▸ Column · Modern X-Men era — present-day urban American setting
SABRETOOTH replies.
Replied to by Sabretooth, with a rebuttal from Wolverine.
The letter
Came across your column because I've been stuck on something I can't seem to say out loud to the one person it actually involves. My girlfriend is full-speed ahead on moving in together — she's got a shared housing board running, pings me listings near her office every few days, and apparently told her family we'd be sharing an address by fall. I'm barely three months clear of breaking a lease during my last breakup, and every time I actually picture it — joint finances, merged closets, someone else's schedule grafted onto mine — my chest locks up. I do love her. I do see a future with her. But every time I try to say not this soon, she goes silent for a day and I end up nodding at listings I have no intention of touring just to get the air back to normal. I know I'm making it worse. How do I tell her I need more time without her hearing it as me calling the whole thing off?
Sabretooth replies
You know what I haven't done in about a hundred and fifty years? Signed a joint lease. Shared a closet. Let someone run my timeline past their mother. Not because I never got close to it — once or twice, close enough to smell the collar — but because I've always had good enough teeth to notice what I was being walked toward.
Here's what your letter actually says, underneath all the 'I love her and I see a future': your body went NO. The chest-tightening isn't a scheduling problem. It's the animal in you reading 'merged finances, shared closet' and saying collar. You turned it into 'I just need twelve more months' because that's the polite version. Softer than admitting what the tightening's actually telling you.
She's not stupid — she can smell something's off, which is why the silence works so well on you. She holds the quiet, you fold, she advances another step toward move-in. But a year isn't going to fix what the tightening's pointing at.
Stop trying to negotiate the timeline. Look at the actual question: do you want the collar or don't you? The Pinterest board's gonna still be a Pinterest board in twelve months. Figure out which answer is really true, then say THAT — not a polite deferral, not a schedule renegotiation, the thing underneath that you've been dressing up as a calendar problem since the first listing hit your screen.
— Sabretooth
Wolverine weighs in
Creed wants you to audit whether you want her at all. That ain't what I'm hearing.
I had a woman once — Mariko. Years of things left unsaid because I kept thinking there was more time. There wasn't. I know what it costs to let someone build their whole future around a version of you that's slightly untrue.
She's not running a play on you. She's trusting you. The nods you gave her are what she's planning around, and the piece she's missing is the actual answer: not yet, but yes. That's different from what Creed's selling, and it matters — because she deserves the true thing so she can make her own call.
Not as a tactic. Because she's owed it.
— Wolverine
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