Today I read a poignant and well-written essay on waiting – specifically as it relates to love. It referenced some modern anxieties (waiting for the good morning text in a new relationship), but also brought some heavy-hitting thoughts to the topic citing Walt Whitman, Roland Barthes, Dorothy Parker and others. As I read, I found myself copying and pasting selections on to a separate document, hoping I could figure out ways to incorporate them in to tonight’s post. The essay entitled “Ladies in Waiting” by Becca Rothfeld was originally published in Hedgehog Review. I will shamelessly borrow from it (a lot), and unlike Becca, I will not take care of academic business by providing proper footnotes – welcome to the world of blogging.
Admittedly, this essay spoke to me because I am struggling with my own waiting. I can’t tell if I am pursuing a high form of love (waiting without expectation), or simply being foolish and letting life pass me by as I wait for B, my ex-fiancee, to miss me as much as I miss her… all while secretly fearing that I no longer register in her world. It’s painful to be the forgotten one. Coupled with these thoughts, I’ve had to contemplate much of what Becca discusses in her focus on waiting as the primary domain of women. I don’t disagree with the stereotype or the cultural norms. Waiting for love has primarily been the woman’s business. Becca provides ample examples in literature (Penelope in the Odyssey and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations). From Whitman she cites a single line that speaks volumes to the male ego “A woman waits for me.” and from Raymond Carver she quotes:
the house where the woman
From “Waiting” by Raymond Carver
stands in the doorway
wearing the sun in her hair. The one
who’s been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
“What’s kept you?”
If you’re a romantic, there’s a beauty in waiting. Carver captures it – though, as Becca points out, it’s usually a beauty that is feminized. But…. as a man who has almost always been the one left waiting, it brought to light something that I have felt so often – that the manly thing to do is to, first and foremost, not wait… but secondly to get over things, move on, care less, exude indifference. As one who waits, the end is almost always me chasing someone’s indifference. As someone who believes in those silly notions of romance and the possible reunion of long, lost lovers, I sometimes feel like less of a man. As someone who has, from my earliest days as a child, had a sense of longing, I sometimes feel like I’m not allowed to contemplate life by waiting, beautifully, innocently, hopelessly, sadly in the doorway. That’s the woman’s role.
On more than one occasion I found myself reading Becca’s essay and saying – yes, I know what that feels like. Or perhaps more accurately, yes, I wish I could have written that. She begins with W. S. Merwin’s poem “Separation” “Your absence has gone through me / Like thread through a needle. / Everything I do is stitched with it’s color.” She then quotes Barthes:
“Am I in love?—Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits
When waiting became difficult or burdensome (mostly during my marriage, and less about romantic waiting but just waiting in general) I’ve wanted to make the other wait – to make them feel what it’s like to not have their time taken in to consideration. This sometimes became an issue with B – when she asked for or needed space, I was put in the holding pattern of waiting. For me it became less about giving space, and more about the reassurance that the distance being created would not grow greater. As a child of divorce, and as someone who lost his first love to infidelity and his marriage to academic pursuits…. my experience is that the people who leave never fully come back, if they come back at all. When together, B was more present, loving, attentive, and affectionate than anyone I had experienced – we had a rare connection in that sense. And while full presence 24/7 is unsustainable and exhausting, anything less than that became a form of waiting.
When this push and pull got to be too much for B, when the exhaustion of being fully present set in, B would call me needy or a diva (a feminizing term for sure) or she would simply leave – either the argument, or the physical space, or the relationship. I had never intended to be greedy, needy, or exhausting, I simply enjoyed her presence. In a series of one-sided departures – I wanted to be the one to leave, just once – to show that leaving or threatening to leave is damaging and hurtful – to make her wait. I always lose at this game. Is that self-aggrandizing? Do we, the lovers, assume a moral high ground simply by waiting? simply by taking a more patient posture? It’s complicated, because I don’t think it’s intentional, but what probably seemed like martyrdom didn’t help in the push-pull tug of war that eventually played out. B would always say she was broken from the losses she suffered – to me this was deserving of all of my compassion, love, patience, and yes waiting. I wanted to help her heal – I never knew what that looked like. I hadn’t learned how to wait for it.
Becca has a great line in her essay. She’s talking about someone she pursued and says “What had at first been surprised delight that he existed was transformed, without my noticing it, into fear that his privacy would close back over him.” B’s desire for space and alone time made me fear that her privacy would close back over her. Love, for all its splendor, also encompasses fear (another unmanly thing to admit). Not being indifferent necessarily means caring about the outcome, having a vested interest, fearing a different outcome – the one that, for me, ultimately came to pass. She left, enveloped in the cloak of her privacy.
Later in Becca’s essay she speaks of the busying of oneself: “so that one can become the objects one rearranges on the dresser and forget that one is waiting, that none of one’s activities are complete without some additional element that is wretchedly, unforgettably elsewhere.” When the other person is not present (in the moment, or in your life), it is painfully consuming and heavy to the one who waits. To that end, Becca describes waiting as “the transformation of time in to misery.” For the better part of the last six months, time has been my misery. I stopped doing the things that we did, and all of my actions felt incomplete. The one person with whom I wanted to share my successes and failures with was “unforgettably elsewhere.”
Throughout her essay, Becca quotes Barthes frequently: “‘Absence becomes an active practice, a business (which keeps me from doing anything else).'” Becca further writes, “if waiting constitutes love, as Barthes suggests, it is because waiting is the ultimate act of vulnerability: It requires a willingness to endanger one’s wholeness, to halve oneself.” And “What it means to love, he writes, is for ‘an always present I’ to be defined ‘only by confrontation with an always absent you.'” This of course made me feel sad and insecure, and it feels a little too extreme from my experience. The other has never been an always absent you – but in the agonizing moments of waiting, that absence is profound and feels like forever.
Becca closes her essay with mention of Pothos (desire for the absent being) and Himeros (the “curious sensation of missing someone beside me, someone who is with me but who remains less than fully accessible to me.”) Those who wait are acutely attuned to these feelings, and, I suspect, uncomfortable with the vulnerability and neediness they project.
Among her final descriptions of waiting she writes:
Waiting is consuming. At times it is terrible, a wound that cannot be mitigated but must instead be mutely survived. There are days when making it to dinner or tea, as per Sydney Smith’s sage advice, is a feat. And sometimes waiting is an insult, an indignity, as pointlessly pathetic as refusing to take off the wedding dress in which you were abandoned years ago by someone who no longer cares and probably doesn’t remember.
While so many of these sentiments struck home, in the end, I greatly appreciated Becca’s determination to choose waiting: “Instead, I choose my waiting and the joy I find in surrender, in flinging myself at everything I encounter with the brutality of adoration.”