Bad Romance

“The way Tod spoke of their relationship to his friends didn’t always seem entirely accurate to Jill. Tod was ambitious, of course, and perhaps this accounted for his tendency of wildly exaggerating how often they saw each other, or his descriptions of what they did when they were together. “We have this thing we do call Sunday Drives,” she heard him tell his friends. “On Sunday afternoons, we pick a random place on the map that’s about two hours away, a place neither of us have ever been. And then we just drive there and talk about our week—what we’ve been thinking about, what we’ve been listening to, what our hopes and fears are. We really just connect. When we get wherever we’re going, we pick some small café and just drink a cup of coffee and connect. No phones, no distractions. We both really enjoy it.” And he wasn’t exactly lying. At the time Tod said this, they had done exactly what he said in exactly the way he later described it to his friends. What’s more, it had been his idea, he had laid out exactly what he wanted to happen, Jill thought it sounded quite romantic, and in the end, it was. But the following Sunday, he went to the movies with his friends, and the Sunday after that he had been out of town, as was the case the Sunday after that. Many weeks later, Jill reminded Tod of the Sunday Drive they’d gone on and he said he was busy but encouraged her to make a Sunday Drive on her own and to tell him how it went when she got back. “You can do it the same way we always do it,” he said, “just by yourself. That way, you can listen to the music you like.” She had taken his advice and had a fine time after she quit feeling sorry for herself, though Tod never asked how it went and she never felt much compulsion to tell him. After that, she never brought up Sunday Drives again. Months later, when Tod told his friends about their Sunday Drives, Jill was surprised he even remembered. “They’re great. They’re such an important part of our relationship,” he told his friends.”

-from Bad Romance: On Changing Your Mind, my latest for CiRCE