied.

He brought frozen pizza, we sat on opposite sides of the couch with a dog between us, and put on a movie that had a 2.7 rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When the movie ended and a commercial started, the dog jumped off the couch to stretch, and Finbar and I started talking about the pharmaceutical commercial that was going on.

“I actually use the drug ads to learn about drugs for exams,” I told her.

“What’s the most original name you know of a drug?” he asked.

I thought about that for a second. “I guess it’s fun to say carbidopa-levodopa.”

“What does it do ?”

“Levodopa is the precursor to dopamine, and carbidopa helps it cross the blood-brain barrier.”

In this, Finbar leaned over to me and kissed me.. His kiss was slow and gentle, eager and determined. When we parted, he smiled and said, “And that dopamine?”.

Maybe he was more affable than she admitted.

We continue to see each other. I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about him, but one night as I watched him dive into the water from the boat, the muscles in his back reflecting the sunlight as he touched water, a wave of attraction came over me.

Later that night we went below deck and did our thing. Then she made us pesto pasta and hosted the reality show “Too Hot to Handle,” which would become our show that summer.

As someone who has spent most of her love life in relationships with men older than me, I was surprised to date a guy four years younger. However, knowing that he was going on a sailing trip allowed me to open up to this experience.

The following five weeks it was an afternoon whirlwind of water and shared showers. We ate at the new poutine in town which had no air conditioning and we sweated through our t-shirts swallowing fries covered in a thick gravy. We sat five feet apart in my apartment while I tried to stuff popcorn in her mouth to no avail. We’ve seen a lot of “Too Hot to Handle”.

One night he rowed me to shore after we sailed and sang “We’re in a Canoe” to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” the whole way. One morning at my house, he yelled at me from the bathroom, “Do you mind if I make good use of your toilet?

” All yours ! I shouted at him.

Moments like this made me love Finbar. I loved his heart, his ability to present himself at every moment as he was. It made me want to do the same.

In the middle of it all, I went to Vancouver and he helped direct a ship to Panama. When he returned we met after his weekly Irish music session and picked up where we left off, knowing that in a month he was going to set sail. His trip was to last “from six months to two years”.

It was the same whirlwind as before, but with a deeper sense of knowing each other. He told me about his father’s death. I cried when I told him about my grief from the previous year. We held each other as we talked late into the night. We both knew it was fleeting, and it made us feel less inhibited, like what we were saying to each other became irrelevant the moment their boat left Lake Champlain.

I dated a lot of people in their twenties. Most of these relationships fell apart, some ended in heartbreak. However, sending a lover out to sea was something new, and I was no stranger to the cliché of its theatricality.

Summer faded with him getting ready to leave and me starting another semester. The night we said goodbye it was after his farewell party; I was going to cast off in the morning. He was in good spirits and excited, and no one was dressed properly for the cold September night. By nine-thirty most of the guests had left. Realizing it was time to go, I whispered, “Will you walk me to my car?”

We held hands in the lantern-lit parking lot as the wind blew off the lake. “I learned a lot from you,” he told me.

I leaned towards him I didn’t want to lose that, I wasn’t ready to leave. We hadn’t planned to see each other when he returned from his adventure, whenever that happened, so it was a farewell. He gave me one last kiss and said, “You’re going to have a great life.”

“You too,” I said, tears in my eyes. I shook his hand as I got into the car.

The next day he set sail and traveled through the Champlain Canal system to the Hudson River and eventually to the Atlantic Ocean. I know from blog posts that he has been to the Caribbean. Where will it go next, I don’t know. I’m not sure he knows either.

Finbar lives in my thoughts like a favorite song, the letter appearing at random. I smile when I think of him singing to me in the boat. I read your blog posts and laughed out loud at your witty short comments. I remember the taste of the poutine we ate and its great ability to be fair.

And thanks to the time I spent with him, I try to do the same. That the ultimate goal of every romantic encounter is not a long-term relationship, a future, someone to build a life with. This expectation can very well stifle the life, the possibility, even the possibility of really knowing someone or of being known. Do you want to experience the beauty that can come from letting go of expectations? dating someone leaving.

I don’t know when I will see Finbar again, or even if I will see him again. I only know that, for one summer, we found refuge in each othera romance in the same water that, over time, has taken us on different journeys.

© The New York Times 2023