The Clean Exit

There are nights when the accumulated familiarity of a long relationship is exactly what you don’t want. Not because anything is wrong—because knowing everything, having memorized the complete geography of someone’s body and preferences and limits, can start to feel like a territory with no surprises left in it. All that accumulated knowledge is a luxury until suddenly it isn’t.

Some nights you want the woman from the bar whose name you didn’t catch, or the neighbor you’ve been making loaded eye contact with for three months, or the couple at the corner table who’ve been looking over all evening in a way that is not ambiguous. No backstory required. You don’t need to know her coffee order or what she thinks about anything—you want her in your bed, specifically, tonight, and you want it to be exactly as good as it looks like it might be from across the room. Nothing that requires a conversation the morning after. Desire doesn’t need a narrative to be real.

The morning walk is its own pleasure. Shirt slightly wrong, someone else’s shampoo still in your hair, a body that feels like it was put to proper use the night before. The received narrative says men come out of these nights feeling triumphant. Mostly I just feel quiet—not disappointed, just quiet. Something specific happened and it happened and that’s the whole story. You move a little faster than usual for no particular reason and the city looks slightly different.

What I’ve never understood is the social energy that still goes into policing all of this—the implicit questions about whether it was right, what it says about you, whether wanting it makes you something. In Australia, apparently, they’ve found a more efficient approach: color-coded shag bands that signal plainly what you’re looking for. Cuddling, sex, or the full program. Misunderstandings are structurally impossible. I find this genuinely sensible. We’ve been overcomplicating it.