A fictionalized column about insecurity after getting back together.
After a break, Emma and I were trying again. This should have involved discussing what had changed and what we wanted. Instead, I found a box of Magnum condoms in her bedside table and briefly became a specialist in packaging analysis.
“I hadn’t bought condoms in ages,” she said. “I picked those.”
I considered the explanation. Then I considered several far more elaborate explanations, each involving an imaginary rival and an increasingly poor opinion of my own powers of deduction.
A brand name could not tell me whose body the condoms had been intended for. Nor could it establish whether any agreement between us had been broken. We had been apart; what that separation meant was something we needed to discuss, not infer from cardboard.
The awkward truth was that I wanted reassurance about restarting the relationship. A packet in a drawer had become a convenient place to put that anxiety because it seemed easier to investigate an object than admit a feeling.
So I asked the question I should have asked earlier: what were we agreeing to now, and was there anything about the time apart we needed to discuss for our decisions and sexual health?
It was not as entertaining as my private detective work. It was more useful.
The box remained a box. I remained capable of overthinking it. Getting back together did not instantly cure that habit, but at least I had stopped asking the packaging to answer on Emma’s behalf.
