That online conversation was our last. Once he signed off, he was gone for good. At that moment, those children we had planned died, or were never born, or could have been born if things had gone differently. It was like when we planned our breakfast nook, and we agreed we both hated crosswords and wouldn’t be doing them on Sunday mornings. We wouldn’t be doing this and we wouldn’t be doing that.

Now, I felt I had to go through our past plans about our future and undo it all.

I thought: we’ll never have a big wedding. We won’t have a small one. Our wedding won’t be medium-size. We’ll never know if our children might have been smart or worn glasses or had vocabulary words printed on index cards. We won’t be having any boys. No girls, no boys. We won’t call them anything. We’ll never argue about what to call them. I’ll never be unhappy with one of the names, and I’ll never tell him I wished our daughter were named something else. I’ll never pretend to like a name just because he liked it. No, we’ll never have that fight.

For that, at least, I am glad.

We’ll never say we love each other, and that this time we mean it like we haven’t meant it before and like we’ll never say it again to anyone else. No. We’ll never do that.

I hadn’t read a Modern Love column in a long time before coming across this installment today. Not that I have wedding fever or anything, but a lot of this hit home for me.

In varying degrees since the time I was 16 and first started secretly dating because my parents didn’t allow me to, I have had boys and men and men who are basically boys dream up intertwined futures with me only to suddenly disappear. Of course, telling someone out loud that you want to [insert future plan or goal here] with them one day doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind. It just sucks quite a lot when one of you does and the other gets left in the dust.

Hell, I just did that to someone else in February…except we never talked too far into the future, and that’s actually kind of weird when you’ve been together that long. Looking back, the fact that both of us avoided ever broaching the topic of marriage or children unless pressed by others was probably not a good sign. However, I at least know that I never promised anything I wasn’t planning to deliver on.

I also think that a lot of things get said and shared when you’re having hours long, middle of the night conversations on the Internet. Real things, true things, secret things, sad things, and tragic things as well as positive and hopeful things for the life you want for yourself. As someone who tends to overshare online (I mean, have you seen the “personal” tag on my tumblr?!) and offline (just ask my grad school and/or bartender friends), I’m trying to learn not to give up so much of myself to someone so easily. I prefer to say what I mean, and I really, truly do mean what I say almost all of the time. However, I don’t think that’s the case for most people. Especially most people of the straight male variety to be totally sexist about it.

I know that I can take things literally, and I definitely take things personally way too often. But I just wish that dudes would stop to think about whether [insert future plan or goal here] is really a shared experience they would one day like to have with the woman they’re telling it to, or if the words are just coming out of their mouths (or fingers in the case of texting/chatting/emailing) because they want to get laid so badly that they will say whatever it is that will help make that happen. How can you not take it personally and not be completely crushed when someone envisions an imaginary future with you and then decides to remove themselves from it?

This is rambly, so I’ll quit…but I hear you, Elissa Bassist, and I just googled you so I could follow you on Tumblr!