Love, And the Messy Business Of Relationships

I don’t know why we do it to ourselves, honest.

Get into these very messy, constrictive things we call relationships, all in the pursuit of stability.

It’s odd.

However, I am starting to recognize and factor the subconscious component—the need to be worshiped through the act of worship.

Worship me so that I may worship you in return.

We humans, truly, are an odd bunch.

But I’m doing this all wrong. Let me start over from the beginning.

This story starts, as many tragic stories do, with a young boy and a young girl, both very much in…

LOVE

Picture this, I’m twenty-two and new in the big city. All I’ve got is a suitcase full of clothes two decades out of fashion and a dream to make it as a commercial artist.

Keep in mind, I’m young and wide-eyed, and young women are a showy lot, so it isn’t long until I’ve got my eye on one who hides.

She reminds me of me.

After a series of furtive and awkward glances, we speak.

Her name is Summer, and she is my first love.

But before that, she’s a girl from Saudi-Arabia and a 3D animation major. She’s studying abroad, she tells me, at her family’s behest. We have much in common, and we are, both of us, young and wide-eyed and not at all showy.

So we form, in this rare opportunity to share ourselves, a bond.

But remember, I'm twenty-two and new to the big city, so the people tour must continue.

Must be out and about!

Must make friends!

Must live!

Must fuck!

Let’s not go clutching anything too tightly just yet; all of us, at twenty-two, feel this way. Or some version of it.

Some of us, for example, want to fuck money. Others, food.

Smirk and wink if you know yourself.

Anyways, back to me. I wanted to fuck, myself. Or more accurately, parts of myself I saw in others.

Drive. Passion. Ambition. Strength. Otherworldly beauty.

Parts I either had buried or repressed, or that I was altogether lacking, but not so much so that I didn’t still recognize how much I craved them. And so I was often drawn to women who displayed these parts to me.

I was fond of dalliances. Of exploring these parts of me, in these women.

But wait, uh-oh!

What were these other parts doing here? Parts wholly alien and very much unlike me.

Come one rainy fall, Summer had to leave.

She was moving away to another, better art program, in a school very far from my own.

But what about us? She asked.

We can do it! I reassured her.

Yeah? She questioned.

Yeah! I repeated with-

PASSION

Ah, but won’t God save us from the passion of young men?

It is a thing to fear and behold both in its naïveté and its shortsightedness.

And now that I’m done making excuses…

Time to live!

Time to fu-uh-uh-uuck!

And I went on to do just that, as did she, but at my insistence, she still remained tethered to me. A source of much conflict and heartache down the line for us in this story, but first, a poem:

“Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way. And against all opposition, straining from within and at any price to become distinctively, itself.

It is good to be solitary because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.

To love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation.

With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. To love is not about merging. It is a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another-”

Pg. 56, Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

Man, I love-

ROMANCE

Soon, I would meet another, also wide-eyed and curious.

A musician. A composer. And I would be drawn to her.

And at the very real risk of seeming like I’m repeating myself, I have to preface this next part with the admission that I’m twenty-two. Young, wide-eyed, and passionate. Not to mention a little narcissistic and a lot lacking in self-awareness.

So, a dalliance begins between me and the musician.

Oh, oh, naughty, naughty boy! What about Summer! Your first love?

Well, to answer your question, I loved her. I love her still.

Or I love the part of me that she saw, I think.

I’ve long since forgiven myself for this decade-old indiscretion, so anyone arriving late to the blame and pity party- find yourself a nice spot on that wall there… Yup, right there, and post up.

Listen, young romance plays such a massive part in our collective canon precisely because it is so fragile. It’s innocent. Untested. Unaware. And brittle enough to blow away at the slightest breeze.

And here is where the high school sweethearts, the love-at-first-sight types, will chime in, drowning us in their consistency, their stagnant, dutiful romance- their ever-evolving love.

And because I am also a romantic, for these people I have, you guessed it, another poem:

“ The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with those who free you, who love you from a lighter affection to bear as strong as you can to experience.

-Today’s life is too hard, too bitter, too anemic, for us to undergo new bondages from (those) whom we love[.] This is how I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure in one word, and I would like to be for you the companion we are sure of, always.”

-Albert Camus to Réne Char

I find Albert’s sentiment both poignant and romantic.

Yes, I love romance, couldn’t you tell?

It’s why I fucked the musician.

Predictably, I was judged, shamed, and ridiculed for it by my fellow twenty-somethings, all of them paragons of virtue.

Men understood, but women… oof, they were tough on me, and I can hardly blame them.

Bad Gaël! Infidelity! We thought you were one of the “good ones”. How could you do that to Summer, and so on.

I seem dismissive only because I have the benefit of context; I lived this whole dramatic affair, after all. And minus some details, I told the story straight and true.

The musician would eventually hear about the girl from Saudi-Arabia. She would tell her of our dalliance, and they would both resent the tether that was the other, as well as my dishonest part in it.

And uh-oh! Here they were again. Those alien parts that were very much unlike me, coming home to roost, bringing with them so much conflict and pain. It was all too much for me, so I fled.

I ghosted, as one does. I was not yet mature enough to be fully committed, not aware enough to succeed at-

RELATIONSHIPS

I know.

Messy, right? This business of relationships.

We have to be careful, so as not to barrel into each other like so many callous and passionate semis- oblivious and unaware of the nature of that which we are embarking on.

That final test. This so-called noble calling to become- and I do love this sentence-

a world in oneself, in response to another.

The meaning of that. The gravity. The lightness.

I notice this morphing in today’s world, this evolution of love into this heavy, burdensome, bitterly familiar thing—this slow build-up of fear and resentment, of bondage and self-worship.

Modern day relationships are the churches we’ve built to pray to ourselves, to worship and shackle, and possess ourselves and each other—all in the pursuit of happiness and stability, of a sense of belonging and continuity.

But remember, love is difficult; caring for another takes all the strength you’ve gathered.

So I pray you’ll cut me some slack if I admit to struggling with it in the past.

It’s a learning process.

Maybe you’re still in that process of learning, so cut yourself some slack, too.

Most importantly though, get the fuck over yourself.

I promise, we will all love you for it. Hell, you might even end up in a relationship.

Eek.

Bon chance.