My boyfriend left for a boys' trip on Thursday afternoon. By 7:14 p.m., I had already replaced our relationship with a subscription service with, frankly, better customer support.
Here is what happened.
I was on the couch in my favorite pajama pants I've owned for so long they've circled all the way back into vintage without ever becoming cute. That's when my Instagram algorithm delivered unto me a woman — sun-kissed, blonde, unbothered — who films herself getting everything delivered. Groceries. Skincare. McDonalds. And then: her latte. Iced vanilla. Delivered. To her door. For a $10 upcharge, on top of the latte, on top of the fee, on top of a tip she added with the casual cruelty of someone who's never spent a Saturday piecing together a grocery list between Aldi and Trader Joe's just to save a few bucks.
I watched this the way you watch a car accident you're personally causing.
I would never, I say to Simon, my tiny dog, who declined to weigh in.
Then my stomach did the thing where it announces itself like it's got news. And I remembered: I don't have a person here to fix that. Because handling my hunger is, unofficially, my boyfriend's job. It's in the marriage-adjacent fine print nobody signs, but everybody honors. I handle the emotional labor of remembering his mother's birthday. He hunts and gathers takeout whenever I say "I'm hungry" in the tone that means we're already behind schedule. It's a system.
Turns out, this system comes with interest. My boyfriend does not run this errand for free. He runs it for a fee, and the fee is paid later, and the fee is not cash, and if you are a woman reading this, you already know what the fee is, and you are already sighing.
So, I started doing the math. Tacos, DoorDash, twenty-seven minutes door to door. Fifteen dollars, tip included. No conversation. No silent fees. No guy standing in my kitchen giving me "the look" like he's owed something because he crossed a parking lot for me. Just a bag, a doorbell chime, and a man named Zane who I will never see again and who will never see me in these pajama pants.
I sat there eating fifteen-dollar tacos, and I thought about the economy. Not in a serious way. In the way where you use "the economy" to justify a decision you've already made. "Inflation is bad", I told myself. Everything's expensive now. But…maybe fifteen-dollar food delivered to your doorstep by a man in a Toyota Corolla isn't insane. Maybe Zane is worth it. Maybe Zane is, in fact, a better boyfriend, because when Zane says he's bringing me tacos, the tacos are the entire transaction and not the opening round of a bilateral trade agreement.
Then I opened the app again — not hungry, just curious and discovered DoorDash does pharmacy runs.
Readers, relationships occasionally pivot in very small moments. My boyfriend, a grown man who has field-dressed a deer, will not walk into a CVS and buy me tampons. He has drawn this line clearly, calmly. And here was an app, willing, for a small fee, to have a total stranger do it without a single comment, without a single "so, uh, what size," without making it uncomfortable for the rest of the evening.
I ordered them. I also ordered a bottle of wine. I also, because I was no longer ordering things I needed but things that supported a narrative, ordered flowers — for myself, sent to myself, with a card.
And as I hit "confirm" on a bouquet of peonies being delivered to my own front door by a man I will tip generously and never make eye contact with, one thought crossed my mind, clear as day:
I wonder if they'll deliver a Dear John.
I searched.
Nope.
Which feels like a missed opportunity for a company already willing to deliver cheese fries and a bottle of Chardonnay.
My boyfriend comes home Sunday. I assume I'll keep him. He knows where the breaker box is, and DoorDash still won't come upstairs when the elevator is broken.
But something has changed between us.
Last night he texted, "Miss you."
Zane texted, "Your order has been picked up and is on the way."
Only one of those relationships includes live tracking.
