Masha and I met at a Russian karaoke bar and went to my place thirty minutes later — a fact I try to omit whenever people ask how we met. I usually say something like, “Oh, we go way back.” And it’s true, though it’s my phone, not me, that goes way back with her.
Three months into our relationship, as I was sorting photos on my phone — read: deleting photos of my exes — I accidentally discovered that I already had a picture of Masha from a decade earlier.
It was a photo that my then-girlfriend, Angelina, must have sent me from their joint graduation. And there, smiling from the corner of the photograph, was Masha — someone I didn’t know at the time, but who knew Angelina, and, by extension, knew of me.
As we made our drunken way towards the cab on Tottenham Court Road, the night we met, I held Masha’s hand and asked her to tell me about herself. She was talking about something, but I wasn’t really paying attention because all I could think about was the terrible mistake I was making.
Here was a woman who had agreed to come home with me thirty minutes after we met. And sure, she did know about my existence, having been Angelina’s classmate and stalking me on Instagram for the past decade, but still.
Wasn’t the whole thing just weird?
Being drunk and horny and lonely, I pointed towards the Toyota Prius with the license plate that showed up in my Uber app. We got inside in the back seat, our eyes half-closed, nodding slightly in that way people do when it’s 2 in the morning and they have at least a bottle of strong liquor inside them.
As the driver put on Jamaican music, drumming the steering wheel to the beat, we drove along the A501 towards Hammersmith — the same Hammersmith where, just a few months earlier, a woman I dared to call my wife had packed her things and left, leaving me with an orange couch infested with bedbugs.
Thinking about all that, I didn’t notice when Masha handed me her phone. I assumed she wanted me to enter my number — but instead of a keypad, there was a black world map, several countries highlighted in yellow.
“This,” she said, “is my map of conquests.”
“What?” I asked, knowing exactly what she meant, but secretly hoping it was something else.
“The map,” she repeated, tapping the screen with her long, skinny fingers, her nails painted the colour of red wine. “Of all the people I… well, I was with.”
I turned away, watching London slip by in the dark, disappointed. I kind of liked this girl, I thought, as we passed Joe and the Juice and stopped at a red light next to Baker Street Tube station. There was something about her. Lightness. Fun. Ease. In the fifty minutes we’d spent together, I felt a strange comfort, like I could just be myself with her.
She didn’t seem particularly wise, no — and the map didn’t help her cause — but she didn’t seem stupid either.
The Uber app said it would take 20 minutes to get to my apartment. I stared at the driver’s balding head and wondered if I should stop the cab and call it a night — say goodbye to this ex-girlfriend’s ex-classmate before it got more, uh, complicated.
But as I listened to Masha talk about the boy from Italy, another from Portugal, a few from the UK, a man from Ecuador who had a small penis, and the first serious boyfriend — from Russia, though abusive and just plain weird — I got hooked.
Some of her choices, sure, seemed poorly thought out.
Then again, I thought, still sitting there, what did that say about me?
Almost 18 months later, Masha and I live together, are engaged, and, as some people say, are very much in love. We’re also, I must say, perfect for each other. Not in that cliché way couples are in the movies, eating one long strand of spaghetti until they kiss in the middle while It Must Have Been Love plays in the background.
But more like two people who simply don’t get on each other’s nerves — or secretly wish to smother each other with a pillow in the middle of the night.
The older I get, the more I realise that might be the real secret to a successful relationship.
This isn’t to say everything is smooth between Masha and me, no. One of our biggest problems comes up in bed.
As we drift off, I usually throw my meaty leg over her slender one, cutting off her blood circulation.
It makes her furious, but I can’t help it — I like sleeping like a fetus with its legs sticking out.
“It’s just,” Masha said to me once, “sometimes I want to take that leg and rip it off your body…”
But then, when I was away for several days, she called me and said, “I miss you. And–God, I can’t believe I am saying this—but I even miss The Leg.”
Love, I guess, is just finding someone whose murder you can indefinitely postpone.
We were at a house party recently when Masha’s friend said, “You two.”
It took me a second to realise she was referring to me and Masha.
“When was your last fight?”
It was that point in the night when questions started getting personal. Masha and I looked at each other and smiled.
“Ah,” Masha said, “Serge just can’t seem to eat an avocado toast without spilling half of it on his shirt!”
Her friend’s face twisted in disappointment, as if she’d been hoping for something juicier — a crack in the facade — and here we were, ruining it for her.
And sure, you might say, it’s only been 18 months — wait a bit, grow up, have children, get married, and then you’ll see… something.
When you’re happy, I’ve noticed, people around you want to convince you otherwise.
But somehow, I’m looking forward to it all — the fights, the making up, the slow, clumsy process of learning more about this weird, easygoing, and much wiser-than-I-thought-at-first person I met by complete — or maybe not — accident, and whom I now can’t imagine my life without.
Sure, our relationship isn’t ideal, and we have our share of “You better think twice about the next thing coming out of your mouth!” moments — but that’s fine. My previous marriage, which lasted two and a half years, taught me that ‘ideal’ is just French for ‘boring and repressed’.
Still, I make an effort. A few weeks before writing this, I quit dropping my leg over Masha at night, much like one quits a bad habit, as I did with sucking fingers at four or smoking a few years back. It was a conscious decision that still requires me to fight a pressing urge that wants to come out, but I know better than to give in.
Before publishing this essay, I, as always, showed Masha my piece and asked her whether she wanted to change anything since it is, after all, about her.
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “But what is it with you and the map obsession?”
But it isn’t the fact that Masha had a significant number of people she “uh, well, was” with before she met me, or even the fact that she agreed to come home with a complete stranger thirty minutes after that bothers me. No.
I’ve been guilty of all of this myself.
It’s just that I realised in that moment, sitting in the back of that Toyota Prius with the driver blasting Jamaican music from the speakers, that as a man in the Western world, I would never get away with owning something like a map of conquests.
And frankly, I am jealous.
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– S