Something a little new on my mind. I don't write about love all that often. Really, I am alternately totally uncomfortable with and then totally thrilled with love. As a chronic commitment-phobe (places to live, people to be with, favorite ice cream flavors..I have a hard time committing to anything), the idea of true love makes me squirm more than a bit. Because that's it, right? Once you have found the one, there is no need to keep searching. This is what most people hope for. It's what I fear. Among all of my ridiculous idiosyncrasies and irrational nightmares, my fear of boredom reigns king. And somewhere in there, I began to equate true love with boredom. To me, they are the same thing.
And this is what's bugging me right now.
I essentially live inside a Billabong catalogue. The sunsets nestle nicely into postcards and beautiful, tan people are everywhere, barely dressed, surfing and sunning and falling deeply in lust. It's exciting. There are new couples whose butterflies you can almost feel yourself. They sparkle, the couples in lust. Lust makes you high.
And then I look at the people who vacation here. We are a family resort, so we get a good glance at marriage at most levels. No kids to young kids to adolescent kids to the horror that is having teenagers and then the empty nesters and, finally, the retirees. We see all of them. Now, I am well aware that comfort and boredom can be easily confused. From the outside, these couples look bored. They are out of firsts, maybe. Or she has washed too many pairs of his stinky socks and he has picked up too many boxes of tampons at the grocery store for the butterflies to live. Butterflies breathe thrill, I've heard, and flirtation. And I could be wrong, here. But I see a lot of couples sitting at dinner without much to say to each other. And I hear them have lengthy, invested conversations about what size of Gatorade they should take to the beach. Without holding hands. Without smiling. Without any hint of an emotional relationship or connection. I suppose it's a lot like being tired of living here. Like I've said before, a beautiful place to live eventually just becomes home, where you do your laundry and make coffee in the mornings. But is that really what you're supposed to be looking for? Comfort, fine. But who, as they are smile-tipsy and falling madly in love with the one person they are absolutely supposed to be with for the rest of forever, thinks that they will end up having full conversations about whether they should go to Bed Bath & Beyond on Saturday or Sunday? Honestly? What happened to the madly in love part?
Do you think that is the fate of lifelong relationships? It must be. It can't not be, really. It seems like it's just the natural progression of things, and an obvious result of eating breakfast with someone every morning for anything beyond five years. I could buy twelve women's magazines right this second and probably find an article in each one that is dedicated to keeping your marriage exciting. Getting the spark back, that sort of thing. If you have to get the spark back, it can only be assumed that it was lost at some point. Why is that so normal?
I'm beginning to think that womanizers and women labeled as heartbreakers are just addicted to this spark everybody talks about. Once you get a few tastes of it, you're hooked. Nothing else will do after that. And as soon as it's gone, so are you.
Maybe your opinion of this whole thing changes after you've found that one person. I might be blurring the lines between boredom and contentment. My hope is that the spark is dynamic; it changes colors and shapes as the relationship evolves. Sometimes it wears a mask and is hard to recognize, and that's when you think it's lost. But maybe you know how many sugars to put in his cup of coffee and he always wakes up in the morning to let the dogs out so you don't have to, and that's where it is.
Ugh, I don't know. It's a hard line to draw, isn't it? If it stays small like that for a long time, I suppose it could just burn out entirely. And though they're completely terrible, I can see how affairs happen when it's tiny and wearing a mask. Because what's so great about love if you have to look to make sure it's still there?
Clearly, I have no real idea of what I'm talking about, here. I'm attempting to predict what the end of a curvy road looks like, and I've never even been on it. Pointless. A textbook case of fear of the unknown. People say all the time that relationships are work and marriage is a full-time job. I get that. Melting two people together does not always go smoothly and compromise is constant and difficult. But the heat involved is enough to make everything worth it. And that part should be automatic, shouldn't it? Why should that require work, too?
These couples fighting about Gatorade, do they still get giddy and stupid when they kiss each other? Do they still kiss? Do they sing love songs to the radios in their cars and think about one another? Do they still have big crushes on each other? Because I think that they should. And if they don't, then I have no interest in that life.
This is not something than can be answered by anything but experience. We won't know until we know. And I'm always game for a road I have never been down, but boredom is a dead end sign and I really hope that that's not what happens every time.
No comments:
Post a Comment