The relationship Nadia was in — if it could be called that, which she spent considerable time debating — had no name she could use in ordinary conversation. She had tried several. Seeing each other was too casual for the depth of her involvement. Together was a word Marcus had never used. Partners was something she had floated once, early on, and he had smiled the way people smile when they are deciding not to respond to what was actually said.
She had been in this situation for three years. In that time they had spent a great deal of time together, slept together consistently, met each other’s close friends. They had not, in three years, had what she would call a defining conversation. Every time she had tried to begin one, something had happened: a distraction he had pursued, a response that answered a slightly different question than the one she’d asked, an acknowledgement that had been warm and sincere and had ultimately said nothing at all.
She had begun to understand, in the third year, that this was not an accident.
She had a friend named Clare, who was blunt in the way that people who love you are sometimes blunt, which is to say she delivered observations that Nadia would have preferred not to hear in a tone that made it clear they were being offered as gifts rather than weapons. Clare said, in the spring of the second year: “He’s keeping you in a position where you can’t leave and you can’t stay. You’re in a waiting room.”
Nadia had objected to this. The relationship was good, she said, when it was good. There was genuine warmth. There was history. There were things between them that she did not have with anyone else. All of this was true.
Clare said: “I know. That’s how a waiting room works. It has to be comfortable enough that you don’t leave.”
The mechanism, which Nadia studied later with the focused attention of someone who needed to understand how they had been deceived, had a name in behavioural psychology: intermittent reinforcement. It was the same principle that made gambling addictive — the unpredictability of the reward created a more powerful conditioning effect than consistent reward would have. Pigeons trained on intermittent reinforcement schedules would continue pressing levers long after the reward had stopped entirely. The uncertainty was not a flaw in the system. It was the system.
Marcus had been, without any evidence that he had done this consciously, an expert practitioner. There were weeks of closeness and weeks of distance with no discernible external cause. There were moments of unusual warmth — a weekend away, a letter he had once written, the way he sometimes looked at her across a table — that arrived unpredictably and created a ratio of hope that she found herself recalibrating everything else around. She had not noticed, while inside it, that the unpredictability had a structure. She had experienced it as mystery. She had experienced it as depth.
She had experienced it, to be entirely precise, as evidence that the warm weeks were the real Marcus and the distant weeks were a problem she could solve if she understood him well enough.
She did not blame him, exactly, which was one of the things that made it harder. To blame someone requires a theory of intent, and she could not be certain whether Marcus had designed what he had built or simply occupied it. He was not cruel. He was not cold. He was, so far as she could tell, genuinely fond of her in a way that did not include any impulse toward resolution. He wanted her in his life. He wanted her on the terms available in a waiting room: present, hopeful, not quite there.
What she had to confront, in the third year, was not whether he had done this to her but whether she had allowed it. The answer was that she had, and the reasons were her own — a history of relationships in which departure had felt dangerous, a tolerance for uncertainty that she had mistaken for flexibility, a tendency to interpret incomplete information as the fault of her own analysis rather than as a characteristic of the person providing it. She had been a very good waiting room inhabitant. She had been patient and understanding and she had asked very few direct questions, and each of these qualities had served Marcus’s preferences rather than her own.
The conversation she eventually had was not the defining conversation she had imagined having for three years. She did not ask Marcus to name what they were. She did not offer an ultimatum. She told him, calmly and in specific terms, what she needed from a relationship she was going to stay in, and she said that she had not had those things in three years and that she was not prepared to continue without them. She said it like a statement of fact rather than a question or a demand, which was something Clare had coached her on: Don’t ask him to decide. Tell him what you’ve decided.
He said: “I don’t want to lose you.”
She said: “I know. But what you want doesn’t answer what I asked.”
He did not have an answer. She had suspected he would not. The waiting room had never been a temporary arrangement for him — it was the arrangement.
She left in April, which meant leaving a great deal: the warmth that had been real, the history that had been real, the specific form of his company that she had loved and would miss and did not pretend was insignificant. None of these things were false. The waiting room had not been a fiction. It had been a very comfortable room in which she had spent three years waiting for a door that was not there.
She told Clare, some weeks later, that she kept thinking about the pigeons. About the lever-pressing that continued after the reward stopped. Clare asked her what she was going to do with that image.
“Remember it,” Nadia said. “Next time I find myself pressing a lever and getting nothing, I want to ask what kind of schedule I’m on before I decide it’s worth continuing.”
Clare said that seemed like a good thing to remember.
Nadia agreed. She also thought: the difficulty is that intermittent reinforcement only looks like intermittent reinforcement from the outside, or from the end. While you’re inside it, it looks like hope. It looks like a relationship that is about to become what you need it to be. It looks like a door that is, at any moment, about to open.
She was trying, now, to become someone who could tell the difference. She was not certain she was there yet. But she was no longer waiting to find out.