I remember fighting with this boy in school when I was maybe nine or ten. He lived across the street from us in four bungalows, the boy I looked up to as somewhat of a role model. I don’t remember what I’d done, but one day he yelled at me, said I was schizophrenic and I needed help. Though he was probably just throwing out a big word he’d heard somewhere, I was shocked at what I thought was his clairvoyance. I was so changeable, I was a danger to myself, to others. He had seen through me. I thought I knew what he meant — that I was a different person to every individual. That I tried to carefully control my image, make myself what I thought someone needed me to be in the moment. I have been, all of my life, a private person, reticent even, almost to the point of consulting some hidden tome to see what’s safe to say or do. This one might like me if she knows this fragment of my life but not that one; That one will smirk at this gesture but grin at that.
Years ago, I watched a movie once in which a woman and her paramour were obsessed with each other. They push each other more and more towards a precipice, until, at the end of their relationship and subsequently the movie, she puts a pillow against his face as he sleeps and smothers him. There was something of a Protestant ethic in this story: anything that’s worth doing is worth doing right. That is, if you have not smothered each other with your passion, it wasn’t truly passion.
“Any decent human relationship in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,’ ” Adrienne Rich writes, “is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”
When do we fall in love? When we’re ready to tolerate the presence of someone else in our lives? When we can turn our lives into a theater? When we are bored of ourselves and available to the first one that crosses by? When we are rejected and need to prove that the rejection was just a one-off disappointment? When we are trying to prove to ourselves that we are, in fact, alluring, impressive, alive; or, contrarily, invisible, ugly, and dispensable? We fall in love when we find someone with whom, for whatever reason, we are willing to take the greatest risk: the risk of realizing while in the mid-act of kissing that person one day, that he or she is probably not the one you were looking for.
In the time that I have loved and lost or loved and gained, I have realized that there are two types of love, mostly. There is the love that has the ability to get two people from being strangers to move into a relationship and maybe get married to memorialize their coming together— The kind of love where chemistry just bubbles up to the surface, the kind of love infused with vapid hormones and ardent attraction, the kind where you feel breathless without one another, a love that seeks out the other, a love that seeks beauty even in their worst moments.
However, years later, after you have been together for a significant amount of time and the dance of the hormones have subsided and the indignities of day to day life has eroded you enough and you are still lucky enough to stay together, you would be sitting on your couch someday with the person next to you and suddenly realize that there is a completely different type of love that got you to stay — To be under the same roof, in the same room, on the same bed, under the same sheets, watching the same movie. She scrolls her phone for recipes while you are deep down buried in a book. It is the rhythm where you are not seeking an agenda, be it chemistry, approval, acknowledgment, or sex. There are things at stake here for which these things are a poor substitute. It is the type of love that doesn’t burst in flames. These are embers that burn slowly.
Companionship, as you will realize someday, is the great reflector. It can mirror the elusive self back to itself so that, maybe, it starts to understand itself better than it did before. The only regret is that it might just be too late. Your time is never enough. It’s so unfair that we live most of our lives with what we don’t understand, and then finally when we do start to understand, there is not much of a life left.
So in the end, when you have spent the fruitful years chasing the big illusion— Be it as basal as your carnal desires or the more refined version, attraction, or even the subdued renditions of companionship and affection, you realize that none of them are actually the real reasons for two people coming together and staying that way over a period of time. What is that thread that holds together that fabric of a relationship? What is the glue that binds? The answers may be simpler or more complex than what you would think. The answer may be what you want it to be.
However, what you would discern over the number of years is this — You were wrong about the greatest risk that lurks in a friendship, a marriage, or for that fact in any relationship between two individuals. It is not disillusionment or regret.
The greatest risk is being known, fully, by someone else…
