For 13 Days, I Believed Him

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/style/modern-love-for-13-days-i-believed-him.html

Version 0 of 1.

James was all over my dog, Cindy, photographing her and posting her to his Facebook. He would roughhouse and then curl around her, pinning Cindy down and forcing her to look him in the eyes: a deep, locked gaze that said they were connected, that said he belonged in this apartment with this dog.

He would stay way too long. He would follow me into the laundry room.

“I have chores to do,” I’d say. “See you later.”

“I’ll help,” he’d say, smiling and grabbing me with his ropy arms, twisting around me into a sort of human backpack. He went with me to Trader Joe’s, trailing behind, picking up items and putting them down. Afterward he would enthusiastically carry my bags. He started saying, “I love you, and you love me too.”

I knew him for 13 days. For those 13 days, we were together constantly. He told me he was a real estate agent so he had time and a flexible schedule. He told me he was between apartments, staying with friends in their gorgeous Bushwick apartment, where he helped out with their new baby.

He taught me about emo music. I introduced him to Gloria Estefan. We listened to everything in bed, shouting at Alexa while singing poorly and loudly.

He was fast and alert, like an amphibian, popping and bobbing around me. He had a thing for that cartoon cat called Pusheen and would say, “Pusheen” in a baby voice every chance he got. One day he brought me a stuffed animal sort of like it, and I oohed and aahed.

James was kind of great, but his intensity freaked me out. When I first swiped him on Tinder, I didn’t see the overgrown skater boy he turned out to be. I thought he was serious in his photos, a grown-up.

In person he seemed too cool for me, too playful and young. He was cute, laughed a lot when I was funny, and complimented me. Truthfully, I didn’t much like him at first. But I tried it.

I always try it. That’s how I am and always have been. I don’t remember a lot from my childhood in Fort Wayne, Ind., but I do remember creepy things.

There was a girl in the neighborhood who had a dirty face and dirty hands. Once we found her crouched on the floor of our pantry eating Ritz crackers, and my mother had to shoo her away.

That image hits me in a dark place. It’s so real, but did it actually happen? My childhood memory is like a murky, creepy liar. However, some things are crystal clear, like when my father would drive me to figure skating practice and I would look at my own hands in my lap and think: “Who is that? How long will I be stuck in this charade? How long do I have to be trapped in me?”

It seemed unendurable.

I started emotionally doubling, being a me who lives in reality with other humans while simultaneously being a me that feels above all that, untethered and floating. I always believed that “life” only applied to me in a superficial way, as something unimportant to be endured.

Emotionally doubling let me — made me — hold hands with James and have sex with James and put up with James at all. I have always had romantic relationships because it seemed easier than not having them. It was so much more work to say, “No thanks.”

Although I was aware that humans need and desire love, sex, togetherness and family, and that they prioritize those things, I felt as if I were doing all that just to do it. In terms of love, I always accepted horrible deficits, emptiness and disconnection, and I didn’t really care.

When I met James, three years ago, I was 36 and nothing about my life was how I wanted it to be. My apartment had one window (it still does). I spent hours walking around Brooklyn Heights peering into people’s living rooms. I was surviving as an actress, on residuals. When I was acting, I had everything; when I wasn’t, I had nothing.

And I set it up like that. I chose to believe that, for me, everything that was important to other people was wrapped up in success. It was as if success were a piñata, and when I finally smashed it all of the stuff of life would fall out, and I would consume it and become one with myself.

I thought the same way about love. I figured that love, for me, would fall out of the success piñata whenever I was finally able to break it open. It took me years to realize that success wasn’t actual or tangible or a piñata in any way. In fact, I had already experienced a big conventional success — being on a hit TV show — and no piñata containing all of life’s delights had burst open for me.

That’s how I found myself on Tinder.

And Tinder brought me James. For 13 days, James told me I was beautiful. For 13 days, he proudly held Cindy’s leash and paraded her around my block as if it were his block. He was super into it, and it was his “into-it-ness” that got me and started to change me.

His committed confidence shook the complacency out of me, and I discovered that I was doing it: I was living. Meaning I was starting to invest in the hand holding and the outdoor Brooklyn beer dates where both of us laughed in our baseball hats.

I was starting to imagine that I might like him or that liking him or any man was something from my very own life. I took him to meet my friends. There I was, getting kissed and squeezed in front of my people.

Then, after those 13 long days, he said, “I have something to tell you.”

It’s the kind of sentence that makes the floor drop out.

“Everything I told you is true,” he said. “It’s just not true anymore.”

Meaning he wasn’t actually working as a real estate agent. He didn’t have a job, or, as it turned out, a place to live. He wasn’t living with any friend or helping out with any baby. He was staying in a men’s shelter somewhere out in Queens.

He cried a lot, and I felt sick. I sat there waiting, vibrating in that empty moment.

“But you have so many shoes,” I said.

And he did. He seemed to have on a different pair every time I saw him. He had style and outfits, which he kept in a locker.

The feeling that followed was so strange, as if I were coming into consciousness in the middle of a home invasion. My breathing slowed and I became still. Psychologically, I started to move around him, soothing and cajoling him toward the door.

I know that anyone can fall on hard times and that the world is awful, but I was suddenly scared of him and angry. It was as if he had broken into my house and my body. He had given me what I needed so I would give him what he wanted, and it made me feel worthless.

In the moment, I did what I could to get him away from me. I could have screamed that he was a liar. Instead, I stood in silence, facing off with my own guilt and unease. It was ugly because I had a problem with a person who had nothing.

“It’s O.K.,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

But it was his fault that he lied to me and used me. What happened between us was his fault.

It took another 10 days for me to completely break up with him — via text, email and messenger — until he had resisted and persisted to the point that he finally earned my cruelty. And that was that.

Until later that summer, when I passed a candy store with a giant stuffed Pusheen in the window. Staring into its pinprick eyes, I realized that my lying Tinder lover was the one who broke my emotional double.

Because of him, I had crashed into my own self and come to see that I did want and need real love, that I did want and need good things, and that I am more than just a lifeboat for desperate men who prey on women who don’t care enough about themselves.

Leaning against that windowpane and remembering my time with James, I felt a tiny piñata burst open in my heart.

Zuzanna Szadkowski played Dorota on “Gossip Girl” for six seasons. She will appear this fall in Bedlam Theater’s production of “Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet.”

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

To hear Modern Love: The Podcast, subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music. To read past Modern Love columns, click here. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.