You shouldn’t have argued with me, even if you were right. I just needed someone to listen, not to critique or judge. But you made me feel worse about it.
I should have approached you and held you and told you it was going to be OK. Instead, I just sat there, frozen, timid, not knowing what to do, which was the worst thing I could have done. It wasn’t a choice, but a reflex. I wish, in that moment, I would have, could have been what you wanted, what you needed.
But I didn’t and I wasn’t. And you didn’t and weren’t, either.
We failed each other and we fail each other still. Not every day. But enough. Maybe too much.
We violate the romantic Hippocratic Oath. Not only do we not heal, support, provide, comfort…but we do harm. And when we do, we trespass the boundaries of our emotions, triggering our fears and anxieties.
And, again, like last time, it feels like a fight or flight.
Do we expect too much of each other?
Am I too serious and not quick enough to lighten up after a difficult conversation?
Are you too hard-edged and honest, too direct in a way that conflicts with me being too sensitive?
Perhaps we aren’t “too” anything at all and we just are who we are — which leaves us…where we are: struggling, frustrated, at times angry, and disappointed at not helping each other, not being what we need.
All the while being deeply in love, wanting better, dreaming of the way we could be, recalling the way we imagine we once were, wondering if we can return there, and stay there, be there, to fashion the normal we want.
We are fallible, to ourselves, and to our friends and lovers. And we know the clichés that no one person can make another person happy.
But a person can make another feel better. You can be supportive in just the right way. You can offer the kind of strength, comfort, the levity that another person wants or needs.
A long-term relationship can crumble under the weight of expectation when we want someone to fill a role for us that they can’t or won’t.
At the same time, a long-term relationship cannot be sustained by hope or desire or love alone. We must, more often than not, fulfill our partner’s needs, emotional, physical, even logistical.
We all have something to offer. The challenge in relationships is to be aligned with what you have to offer and what the other needs or wants. How hard it is to get that puzzle piece to fit.
Through communication and time, experimentation, even trial, and error, we can learn, we can adapt, to provide what is needed.
But we still have our core personalities. Our instincts, our reflexes.
And sometimes we just can’t…be what is needed. Sometimes, not only do we fail our loved ones, we make things worse.
Not intentionally, but just by who we are.
Which sometimes can feel worse, to be with someone it feels doesn’t understand me, cannot relate to me, cannot even see me.
Someone we love, someone we want to be with, someone we feel so close to, at times can be so physically close, across the table, next to us in bed, but emotionally and psychologically so far away.
There is no greater loneliness than looking into your lover’s eyes, holding her hand, being in the same room or car or bed, and feeling emotionally distant and vacant. To feel loneliness in the company of another person, especially someone you love, is to feel not just all that separates you from that person, but all the ways you differ, all that you can’t relate to, all that you can’t provide. There is an emotional canyon between you, a gap, it seems, that can’t be filled or crossed.
In that gap lies the pain of love, the disappointment of relationships, the distance between our expectations and desires and what we actually receive.
Why compromise ourselves? Why admit those we love cannot provide for us all we need?
Because this kind of compromise and sacrifice lies underneath the trust we must have in our partners.
A trust that symbolizes that their intent is to be there for us, that their love is sincere, that their desire to form an ‘us’ that is mutually beneficial is congruent and compatible with our own.
Yet intent is not enough. Actions and our behavior speak louder than words. And however much we may want to, sometimes we just can’t.
Sometimes we aren’t aligned. Sometimes we miss so badly that it strikes us just how much we aren’t getting what we need.
However sad and painful that may be and to admit, it points us in the direction we should go, even if that means away, apart.
We stay because it’s worth it. Because there are enough smiles, enough togetherness, enough good memories, enough value in being together that it makes the cost of the misfires, if not an easy one to pay, then one, however frustrating at times, a better option than the alternative.
So we ask ourselves, what is this for? Why am I in this relationship in the first place? What drew us together, and now the honeymoon has passed, what is keeping us together?
Love is more than an equation. It’s more than the good times outweighed the bad times by a certain percentage or proportion.
To sustain a long-term relationship, to remain in one, means finding comfort in the security of the other person, and finding your bond additive to what you could do alone.
That can mean something as simple as having a companion at the movies. It can certainly mean sex. It can mean someone to talk to, someone to share experiences with, someone to be vulnerable with, someone to tell those things to you wouldn’t tell anybody else. And you know what else? Someone to laugh with.
But the commitment it takes to stay in a long-term relationship is not with the other person, or rather, with the other person alone.
The commitment is to the relationship itself. This might be a subtle difference or semantic, but the relationship itself, the couple, the us, is an entity all its own
It will have bad days and good days. It comes with expectations that won’t always be met, some, even, that may never be met.
But without commitment to the relationship, the structure of the bond, the foundation, won’t be able to sustain the many forces and headwinds thrown at it. At times we’ll be resilient, sometimes together, sometimes individually.
One can carry us both, as long as we share the load over time.
When those times occur, I can be strong. I can be resilient. I can see the good through the bad, the love over the travails, the clearing among the darkness.
But when I turn around you must be there. It doesn’t matter how you are. It doesn’t matter if, at that moment, it is off. So often we are off, because of nature, ourselves.
But you must be there.
And trust in me. In us.
We will fail each other. It the burden and consequence of the expectations of and within love, of and between two different people.
Can we look at each other in those moments and instead of failure see our love?
Can I take the pain and disappointment of not being there for you, of being hurt by you, and set it aside, and return to our love?
When we tell one another “I love you,” is it enough to cover our failures?
When we are there for each other, and we connect, can we remember our failures then, and know that we can get it right?
And would we answer these questions the same way?
Can we try again?