UVic “Modern Love” Stories, inspired by the New York Times column
Illustration by Sage Blackwell.
Mabel and I always boasted how we met in a baby group, before our brains were solid. There’s a picture to prove it: in a 2000’s carpeted living room, seven babies sit in Halloween onesies. She was a pink piglet; I was a bumblebee.
Fate placed our university dorms side-by-side, causing us to meet again for the first time since infancy. Mabel and I bonded when the toilet overflowed into our rooms. We contacted our residence leader and felt very heroic (the plumbing issue did not improve).
Mabel had a long-distance boyfriend, Jacob, when I met her, and she often needed help escaping spirals of self-doubt he’d send her into. He’d make comparative comments about friends or celebrities, and it would hurt her badly. She used to FaceTime him while studying and Jacob would drift off, his face covered by mounds of blankets. Mabel would run to show me her phone, cackling that he could sleep with flashing rainbow LED lights on in his room. I wished he would talk to her more.
I helped Mabel break up with Jacob in November, sitting in the common room as the dial tone buzzed. She bit her nails. When we heard click and Hello?, she looked at me with blank eyes full of horror. I mouthed prompts to her. The clock ticked boldly. Tissues lay on the floor. It was their last phone call.
After Mabel grieved Jacob, she downloaded Tinder for the first time. She’d been sickeningly jealous when I bravely downloaded the app on my 18th birthday with my heart in my throat (I got about three matches in a week, because there are no lesbians on there.)
Once Mabel had Tinder, she used her swipes in an hour. “Watch me get Tinder gold…” she joked. We had taken to regularly confiscating her phone so she wouldn’t break no-contact with Jacob, but we noticed now that she wanted it back. I convinced her to donate Jacob’s clothes to the thrift, rather than burning them on the beach.
Mabel’s first Tinder date was going to be at the campus gardens during the day, which we deemed safe. Then I found out “Troy” was 27 to her 18. She later told us his first messages included the phrases “baby girl,” “push you on the swing,” and “I want to.”
Mabel was five feet tall. She had long, thick brown hair, and a round face, with full, blushed cheeks. She always wore black leggings or sweatpants, and patterned crop tops with tee sleeves. When she saw you, she would beam with her eyes closed in your direction. She was a classically beautiful girl. He was a man.
The date was delayed, and suddenly it was dark and Mabel hadn’t left yet. Someone wanted me to stop her, but as you can imagine I’d already tried. A few of our friends took on the challenge, knocking on her door and ducking in with a salute, hoping that they would be the ones to say they kept her safe that night.
But she didn’t listen. She went. We were horrified as she left, wearing a flannel and holding her phone with tangled earbuds plugged in. She came back later and said she used us as an excuse to leave early. We were just glad she was alright.
Mabel had more dates set up quickly. This cycle began, and did not end, for years. It sometimes seemed like Mabel didn’t know that she was allowed to say “no” when a man asked her out. She’d have multiple dates in a week, or two in a day. She would come home from coffee and say “blocked” for reasons such as “haircut,” or “catfish.”
When she went on nighttime dates though, she would always have sex. It sometimes seemed like Mabel didn’t know that she was allowed to say “no” when a man asked her to sleep with him, either. Time and time again she reported she’d had the best night of her life — maximum pleasure. Whenever I saw Mabel on campus, I knew she would have a story. She always started it as an adventure, and then left us in horror.
By the end of first year she acquired Chlamydia, a new boyfriend named Eric, and $1 200 of debt in failed courses. We’d already signed a lease on a place with two other roommates for the next school year, so we moved stuff in, and went home for the summer.
In September, my mom helped me move in. I slept alone on my first night because Mabel went to Eric’s. He was somehow a senior in high school despite being on Tinder, so his grandma drove him everywhere in her grey, sliding-door van. Mabel said his family was rich and they were going to give us their old XBOX.
After their eventual breakup, she turned back to dating apps even faster. We had arranged that Friday nights, when the rest of the roommates had class, she was allowed to have Eric over for dinner at ours, but we substituted “Tinder Boys” as a blanket category into this time slot.
What we didn’t know is that it was these very Friday nights that led to her eventual marriage to a Navy man with a tattoo of a gun on his sacred flesh.
“Cowboy Todd” swept in in January of our second year, with almost thirty years under his belt, but no hair to show for it. He always looked brazen and angry. Cowboy Todd was a welder, which meant he spent his time making metal blobs, as well as clunky crafts for Mabel, or getting blackout drunk with Navy men.
I tried to defend Cowboy Todd when they started dating. He drove Mabel in his truck and on his motorcycle, and took her on mini weekend camping trips. People thought they were an odd pair, but I was just glad someone wasn’t yelling at her anymore. That was, until he sat her down one day and said he couldn’t stand a few things: her body type, and her “body count.” He said he usually dates “skinny girls,” and he’s embarrassed because he doesn’t want his friends to know that Mabel slept with other men. After this Friday afternoon conversation, he drove off into the forest and disappeared.
The weekend was full of mourning. Mabel cried in my arms. She told me she felt unworthy, and I said: you remember that feeling for a long time, ok? But it was to no avail. Cowboy Todd came home on Sunday night and picked Mabel up, refusing to even come up the drive.
I sat silently with our roommates in the living room when she arrived back home and said:
“He told me he loved me for the first time.”
I felt a burning fear then, that this moment would come back to bite me. Really, I was preparing for what I would inevitably hear when I picked up the phone at work, the summer before third year:
“…Will you be my maid of honour?!”
Wait, what? I had to say:
“Maybe…” after reading that the country-themed wedding would take place in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, May 2025. Cowboy Todd said it was spontaneous; Mabel was trying rings on, and one got stuck on her finger, so they bought it (and buttered it off). It was too small for their entire engagement.
Ten days before third-year classes started, Mabel dropped the bomb that she paid our landlord to let her exit our lease so she could share an apartment with Todd. Heartbroken, I angrily texted her that I would end our friendship if she went through with it.
She went through with it. She packed up everything she owned, filled holes in the walls, kicked us out of the wedding group chat, and was gone without a trace. Her room echoed loudly.
Mabel eloped with Todd in February. We haven’t talked since. I grew close to one of our mutual friends online because we were both supposed to be in Mabel’s bridal party, but weren’t. She told me she wasn’t surprised it ended up this way, because Mabel always cast her aside for boys in high school. She said the only time they were close was when Mabel was single. I knew exactly how she felt.
That mutual friend told me Mabel doesn’t know why we were mad. I know exactly why I was. I loved Mabel with all of my heart. More than she ever recognized. I really did see her as a great friend. But Mabel wasn’t interested in being cared for or worried about; given advice or tough love by a true friend. She was only interested in finding one kind of love: a man’s. It makes sense that she jumped at the chance to marry at twenty. It was what she always wanted.
I think about Mabel when I smell fresh bread, and pop snowberries on the sidewalk with my shoe. I imagine how mad she would be when I use the pink lamp she forgot at the house. I wonder if she’ll have a baby, and if she’ll actually name that baby girl after Meredith Grey. I desperately hope Todd is treating her alright. I hope she’s alright.
