The Weird Kid
Friday, August 29, 2008
Okay okay. I'm here.
Now, I think I just figured something out that just may ensure my marriage, and my contentedness with it. Forever on.
Get this. Name me an exception and I bet I can argue it.
All love songs. All romance stories, even the romances stories that are tiny diversions inside bigger stories. All romantic love on TV shows. All the love stories my friends have told me about in their lives. The oldest love poems written on lambskin in scriggly Latin.
One thing in common.
They. Are. ALL. Only about the beginning.
Love, as I have always understood it, as it has been shown to me, can only exist in the beginning.
I didn't know that.
If a movie has two characters that have been married for 17 years, it is not a love story. Unless they almost break up and have to start their love over again. That is why Beverly Hills 90210 was about the teen-agers, not their forever vegetable-chopping parents.
The love we had was unsustainable, and not because it was shakily built or inauthentic. And as I felt it shifting, shifting around Smudge and our aging bodies and libidos, our increased independence and our dwindling fears, I hated it. I wanted to have it back. I wanted to be drunk on him again, suicidal over him again, like I had been before. I thought, "This love is mellowing into a flat brown thing. We're doing something wrong."
But we aren't doing anything wrong. That first hot love, it will die. It must die if you have children, if you aren't manic-depressive, if you aren't co-dependent. And when it dies, you can only be miserable ("trapped in a loveless marriage"), flee, (have an affair, get a divorce) or embrace it. And look at your new love, the old kind, the kind that seldom burns with lust or imagined tragedy, the practical partnership, the marriage of brain and soul, the love held by flat characters in the back-ground of the novel.
And say, What do I have here?
Whatever you have, it's all you're going to get, unless you pick one of the other options. The other love is fireworks and fireworks burn hot and beautiful and very very fast.
The couple in their 80's, universally envied for their hand-holding on the porch, facing the sunset. They had to go through this, to get there.
Whaddya think?
Now, I think I just figured something out that just may ensure my marriage, and my contentedness with it. Forever on.
Get this. Name me an exception and I bet I can argue it.
All love songs. All romance stories, even the romances stories that are tiny diversions inside bigger stories. All romantic love on TV shows. All the love stories my friends have told me about in their lives. The oldest love poems written on lambskin in scriggly Latin.
One thing in common.
They. Are. ALL. Only about the beginning.
Love, as I have always understood it, as it has been shown to me, can only exist in the beginning.
I didn't know that.
If a movie has two characters that have been married for 17 years, it is not a love story. Unless they almost break up and have to start their love over again. That is why Beverly Hills 90210 was about the teen-agers, not their forever vegetable-chopping parents.
The love we had was unsustainable, and not because it was shakily built or inauthentic. And as I felt it shifting, shifting around Smudge and our aging bodies and libidos, our increased independence and our dwindling fears, I hated it. I wanted to have it back. I wanted to be drunk on him again, suicidal over him again, like I had been before. I thought, "This love is mellowing into a flat brown thing. We're doing something wrong."
But we aren't doing anything wrong. That first hot love, it will die. It must die if you have children, if you aren't manic-depressive, if you aren't co-dependent. And when it dies, you can only be miserable ("trapped in a loveless marriage"), flee, (have an affair, get a divorce) or embrace it. And look at your new love, the old kind, the kind that seldom burns with lust or imagined tragedy, the practical partnership, the marriage of brain and soul, the love held by flat characters in the back-ground of the novel.
And say, What do I have here?
Whatever you have, it's all you're going to get, unless you pick one of the other options. The other love is fireworks and fireworks burn hot and beautiful and very very fast.
The couple in their 80's, universally envied for their hand-holding on the porch, facing the sunset. They had to go through this, to get there.
Whaddya think?
posted by Imez at 7:31 PM
10 Comments:
that it's true. That love is a behavior more than an emotion.
I've been married for over 26 years, so i know whereof i speak.
The only other option is "serial monogamy" in order to keep getting that newly in love feeling.
And for me, that's just not what i want. I want security and stable mature, yes, even brown, love.
I love this post. Can I just tell you how I long for the vegetable-chopping days, the brown love....unfortunetly I can never seem to find the man that can stick around after the fireworks. Your whole awareness is beautiful.
One thing I like about my husband (of 10+ years) is that I still never know what he's going to say. He's a funny guy and has a very different point of view than I do.
Even when I'm really mad he can make me laugh (though I don't always tell him that).
That's not to say that we still don't have to work on having the fireworks and all that, we have three kids and life going on but he at least is the person I know I want to work on it with.
It's so very, very true. Love changes. You can't expect to keep the first insane passion like you have in the beginning. If you can accept the changes with the person that you have then I think you are on a pretty good wicket.
What kind of love do you have or are willing to accept?
meno-love is a behavior more than an emotion. Yes. That's it you get it so succinctly, better than I did.
jill- I think the guys that stick around don't always provide the brightest fireworks.
sari- congratulations on having your love figured out!
chisty- not just insane passion...I alway expected to lose that...just the whole emotion, it's just so different.
I get crushes a lot. I mean all the time. So at home I have my husband, who's always there and always the right one, but at night in bed I have Mischa, my Belarussian soccer teammate. Last month it was the guy who works at the taco place on the corner. I guess I can't give up on the fireworks completely.
I suppose this is why buddhist turn away from passion. I wonder if anyone can maintain it or at least figures out how to keep it flaring up from time to time.
In October, my sweetie and I will have our 35th anniversary. I still get giddy whenever I hear his voice on the phone or when he shows up unexpectedly.
When couples are young...especially when children are in the picture, 'life' gets in the way of the fireworks. Brown love comes in and gets all comfy.Once in a while, the fireworks show up and we Ew and Awe and remember how it all started. And so it goes....round and round...up and down...sometimes we zig when we should have zagged, but that's life. Love is alot like nature. Nothing grows well without being nurtured and watered and tended to.
There is one word that I tell young couples to educate themselves on. Empathy. If you have that for your partner....there will be more sunny days than coudy ones.
That's just my thought though.
Have a great trip :)
I know that Johnny and I will have the love of which you speak. Fireworks are hot and fast but we've got the slow burn that still sizzles! Awesome post, dude. Made me smile.
First of all--you are a fantastic writer, and I love your blog.
Secondly, I think you are dead-on about our romantic relationships having an inevitable and necessary metamorphosis into something far more mellow, but just as wonderful in its own way.
I'm sneaking up on my twelfth anniversary, and without a doubt, we are less into the pyrotechnics these days and more into the, "hey, why don't we put the kids to bed and you go get us a couple of Blizzards from Diary Queen, which we will then eat 'em in bed and watch Comedy Central?!?"
And we are so happy together...
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