The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Romantic Musings

Watched 'The Way We Were' and did not cry. I might have wanted to, had I been completely focused on what I was seeing rather than sorting through laundry, but the sharp sting of broken love is no match for tiny socks that are missing their mates.

I used to think that love was all that was needed to make a relationship work, but that was when I hadn't experienced it yet. It's nice to think that way, but it takes more than that. Often, a failed relationship feels like a personal slight, like we weren't good enough or weren't worth loving. The truth is that sometimes relationships don't work because the pieces don't fit together, even though we try to force it. What most people in love aren't capable of doing is looking forward without being mislead by the crazy haze of novelty. When we are newly in love, we don't see the cracks in the surface or hear the words that would normally incense us. We grab on to the faith in it and we pray because it feels divine. Only when the sex passes, when the conversation and the ideas become more necessary that we are able to feel the inconsistencies in the skin of the other. That's when we can smell their breath and hear them murmur incoherently in their sleep, and it doesn't seem as pleasing as it used to.

I understood the last bit of the film better than I might have years ago. While some people may not be able to understand the phrase 'they loved one another but couldn't stand to live together', I do. I understood how two people might long to stroke one another's face, only to leave them soon after and know that they will never be together again. It is a strange sadness in that sort of withdrawal, because there is a momentary spark of hope in it until it is blown out. Not everyone we encounter in our lives is meant to be more than a bit part, but some of us refuse to let them go because of what we hope they will someday be. Sometimes, the love we try to keep was never meant to be more than a flash in time. There is no reward in loving someone for their potential, because what they are is the only true thing. What gets me is the way we allow ourselves to die a little when those involvements are over, as though they meant more than they actually did. Sometimes, a relationship is nothing more than a mistake that no one would admit to.

I know people who are married who wish they weren't. I also know people who are married but are fairly indifferent to the person they share their life with. That isn't something I think could ever deal with. I need to feel something for the person I share the bathroom with. I need them to feel for me, too. There's nothing to be ashamed of in that, we deserve it. My sister told me yesterday that if ever she decides she hates her husband, she will never leave him because of the children. I understood what she was saying, even agreed on some level, but how can two people come together, fall in love, have children and then realize they don't care about one another? Even as I ask this, I know that I know the answer: we're humans, we tend to make mistakes. I just don't know which mistake is bigger; staying with someone you don't love until one of you dies, or ripping your family apart because of the emptiness you got yourself into.

But, it isn't fair to blame ourselves for love that dies. As we get older, evolve as it were, we change as people. While our core values usually remain intact, our collective experiences tend to reshape things and bring new order to the things we deem important. Teenaged love is completely different from middle-aged love. One has a backstory, and the other doesn't. Anyone who thinks that it is easy to hold on to the freshness of that pubescent exhilaration are fooling themselves; with age and experience, love takes a good beating.

My friend C. is married to the same guy she went to prom with. We are talking twenty years of togetherness, seventeen of which are married years. While they still have a fairly active sex life and seem to genuinely be committed to one another, C. did have her bags packed about twelve years ago and was ready to head off to Mississippi to take a nursing job. She was serious about it at the time, and her husband called me to ask me what to do. I didn't tell him that I'd been the one who had told her she should do it, that wouldn't have gone over well. What I did tell him was that he wasn't a teenager anymore, and that she desperately needed him to straighten up. He needed to get on to the same wavelength as she was or he would lose her. I have to admit that I was greatly surprised when he took my advice and got a job, stopped playing video games, started to save for a house and became a grown-up version of the guy I'd once seen throw up three times in a restaurant parking lot just so he'd have room to revisit the all-you-can-eat buffet.

C.tells me that it was always meant to be a scare tactic, her moving to the south. She doesn't believe in divorce, not really, and her husband wasn't raised to believe in it either. When I stand away from them and look in, I see that one of the main reasons they have managed to remain close for so many years is because they share a lot of the same values. Neither one is very worldly, and neither of them care to be, so there are rarely disappointments and as long as they stick to their routine, they're happy. They like the country, like to eat fried food, both love to play baseball and listen to country music. I have less in common with her than he does. They argue constantly, but I've come to learn that this is their foreplay. Neither of them want anything more, that's true, but it's tough to look at these two and not see that they have a connection. You can feel the purity of their pairing. It is worthy noting, too, that not one couple who attended their wedding way back in the day of puffy sleeves and free-standing hair are together today. They beat some steep odds.

We live in a disposable world, that's true, and sometimes we abuse it. That said, there are some good things about the way it's set up today. If we are in a relationship that doesn't feel right, we can leave it. If we are in a marriage that is taking our life from us, we can file for divorce. I'm all for ending something that doesn't make you happy, as long as the reasons are genuine and the proper amount of effort goes into fixing the problems. It's just that people often enter into these things without thinking clearly, without putting their needs in front of their longing. Sometimes, no matter how much love we invest in someone, they won't be able to meet our needs or expectations. It doesn't make them bad people, it just means we took a fleeting moment and tried to make into something it was never meant to be.

So far, none of my close friends or family have divorced. My break up was the only thing resembling a divorce in the group and it was heavy for everyone. I can see which ones are not happy, though, which ones are prime candidates for affairs or separations, but so far, so good. Everyone is soldiering on, most of them aware that there will be rough times in every relationship and hoping that their rough patches are temporary. It's when you're outside of it that you can see the fissures beginning. You begin to prepare yourself for the crack to widen, even if they don't hear or see it yet.

So far, so good, though.