“Out with it. What happened with Livi?”
I had the impression that it pained him to have to ask, which made me appreciate him all the more. Barney was not a guy who wanted to talk about feelings.
“It’s not going to work out between us,” I told him.
“What did she say about the guy in the picture?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I haven’t talked to her. We broke up.”
“She broke up with you?” he asked in surprise.
“No, I broke up with her. Seeing those pictures reminded me that we are way too different for us to pursue anything long-term. She’s used to a certain lifestyle, a certain level of… well, everything. People will assume that I’m with her for the wrong reasons, and sooner or later she’ll realize that I’m holding her back. The two of us can never be happy together.”
“Bullshit.”
I looked up at Barney’s forceful expletive.
“That girl loves you, and you love her. Everything else is noise. You’re not the first couple to come from divergent backgrounds, and you won’t be the last. One thing I can tell you from my own marriage is that you’ll get a lot farther looking at the things you have in common instead of the things that make you different.”
My mind flashed over the past few months, all the good times we had, the way Livi had treated me so well, and I felt sick to my stomach. What had I done? I hadn’t even given her a chance to talk about my concerns. I’d shut her out, hurting her before she could hurt me. I was such a jerk.
“Has Livi ever made you feel like she was better than you or you were somehow a problem because you don’t come from a wealthy family?”
“No.”
I’d given her a hard time about being wealthy, but she’d never said a word about me being middle class or having a blue collar job. I was the one with the problem, not her.
“I’ve made a mistake, haven’t I?”
“A big one from the sounds of it,” Barney agreed. “The question is, what are you going to do to fix it?”
“I need ideas.”
Barney stood up and grabbed his lunch. “Let’s join the guys for lunch. You need to eat anyway, and maybe one of them will have a suggestion. It’s been way too long since I was in the dating pool.”
Normally I kept my personal life private but given that the crew had a front row seat for mine and Livi’s budding romance, I swallowed my pride and took Barney’s suggestion to talk to them. I shared how I’d gotten freaked out by the photos of Livi, not because I thought she was cheating on me but because it reinforced that we came from such different backgrounds.
“So I called things off with Livi,” I ended.
“Wait, you broke up with her over text?” Jose said. “Man, that’s harsh. Any relationship over a month you have to dump them in-person, it’s like a rule.”
The rest of the crew nodded in agreement, making me feel even worse about how I’d left things with Livi.
“Yeah, it wasn’t my finest moment,” I said. “But the question is, how do I fix it?”
“You need a grand gesture.”
The guys started brainstorming increasingly elaborate grand gestures.
“You could have a mariachi band play outside her house,” Jose suggested. “Ooh, what if you make a video collage of all the fun times you had together and play it somewhere that she’ll see it.”
The suggestions got more and more outlandish until Barney finally spoke up.
“You know what? This is stupid. You’ve been broken up for what, four days? How about if you just go talk to her like a grown up?”
For some reason that sounded harder than a grand gesture.
Olivia
