I went out with my friend Hank tonight. We grabbed pizza and beers in New Hope. Hank was coming down from a week of live shows. His brain was mush and he needed calm. He also needs to get back in to domestic mode. His partner, Kasia, returns from an extended (as in seven week) trip to Poland (where she’s from). I always know when Kasia is away because I get a lot more invites to go out and see music. Hank becomes a different person when Kasia is away – he has a lot of time to fill and prefers to be active. He knows that otherwise, he’d sit home pouting that he misses Kasia. I don’t know how he does it. I suspect the amount of time they’ve been together (maybe 16 or 17 years) has something to do with his ability to suffer the distance. When I was married, time apart wasn’t much of an issue. We both had business trips and every once in a while my wife went with girlfriends to Atlantic City. Then again, for quite some time we didn’t have the strongest connection, so I’m not sure how much we missed each other when we were gone. Every relationship I’ve had since then never really got out of the “I want to spend every minute with you” phase (at least not for me).
I have two other friends, Jon and Kristi. They’ve been together forever (since high school). They recently realized that over the course of all of those years, they have only spent four days apart. That seems unreal. If asked, I’m sure they’d say it’s not because the want to spend that much time together – I think they’d both welcome a chance to get some space, but somehow never made it happen.
As I write, I’m trying to figure out where I fall on the spectrum. My most recent experiences had me closer to Jon and Kristi. I know I told my ex-fiancee, B, I would rather spend time with her than do just about anything else, and that everything I would do on my own was always better with her. Does always wanting my partner around make me needy? Suffocating? She thought so. Part of my belief system is that relationships have a natural decay to them, a settling…. the honeymoon phase wears off. I think of all of those couples who have to find ways to renew…. That makes me think, well if it’s going to happen anyway, why hasten it? Shouldn’t we enjoy each other’s company as much as we can, while we still can and do? I suppose the flip side of the argument is that time away helps with the renewal process. Does absence make the heart grow fonder? If so, B should be pretty damned fond of me by now.
As with most things, it’s more gray than it is black & white – another continuum. I don’t think there’s a right amount of time together or time apart. I do think when apart, it’s nice to miss each other, and even nice to say it or hear it (we all want to be missed when we’re gone). I also think when together, it’s important to be present and really together. This is a touchy subject for me. In the end, my fiancee left because she felt suffocated. I’m not sure I knew what she needed in terms of space, let alone whether or not I was capable of giving it. She had complained that her late husband never seemed to miss her when they were apart. She complained that when she would go away to visit friends, they might go days without talking…. By contrast, I missed her all the time. For a while, early in the relationship, we would both get this queasy feeling when we had to part ways on a Sunday night. I felt alive just being in her presence. I think she worried she would never get to go visit friends or have alone time… I’m sure I would have lobbied to go with her, but if being alone was important, I’d have respected that. This is one of those things that is hard to figure out on your own. It requires assessing the connection, weighing your needs against someone else’s. You might know that you need space (or don’t), but only realize you have too little or too much when you’re in the throes of it.
In the end, I feel like it might be better to shrug and just roll with it as opposed to over-analyze it. In hindsight, it seems so easy to find the compromise. Like so many things, we would have gotten there with practice.