In 1998, Ms. Lauryn Hill introduced a word to my vocabulary: reciprocity. I knew what the root word, reciprocal, meant. It was one of my SAT words. I never used it, though. Reciprocity, however, was illuminated in the stunning video for “Ex-Factor.” Ms. Hill languished in sunshine and off white, then glowed and vibrated in blue lights, seeking answers she already knew. I was in love with the look, but had no clue what she meant by those lyrics. I had no understanding of reciprocal relationships of any kind.
It’s taken me all these years to even begin to get it. She was singing about codependency and what happens when you’re waiting for someone’s awakening to your needs. She was singing about the corners into which we paint ourselves by trying to be everything but vulnerable and honest. “How can I explain myself?” is the quandary of a self-breaking heart. Who or what taught me to be that way? Of course, I’ve managed to answer that question a thousand times over the last decade or so. I’ve been in therapy for most of this time; the answer changes daily. When I first thought about it, I pointed to never receiving relationship guidance from adult caregivers. Later, I explored the lack of realistic relationship examples in the media I consumed as a youth. The white people were white, and therefore alien to me. The Black people were heterosexual/ light skinned/ skinny, and the queer people … were Ellen DeGeneres on her sitcom. Or, the further unrealistic caricatures of David Alan Grier and Damon Wayans as “Men on Film.” I had nothing to go on. I rarely saw any one part of myself anywhere, except in the mirror. I was the girl with the bad skin and the lisp, the girl whose hair didn’t take to a perm too well, the corny bookworm. I felt like I fit exactly nowhere. Not even in my house, with my family. So, I learned to compartmentalize. I was safe to be Black at my high school lunch table, safe to be a smarty pants in my English and Spanish classes, though never safe to be queer anywhere that wasn’t my imagination. My development was piecemeal for a long time, because I never had a place to be most or all of me.
This survival strategy convinced me that I would never be safe in one place, as one self, with anyone. Full acceptance from others was an imaginary friend I courted as I daydreamed myself into Brooklyn bohemian chic, a mishmash of Ghostwriter, Living Single, and New York Undercover. In short, I moved through friendships and acquaintanceships in an endless effort to please people with who I thought they wanted me to be. This maladaptive behavior followed me into my young adulthood, and was most apparent in my dating and romantic life.
I dated someone I knew I didn’t want. I squeezed myself into the role of upgrader, caregiver, den mother, and Most Likely to Have Money. It didn’t last more than a year, culminating in my abandoning him when he was too injured to walk, and him getting some white girl pregnant. Siri, play the sad trombone from The Price is Right. When we had our official breakup argument, I listed all my labor on his behalf. Of course, he responded, “I never said I wanted that. I never told you to do that.” We both cried and yelled. We had some really awkward farewell sex. I never saw him again after that. He never asked me for those things, but he never saId no, either. I decided that I needed to find someone grateful for the kind of girlfriend I fancied myself to be. I never found that person, no matter who I ended up with, drifted into, begged, chased, or allowed to swallow me with their emergent needs.
I had unaddressed needs of my own. I wasn’t always comfortable naming them; neither were the people I chose, really. Each of us, in our own ways, acted out abandonment and neglect. The mirroring was painful, familiar, and unsurprising. We were ashamed to need, to be anything other than the representatives we’d tried to portray for months on end. We recreated old wounds and developed new ones. We cycled in and out of “doing better,” but were running on fumes. We were hungry ghosts inside, never satisfied, always grasping for more of what we thought would help. The lack of satisfaction fueled resentments and mistrust, reinforcing the negative feedback loop that got us into those positions to begin with.
This is a very, very truncated version of events. I’m speaking in generalities to illustrate a point about patterns of codependency. Namely, the non-reciprocal relationship form that Ms. Hill sang about in “Ex-Factor.” Your fear of abandonment confirms what you think about yourself, so you create an emergency to keep them close. If you’re used to pretending that you’re always so together, that kind of dysfunction will have you lying to any and everyone and praying nobody figures it out. Your other becomes your partner in inauthenticity. This binds you by shame.
“How can I explain myself?” is the quandary of a self-breaking heart: you can’t explain yourself if you don’t face yourself, so you can nurture yourself, and be honest and vulnerable with yourself. There’s no room for that in a non-reciprocal relationship. Any non-reciprocal relationship, whether it’s romantic or not, runs on dissatisfied and unfulfilled people trying to have other dissatisfied and unfulfilled people replace what’s missing.
I hope my teenage self is listening. It’s taken us some time to get here.