Romance

As it turns out, I am broken in the romance department.

A good friend said to me today, "how could your job search not be depressing at this point? What's remarkable is that you seem to be doing so well in the rest of your life." And this is all true. (My job search is a little bit of a downer after 6 months. On the other hand, I'm doing really, really well.) One of the things that has changed most for me in the last 6 months of unemployment is to have really located my feelings and made peace with feeling them. On time. And to deal with them in pretty healthy ways. (As opposed to stuffing my feelings down, pretending to be fineFineFINE and then having to unpack that particular box. LATER. All alone. In unhealthy ways.)

I know, everyone else figured this out right around the time they were learning to tie their shoes, but this is big for me. So, having located my feelings, and knowing what I am feeling at any given moment, for maybe the first time in my adult life, it's surprising to me to discover I'm not much for romance.

Let me be clear. I am, indeed, a girl. I get pedicures and I even wear skirts on occasion. This is to say, the standard notions of romance don't totally escape me. Having someone tell me I'm pretty, wonderful, incredible, etc. is GREAT. I also like flowers. But since I've discovered various locations in my neighborhood where I can . . . relocate flowers from, I don't need anyone to bring me flowers. (Before you judge me, know this: for two years, I've had dead and dying bushes blocking the path to my house. This year, my complex landscaped everyone else's pathways, adding flowers to many, and ripped out my bushes. Path cleared, view into every window in house also fully cleared. They did not plant anything else. So . . . I figure, I am owed a few flowers in my every-curtain-closed-house every couple of weeks.) I like thoughtfulness, and snuggling. Yes indeedy. All girl over here.

But, I had a boyfriend who was all about the flowers and the compliments and the telling me how much he loved me . . . and then was completely unable to back it up with action, reliability, or . . . integrity. Ultimately, it felt worse and worse every time he brought me flowers or told me he loved me or told me how wonderful I was because . . . I knew that was his cover for all that he refused to address in himself, our relationship, and the ever widening gap in our communication. It was all motivated by making up for some basic relationship need that wasn't being met before that moment, or it was covering up some as of yet undiscovered other relationship sin. I've been lied to too many times to accept the flowers and compliments without wondering what they are REALLY about. I want honesty, and buckets of it.

So, to me, standard Hollywood romance has become . . . something that people do to distract from what's really going on. The things people say to make things look ok, for now. I don't want to take anything away from people who do sincerely nice things for someone they care about. I don't. (Especially since I genuinely enjoy being nice to people I care about. and not just people I'm dating.) But a lot of my experience with being brought flowers, told I'm perfect, or bought a nice dinner is that it comes from ulterior motives.

I want also to not think that honesty and romance are incompatible. But these days, romance to me is reality. I know there wil be good days and bad days, even if I'm happy in my relationship. I know romance is nice, but trust and communication are worth sooooo much more.

And I know that the idea that love makes everything ok is not only wrong, but dangerous. I had long talks while walking with another friend this spring. We see the same therapist and have some of the same pitfalls when it comes to insecurities and relationships and were prone to picking them over and examining them together in the backdrop of West Boulder with lattes in our hands. What I finally said to him was, "Dude, if you think about it, some of your worst, miserable, lonely, most doubt-filled insecure moments were when you were in love, because you were in love with someone and struggling with them. They were for me. Love is no guarantee that you will feel good."

I was reasoning my way through this last week, and heard myself say out loud, "Saying that being in love isn't the equivalent of 'everything is taken care of and happy' doesn't mean you can never be happy and in love, but it does stand as evidence that unhappiness and love can co-occur too which does prove that love and unending happiness are not the same thing."

For me, this isn't a pessimist's tale, but the reason to notice and appreciate and smile big when being with someone does make you happier and things are going smoothly.

It's also the reason why the last time I wrote marriage vows (to any new-comers, that's right! I've been engaged twice, but never married) I noted in them that promising forever seemed outsized, but that promising that for each day we were together I would go to bed with a plan to wake up the next day trying to be the best version of myself loving them again. I wrote:

"Plans are often the blueprint of what we want and hope for, but it's important that what I promise is something that I deliver, not just hope for. I want to be sure that what I pledge to you today is something you will believe and put your faith and trust in.

What I pledge to you is that every day I will try to support you and nurture the best in you, and that I trust in you to do the same for me. I say this knowing that our love for each other encompasses, understands, and forgives the things that are less than our best selves and hoping that we continue to believe in the strength of our relationship to seek what is mostworthy about each other and our together-ness, and move past the things that detract from that. 

I stand here choosing to be your wife, your partner, and a source of strength, safety, love, and compassion for you. I ask you to do the same for me. My pledge to you is that I would not choose another nor can I think of anyone more worthy to make this comittment to."

Now, roughly 5 minutes after I wrote these, the person I wrote them for made fun of marriage, commitment, and tried to dodge the whole conversation about our relationship while also asking me to move across the country for him and somehow still demanding credit for having thought about maybe-kinda-sorta proposing to me. So, you know, I was wrong about him being worthy of those promises. I've been wrong a lot in my life and this is ok because mistakes and being wrong aren't the same as regret.

As my person said to me recently, when people promise to be together forever, what they're really pledging is to be together until forever becomes impossible, "but that's not what you say in front of your friends and family because it doesn't sound romantic." I must not be very romantic then because, as you can plainly see, I wrote wedding vows that weren't about the forever that no one can promise (because there isn't any of us who can see that far). I also didn't marry either of the people I was engaged to because . . . well, I believe in marriage being a promise to love the person you're marrying enough to support them in being their best selves, and to be challenged to be your best self BY them. And neither of my fiances turned out to believe that or to be those people. I also believe marriages are relationships, not contracts, and that all relationships should be built on honesty and communication. And both of the people I was engaged to struggled with one or both of those things at those times in their lives. But most of all . . . they didn't love me for me. They loved me for what I could give them or who they thought I should be. And none of that boded well for making a big commitment, even if I was very conscientious and conservative about what I was committing to.

Here's the thing: I'm a hunter-gatherer when it comes to data. I pile it up. I go looking for it, and when I think I've amassed ENOUGH (whatever counts as enough) I analyze the crap out of it. The catch with data is sample size. For psych studies, there is a minimum number of data points that qualifies something as a well designed study. For mathematical reasons, most statistical tests require 33 independent data points as a minimum. In relationship terms is that 33 dates? 33 weeks? 33 years? No, it doesn't translate. I'd have to literally be able to see the future, or predict it with some strong probability in order to promise forever. But at 6 months into any relationship, as I'm off in my corner processing 6 months of data, if evidence warrants, I embark on the next 6 months and then that is unfolding. With more data. Which then needs to be analyzed. As that continues forward, well, then there's just more data being generated. Then, 6 more months . . . and you guessed it. MORE DATA. Y'all are smart readers so you see where this is headed.

So, this means . . . there will never be ENOUGH data to stop gathering, analyze, and make a prediction  solid enough to bet on. Or to stake a  promise of forever on.

I will always be scared about what happens next. About vulnerability. About my baggage. About my choices.

Moving ahead even though I'm scared . . . that's romance to me.

My friend (who's in jail), and his wife, going to counseling before he was sentenced so they could be at their strongest point before he had to be missing from day-to-day life is romance.

My dear friends who met and fell for each other while they were in other relationships forging ahead, that means something. Five years later they married and to me it was a show of bravery, of knowing that it was scary and uncertain, given that one of them had been in a marriage that dissolved, and that it was worth the leap anyways. It was a promise with teeth, flying in the face of knowing that for every amount of easy that it is to say the vows, it's three times as hard to make it stick. Them deciding that they would get up in front of their friends to exchange vows despite this country not recognizing their marriage, because it mattered to say it front of people, was love. Them deciding that doing it when they wanted to do it, how the wanted to do it trumped tradition or fanciness, and that a pizza party reception was just fine by them was almost as big a testament to their reasons for marrying as their solid "I wills" as their officiant asked, "Will you take _____ to be your wife? Will you share her joy and ease her burdens? Will you be honest with her, and be faithful to her?" after one of them experiencing the dissolution of a marriage, it moved me.

It was, of course, less heart-skippingly-lovely when they had to fight to have their marriage recognized for the purposes of one being covered by the other's benefits . . . but my thoughts about marriage rights and separation of church and state are another can of tuna.

Romance to me is about choice and action and and, yes, thoughtfulness and support. Consideration and communication. But, that looks the same to me whether the picture is painted in flowers and candy, or in things less Hollywood-worthy.

For me, the central idea here is, we can't always be clean shaven, in our hot jeans, wearing perfume. It's not real unless it's real. Flowers are nice, but someone who holds me after I've messed up dinner and wants me around after I've cried for apparently no good reason when discussing why I might or might not want to go back to school, that's priceless. The woman who loves my best friend from grad school even when she is over-worked and overwhelmed and wants nothing more than to lie on the carpet loves the real HER. The men in my life who married each other knew, deeply, exactly who each other are - good, bad, and ugly.

Romance is saying, "At any point we could discover there is no future, but there aren't deal breakers now so I want to move forward," and "this is scary, but I'd rather be scared with you than without you," and "I can work with that," but even more than that, "I think there is room for me to see this for what it is, to care for you still AND to support you to be the best version of yourself as often as possible." I was completely sappily moved by the Grey's anatomy non-wedding that the fabled Derek and Meredith performed for themselves on a post-it BECAUSE they talked about realities like getting old and senile, running away, giving up . . .

Love and happiness aren't the same thing, but I think there's a better chance of happiness in any relationship (friendship, siblings, family, romantic) if honesty and reality are present as much as possible. Reality is bad days, bad haircuts, hard conversations, simple pleasures, ratty t-shirts, calling yourself out, calling each other out, not always looking cool, forgetting things, being reminded of why you liked them, friendship, fights, growth, guards coming down, and things that can't ever be planned for. I know this from my longest relationships (none of which lasted more than 5 years) and NOT being married, so, while I know jack all about marriage, if this is true for 4+ years of non-marriage . . . then at least some of it has to be true about romance and marriage too, yes?

Ok, I'm done rambling about this for now and will just hope someone out there reading this knows more than me and will comment, otherwise I will remain, forever, romance-deficient.