How the hell did we get on to this? Oh well, here goes.
What does love mean to me? Just wanting to be with someone, I guess, paring it down to its simplest form. Forget the guff about caring more for their happiness than your own – that’s hopelessly unrealistic, obviously. Forget sex, which is a completely different can of worms (though it might be nice…) Several people have told me communication is important. I suppose it would be great to have someone who would listen to your thoughts, ideas and dreams, someone you could share them with, but I realised long, long ago that wasn’t an option in this marriage – which may be why I’ve started writing them instead (much less threatening and easier to handle than actually speaking to anybody).
I used to know a man who had several affairs, although never with me (at one time I wished he would). We went away together to a conference in the States – his first time over there, but not for me, as I’d lived there for four years. Everything which I just took for granted he found new and exciting – and he constantly interpreted it through his wife’s eyes, telling me how she would react. In fact, he never stopped talking about her, except when he was actually talking TO her, on the phone. I was just happy to be there with him, and barely gave a second thought to hubby and kids.
That wasn’t the first (or last) time I started wondering about the state of my marriage, but it’s probably the most dramatic illustration. Another example. Last year, when I was in Brussels, I was chatting to another woman who was telling me about her husband, how he was still her ‘best friend’ after years of marriage, how she might be attracted to other men and flirt, but she would never be tempted to be unfaithful because she knew what she had to go back to was more important than anything.
Now, that to me sounds like love. Is it really that unusual for people to feel like that about their partners? Seems to me that there are two kinds of ties which keep relationships together, some of which are strong, and some are weak. Strong ties are that knowledge that your partner is so important that nothing would be worth giving them up for; even if you might have affairs, you would still always go back to them. I don’t only mean being ‘in love’, or sexual passion, or romantic fluff, but an enduring sense of confidence in the strength of the relationship. Maybe that feeling is very rare, so most people rely on the weak ties, the sense of obligation, the shared history, responsibility to the children, the sheer complexity and difficulty of untangling lives which have grown into each other. Not to mention fear of being alone.
Maybe the strong feeling changes according to circumstance (it’s so long since I felt it, I couldn’t really say), so there are times when you just have to buckle down and go along with the weak ties in the hope that the strong tie-feeling will come back one day.
So is that what love is about? Just sticking at it, even though the communication is lousy and the sex is not great and the shared activities are limited to going to the garden centre every now and again?
I suppose you could call it love.