Ah yes, the Great Sourdough Revolution of 2020 when we all decided to place containers of bacteria on our kitchen counters for a month.
“Okay, I’ll take a few things,” he says, probably sensing that it’s the path of least resistance.
Mom beams at Nick’s surrender, like he’s the good-natured son she never had.
8
It’s rare that I havea night alone in the condo. My mom and Perry have tickets to see Iron and Wine. Instead of going out and being social, I elect to stay in and beantisocial by inviting Romily over. Usually we share a bottle of wine, scroll our phones, and at some point I end up asking her opinion about my relationship with Hal even though I know exactly what she thinks about it. She’s not the sort of person who treads lightly.
I answer the door holding the bag of garbage I’m about to haul to the trash chute. Romily has a leather backpack slung over her shoulder. She cradles her MacBook in her other arm.
“You brought your laptop,” I say.
She eyes the garbage bag at my side. “Was I supposed to bring a bag of trash?”
“Actually, you were supposed to bring wine.”
“I didn’t have time to stop at the store. I’m going to a PowerPoint party after this.” Romily drops her bag on the armchair. “Want to come?”
“Do Ieverwant to attend one of those events?” I ask her. “Nothing sayspartyquite like ten minutes of tier ranking Disney Channel original movies.”
“High School Musical 2is S-tier.”
“I thought we were going to have a do-nothing kind of night,” I whine. Houdini wanders over to sniff Romily’s legs.
“Sit down,” she says, connecting her computer to my mom’s living room TV. “I want to do a dry run. Give me five minutes to rehearse this and I’ll take your trash out myself.”
On some level, there’s nothing I want more than to dive down some obscure rabbit hole in front of a captive audience. The truth is, I’m afraid I’d like it too much. It might remind me of how I’m not in school. She’s been participating in these gatherings since the pandemic. I envy the way she’s found a hobby that allows her to nerd out on data analytics while being social.
Romily’s favorite form of communication is presentation decks. I’ve learned more about her interests, her experiences, and even her personal life from PowerPoint, as opposed to organic conversations. The formality of giving an official speech with visual aids seems to offset her reticence to share. With every slide deck, her presentations get more polished, more thoroughly researched. She even started taking data analytics classes through Cleveland State after watching someone’s PowerPoint about her job in business intelligence.
I prop up the trash bag by the front door and plop myself down onto the couch.
On screen is a slide titled: “Transitioning a Nonexclusive Sexual Relationship: A Guide to Uncertainty Reduction.”
“We all know the process of evolving a friends with benefits,situationship, or even flirtationship to a committed romantic relationship is fraught with impediments,” she says. “Today I will cover new typologies that describe the wide variety of ongoing sexual relationships in which there is no expectation of romantic feeling or exclusive commitment.” She pauses. “That’s right. All happy committed relationships are alike; each unhappy situationship is unhappy in its own way.”
“Hold on.” I put my hand up. “You identify as aromantic and ace”—I know this because of a previous PowerPoint—“butthisis the topic you picked?”
“The theme of the party is Summer Lovin’,” she says. “And not engaging in it personally makes me well suited to provide an unbiased analysis.”
I’m tempted to challenge her assertion. Romily tends to substitute data analysis for empathy, which is probably why we rarely have real conversations. But I tuck my legs up under me and settlein.
“It might surprise you to learn that only fifteen percent of all friends with benefits successfully transition to romantic relationships.” She advances to a slide highlighting a 15 percent sliver of a pie chart. “And only one half of those were intentional.” The pie slice gets brutally slashed in half.
“For the record, that doesn’t surprise me,” I say.
“Understanding the behaviors and strategies that correlate to your desired romantic outcome will improve the likelihood of happily ever after. Conversely, this presentation may help you come to terms with the more statistically probable scenario”—she advances to a slide with a stock image of a woman with her head in her hands—“failure.”
“Jesus, Romily. This is for a party?”
She continues, undeterred. “A recent study of emerging adults identified several new categorizations of friends withbenefits, or FWB relationships, including real friends, serial hookups, ex sex, and mutual sexual fail-safe.”
The next slide helpfully lists out these terms.
“I’m sorry, ‘mutually sexual’ what?”
“We can plot these FWB types along the x-axis of emotional intimacy and the y-axis of romantic desire.” She pulls up a four-quadrant diagram.
