I saved the drunk voice mail from Texas, which he left during a wedding rehearsal dinner.
“I miss you,” he said. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I’m lucky to have you in my life. Thank you. I hope to see you again soon.”
For almost a year, we had been hanging out a couple of times a month. The food and the sex were above average.
Sometimes we shared a few craft beers on his wraparound porch. He told me about his Midwestern childhood, his punk years in college, his first girlfriend’s betrayal, his unfortunate job history, his parents’ acrimonious divorce.
Other times we hiked and talked politics. Or walked city streets, ate in dark restaurants, conversed about books and spent nights in each other’s beds, curled into one another like kittens. In the morning, he made fair trade coffee from continents to which he had traveled and cooked colorful breakfasts for me before I rushed off to work.
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I thought of him as my lover, although he never said he loved me. When I was feeling concerned, I would ask him what we were doing, what he wanted, where this was going. He was uncomfortable with such questions, but if I was direct, he would answer.
No, he wasn’t seeing anyone else. No, he wasn’t having sex with anyone else. No, he didn’t want to.
But he didn’t introduce me to anyone in his life. Even when I asked him to. And he didn’t tell his family about me, although I knew all about them.
When I was cold, he would give me his jacket. When I would step off the curb into the street while there were cars whizzing by, he would reach for my hand and pull me back. Eventually, he reached for my hand in other public spaces, but he never called me his girlfriend. He didn’t like titles. He said I was his “lady friend.” And he called himself my “gentleman friend.” He was younger than me, but this terminology made him seem very old.
I was enjoying my career, good health, long trail runs with my Australian shepherd, a vibrant social life and the quiet time it took to read a book a week. I appreciated that he wasn’t needy, that he didn’t call just to check in. He didn’t send “good morning beautiful” texts when he needed attention or wish me sweet dreams in Bitmojis to see if I was home.
When we texted each other, it was to exchange information about when and where we would meet. When I asked him how he was doing, he answered in one or two words. When we were together, he often told me how much he appreciated my low expectations.
I was just grateful he didn’t pile his problems onto my overworked shoulders.
There were dozens of ways he didn’t remind me of my father, but sometimes his presence provoked memories. When my father taught me to drive a car, he made me demonstrate that I knew how to change a tire and the oil and could name every part of the engine.
“Never count on a man,” he said. “They will always let you down. You can only count on yourself. You need to know your way around an engine.”
I have a small circle of women friends who say “I love you” easily and often, who write me handwritten cards and give me flowers or books on holidays. I wanted these things from my gentleman friend, but I didn’t need them.
I never heard “I love you” from anyone in my family of origin, and I spent years of my adulthood achieving respectable accolades to earn those three words. I wasn’t about to step back onto a hamster wheel in order to coax verbal affirmations from a lover.
Growing up in an isolated religious camp on a California mountainside, I was too young to understand the neglect my siblings and I endured, the times we were left to fend for ourselves, rummaging through the bins of government-subsidized surplus food donations or begging near-strangers for a place to stay.
We all grow up to realize our parents can’t protect us, no matter how much we want or need them to. It’s just that some of us learn this before we learn to depend on anyone. When self-reliance is forced upon you as a child, it can make it hard, as an adult, to be any other way.
One evening, while my gentleman friend and I waited for our meals on a restaurant patio, he said, “I have a confession.”
I loved his passion for food, the way he cared where it had been grown, cared about the colors and textures and nutrients. It was a sensual pleasure to watch him cook. And it was a delight not to look at a menu. Asking him to order for us in restaurants was an extension of that. Dining with him, I felt taken care of.
He looked nervous, but serious. He took my hand and said, “I got food poisoning here a couple years ago.”
I laughed.
“It’s not funny,” he said. “I got really sick.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just an odd thing to tell me after you’ve ordered. Did you just remember? Do you want to leave?”
“I can’t tell when you’re joking,” he said.
Men often can’t tell the difference between my smiles of pleasure and self-defense, which is why the latter is effectively protective. I apologized again.
“But it was meat that did it,” he said. “I ordered vegetarian tonight, so we’ll be fine. I just thought you should know.”
“Thank you,” I said, although I didn’t know what I was thanking him for.
My mother is a self-educated botanist. When we were a young family on that mountainside, we foraged for elderberries and nettles, yucca and acorns. We dried and boiled and baked the plants that would sustain us.
Of all the things in my childhood that could be called deprivation, this is not on the list. The mountain was rife with life. Our parents were often away for long periods of time, and they never used the word love, but the mountain was fruitful and abiding. I knew how to survive on what I found there.
After my gentleman friend and I ate and didn’t get food poisoning, we went back to his house. He brought out two cups of water and told me he had decided to give up drinking. I hadn’t seen evidence he drank very often or very much, so I asked him why.
“I think it’s healthier.”
He was training for his third marathon.
“Makes sense,” I said. “I don’t need to drink when we’re together, if that makes it easier on you.”
“O.K.,” he said. “Whatever you want.”
I wasn’t used to thinking about what I wanted, and I didn’t know how to ask, but after that I stopped bringing over beer and our evenings on his wraparound porch ended.
For my birthday, he gave me a water bottle.
A few weeks after he stopped drinking, he showed up at my house with vegan food and locally sourced dark chocolate.
I told him I loved him. He was quiet for a long time. I watched his face for clues. He didn’t smile or grimace. He was just still.
“I just thought you should know,” I said.
He didn’t say thank you.
“Want to take a walk?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, so we did.
On the walk, he told me long stories about cases at his office and the hierarchies and politics of their power structures. When we got back to my place, he looked through my books. “You have a lot of women on your shelves,” he said.
“Not more than I have men,” I said. “You just notice it because there are no women on your shelves.”
He was quiet for several minutes, which would have been interminable, but I was on the couch and had already begun reading, waiting for him to finish rifling through my books. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ve never thought about it, but I have no books by women.”
“I know,” I said. “I looked.”
He left me a few text messages after that, saying he was thinking of me. Sometimes he included the heart emoji. Sometimes I texted the heart emoji back. I didn’t ask to see him and he didn’t ask to see me.
I have returned again and again to the mountain of my youth, each time telling myself it’s the last time. I could spend the rest of my life going back to it and never really get there. But I don’t return to him.
The drunk voice message from Texas, which he left me just a couple of months before we stopped seeing each other, was the closest he ever got to saying, “I love you.”
For some of us — however self-reliant we may be — that’s not enough.
Michelle Dowd lives in Southern California, where she teaches writing.
Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.
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