The relationships I count with the women who I call ex-girlfriends, have all made an impact on me. They are women who, for better or worse, I laughed with, cried with, went through some stuff with, and maybe even loved. They were the type to make me change my Relationship status on Facebook, or if we were together when Facebook didn’t exist, I would hold their hand in public, in front of other girls who at some time or another, I wanted to make my ex-girlfriend too. Those women, the ex-girlfriends, are easy to think about, probably because the memories I have of them are rich with experiences. Two people, together like team, going through high points and low, hand-in-hand. Easy stuff to remember. Their stories are neat and some of them are still around, popping up on my caller ID every now and then to check on me and see how I’m doing. So in many ways, the stories are still being told, even if it’s gone from a sweet romance to a coming-of-age tale of guy and girl who once were together and later found they were better as friends.

But what of the women who I don’t call my ex-girlfriends, because, well, we were never in a relationship. The women who I was with for like two weeks (maybe more), but often find occupying the same amount of space in my thoughts as the women with whom I was in a relationship. The one thing I have realized since I started living on my own in the real world, is how relationships are nothing like they show in televisions sitcoms or movies. In my life, relationships have not always been neat or worthy of a status change, but in retrospect, these strange arrangements mattered too.

My last formal relationship with a girl I called my girlfriend, was a little less than two years ago. Since then, I’ve found myself in many relationships just not in a formal sense. There were some more casual than others, and some lasting longer than others, but in retrospect, all matter deeply. Women who I was with for like two weeks or two days, do not get discredited from my memory bank because I was with them for like two weeks or two days. They stay in the picture too, as a matter of fact, they’re the details that help make my picture stand out. These days, I don’t even trip over where a relationship is going, if it’s going anywhere at all. As a matter of fact, I don’t even trip over the word relationship, and anyone who is worrying about where their “thing” is going is worrying about the wrong thing.

What’s really important in a relationship, even if we’re not calling it that, is respect. No amount of time should go by before respect is given. And anyone using the status of their relationship to dictate their behavior is probably doing so because they only know black or white, and have never seen the gray, like some of us have. When I look back on all my relationships, I think I’ve learned as much from the one I didn’t call my girlfriend as the one I did. I may have been with her for like two weeks and I may have never seen her again, but she matters too. She is the details.