In the fall of 2024, I asked the universe for three things: a car, a salaried promotion and a boyfriend. At 28, I was licking my wounds from an excruciating breakup.
I live in Los Angeles, so most of my friends have relationships with “the universe.” I once caught my best friend, Risha, Googling “moth spiritual meaning” after finding an infestation in her closet.
I have never been one to ask anything of the cosmos because speaking my dreams aloud makes them real enough to crush. My preference is to live by the credo: “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”
Less than a month after declaring my desires, my hourly job was dissolved, and I was demoted. This is why I don’t do big asks. Sometimes it feels like the universe is pummeling me into surrender, holding everything I want hostage until I finally read the copy of “When Things Fall Apart” that’s been decorating my bedside table for years.
In my subsequent financial panic, I offered to sublet my apartment to a British man I had matched with on Hinge who mentioned that he was searching for accommodations until his visa expired in a few weeks.
We agreed on a price, exchanged handshake emojis, and I arranged to crash with Risha, who lived in the building next door. Most of my friends said it sounded like a rom-com. One said it sounded like the horror movie “Barbarian.”
The first time I met Murray was a week later when he handed me $800 in cash and moved into my apartment.
Four days after that, we had our first date at a wine bar down the street. When he asked me back to my apartment, I said “I’d love to,” enchanted by the oddity of being invited into my own home. The space had never looked so serene: clean and quiet without the noise of my clutter. Even the right lamps were on.
He invited me into my bed, and when I got up to pee, I relished knowing that the bathroom would have everything I needed.
Murray walked me back to Risha’s and kissed me good night. “If you fancy doing something else this weekend,” he said, “then let’s.”
The next night, he cooked me dinner. And the next, and the next. Pasta, salmon, paella. He kept needing seasoning I didn’t have, so I borrowed spice jars from Risha’s kitchen and walked them to mine.
“Sophia,” she scolded, “if a British man is requesting more flavor, your selection must be really bad.”
Murray and I fell into a routine of food, sex and watching “Love Is Blind,” the building blocks of any burgeoning relationship. Soon, he asked if I wanted to move in with him for rest of his stay. “I’ll probably snore you out and you’ll leave again,” he texted, “but I won’t be asking for a refund.”
He was so straightforward about what he wanted. I moved back in and it continued to feel remarkably easy. A few days before Murray’s departure, he asked if he could fly me out to Europe so we could spend more time together.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Of course.”
Murray left me with a plane ticket to join him after Christmas and a love letter that my friends passed around like a sacred text. I had been dealt an enviable hand, and I felt jovial toward fate. If salary had to take a back seat for a charming British boyfriend to materialize, so be it. The universe works in mysterious ways.
For Christmas, Risha gave me three stones to enrich my travels: carnelian for sexual confidence, garnet for passion and tiger’s-eye to deepen attraction. I placed them in the breast pocket of what I was calling “my Europe coat” for safekeeping.
I arrived in London on December 30. Murray met me outside of the hotel with a hug, whisking away my suitcase and guiding us to our room. Once the door shut, I turned toward him, ready to be ravaged. But Murray had busied himself across the room, placing my bag atop a luggage rack.
“Hungry?” he asked with his back to me.
“Sure,” I said. “What, are you waiting until after dinner to kiss me?”
“Ah,” he said. “I just need some warming up.”
It sounded lighthearted enough.
After dinner, our dynamic wasn’t sparkling, but I chalked it up to jet lag and the inherent strangeness of seeing someone after a sprint of intimacy followed by six weeks apart. We brushed our teeth and climbed into bed. When he made no move other than closing his eyes, I said, “I feel really weird about the fact that we haven’t kissed yet.”
“I know,” he said with a sigh. “I’m just not feeling very amorous.”
Recalling the man who had adored me in LA, I was skeptical. “What would happen if I rolled over and kissed you right now? Would you push me off?”
“No,” he said. “But I’d just be going through the motions, and neither of us wants that. I might feel differently tomorrow. I hope I do.”
The next morning, he went out for coffee, leaving me to shower and dress. I searched my coat pocket for Risha’s crystals, tangible encouragement to hold in my hand. They were gone. My sacred rocks had disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic, and my British man didn’t want to have sex with me. I could feel the universe wagging its finger. Instead of sharing a kiss on New Year’s Eve, Murray and I went to a Bangladeshi restaurant where he watched me cry over naan.
Two days later, we had a heart-to-heart at King’s Cross. “You have to let me in on what’s going on,” I said.
Murray told me everything he had fantasized about when imagining our trip: enjoying each other’s company over cheese boards and movies. Spooning, stroking my hair, reading. “But I wasn’t picturing anything carnal. Not because of you, but because I’ve been feeling rather — numb.”
He knew I had been expecting more and apologized. “I still want to spend time with you,” he said. “You’ve become one of my favorite people. But if you want to go home, I completely understand.”
“No way,” I said. I may have traveled 5,500 miles to be friend-zoned, but I was in Europe after all. Weary as my heart may have been, I refused to cut this trip short because of his ambivalence.
We boarded the train to Paris. Murray continued to pay for everything, and I began to feel like a countess sent abroad to experience arts and culture. Without the deadweight of expectation, my grip loosened enough to let enjoyment slip in.
We started spending days apart. I went to the ballet and bathed at the Grand Mosque hammam. I could practically feel my neck lengthening with sophistication. At night, we would meet at a bar to discuss our days before going back to our Airbnb, assemble a cheese board and watch something from opposite ends of the couch.
As I walked along the Seine one evening, I texted Risha: “I’m wondering if the universe was like, OK she has to learn a lesson but the only way she’ll listen is if we send her to Paris and make everything really nice. Otherwise, she’ll be too mad.”
Risha replied: “What’s the lesson?”
“Something about being alone.”
“Oh god maybe,” she wrote. “Maybe the lesson is that sometimes lessons don’t need to be painful? And you get to be in Paris with a nice, weird man who is also a friend.”
From Paris, Murray and I took the train to Lugano, falling asleep on each other’s shoulders. I got to read “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in Italy, which was as satisfying as any sexual intimacy. And the best days of the trip — shortlisted for the best of my life — were ones I spent alone.
The day I left, Murray escorted me to the airport. On the train, I asked him what the hell had happened in LA. How was that fervor such a fluke?
“It seemed like you really needed caring for,” he said. “And I wanted to do that.”
I had needed caring for. My three wishes had all been for the same thing: security. I had lost faith in my ability to tolerate any more upheaval, especially alone.
“White knuckling” is a term that comes up often in my therapy sessions. I have an urge to pin down my life, believing that if I somehow fix all the variables and freeze myself in time, I will finally be able to relax. Although Murray did not help me pin down my life, he did ease me into a place where I felt far less terrified of being alone.
In the end, Risha was right; lessons don’t need to be painful. They can even be learned in France.
Sophia Ortega is a writer in Los Angeles.
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