Crazy little thing called love

I’m in the midst of reading Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love and just finished reading Love: A polemic. Reading each one has, in its own way, made me question the entire “culture of love” that exists. While reading, especially de Botton, I kept laughing out loud. And I was laughing out loud because the stories/anecdotes resonated with me. How there are predictable stages to things, how chimerical the object of one’s affection becomes, how (borrowing from de Botton’s words) we are all predisposed to love so that it comes as no surprise when we eventually discover an object for our desires.

I am cynic. And perhaps, as de Botton suggests, we tend to fall the hardest. Why? Because we want to suspend the disbelief, even momentarily. We want to put down the heavy burden of seeing through people and discovering the not-so-nice truths about them. That for brief spans, we are all willing to be blinded by love. Cynics the most of all.

I laugh because it’s true and I know it.

In my bedroom, appropriately enough under my bed, I keep a box with various scraps of mementos. High school yearbook, college diploma, my old baby book, cards from friends, photographs, trinkets, baubles, other things too precious to see or to use for fear of losing them. Occasionally, I sift through it and force myself to throw things out. I call it the purge session and it always makes me feel better.

On a recent go-through, I realized that I have at least one hand-written note from every significant lover or love I’ve ever had and the one thing that strikes me is that the word “love” is a very tricky thing. There it sits, neatly or haphazardly scrawled across the bottom of cards and notes, in some cases a full ten years after it was written. If something is true when written, and then fades like the ink it was written in, is it any less true ten years on? Somehow, does the word lose its meaning when we stop caring about those who wrote it and vice versa? Or, as Proust might suggest, do all of us still contain a version of the person still in love with a long-gone love of old? If a time/space continuum opened up right now and transported me back, I’m fairly certain that I would come face to face with my old self still madly in love with my first real boyfriend. Here’s my question, then – would the now version of me see all the flaws?

Would I scoff at myself? Try to tell myself how insane I was acting? How it was all going to end badly?

The truth of it is, and I’ve always known this about myself, I’m still half-in-love with all of those lovely boys and men I’ve ever loved. Partially because each one of them had something untouchable that made them unique and I got to know it and those things do not change over time. Partially, however, because I am still in love with the concept of love.

And aren’t we all?

Even in the midst of this breakdown of my marriage, with divorce getting closer on the horizon each passing day, I still have some sort of suicidal hope that I can find a meaningful connection. Why? I guess because I have come close before, which gives me hope that life is a neverending opportunity to get to know other human beings and just possibly find one that might love you back. In the meantime, I carry on.

But the raw truth is this: that a part of me has known that love is a mirage my entire life.

A part of me is like Estella in Dickens’ Great Expectations. For all the affection I have doled out, I don’t know if I’ve ever really been in love with someone before. I’ve come close, but I’ve never trusted anyone enough to let them hurt me. And I mean really hurt me. I’ve always been able to walk away, like Elizabeth Bishop (the poet) tells us – losing isn’t that hard an art to master.

And now?

I’m reading and writing poetry again. So what does that tell you?

On Divorce

Ugh. Such an ugly word. Partially because when you get married you have “happily ever after” ringing in your ears and you’re certain that you couldn’t possibly end up on the wrong side of the 50% bracket. Divorce is for other people. Silly people. People who just don’t have it together like you do, right?

Wrong.

Now I get it. There is just absolutely, 100%, no way to tell what it’s like to be married before you are married. And, like it or not, people DO change. In fact, change is the name of the game, isn’t it? If not, we’d all still be living in our parents’ house, eating bags of Doritoes while watching MTV, and stuck in some horrendous math class.

Instead, we’ve all graduated, have jobs, careers, wives, husbands, kids, dogs, cats, cars, houses, aging parents – in other words – RESPONSIBILITIES. Another ugly word at least a full half of us wasn’t prepared for. It’s quite a shock to wake up one day and realize that you are in your 30s and supposedly a “nearing middle aged” ADULT. Yikes. Doesn’t sound too pretty, does it? Not to me, anyway.

How does it all go haywire anyway? And I don’t necessarily just mean the marriages. When did life stop being an fun adventure on the roller coaster and start being more like a ride through a haunted house? When did I round that imperceptible corner into the “downhill” phase of my life? I still feel really young and like I have everything ahead of me. So why is it that the prospect of being a divorcee at 34 makes me shake in my birkenstocks? Why do I suddenly feel as though my future is dwindling?

Does everyone go through this? Is it forced on us by the media? How do we get the images of what we were supposed to be like at this age out of our heads?

Here in Asia, divorce is just starting to take hold. People would still rather eke it out with someone they don’t particularly like just to have some “security.” Which means money, if you’re a woman, and a nurse for your old age, if you’re a man. It’s strange how all the illusions of romantic love really haven’t gotten their hooks into the culture here yet. When you talk to people about relationships, they stare at you with that “have you gone mental?” look on their faces. It just isn’t an issue here – at least not in the same Jerry Springer type of way it is in the US. People might hate the way their spouse breathes and secretly hope they fall down a flight of steps, but you’d never hear about it. Oh, they constantly joke about bickering with their wives/husbands, but that is the RULE, not the exception. You’re not supposed to love your mate in a Hollywood way. That’s our own particular brand of nonsense and they’re not buying into it.

As much as I have tried to make this marriage a success, it just isn’t. That’s the bald-face truth of it. Yesterday we got into it because I corrected his usage of “jaded” – which he took to mean tired and I explained was more like “wisened with bad experiences.” Par example, I am now JADED when it comes to marriage and love. Instead of saying that he was annoyed by me making fun of him a little, he pushed my buttons. Instead of just taking that in stride, I let him and started a bigger argument. End result? He was yelling in the middle of the street and left me with two 20-pound bags of cat litter to carry home. In the end, maybe because I was crying, he caught up with me and helped me home. Then I had to admit what I’ve known all along – this just isn’t WORKING.

So, that’s it, I guess. Somehow we’re going to try to live with each other for another year so that I can finish my Chinese studies. Maybe we can at least salvage something to be friends. To be honest, we’re not really that great of friends anyway. So maybe we can just learn to become friends.

It’s funny how things change. Slowly, over time, love just drains out of a thing like water out of a leaky bathtub. No matter how full, warm and inviting the bath was in the beginning, if you don’t keep adding hot water or learn to fix the leak, you will be left cold and shivering in an inch of water. And that’s what we did. We enjoyed that awesome bath to the fullest – but paid so little attention to the water leaking. In the beginning, at least we kept adding hot water to keep our love lukewarm. Now, we can’t even do that. We’re sitting in an empty tub arguing about how it got that way. And it makes me so sad that I can’t even believe it. How empty I feel.

Life History – Romantic Ponderings

Does anyone ever really forget a lost love?

As I age, I realize that I’ve logged in a lot of relationships over a relatively short span of time. All seemingly characterized by intense, fiery trajectories that ultimately end in the same way – burnout. That and I have a long string of “potential relationships that never were.” I find that I think about both types with the same frequency, which leads me to the question of whether or not everyone lives with a certain amount of remebrance or nostalgia about people they once used to know.

Now I once said, quite accurately I believe, that I am already nostalgic about the future. Meaning that I almost never appreciate anyone or anything until they are a mere speck on my rearview mirror. Why this is, I have never really figured out. Unless of course it’s always been about the all-too-human ability to erase “reality” and install it with a filtered version of “what we like to remember.”

For the life of me, I can’t remember why I ever broke up with Joe. Except for timing. Bad timing. Now for certain, Becky, my best friend at the time, would tell you categorically that there were many other, bigger, reasons for our relationship’s demise. For one, he was a devout Catholic and I had had – gasp! – more than 3 sexual partners by the tender age of 20. To him, three was the acceptable number. I lied through my teeth and doubled that for 6, still a drastic lowball of the actual number. When I finally told him the truth, it forever discolored who I was for him. To this day, he’s still teaching at the same school – not 20 minutes from where we grew up – and probably thinks I’m the biggest slut in the world. Sometimes I wonder if he ever remembers me at all, or when and if he does, if he thinks nice things or rather uncomplimentary things.

But, as we are all wont to do, I have replaced the “Joe” I knew for an idealistic version of “Joe,” one that I might have married and had kids with.

Sometimes I also go back through the men I’ve known and try to picture myself married to them. I do this even with the gay men I know – heaven only knows why. I think maybe it’s because I’m trying to vanquish the thought of a “perfect” person out there, surreptitiously placed in my subconcious by all the damn media images I used to swallow whole as a child and teenager. That in the end, relationships really are about work.

I had a semi-revelatory moment the other night on the town with my new Korean and Japanese girlfriends. The Korean, at one year younger than me, has already been married and divorced. Now she is in another relationship with a man much older than her and she is hesitant to make another mistake. But she also told me that she has learned a thing or two through her divorce – that even if it was a good idea to marry someone, you might find out it’s not a good idea to stay married to them forever. That we all change and the person you married 10 years ago might look basically the same, but be forever different. And then what? What if you don’t love them anymore? What if they drive you crazy? What then?

So maybe marriage isn’t the best idea for people in the modern age. After all, 100 years ago marriages didn’t last all that long due to early death rates. Now we are all staring down maybe 50 years with the same person doing the same annoying things to drive you insane. Or doing the same things you love. Probably a mixture of the two.

Occasionally, I still have dreams where I am reunited with past loves. We’re dating again and I’m happy this time around, everything is near perfect. And then, sometimes, I have dreams about people I’ve loved from afar and we finally, miraculously, get it together and it’s just how I imagined it to be – good and bad. And then, of course, I have the stray odd dream where I’m dating Ashton Kuschner or the blond kid from cheesy show One Tree Hill.

Hell, once I even dreamed about dating Tony Curtis. But before you call the sanatorium, don’t worry, it was the 1950s version.

I guess that in the end, the fantasy really is better than the reality. The men I still love the most are those that were close to me but that I never had the chance to be intimate with – go figure. And the men that were pure fantasy to begin with.