When I was 24 and about to make a hasty and outwardly inexplicable exit from Dublin to London, my father sat me down. My father is a gentle and wise person whose pleasantness sometimes masks the shrewdness with which he perceives the world and people around him. We were discussing practicalities, of which there were essentially none. There were no practicalities in place, no structure or consistency to my actions; I had no job to go to, no money to tide me over while I looked for one, no place to live beyond a few weeks here and there, and knew few enough people to count on one hand.
“Now,” he began, speaking of my formless plans, my insistence that the move must happen now despite the lack of any apparent urgency, “This is all fine, you can figure out the logistics. But what would be truly disastrous is if you were moving there to be with that fellow.” He was referring to the person I had fallen in love with a few months earlier, the person I left my live-in, long-term boyfriend for and whose anxious ambivalence about my adoration was probably clearly visible to my father on the one occasion they had met.
“Of course not,” I said to my dad, as though outraged by the very idea, “I would never move for him,” as I prepared to do very much exactly that. I don’t think I was lying exactly. I think my pride, limited as it may have been in useful ways such as deciding against blowing up my entire life to be with a man who happily admitted he didn’t want to be with me, wouldn’t quite allow for me to admit the reality even to myself. There was also the matter of not wanting to frighten him off any further—he had repeatedly encouraged me to move to London but in an abstract, impersonal way, not in order to be with him. He barely lived anywhere, in any case, moving around depending on artist residencies and gigs. To have openly said I was moving for love would have sounded deranged to myself, to him, and to my concerned friends and family who had to watch me tip all my belongings into taped up bin bags with the fervent mania of a newly converted religious zealot.
Moving for love had to involve some of this determined mania for me because if I stopped and considered it deeply I would have been humbled into inaction, and part of why I was able to take such a foolish decision was that I was so sick of the deadening inertia which had characterized my life before. I was afraid to take any option, refusing the possibility of responsibility which accompanies any decisive action. My terror of failure was so intense and bodily that I would occasionally feel my throat literally constrict when called upon to contribute to a decision at work, or when my then boyfriend would ask what we should do for dinner. “I don’t know,” I said a thousand times a day, which again was not a lie as such: My disgust at my own inclinations and their implied ability to render me unlovable was so complete that for long stretches I no longer even experienced preferences or original thoughts. This was partly why I made my move, even though some part of me knew it was stupid and bound to fail. I had found something I cared urgently enough about to splinter all the frozen land which had constituted my body and heart for years, and perhaps I sensed that if I didn’t capitalize on its propulsion I may never move again, in any direction.
There’s something I associate with gaining autonomy at certain parts of a woman’s life. I think of it as having to consciously latch on to all the glassy and barbed parts of the wall before you can hoist yourself over it in the pursuit of freedom. It’s a little like how an adolescent girl may feel the thrill of superiority and adulthood when she begins to restrict her eating, how that bid for self-definition can feel so lofty before the way it instead minimizes one’s self becomes clear. I had experience with that poisoned chalice, and another when I began to have sex with men who I didn’t like and who didn’t like me. I was seeing how far I could push it, I was saying to the world and to myself that I owned my body and could do what I liked with it, even regrettable and ugly things. My determination to move for this cursed love was another frontier in this lineage. I was trying to convince myself that I was a sentient person who could take big bold actions, even if my big bold actions had to in the first instance be caused by loving a man.
Maybe this is why, nine years later, I bristle when people ask if I am moving to New York for love. I began to tentatively make plans to leave London for New York four years ago, spending increasingly substantial chunks of time in the city. It was ostensibly for work but also just to try it on, see if I could feel like myself when I walked its streets. It was the opposite of the way in which I moved to London. London was a place I had only ever visited for a weekend here and there before I relocated and was plunged, reeling, into its vastness. New York I got to know in increments over a longer time, living in neighborhoods all over the city for months at a time, so that I already had preferences, cherished restaurants and bars, places I liked to work from, a whole thriving cast of friends and confidantes. This slow-burn move signified to me some pivotal departure from the person I had been in 2014, because I was doing it on my own and to build a world which didn’t require another person to legitimize it.
Then, naturally, I fell in love last summer. We went all in immediately, spending all our available time together until he went on a trip to Europe which he deferred after our third date, and again after our fifth which was perhaps the most flattering opening gambit I had experienced. We dated long distance all autumn and winter, knowing I intended to move in January. Both of us were fortunate enough to have movable work practices which could be transplanted to where the other was, and he joined me in Spain for my friend’s wedding and then in Mexico for a book fair. He was in London with me when my mother became sick and flew back to Ireland to help me get through the worst of that shock.
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