Relationships: 

 

If you live long enough in a couple it happens. The great divide. Where initially there were two people whose very love desired total uninhibited disclosure of all thoughts and feelings, communicating and sharing almost as one, this eventually becomes—as we all know with time, a thing of the past.

One day there are now at least four of you living under the same roof. There are the two of you who now converse by being careful to gauge, measure, sift, edit, and when necessary stifle what you say. You learn where the speed bumps are and how to deftly steer through curves out of mine fields. Basically, you don’t go behind the iron curtain unarmed. Relating becomes about best outcome scenarios as ones where both get to save face or at least walk away in time to stem the bleeding.

Then there are the other two of you known only to yourselves, who seldom say much of anything you deeply feel out loud. The loneliest moments in a love affair revolve around internal monolgues-- succinctly spilling your guts using perfect syntax and irrefutable logic— silently saying all the things you wish could be really heard if you did say them. So goes the retreat into a kind of inner dialogue that hides the truth of itself out of fear, apathy, rage, unconsciousness and sometimes grief.

Truth is, maybe naked honesty is meant to wane for the same reason the urge to copulate like rabbits goes away. We all wish it were different- swear that this time it will be--a true no holes barred connection- and then the holes get, well, barred. And not always for lack of trying! Don’t you know at least one uber switched on relationship where they vowed to keep it real and open forever?

 They did perpetual counselling or some variation on the Tantra-Meditation-Our-Love-Comes-First schtick and one out of a million times it worked- til the day they both openly admitted they’d be better off apart because they’d run out of things to say.

Most of us I believe come to see total disclosure in our relationships as overrated. It makes more sense not to hurt or be hurt in the name of openess when you understand that leopards don’t change their spots just because you point out that the spots are there. The people we love are who they are in spite of us and because of how we choose to see them. Perhaps when we court the slow death of intimacy for the preservation of equilibrium we do so partly because it’s the tried and true model we grew up observing. It becomes enough if the conversation was mostly pleasant on any given day and if there were any moments of genuine tenderness or humour- all the more for the glory.

I know, you want more than mediocrity and so do I. The disappointing but wholly important lesson is that friendship and basic respect prevail where the language of romance falters… Every day kindnesses which when mastered allow one to move on to that utopia reserved for the undemanding or the patently innocent at heart.

I personally know that the fastest way to waste years of your life with someone is to hold out for some guarantee of happiness. Though I am working on it. Hard. I do suspect that love is the answer, not the kind where the violins swell along with parts of one’s anatomy…but that the way to build meaningful bridges between men and women is to become bilingual. We get to learn the other’s language of love- it may not even be a spoken language or easily recognisable after years of not listening because we assumed we knew. It isn’t necessary to speak it fluently to each other at every moment. My self-appointed task is to find a way to become a walking dictionary by using actions to define what love means to me. Do that I tell myself, and then watch and feel and taste what happens.