Today was one of those grey city days. Low clouds obscured the tops of the buildings and a cold mist ____ the city… poetic word choice: blanketed feels too cliche, swaddled is too warm, fell is too passive, enveloped? pestered? nibbled? permeated? lingered over the city…. I made my way to Cafe Keough, read a bit and worked on a poem that was inspired by my morning reading. I jotted down some lines from Stephen Dunn
Be careful: I would like to make you believe in me.
The terrible power of the one less in love.
…must know how to make her own ceilings out of all that is beautiful in her.
After my morning diatribe against the lack of compromise in modern relationships, I read another great piece on Brain Pickings… I’ll get to that momentarily. The diatribe makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to seem anti-feminist… I believe in choice and happiness and following your bliss BUT I also believe in trying and working and the full expectation that your partner will make you unhappy – sometimes more unhappy than anyone else possibly could… When my ex-fiancee, B, and I did couples therapy, our therapist, Jocelyn, would say sometimes you have to say “you infuriate me, but I wouldn’t want to be infuriated by anyone else.”
Today I got a note from a woman who liked my profile. I usually respond that I wrote it for me – a reminder of who I am and how I want to be… in case I get lost out there.. She wrote back and unloaded her entire story on me. Married 16 years to a self-important narcissist who was abusive in every way imaginable. He cheated. He was physically abusive and she would apologize for the abuse. She’s afraid and broken and full of anxiety, but wants a human connection…. On this blog, I’ve talked about some of my struggles with gratitude – when things suck, it’s ok to say things suck and not have to find a story that’s worse than yours to feel a little less bad. When I hear stories like this one, I get a little ticked at my ex-fiancee. She may have needed space, and I may not have been great at giving it… but we adored each other. We were genuinely happy. A friend sent me a pic that was a Facebook reminder of hers from years ago. I told her it was a rough week for my reminders and sent some pics from the engagement in San Diego. She said my pictures made her sad – we looked amazingly happy. She told me that type of happiness is so much more than a lot of people have. When I read articles bashing men for being emotionally needy, I think of how intolerant, unforgiving, and kinda petty that sounds…. which brings me to Brain Pickings and David Whyte on the True Meaning of Friendship, Love, and Heartbreak.
Popova sets the stage for Whyte’s take on friendship by writing:
Of friendship — which Emerson considered the supreme fruit of “truth and tenderness,” Aristotle the generous act of holding up a mirror to each other, Thoreau a grand stake for which the game of life may be played, and C.S. Lewis “one of those things which give value to survival”…She then quotes Whyte:
FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.
Because friendship is at the heart of deep love, those same statements can be applied to love. Whyte continues:
the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.
The article continues on and quotes Whyte on heartbreak, which he sees as an unavoidable human condition and springboard for growth, and unrequited love which he says is every form of love…
Men and women have always had difficulty with the way a love returned hardly ever resembles a love given, but unrequited love may be the form that love mostly takes; for what affection is ever returned over time in the same measure or quality with which it is given? … And whom could we know so well and so intimately through all the twists and turns of a given life that we could show them exactly, the continuous and appropriate form of affection they need?
Popova adds to this calling love “that glorious ‘dynamic interaction’ of souls responsive to one another, which requires a constant learning and relearning of a common language.”
I cant help but to read these “treatises” and reject the “path of happiness” as one that is, in it’s fullest, simply unattainable. B once told me nobody is happy all of the time. She was right. Striving for happy all of the time is unrealistic and unsustainable. Whyte writes:
Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world. The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against the odds.
More often than not, I had a profound sense of arrival and fulfillment. It helped me withstand the brief moments of searing disappointment, the occasional threats to leave, the pointed complaints of my neediness. It was why for the longest time, I was sure we would find our way home to each other.